Of my past internships, one of them included working in the marketing department of Wiredset Digital Agency, an internet entertainment marketing and consulting firm. During the course of my internship I became familiar with every social networking site imaginable and frequently had to upload and track videos for MTV and different recording artists. In many of my tasks, I acted as a Leviathan by moderating, editing, and maintaining several of these websites.
The internet is a vital outlet for marketing and branding of musicians and social networking sites help make this possible. Since so many people view these websites, it is important that artists are being represented in a manner that portrays their image appropriately. Before working at Wiredset I knew that all music artists had their own MySpace sites, however I did not know that the artists are not at all involved in maintaining their own profiles. It is marketing companies like Wiredset who are in charge of preserving order on these websites and profiles. Every morning when I got to Wiredset, I was in charge of maintaining Lenny Kravitz’s MySpace. I had to accept all of the hundreds of friend requests each morning and read his wall for inappropriate postings. I was told to monitor his wall and delete crude messages, pictures, and website links that might damper Lenny’s image.
I noticed that after I deleted posts from certain MySpace members, their consequent posts were not as inappropriate as the deleted ones, and conformed more to the traditional fan-based posts. Because I was acting as a Leviathan to maintain a healthy online brand and “to preserve a productive online group environment” (p. 70) for Lenny Kravitz, MySpace members began to conform to the norm I had set. While it may be allowed to post inappropriate comments on friends’ walls, it is not socially acceptable to do so on a famous music artists’ wall and will only result in a comment getting deleted. Although it felt pretty cool to have the power to control Lenny’s MySpace, I couldn’t help feel sorry for all the people who posted “Marry me Lenny!!!” on his site, knowing Mr. Kravitz would never see these proposals.
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3 comments:
This post is so interesting. I always figured established musicians didn't deal with their own Myspaces, but I never actually thought about who did it for them. This is a perfect example of the deliberate ways in which celebrities work to craft a perfect image to the public: although comments on his Myspace may have had nothing to do with his music, you were told to delete anything controversial as to not taint his reputation.
I wonder what would have happened if you had been remiss in your duties for a few days. Do you think devout fans would have stepped in had there been inappropriate comments?
It must have been such a cool internship! I never realized that artists didn’t run their own Myspace pages. When I had a Myspace a few years ago, I was friends with a few artists. I friended a few well known artists, and a few artists that I had never heard of friended me. I was baffled by (seemingly) these unknown musicians knew who I was. Based on your experience, it was likely that their managers just friended anybody they could find on Myspace to promote the artist. Your internship shows that everything is about image when you’re in the public eye, and that it often has nothing to do with the artists. Being the Leviathan for somebody’s image was, I’m sure, quite the experience. Great post!
Thanks for the really cool behind the scenes look at this particular aspect of the entertainment industry. I'm surprised that your effects actually worked and compelled some users to modify the style of their subsequent posts. I suppose they may have really thought that it was Lenny who deleted their messages. As a result, that they wanted to show him that they didn't mean to offend him. The Leviathan definitely served its purpose. Very interesting!
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