“Are we tired of Charlie Sheen? … Or is it the kind of thing we can’t get enough of?” David Letterman asked on his CBS late-night show. “If you thought you were going to see 100 wrecks a day, would you take a lunch? It’s kind of like that, isn’t it?”
The public’s fascination with Charlie Sheen has shown no signs of slowing down as his Twitter fan base just keeps growing. So is the so-called drug “Charlie Sheen” #WINNING?
Well let me start by saying I’ve never followed the show Two and a Half Men, nor do I care to have to watch a movie that Sheen has played in, but somehow Charlie Sheen has caught my attention in recent weeks as well as the attention of many other people like me. So I went in search of how a celebrity like Charlie Sheen, given all the negative attention recently, could gain the fastest growing following on Twitter.
After Sheen’s publicized troubles in recent months with life, family, and work, Charlie started a bizarre media blitz in the past two weeks, landing many TV and radio interviews that had us all wondering — what the hell is Charlie Sheen thinking!?
To my surprise, I heard Sheen had gained nearly 3 million followers since joining Twitter on March 1, 2011, taking the Twitterverse by storm. How did this happen? How did Sheen become a hardcore tweeter overnight? Turns out Charlie Sheen has a friend who knows a few people over at Ad.ly — a Beverly Hills firm that focuses on celebrity endorsements via Facebook and Twitter. Ad.ly met with Sheen to explain the tools of Twitter: hashtags, bit.ly, TwitPic, and how to use Twitter to build an audience and keep it engaged.
Excited about this new way Sheen could get his message out to fans, his first tweet said:
Winning..! Choose your Vice… #winning #chooseyourvice http://twitpic.com/455ly9
He was already rapidly gaining followers. He went from 0 to 900,000 followers in 24 hours. That single link may have also helped other brands; the photo of Charlie and ex–porn star girlfriend Bree Olson holding Naked Juice, which is owned by Pepsi and DirecTV, has been viewed 1,776,916 times. Both Pepsi and DirectTV shares were up (last I checked on March 8, 2011). Any correlation?
Well, so far Ad.ly has stated that none of Sheen’s tweets have been sponsored. Even the TwitPics that look like ads are NOT Ad.ly endorsements, and so far Sheen’s doing his thing, building his Twitter following on his own: almost 3 million so far. The more followers Sheen draws, the more appealing he’ll be to companies looking for celebrity endorsers. He is certainly not a mainstream pick for an endorsement, but for the right kind of product, marketers could be willing to pay.
From Sheen’s house of porn stars, to the many violent cocaine binges that ended up with him in the hospital numerous times; is it all the trouble and crazy interviews #LOSING that are influencing Sheen’s Twitter followers? Or is it his fans merely supporting him, fueling Sheen’s belief that he is #WINNING?
