In short, earlier Bisbal made a not very clever remark about the lack of tourists in Egypt (the country was in war) and last week he ended a few of his tweets with #prayforjapan, while the tweets themselves were promoting his concerts and addressed to his friends. (You can find more on the web, translate via Google from Spanish if you need to).
My not so humble opinion is that 1. the storm is exaggerated to an unbelievable extent as many people at the same time ended their tweets with the same hashtag showing support for Japan while writing about all kinds of stuff; 2. the man made a genuine or not so genuine effort to show compassion and pushed a bit too hard - one tweet per day with #prayforjapan and nothing else would have been quite enough and saved him lots of trouble; 3. who is his PR???
The thing is that these days the world seems to support the high/low discrimination more than ever. I've commented on this before in relation to blogging vs. creative writing, now I'm confirming my opinion when it comes to PR. In case you haven't been there, in the industry are still those who believe social media is for students and college girls who spend their days mainly nail polishing, biting, and nail polishing again. Eventually, going to the mall.
These PR dinosaurs are not much concerned even when their A-list clients cause waves of sincere laughter on the web whose influence may be comparable to a tsunami, one never knows. They will say they know, of course. The truth is they couldn't. No matter how much we want to measure public reaction it has proven itself impressively difficult and surprising. Naturally, we still measure all the time. And it still surprises us. It's especially true with social media and the remarkable power it possesses. I doubt we even realize what era we are living in. One could rule the world. All it takes is a strong tweet. Or a Youtube video. Or a message to shake the foundation on Facebook. Everything happens in seconds, it goes around the globe before we have finished editing... Sadly, same is true about the negatives.
I've been monitoring Twitter, specifically, for quite a while. It's part of my professional curiosity to follow how those in the spotlight are managing, and overall I think the need of Social Media PR is already evident. Netiquette should be part of those stars daily routine. But it's not their job to know it, it's their PR's job. It's not David Bisbal to be intelligent, clever, smart, etc. - traits he's been accused to lack. He is here to sing well. Noone should expect him to conquer Oxford. If he does, all the better but we don't buy his CDs for his degree, right? However, all those who are ranked "stars", "below stars" or "to-be-stars", must be aware how social media functions, what looks good and what doesn't. It's another story that many of them refuse to listen to anyone about anything but somehow I don't think this is the case now. I hope Bisbal's decision to pretend nothing happened was the right one although I'm not particularly fond of this crisis strategy.
