There are a number of celebrities using twitter and social media these days.  Some of them have their people do all the updates, some of them only update occasionally and others update regularly and interact with their fans on a regular basis.  However last night I saw a level of interaction from a celebrity that I hadn’t seen previously.

Hannah Montana star and pop music starlet Miley Cyrus spent a good chunk of her night interacting with female fans on twitter.  It all started around 9:40pm when Cyrus posted a picture of herself without any makeup and then about ten minutes later she called for a girls night with her tweeters.  For the next hour Cyrus interacted with a number of her fans and exchanged beauty and skin care tips.

The night ended with a series of tweets from the actress telling the girls on twitter to believe in their own beauty and not to ever think that they are ugly.  In all honesty her words were heartfelt, kind, and even a bit inspiring.  But at the end of the girlie makeup fest I was left wondering; was this staged to push products or was this just another teenage girl chatting it up with other girls online.

I’ve mentioned in the past my concerns with social media and honest opinions, and I wonder if the same concerns should apply to celebrities.  We all know celebrities are endorsed by various brands and last night Cyrus dropped brand names like crazy.  In fact nearly every response to her fans included a brand and occasionally the twitter account for the brand.  While I thought the outreach from Cyrus was amazing and unlike anything I have seen come out of almost any musician or actor to date, it did leave me to wonder about the motive behind this impromptu girl talk.

Was Miley Cyrus just enjoying a late night chat with the girls, or was she setup by her agent to push some products?  In the few days that I have been following Miley Cyrus on twitter I will say that she seems like a really sweet girl.  Very down to earth, very genuine, so at the core I want to believe it was just a bunch of teenage girls have a virtual slumber party.  However the marketer in me and the skeptic are wary.

What do you think of stars dropping brand names on social and microblogging sites like twitter?  Do you think the opinions are legit or are we as consumers being left open to product endorsements? Weigh in in the comments below!

I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately on how to make my online blog and article reading more efficient.  I am subscribed to over 200 blogs in Google Reader and what used to be easy to skim on a daily basis is becoming next to impossible.  I used to have more time at the last company to catch up on blog reading throughout the day, but since the switch to PlasticSurgery.com I just can’t dedicate the kind of time needed to get through the list.

My reader is chock full of stuff from varied interests, but SEO is by far the largest category with the most frequent updates.  Last month I threw out the idea of having my readers and twitter followers decide what blogs stay in my reader, but I haven’t been able to come up with a valid way to expedite the process.  Today, while spending a little extra time catching up on last weeks posts I started thinking to myself, if I gave up my SEO blogs in reader could I pick up enough of the most important SEO information on twitter and other social outlets alone?

What are your thoughts? Do you think there is enough buzz on twitter from the SEO community to keep you well informed, or is there simply too much information and noise to consider twitter and social media a reliable source?  Share your thoughts in the comments below or weigh in on my previous idea to let my readers decide what I read.

A few weeks back I did a post about a Twitter exploit that could hurt you.  Many argued the exploit was more on Google’s end than Twitter’s, but that it was a valid concern nonetheless.  Today when I returned from my weekend long camping trip I of course had a plethora of e-mails waiting for me, one of which was a twitter follow notification for WeaponMasters.com.  I was happy to see that in the e-mail the usename was not a link, which leads me to believe that Google or Twitter has done something about the potential exploit I previously mentioned.

Below is the e-mail as it appeared in my Gmail account.  You’ll notice that unlike previous e-mails the member name is not a link.

This is what one of the e-mails looked like previously with the member name in the e-mail as a link.

I highly doubt that this is Google’s handy work since a test e-mail to myself with nothing but a .com address in it still appears as a link, so my assumption is that Twitter has gotten wise to the potential damage this could do and done something on their end to prevent the e-mails from displaying domain members names as URL’s.  Regardless, I tip my hat to whoever took it upon themselves to rectify this potential exploit.