The ghost of a Tweet

There is, of course, a distinction between having Twitter ghostwriters and paying someone to update your social networking profiles. The former is what 50 Cent does, the latter is Britney Spears' approach.

It's one thing to openly make it clear that it's someone from your team who is sticking up the messages: when you read "Britney is doing something really cool", you're going to know that it's a minion doing the typing.

But what about when the Tweets are constructed to make it seem like they're coming from the person in whose name the account has been established?

For instance, say you're one of the 200,000 people signed up for 50 Cent's feed, and you saw his eloquent March 1 post in which he opined, "My ambition leads me through a tunnel that never ends." Deep, right? But prompted the savvy businessman and beef-addicted rapper to write such a line? Apparently you'd have to ask "Broadway" (a.k.a. Chris Romero), the director of 50's Web empire, who tweeted the thoughtful comment after reading it in an interview.

"He doesn't actually use Twitter," Romero told the paper about his boss. "But the energy of it is all him." The energy, huh?

If you can't manage to come up with 140 characters worth of something to say, you might wonder if you should be doing the job, surely?

After all, what possible argument could there be against a musician actually writing, for themselves, the material through which they connect with their audience?

Oh... hang about, I'm just getting a text... let me just read this... hmmm... let me just try that final paragraph again then:

After all, what possible argument* could there be against a musician actually writing, for themselves, the material through which they connect with their audience?

*Except for Courtney Love on MySpace.