Gil Scott-Heron may have told
us that the revolution will not be televised, but he didn’t say anything about
social media.
On the morning of October 26,
2104 Alex Christopher LaBeouf, a normal, good looking sixteen year old living
in Dallas went to work at his part time job at the local Target store. Like
most teenagers his age he participated in social media, but his engagement was unremarkable.
In fact, he had less than 150 followers on Twitter.
That afternoon, a fifteen year
old girl named Brooklyn Reiff took a picture of Alex and tweeted it to her
friend Alanna because Alanna had told her that Alex was cute. Then she forgot
all about it, and him, unaware of the internet tsunami she had just unleashed.
Nothing much happened for a
few days. And then a teenager in the
U.K. with the twitter handle @auscalum, who presumably thought the boy was cute
and who was very actively engaged in social media, retweeted the photo. And all
hell broke loose.
Instantly the photo went
viral. The hashtag #AlexFromTarget trended through the roof. Alex’s own twitter
followers grew from 144 to more than 600,000 almost overnight. Alex was invited
to go on the Ellen DeGeneres show where he told Ellen, among other things, that
he had received several marriage proposals.
That’s all good fun, right? You
be the judge.
The folks at Target denied having
anything to do with the viral meme. Yet recognizing a native integration opportunity
when they saw one, themselves started tweeting about Alex and the #AlexFromTarget
craze.
Bags of Bliss, an Australian manufacturer
of pre-packaged maternity gift bags, has a Twitter handle almost identical to
Alex’s handle. After gamely posting several times that they were not
#AlexFromTarget they figured if you can’t beat’em join ‘em, and started advertising
their product to a suddenly expanded customer base.
An unknown social media marketing
company called Breakr made the unlikely claim that they had orchestrated the
entire thing to show brands and potential clients the commercial power of Fangirls. When Alex, the girls who had originally
tweeted the photo, and even Target denied any knowledge of Breakr the company backpedalled,
leaving them with a black eye and the specter of dishonesty.
@auscalum, the young woman whose
retweet started the avalanche, got so much hate content on her Twitter feed,
including death threats (!?), that she temporarily shut down her Twitter
account. Ironically, @auscalum reactivated her account to deny that she knew or
had anything to do with Breakr.
A number of fake Alex accounts
sprang up, the most egregious being one that created the handle @acl164 (Alex
uses the handle @acl163) and started aggressively procuring follows and
engagement from teen girls. Whether that user is a teenage boy, a pedophile, or
something else remains unknown.
And what of the fate of young
Alex LaBeouf? Well, the jury’s still
out. He’s still working at Target. He’s still posting normal tweets, albeit now
to a whole lot more people. He still seems close with his family. But will his inadvertent
celebrity help or hurt his development as a young adult? Target will profit from all this free press,
but will brands embrace Alex to endorse their products, or will he slink back
into obscurity when his fifteen minutes (or fifteen seconds) of fame are
up?
Only time will tell. But the
lesson of #AlexFromTarget is that the unintended consequences that can spring from
social media should make us all tread very carefully as we are drawn to its
siren song.
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