Business Bytes
Renee Oricchio

Streisand on Facebook: How Not To Do It

 

It pains me to 'dis my favorite diva. But this is a teachable moment that I cannot resist.

Social networking is an irrestible venue for self-promotion and public relations. There's just one really big cardinal rule; don't look like you're doing it.

Barbra broke the cardinal rule.

I watched Barbra Streisand's concert special on CBS over the weekend. Toss your slings and arrows; but I still love her. And, can she still sing? You betcha! Her voice is as strong and wide-ranging as ever.

I did however find it tiresome that the concert took on more of an info-mercial feel with all the commercial breaks promoting the three cd release of the entire concert. Thank you for reminding me, Ms. Streisand, that you did not sing a great many of your standards during primetime. I will, however, not be purchasing the cd.

After the show, I was on Facebook and out of curiousity did a search to see if she had a celebrity page. Of course she did! And it was an even more shameless infomercial promoting the CBS concert and, of course, the cd set.

Barbra's "What are you doing?" posts were just a shameless string of canned comments from the publicist counting down to the date and time of the show, as well as the release of the cd set.

There wasn't one single message of any kind of personal commentary from Babs, herself. Not one single "Man these shoes are tight? Why can't I just sing in my Merrills?". Something, anything, like that!

As a lifelong Barbra fan, if it turned me off; that's a bad sign!

Renee Oricchio is a technology writer and former supervising news producer for CNN Financial News. She has been covering the computer industry since 1987. @oricchio