At the recent Collision 2021 online event, Hollywood celebrities and techies share how social media plays a part in their lives and professional careers
SOCIAL media is part and parcel of daily life and at the recent Collision 2021 event, North America's fastest growing technology event with more that 38,000 attendees, celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, Cindy Crawford and Liam Payne, as well as techies like Fidji Simo, spoke on how social media has shape their careers and some of the new innovations for content creators.
BECOMING OWN PUBLICIST
One of the top celebrities at the event was Cindy Crawford, who shared how social media has allowed her to be less reliant on journalists, who she claimed occasionally don't "capture" who (she is), and that she can now tell her story independently.
"With social media, I'm my own publicist," said the former supermodel.
Crawford spoke of her journey from the "OG influencer" of the 1990s supermodel era to becoming founder of skincare line Meaningful Beauty.
"So many celebrities are dependent on journalists and the press to tell the world who they are," she said.
Crawford made the remarks at the online conference Collision 2021.
In 2005, she created the skincare line with French doctor Jean-Louis Sebagh.
The emergence of Instagram since then has brought Crawford a certain liberation from traditional media.
"It definitely started with just thinking, 'Wow, this is a fun way for me to be my own publicist in a way'. I think so many celebrities are dependent on journalists and the press to tell the world who they are, so it's not as direct," she said.
"When Instagram came out, I was like, 'Wow, this is my opportunity to be funny. People maybe don't think I'm funny!'
"Models don't really get an opportunity to maybe show their personality," said Crawford.
She went on to speak about the continuing evolution of her feed.
"As my following grew and I started to understand how it's part of building your brand and telling your story, I definitely changed. It definitely became a little bit more curated, as if it was my own magazine. That's what I loved about it," she said.
"There will still be journalists who write things about me that may or may not be, I think, capturing who I am or what I want to say, but at least I have a chance to do it as well. I don't need that third person to do it for me," she added.
For her "there was no such thing as an influencer".
"When I started down this path of being a public figure and modelling, there was no such thing as an influencer or social media, and it has definitely been a learning curve, and a lot of it I've been exposed to and learnt through my children, and finding different ways for me to understand it," said Crawford.
PERSONALised platform
Hollywood actor Ashton Kutcher, who is also an investor at Sound Ventures, talked about how the Community app he helped fund could offer the level of private intimacy required to build authentic relationships like what text messaging between individuals could do.
Together with Matthew Peltier, chief executive officer of Community, they discussed how the communications app has helped people to limit the intake of irrelevant information from other people who they don't have an intimate relationship with in their social media channels.
"Community was founded on the belief that people wanted to and should be able to choose the conversation they want to be a part of," said Peltier.
Kutcher added that social media channels don't offer an environment in which people believed that the personal data shared on those platforms remained privately and authentically theirs.
"Most tech platforms take self-identified sub-communities...share that (information) with everyone on the platform over time," he said.
Focusing on Community's success into the future, Kutcher said that Community stood out from other messaging platforms because it recognised that different people wanted different information from their connections at different times.
"Most social media platforms assume that we are one-dimensional and that our audiences are one-dimensional," he said.