V@nity Fair, Most Foul

All right, the credibility of this blog is being challenged, and so I am called to respond.

As everybody knows, credibility is the coin of the realm in the blogosphere [though Google Ads often suffice]. The fact that I have to defend my honor against the smarmy, snarky [smarky?] pretties at Vanity Fair magazine makes it all the more distressing.

To recap the action:

Back in September, I wrote one of my effortlessly coruscating entries in which I unmasked a Twitteur calling herself VanityFairer as a stooge of the magazine’s inept communications staff. While she feigned innocence–just a fan of the magazine, nothing more, blah blah blah–I was able to demonstrate without question that she was an inside job trying to appear independent of the Conde Nast mothership.

How was I able to verify this? Flecks of circumstantial evidence,  a hunch virtually indistinguishable from certitude, my strong desire to embarrass the smarky pretties and–most tellingly–the fact that Vanity Fairer convincingly denied my accusations! Not just once, but repeatedly!

My case irrefutable, I dusted my hands and moved on, continuing my unerring quest for truth in other matters. Vanity Fairer, meanwhile, quietly wallowed in her shame. Although she did manage to accumulate over 700 followers and turned out to be a pretty good Twitterer. Which of course only provides further evidence of her guilt.

Then, recently, the plot thickened.

Someone calling himself “Michael Hogan,” writing on what appears to be the real Vanity Fair website, claimed that he was just beginning to use Twitter, the magazine’s first Twitter profile!

Wrote he, about the 50-some followers accumulated by the “official” Vanity Fair magazine’s profile, @vanityfairmag:

One of them is a mysterious and fascinating (to us, anyway) character who calls herself vanityfairer…. She has been doing an amazing job of covering our work here on the site without our knowledge. There was even an article written about her, [n.b. that's my original post!--cs] which speculated that she was an undercover operative for the magazine.

She’s not, though I wish I’d been smart enough to think of that. I have no idea who she is, but I’m very curious to find out.

Ha! Nailed again! Mssr. “Hogan” denies Vanity Fairer is an inside job, once again proving the case that she is. He compliments her lavishly, demonstrating that the is trying to curry favor with an insider. And he uses the hoary “I’m not smart enough to do that” denial, as transparent as any Wall Street bondsman’s casual lie over drinks.

But there’s more!

A few days ago a blog called “blog, p.i.,” co-written by someone calling himself “William Beutler,” published “Who is @Vanity Fairer? [Hint: Probably not Graydon Carter]“. He brilliantly disassembled the argument in my original post, like Tinkertoys, demonstrating with a brisk intelligence how Vanity Fairer virtually could not be an inside job. I was momentarily devastated. Until I looked at “blog, p.i.” closely and discovered that one of the blog’s co-authors is named “Not Paul Begala”!

So here we have a blogger, defending the honor of a Twitteur of dubious provenance, who keeps company with a fellow who misrepresents himself with fake names on the Interwebs! Luckily I could now seize the logically irrefutable “consider the source” argument to reassert my correctitude and scramble back to the high ground.

Close, “Mr. Beutler,” but no Cohiba Cubano for you!

In response to all of this I felt compelled to continue my research into the whole sordid affair, deposing witnesses, using powerful Internet discovery tools and goofing off with Twitter more than I should admit. My investigations are now complete. Here finally I lay out the facts for all to see:

1. William Beutler is really Michael Hogan

2. @vanityfairmag is ghosted by Not Paul Begala

3. The author of the Vanity Fairer Twitter profile is @joaquin_phoenix

Thank you. I trust this puts the matter to rest once and for all.

VanityFairer: The Magazine’s Social Faux Pas?

Seems like everybody and his posse is trying to figure out how to use Twitter to promote a business. A lot of these feeds are loaded with ham-fisted promotions that are as likely to repel as attract. Mainstream media have been no more skilled than your typical supplement pusher, for the most part.

Which brings us to Vanityfairer, a Twitter “fan”feed by someone who identifies “her”self only as Vanity Fair Wayfarer and whose bio reads only “I heart Vanity Fair magazine.”

“Her” updates are really pretty good–mainly pointers to stuff about, in or related to content from the celebrity-addled, scrumptiously visual, annoyingly literate and therefore-hard-to-ignore glossy.

So is this a real fanfeed, or a Twitter Potemkin village?

I couldn’t find any reference to the Vanity Fairer feed on VF’s website.

But back in June VF Daily did a characteristically high-ironic item about the magazine’s new Facebook page. Editorial assistant Bill Bradley writes that he’d been charged with getting 10,000 members for a VF page in two months, at pain of losing his job. [As of this writing, the Facebook page has 8,610 fans, and according to the site, Bradley is no longer in the employ of VF. Of course we have no idea whether this is true.] So clearly someone at VF has been pondering what the magazine should do in the world of social media.

[In fact, read this wonderful entry from Vantiy Fair Daily about VF mid-level editorial staff's recent indoctrination to social media by Conde Nast, which led to the whole Bradley gambit.]

Back to Vanityfairer: It looks to me like the Twitter feed is an undisclosed VF inside job. Vanity Fairer is following a conspicuous list of 51 prominentos from the worlds of technology and media [including Tim O'Reilly, Esther Dyson, WSJ's Kara Swisher, 2.0 author Sarah Lacy, John Dickerson of Slate, Gawker, Ana Marie Cox and TechCrunch, A-list tech bloggers plus a few C-list hangers-on like me].

The trick to building a Twitter posse, as savvy Twitsters know, is to “follow” people whom you hope will follow you back–or actually maybe write a blog item about the Twitter stream to gain some 2.0 brainshare [!]. So there is clearly something tactical and ambitious about Vanity Fairer’s “following” list. Vanity Fairer appears to be following none of her own personal friends, for instance. A bit curious.

[I should point out that as of this date, the only people who have taken Vanity Fairer's bait are CNN social media ubiquitist Rick Sanchez, MSNBC cartoonist Daryl Cagle and someone named Vitor Fasano, who Twitters, I think, in Portugese. And me.]

I direct-messaged Vanity Fairer to see what’s up. “She” wrote this:

Good to hear from you, am actually a fan of *you*rs (Drama 2.0) too! Yes, I am just a fan of VF mag; pretty sure they have no idea I exist. [The reference to "Drama 2.0" regards a mysterious fellow from the world of online advertising and marketing whose schtick is a hilarious bitter cynicism about web 2.0 foolishness. Which is to say his blog is kind of like mine, but his is really good and apparently makes money.]

Then this, an hour later:

p.s. I wish VF HAD put me up to this, it’s something they should be doing!

Then this, after I asked why she was following only media luminaries but not friends:

Have another acct on Twitter 4 friends; this acct lets me “play” a bit anonymously. Media lums I follow here r people I think VF wld follow?

Huh.

For now, let’s have some sport and, what the heck, assume the worst about Vanit Fairer.

If Vanity Fairer is an official VF venture–someone doing the corporate flagship magazine’s bidding but disguised as an independent fan–that’s a bad move by Conde Nast.

Rules No. 1 through 10 of social media are “Don’t f*ck with people.”

Don’t use social media to play pretend. If you want to make a cool Twitter feed for your publication, go for it. But don’t make like it’s not yours. If you’re a real independent fan of the magazine, launch a Twitter feed. But if you have some some sort of entanglement with the pub, say so. No shame in it.

Of course, circumstantial evidence notwithstanding, it’s possible that Vanity Fairer is an independent effort. In which case I am once again spewing nonsense into the digital void. The only consolation is that this is not the first time, nor likely to be the last.

But if I’m right. . .

Vanity Fair has made its reputation by illuminating the world of tuxedo-and-ball-gown “high” society.

Wouldn’t it be a hoot if it stomped into this foreign new social swirl like a drunken hillbilly?