Antonella Barba: Victim or Social Media Genius?

Posted: February 26th, 2007 | By: Steve Mullen | Filed under: PR Opinion, SEO PR News | No Comments

I hesitated for quite a while this evening while trying to decide whether to blog on this topic. But, here goes…

By now you may have heard about the racy pictures of American Idol contestant Antonella Barba that are flying around the Internet, particularly if you’re a fan of social media or at the very least a fan of the reality show. If you haven’t seen them, I’m not going to leave you completely on your own to find them. Nor am I posting them here, however. If you look around, it should be relatively easy for you to find what you’re looking for.

If you haven’t heard what’s going on – here’s the story: Antonella Barba is one of the top 22 contestants on the reality show. She is, in my opinion, a mediocre singer but a very attractive woman. She was nearly voted out last week when suddenly some pictures, a bunch of her in various states of undress and another that might or might not be of her performing a very personal act, appear in blogs across the world. Because of this, she is now even more famous than she would have been if she had merely been a contestant on the show. In fact, her name is, at the time this blog was written, the top search on social media search engine Technorati.

At this point, you’re likely asking, “So what?” Well, here’s my point — either Ms. Barba is a victim of friends and/or ex-boyfriends who really don’t like her much, or she is a social media genius.

Think about it for a moment. A lot of reality show contestants have gone on to pose in girly magazines after their shows are over. At least one other has become a talk show host, if you can believe it. If Ms. Barba is indeed the source of the pictures that are floating around, and I believe she is, I’m impressed.

One of the keys to using social media to promote anything from yourself to dog food is creating something that turns viral. Marketers and public relations folks search far and wide to find something that will spread across the Internet on its own. Sometimes they succeed, and sometimes their efforts fall flat. What this reality show contestant is doing is manipulating her show while it is underway, by using the power of social media. She reason it might work is that the winners and losers on the show are chosen by telephone voting by the audience. She won’t win the show with singing talent, but she could pull a huge voting block into her corner — teenage boys. They’ll dial until their fingers bleed, hoping more pics will surface next week.

Is releasing racy photos of yourself and then denying you did it a new tactic? No. it’s probably been done before by people from Paris Hilton to Britney Spears. There are an awful lot of so-called unauthorized sex tapes out there. However, this is a different because those people were already famous. Before these pictures, Ms. Barba was on the cusp of celebrity. Now, she’s extremely well known, at least in the growing blogger community. It remains to be seen how far these “unauthorized” pictures take her.

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