The excellent Adverlab has run a post about Bill Gates' profile on LinkedIn, with the interesting suggestion that celebrity endorsements through social networking sites would be nice. Back in January, I posted about Linking to Fame in my 2008 Predictions - that the degrees of seperation from the famous are plummeting, from the 19 in Barabasi's Linked, to 6 or less in the age of social networks. I'm waiting for brands to do something than just putting the 'whoever' star of their ads on MySpace or facebook, and doing something really interesting with celebrity.
As William Gibson put it in an interview: “the experience of celebrity is gradually being democratised. It seems as though everyone is going to the currency of celebrity. Everyone's getting their own account of whatever that currency is. That's something neat. It used to be only the elect had any manna in the information society and everyone else was a consumer. I was exposed to people who had the disease of celebrity … It's a great anthropological privilege to be there."
And, somewhat disappointingly, Bill Gates and I have no one in common on LinkedIn.
