Team Sheen: Are We Really All That Surprised?!?

Where to begin? Sorry to fuel the beast any further, but this has reached heights never Sheen before … sorry, couldn’t resist ;). So, Charlie Sheen’s long-term publicist quits. No worries! That just meant it was time to open a Twitter account. Beyond the obvious damage control, at least from an exposure standpoint, you can’t say that Sheen isn’t his own best publicist.

To top it off, the son-of-a-gun goes out and sets the world record (yes, Guinness has confirmed it) for the fastest ever to reach one million followers. (For the record, I’m not one of them). Remarkably, he did it in a hair over 25 hours.

Now, Sheen has taken the bizarre step of posting a job opening for a social media intern and is working directly with ad.ly, a company that connects consumers to celebrities through social media. Celebrities will tweet about a brand to their followers, while on Facebook they’ll post updates to their fans.

Their “celeb team” ranges from Snoop Dog to Charlie and brands include the likes of Best Buy, Sony and NBC. (I wonder whether CBS will stay away, given recent developments). Through all of this, ad.ly has gained a lifetime’s worth of press, and we discover yet another fascinating way that social media is paving its own path.

Ad.ly’s business model is smart. I view it as product placement (or in this case, simply celebrity placement) into our lives. The difference is subtle, but reveals yet another happy marriage of product and celebrity endorsement. Just the medium has changed. Good for Best Buy, Sony, NBC and the rest for realizing the benefits of this. And yes, I guess good for Charlie as well…