Today I sat down with Bret Oliverio to talk about contacting celebrities using Twitter and celebrities who are on Twitter in general.

Bret is a producer for The Junkie Show, which you can hear each morning on 106.7 FM, WJFK, if you’re in Washington, D.C., or the Virginia area. But today, we’re actually talking about his web site, CelebTweeting.com. Bret isgoing to share how to know if a celebrity's profile is real, the best ways to get a response from a celebrity on Twitter, and the future of contacting celebrities using Twitter vs. traditional fan mail.

Jordan McAuley: In case someone listening to this interview has not yet heard of Twitter or is confused about what Twitter is exactly, can you give us a quick rundown on what Twitter is and how you use it?

Bret Oliverio: Sure! I like to compare it to the old school AOL Instant Messenger. When you’re using that and you put up an away message of, the away message would pretty much tell people what you were doing and that is essentially what Twitter is.

It’s a micro blogging site which a lot of people use it as almost a journal or a diary where, in 140 characters or less you just tell people what you’re up to and what you are doing. You can include pictures, links to sites, and links to videos on You Tube. That’s basically it in a nutshell.

Jordan McAuley: How long ago did you start using Twitter yourself?

Bret Oliverio: I started using it six to eight months ago just for the radio show I worked for. A lot of listeners like to follow our tweets so I opened my account just for that reason. Then I started getting really interested in celebrities on Twitter so I found myself spending 20 to 30 minutes a day following these celebrities and all of their tweets.

The only problem is, they tweet so many times and there’s so many celebrities that it takes forever to find the good ones. So, I came up with my site, CelebTweeting.com, by just developing one place where someone can go to find the best celebrity tweets.

Jordan McAuley: So, on your site, do you handpick the tweets that are the best or do you just list all of the tweets?

Bret Oliverio: It’s not a feed. There are a lot of sites out there that are just feeds from every celebrity. I actually follow 300 celebrities myself. My tweeter name is @celebtweeting and I’m monitoring these tweets pretty much 20 hours a day and picking the best tweets to put on the site. For instance, Jewel just posted a picture of herself in a bikini on her yacht in the Bahamas on vacation and it’s freaking amazing. I’m about to post that right now. So, to me, that’s something that’s interesting.

I think 9 tweets out of 10 are boring and kind of useless. I mean, if Paris Hilton is going to get coffee, that’s cool, but it’s not really interesting or entertaining to me. But if she posts a picture of her and Nicky Hilton as babies on the beach when they were 5 or 6 years old, I think that’s pretty cool. So I’ll go ahead and post that picture and that tweet.

Jordan McAuley: Who dare some of the best celebrities using Twitter or some of the celebrities that are using Twitter the best way?

Bret Oliverio: I would say Shaquille O’Neal. He is hilarious. Any celebrity that’s funny or opens up their life to you, to me, are the best celebrities to follow. Shaquille O’Neal is funny. He posts pictures. He goofs on people. He goofs on himself. I would say all of the Kardashian sisters are really good. They’re constantly going back and forth with each other posting pictures, goofing on each other, calling each other out about weird things.

I posted a tweet about Kourtney Kardashian calling out Khloe Kardashian about some sex acts she liked to do, so, I thought that was pretty interesting. So, the Kardashians are good. Pete Wentz from Fall Out Boy is good. Travis Barker from Blink 182 is really good. Aubrey O’Day, who used to be in Danity Kane. Ashley Tisdale is always posting about where she is and photos of herself at the airport. Brody Jenner is a good one. So. There are a ton of them.

Jordan McAuley: So, it is the celebrities who are showing you like a personal side of themselves that you might not see. You see a lot in the tabloids, but it’s coming actually from them.

Bret Oliverio: Yeah. Exactly. For instance, last night, Britney Spears was at a hotel in London and she took a picture on her phone of the outside of her hotel with thousands of fans and hundreds of photographers. To me, that’s pretty cool. Where else can you get that? Other celebrities are just tweeting – Paris Hilton is posting pictures of herself inside of her house, which is really cool. She took a picture of her back yard where she was about to throw a pool party. You get to see her pool and kind of the setup of her back yard, which I thought was really neat.

Jessica Simpson posted pictures of herself and, and that’s one thing about Twitter. If you want to really get into following so many celebrities, they have to post pictures. At least, that’s my preference. I wish Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore would post more photos. They’re constantly tweeting in text but I don’t think they post enough photos. This is celebrity access that no one has ever had. I think people are just getting used to it and feel blown away by it.

Jordan McAuley: Yeah. Now it’s instant, so they can actually beat like the tabloids and Perez Hilton and everybody else. Everybody else has to wait and come up with a story but these celebrities can now instantly post a photo or something from their life. It’s going to be really interesting in terms of publicity and getting the authentic word out there instead of something that’s made up.

Bret Oliverio: Totally. You’re right. I mean, sites like Perez Hilton and The Superficial, are all second-hand sites that are getting their news from somewhere else. Half the time the stories aren’t even true and these celebrities can instantaneously give you their take, their point of view on an issue going on in their life.

Take, for instance, Diddy. He didn’t come across too well on his show on MTV, Making the Band. He came across as a tyrant and a ball buster. But through Twitter he’s started this whole campaign about working hard and making the most of every day. I think he’s totally reshaped his image strictly through Twitter. He posts videos talking about how to make the most of each and every day and it’s just totally reshaped his image in people’s eyes.

Jordan McAuley: Many people think these are not really the celebrities tweeting. The assume it's an assistant or manager or a PR person. How can you maybe tell if a celebrity's Twitter profile is authentic or not?

Bret Oliverio: It’s actually pretty easy, and a lot of people ask that. There are a handful of ways to find out. One of the ways is to have another celebrity vouch for them. Pete Wentz is on Twitter he said, hey, Ashlee Simpson's sister, or my sister-in-law, Jessica Simpson, just signed up for Twitter. You guys should follow her.

So when a celebrity that you know is verified links to another celebrity, or vouches for them, then there’s a 99 percent chance that it’s going to be legit. Another way you can tell is, you know, most of these celebrities that have these accounts, they literally take their camera phone and hold it away from them and take a self-portrait of themselves.

Celebrities are doing that. And it’s kind of funny to see Paris Hilton hold her arm out to take a picture of herself still trying to look hot, you know. So that’s one way to tell. Now there are some celebrities like Seth Rogen and Steve Buscemi, the actors. These guys have never posted a picture. No one’s ever linked to them and said, hey, this is my buddy, follow him. They’re not posting pictures, so those accounts to me are shaky and I don’t think that they’re legit. The same thing happened with Ben Stiller.

If you look at a celebrity's Twitter profile closely and they’re not posting pictures of themselves or anything personal, if they haven’t been verified by another celebrity, or actually, Twitter just started verifying certain celebrities. So if you go to a celebrity Twitter page and you see in the upper right hand corner that it says Verified, then you know you’re good to go. Those are ways you can tell if some of these celebrities' Twitter profiles are legit.

Jordan McAuley: There’s also profiles where at first you think it’s them, but then you start reading the Tweets and you realize pretty quickly that it’s not because there are ads for cell phones and make money quick schemes and whatever. So by actually looking at the tweets you can pretty much tell.

Bret Oliverio: Exactly. Another thing is a lot of these celebrities talk to each other back and forth. If you see MC Hammer talking to Nicole Richie -- those are two pretty well known celebrities on Twitter -- then you know both accounts are legit. If they’re interacting with each other; if they’re posting pictures. Just like you said, by reading the tweets you can get a pretty good tell on that.

Jordan McAuley: Right. And another good one is Ryan Seacrest. He follows like pretty much every celebrity. He’s on Twitter, so just go to his profile and you can get a glimpse of a couple of hundred that are real.

Bret Oliverio: And the owners of Twitter, too. Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey. If you look at who they’re following, they’re not following fake celebrities. They’re following the real deal celebrities. That’s how I came up with a lot of the ones I follow -- through them.

Jordan McAuley: Why do you think so many celebrities are using Twitter? I wanted to hear your thoughts on why you think celebrities are taking the time to do this. You’d think they’d be too busy to be tweeting all the time. Also what are your thoughts on traditional fan mail. Is it dying out? What do you think the future is for connecting with celebrities?

Bret Oliverio: Yeah. I know exactly what you’re talking about. I remember when I was like 7 years old I used to send fan mail to Scottie Pippin from the Chicago Bulls and other athletes. I’d check the mailbox every single day and hope something would come in. But it’s changed now. I think celebrities are using Twitter as a promotional tool because in between their personal tweets they do promote things. Hey, check out my VH1 special or hey, I just came out with a new cosmetic line. Pick it up!

It’s a way to reach hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people instantly. And, two, they’re using it to shape their image. They’re going directly to the fan. There’s no intermediary and fans are really into that. As far as fan mail goes, I don’t necessarily think that’s going to go away just because there’s something to be said for getting an autograph or letter or even a picture with a celebrity.

It is cool that a lot of these celebrities do respond to random average people. In fact, Kourtney Kardashian has responded to me. Bree Olson, who is a porn star, responded to me one time. One of the best ways to get a celebrity to respond to you is to compliment them.

Jordan McAuley: I was going to ask you about that, so let’s talk about that for a few minutes.

Bret Oliverio: Yeah. If you want a celebrity to respond to you on Twitter, there’s a couple of different ways you can do it. Do not respond immediately to the celebrity as soon as they post the tweet. If Pink, for instance, tweets something and she’s got a couple hundred thousand followers, instantly she’s going to get four or five thousand different responses. She’s probably not going to take the time to sift through those.

If you see a celebrity tweet something, give it maybe two hours and then shoot them a response, because they’re going to go check their reply mailbag and whoever responded latest is going to be up top. Instead of being buried in the middle of 5,000 different responses you wait a couple hours, you respond to them, and who knows? You could be at the top, so that's a way to get them to respond to you.

You also want to compliment them. I wouldn’t put them down because they’re not going to respond. I told Kourtney Kardashian that I thought she was the third hottest chick out there as far as celebrities go for tweeting and she liked that. She’s like, oh, thank you so much -- love you. Megan McCain, John McCain’s daughter is all over Twitter and I told her that her boobs looked good in this one picture and she said, oh, my God -- you’re the best -- thank you so much!

That’s the type of stuff I wuld do if I were looking for a response. Just compliments. Eespecially the female celebrities out there. You know how women are, they always want attention. They can’t get enough and these celebrities are the same exact way.

Jordan McAuley: That's a realy good tip. Like you said, don’t reply immediately because I’m sure most people do that thinking, oh, I’ll be the first. Another tip I wanted to share with people is sometimes you can follow the managers of the celebrities. I was following Guy Oseary, who manages Madonna. Well, Madonna’s probably not Twittering, at least not yet. But there were a couple nights when he was like, hey, I’m sitting here with Madonna and she says ask me any questions that you have.

I thought that was really cool because you could ask him questions and he would ask her and reply for her. That’s another tip. Some of these celebrities are not going to be on Twitter, but their representatives or their people are. You can find out who they are using our service, ContactAnyCelebrity.com. Bret, before we go, talk a little bit about what you have planned for your site for the future, anything you’re adding or changing or cool things people should check out.

Bret Oliverio: Well, I’m going to continue to post the best and most entertaining celebrity tweets every day, day in and day out. I’ve been doing a lot of interviews, so who knows? This could lead to maybe doing some interviews on television and doing some more radio interviews. As far as I can tell, I’m the only site that is posting only the best celebrity tweets.

Lke I said earlier, there are a lot of sites that just post the Twitter feed. There’s a site called CelebrityTweet.com which posts each and every tweet from every celebrity. What’s the point of that? Because then you’ve got to sift through thousands of tweets just to find the cool ones. So hit up CelebTweeting.com if you want to see the best celebrity tweets.

Related Posts:

• Contacting Celebrities Using Twitter

Recommended Resources:

• CelebTweeting.com
• Celebrity Black Book
• Contact Any Celebrity