I know all the reasons why I shouldn’t blog about Chrissy Teigen, but let me list them for you.
1. “Blogging” about a person is infinitely passĂ© and puts me in a category with the worst 50% (Julie and Julia) and the best 50% (Chris and Brogan).
2. Chrissy Teigen is a (swimsuit) model. Business writing is supposed to be asexual.
3. I don’t know Chrissy Teigen personally.
4. The phrase, “the best at Twitter” is something that my 68-year-old dad would say. I’m 32.
5. I’m not in a position to judge anyone on Twitter, but hey, this is the Internet.
6. I’m not writing this to get retweeted, but that would be kinda sweet because my Klout score sucks.
One more foundational point before we begin: There is no way that I can prove that Chrissy Teigen is the best at Twitter, but I can say that Guy Kawasaki is the worst.
Chrissy Teigen (or user number #39,364,684, which is much sexier) is the best user of Twitter ever. She has 87,275 followers, follows 697 (about to be 698, hehe), and has sent 21,810 tweets. She has 10 favorites, but I don’t have a clue what favorites are supposed to do and no one uses them. She’s a model and aspiring chef. She’s tall.
My argument is based on five key points:
1. She’s inherently interesting. Chrissy Teigen is a celebrity. She’s stunningly beautiful, bi-coastal, multiethnic, engaged to a (talented) musician that you’d want to watch football with. She does stuff that we all want to do and encounters a lot of the same daily issues, e.g. airline travel. Her Twitter life is as accessible and idyllic as it is regular and mundane. And because of her consistent use of the medium, followers get a glimpse of all of it.
2. She has no filter. I don’t want my mom to read her tweets. But that’s not the point: Teigen tweets from the moment in time in her life, period. If that tweet is about burning a turkey or Newt Gingrich or the Super Bowl in Indianapolis, it’s truth on the spot. Frankly, it’s the best use of Twitter, no matter the context.
3. She has no agenda. I don’t know this actually, but if she’s promoting an agenda, she’s either totally ineffective or totally passive. Despite the occasional invitation to her food blog and a photo from a shoot, there isn’t heavy-handed self-promotion. You get the sense that the byproduct of her Twitter use is a deeper sense of who she is over readership for her food blog. In that way, her feed is authentic.
4. My wife would follow Teigen if my wife was on Twitter. The point isn’t that I have to be ashamed of following a model; the point is that the tweets’ subjects aren’t pigeonholed into a singular category. Our 22-year-old intern enjoys them as much as my 31-year-old wife would. Three sentences to say that she appeals to a wide array of audiences: you’re welcome.
5. She’s technically proficient. Her tweets are staccato; links and photos are posted correctly. That seems like a baseline requirement for success, but so many fail.
-Sam Waterson is the Executive Vice President and Creative Director of Richard Harrison Bailey/The Agency. Follow him on Twitter @slwaterson.