Celebrity train wrecks are inherently fascinating.
I bet you've sat through a traffic jam for 20 minutes, creeping along at three miles an hour, watching people using canes and walkers on the sidewalk pass you by -- only to find out there's nothing wrong with your side of the highway. The entire backup, which could be three miles long, was caused by people slowing down to stare at a wreck on the other side of the highway.
We are naturally attracted to mayhem. Humans are also hardwired to care about celebrities and public figures.
So when professional athletes, politicians or rock stars self-destruct, people naturally pay attention to the celebrity train wreck.
Charlie Sheen's fiery wreckage certainly caught our attention.
Sheen won an Oscar for the movie Platoon, was in classic '80s movies like Wall Street and starred in the most popular sitcom on television, Two and a Half Men.
Then he imploded. He made the news for trashing hotel rooms and hiding in the closet. He was a notorious playboy who couldn't stay married or sober and was finally fired from his hit show after making insanely insulting comments about its creator.
Yet what he did next was interesting, in good ways and bad.
Lesson No. 1: Don't Always Go into Hiding
Instead of retreating from the media and paparazzi, Sheen fired his publicist and started a one-man media blitz.
His new Twitter account boomed to 2 million followers, then 2.6 million.
He invented catch-phrases and one-liners that went viral.
Tiger blood. Adonis DNA. Warlock. Rock star from Mars.
So far, this was interesting and surprising and different. Then it quickly soured.
Lesson No. 2: Don't Make Your Own Instant Show.
Sheen is a veteran. He grew up in a Hollywood household, with a famous movie star dad (Charlie Sheen) and movie-star brother (Emilio Estevez). He knows how act in dramatic movies like Platoon and Wall Street and how to go for laughs in big screen farces like Hot Shots and his small-screen sitcom, the most popular on TV.
But he's not a director. He's not a writer or a producer. And he's not a stand-up comic.
His rambling webcast, Sheen's Korner, bombed. Terribly.
Acting in a movie or a TV show is far, far different than doing a straight webcast. With a movie, you shoot it a scene at a time. That scene might get reshot dozens of times until you get it right. There's an entire crew working with you, trying to do a world-class production to earn money at the box office. TV is a bit different, and there are sitcoms shot before a live audience, but even sitcoms are rehearsed and polished until everything works.
Sheen hopped on the air and rambled. If he was trying to start a new career doing some kind of live show over the internet, it crashed and burned. Nobody will pay money to watch him do that again.
Lesson No. 3: Have a purpose and a point.
Just because you can get the attention of the press and public doesn't mean that you should.
Exposure without a purpose quickly becomes over-exposure and media fatigue.
People get tired of the same crazy schtick when there's no point to it. It gets repetitive and old. It comes off as self-serving, narcissistic and ego-centric. "Look at me! Look at me!"
The press and public tends to grow tired of anyone who dominates media coverage. What balances heavy exposure is having a purpose, whether it's a new idea, a new product (a movie launch, a tablet computer), a campaign or a cause. Bono of U2 and Colin Powell both leverage their fame for a cause, and even though they're in the media a lot for those causes, it's not annoying.
Sheen went, in lightning fashion, from interesting and different to his own punchline. Right away, Saturday Night Live did dead-on skit lampooning Sheen's Korner. Having millions of Twitter followers and skads of attention in the press didn't matter.The attention started to boomerang and backfire.
One of the first moves Sheen made during his implosion was to fire his publicist. A good publicist would have asked him what his goal was. Did he want to get back into movies, maybe comedies? Did he want a different TV show on a different network? How did he plan on paying the bills?
Sheen didn't have a purpose or a plan. And it showed.