Britney Spears has aides write Twitter notes to fans. Shaquille O’Neal says he writes his own.

By NOAM COHEN


The rapper 50 Cent is among the legion of stars who have recently embraced Twitter to reach fans who crave near-continuous access to their lives and thoughts. On March 1, he shared this insight with the more than 200,000 people who follow him:“My ambition leads me through a tunnel that never ends.”

Those were 50 Cent’s words, but it was not exactly him tweeting. Rather, it was Chris Romero, known as Broadway, the director of the rapper’s Web empire, who typed in those words after reading them in an interview.“He doesn’t actually use Twitter,”Mr.Romero said of 50 Cent, whose real name is Curtis Jackson III,“but the energy of it is all him.”

In its short history, Twitter - a microblogging tool that uses bursts of text of up to 140 characters - has become an important marketing tool for celebrities, politicians and businesses. But someone has to do all that writing, even if each entry is barely a sentence long. In many cases, celebrities and their handlers have turned to outside writers - ghost Twitterers, if you will - who keep fans up to date, often in the star’s own voice.

Because Twitter is seen as an intimate link between celebrities and their fans, many performers are not willing to divulge the help they use to put their thoughts into cyberspace.

Britney Spears recently advertised for someone to help, among other things, create content for Twitter and Face book. Kanye West recently told New York magazine that he had hired two people to update his blog.“It’s just like how a designer would work,”he said.

It is not only celebrity entertainers who enlist a team to produce real-time commentary on their daily activities. Candidate Barack Obama, as well as President Obama, has a social-networking team to keep his Twitter feed tweeting.

The famous, of course, have always turned to ghostwriters for autobiographies and other acts of self-aggrandizement. But the idea of having someone else write continual updates of one’s daily life strikes some as slightly absurd.

The basketball star Shaquille O’Neal, for example, is a prolific Twitterer on his account, The Real Shaq, where he shares personal news, jokes and occasional trash talk about opponents with nearly 430,000 followers.“If I am going to speak, it will come from me,”he said. As for the temptation to rely on others to supply his words, he said:“It’s 140 characters. It’s so few characters. If you need a ghostwriter for that, I feel sorry for you.”

In the last couple of months, the Britney Spears Twitter stream has become a model of transparency. Where the feed once seemed that it was all written personally by Ms.Spears, lately it can read like a group blog, with some posts signed“Britney,”some signed by“Adam Leber, manager”and others by“Lauren.”That would be Lauren Kozak, social-media director of britneyspears. com.

Many online commentators are appalled at the practice of enlisting ghost Twitterers, but Joseph Nejman, a former consultant to Ms.Spears who helped conceive her Web strategy, said there was a more than a whiff of hypocrisy among critics.“It’s O.K. to tweet for a brand,”he said, remarking how common it is for companies to have Twitter accounts,“but not O.K. for a celebrity. But the truth is, they are a brand. ”