[LINK] "How spaceman Hadfield's sons pushed him to social-media stardom"

[rfmcdonald]

Peter Rakobowchuk's Canadian Press article, carried in the Calgary Herald, goes into interesting background about Chris Hadfield's media fame. It turns out that his sons pushed him into it, or at least into the social media that made him a celebrity.

[Hadfield's] conversion began several years ago — long before Hadfield's mission to the International Space Station, which ended with great fanfare this week.

He initially balked when his sons began preaching the merits of Twitter and Facebook more than three years ago.

During a family Christmas get-together in 2009 his son Evan, who now lives in Germany, and Kyle, who's in China, pointed out that they relied on the Internet to find out what's going on.

They got on his case again when his five-month mission was announced in early September 2010. It was then that they decided to set up his two social-media sites.

A few months later, in January 2011, Hadfield only had about 1,000 followers on Twitter and about 600 Facebook friends — a drop in the bucket compared to now.

[. . .]

He had only 20,000 Twitter followers when he blasted off with Russian space colleague Roman Romanenko and NASA astronaut Tom Marshburn on Dec. 19, 2012.

Upon his return to Earth this week, Hadfield was hovering around one million Twitter followers and more than 325,000 "Likes" on Facebook. His photography and music, distributed mainly through social media, eventually earned him mainstream news coverage around the world.