Yesterday at 12:55 p.m., Conan O’Brien posted the following to his Twitter account: “I’ve decided to follow someone at random. She likes peanut butter and gummy dinosaurs. Sarah Killen, your life is about to change.” And it did change, very quickly. Killen, who goes by the Twitter name LovelyButton, is a 19-year-old student in Michigan who started out yesterday with 3 Twitter followers and now is up to 13,279. We chatted with Killen (and her fiancée, John) this afternoon about becoming a sudden Internet celebrity.
So how did you become the one person that Conan O’Brien follows on Twitter?
I don’t know! Someone, but not Conan, contacted me on MySpace and told me he wanted to follow one random person. He said if Conan picked me, I’d get a lot of followers, and was that okay. And I said yes and then he did it, and I started getting followers immediately.
Did you actually think he was going to pick you?
No, because the person who contacted me was vague, and I didn’t take it seriously at all until I went on Twitter later and saw he’d put my name in there. All of a sudden, people were talking about me, and my name was everywhere, and I had all these followers. And it took a while to sort it out. I had like 4,000 messages in my in-box, so the first few hours were just going through everything.
What were you tweeting about before?
I tweet about random stuff: I love peanut butter, I love gummy dinosaurs, whatever I was doing at the time. I started doing it because I wanted to vent stuff, and because no one was following me, I knew no one would see it. And now I guess a lot of people will.
Were you a big Conan fan before?
He’s hilarious, I would stay up to watch him. I was one of his followers on Twitter, so that’s how he found me. I just started my Twitter account a few days before he did, so there were rumors that I was in cahoots with him about this, but I definitely wasn’t.
So has your life actually changed yet?
Yes! I have a lot of people offering me free stuff, though I’ve only accepted a computer from Hornblasters. But people are offering us stuff for our wedding, photographers and invitations, but I haven’t accepted anything other than the computer. Oh, and I’ve raised a lot of money for 3-day for the Cure, the charity I support. I think we’re over $2,000 in one day, which is the amount I wanted to raise by August.
So you’re getting married on September 25.
Everybody keeps joking that Conan will come to our wedding, so that would be fantastic. It’s rumored that he’s going to start his new show that day.
Maybe you’ll get married on the show!
I would do it, that’d be awesome.
