Sue Kessler/Christian Oth Studio
Michelle Katharine Barna and Joanna Ruth Stern were married last Sunday evening, thanks to Barna stumbling upon Stern’s tweets about the series finale of “The L Word.”
Barna is the director of social media at Deep Focus, an agency that has conceived many great social TV programs, while Stern is a personal technology columnist at the ‘Wall Street Journal.’ Forget about proving a positive correlation between tweet activity and ratings when we now know it can lead to true love!
The couple met where one might expect a social media expert and a technology journalist to meet: on Twitter.
In February 2009, Ms. Stern happened to stumble upon Ms. Barna’s humorous tweets while searching for comments about the Showtime series finale of “The L Word,” a television drama series about lesbian, bisexual, straight and transgender people.
“I started paging through her previous tweets, and there were a lot of snarky things about the show, about social media, being gay and being very tech savvy,” Ms. Stern said. “All of her sarcasm really caught my attention. I felt she had a personality similar to mine.”
After reading Ms. Barna’s tweets, Ms. Stern followed her on the service and the two soon realized they had emailed previously about a work-related matter. They began a two-week correspondence, which led to a night out for drinks at a Manhattan bar that lasted more than five hours.
“She was just such an incredible personality,” Ms. Barna said. “She was someone I wanted to get to know better, not necessarily romantically, but just someone I wanted to have in my life, someone I had this magnetic pull toward.”
They quickly became friends and within five months were dating.