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By now you have heard that Angelina Jolie has joined Twitter but has no intention of tweeting.  She just doesn’t want anyone else doing it with her name.

Smart reputation management and, assuming for a moment that Angelina is as intelligent as this makes her sound, she has correctly identified the two illusions that social media creates.

1. That you actually know the people you follow or befriend or are linked to.
2. That those people are personally posting the content, that somewhere right now Ashton Kutcher (rather than his publicist or his publicist’s intern) is tweeting and you are one of the privileged five and half million who will see it.

While I’d like to believe that Shaquille O’Neal actually writes those hilarious yo mama jokes and have seen golfers tweet in between shots and know that some NFL teams have barred players from tweeting while they’re on the bench, does that really constitute friendship?

Admittedly, a lot of friendship is made up of inane conversations. One of the best things friends do is listen to you, even when you’re inane. That’s why lonely people talk to themselves.

No. What celebrities (or their publicists) have figured out is the increasingly fuzzy line between content and marketing. There are two separate but indistinct activities on social media: social media marketing and networking online.

Social media marketing is a new version of PR—awareness, attention and interest. Because I’m thinking of buying a new car, I see Jaguar on Twitter, which raises my awareness, makes me see them as a hipper company than I’d thought; they’ve got my attention and now I’m interested. But to be clear, they are not my friend anymore than Ashton is.

Networking online is hanging out with people you can’t be with right now. I have a friend, a genuine friend whom I see and share inane conversations with over lunch, who is obsessed with his dog. He and the dog are on Facebook all the time—cute pictures of the dog, what happened on this morning’s outing to the park, dog illnesses. Because he is my friend, I put up with this and having it on Facebook actually keeps it out of a lot of the luncheon conversations. Social media allows me to keep abreast of all things canine in his life and makes me smile. And if my friend said that Smack-i-licious Doggy Treats are the best and I had a dog, I would go buy Smack-i-licious.

Has he crossed the line from friendship to marketing or is he just doing what friends have always done: sharing an inane tidbit of information? In this case, it happens to be a product endorsement. He has become, in marketing parlance, “an evangelist.”

Social media pushes his evangelism out the same way that PR does and now we have an endorsement from a real-life person with friends and followers. If a happy customer will tell five people in person how great something is, think what that looks like with the now billions of people on social media platforms. That’s what Angelina is worried about, the power of that pyramid.

Andrew Davis, chief strategy officer at Tipping Point Labs, created the Influence Pyramid which shows how one message gains interest and momentum as it spreads down to consumers. But the 92% of consumers at the bottom of his pyramid are at the top of an even bigger pyramid. They have actual friends that they network with online.

That’s the third thing, the fuzzy thing, going on in social media: social media marketing and online networking overlap to create this entirely new and very powerful communication. Random bits of content are put in context and injected into conversations. It may not be friendship but it’s certainly a force to be reckoned with.