“Is Kermit on Twitter?”

Chloe Sladden smiles as she asks, cognizant of the absurdity of the question. She doesn’t wait for a response from her team before proposing that Kermit conduct interviews with the soon-to-be-announced Oscar nominees. “Kermit’s not on Twitter,” answers Omid Ashtari, a gaunt, stylishly unshaven former Hollywood talent agent. Sladden recruited him from Creative Artists Agency to lead outreach to celebrities.

This report is greeted with disbelief around the conference table. But after a quick search, it emerges that Ashtari is correct. While there’s @Kermit_J_Frog and @KermitOfficial, there’s no Twitter handle with a blue symbol indicating that it’s been verified as the character’s legitimate voice.

“Well, so, fine,” says Sladden, steering the idea toward pairing up Academy Award nominees to engage in Twitter dialogues, or having past winners interview the contenders. Looking glamorous in stovepipe trousers and a pale peach dotted blouse, and talking at a caffeinated speed she later tells me was slowed down for my benefit, Twitter’s 37-year-old director of media partnerships recalls the relentless Faye Dunaway character in the 1976 film Network.

This brainstorming session, held at the company’s San Francisco headquarters, is about the same thing most meetings at Twitter seem to be about—namely, getting interesting people to do interesting things on the platform. Sladden’s team no longer encounters the blanket skepticism it once met with, but it is still a minority of celebrities who have embraced Twitter as an organic, authentic way to relate to their fans, as @ladygaga (eighteen million followers) or @kanyewest (six million) has. In rapid succession, Sladden pushes through novelists (“I will die if I can ever convince Richard Ford to do this,” she says), ways the “heritage” band Duran Duran might use Twitter on an upcoming reunion tour, and an experiment with Fox News in real-time polling abou...