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August 19, 2008

Connect with the Mad Men on Twitter

If you're caught up in Mad Men fever and want to drop a little deeper into the rabbit hole, get yourself on Twitter and start following @don_draper and @joan_holloway.

We can''t say for certain that the producers of the show are behind it, but we can tell you the characters seem absolutely consistent with their televised versions when tweeting with one another and followers. In addition, each profile links to the official AMC site, and there does seem to be some highly subtle show promotion. For instance, last Sunday morning, well before the episode aired, @don_draper tweeted: "Wishing I didn't have to spend most of my Sunday at the office." It was later revealed in the show, of course, that Draper had to head into the city to work on the American Airlines pitch. Nice.

It's an interesting use of Twitter, and one I'm content to play along with to see what more they can do with the highly personal medium.

Of course, there's an open invitation for the masterminds behind this to contact us with more revelations.

UPDATE: The Mad Men are getting kicked off of Twitter. Read more here. I can't help but think cooler heads should have prevailed given the amount of good will this was generating. Perhaps they (cooler heads that is) still will.

UPDATE 2: And, yes, cooler heads have prevailed. Less than 24 hours after the smackdown, Deep Focus tallks AMC into chilling out and rolling with it. Nice work to all. Although, I'll admit to wishing this had been an offical effort.

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Truly, a FANTASTIC use of Twitter.

Now @peggyolson and @pete_campbell have joined the fun.

How awesome would it be if the writers of Mad Men were sitting behind the scenes handling the Twitter accounts? I love the idea of taking the voices you've created through your writing and expanding those consistently across multiple platforms.

Eureka from the Scifi channel does something similar. S_A_R_A_H (the artificially intelligent house) has a twitter account and tweets statements that have to do with plot points in upcoming shows.

Leave it to Twitter to suspend the accounts due to "Strange Activity." Every day, there's a new reason to stop using this ridiculous service. God forbid the jackasses in the corner cubicle over at Twitter let something cool like this play out. Twitter, you still suck.

I completely thought AMC was behind the twitter handles and loved them driving the narrative outside the one hour of weekly TV. Man, talk about lost opportunity, I was totally into it.

Even though AMC has chilled out, they still missed a huge opportunity. If they would've just waited to see what would happen instead of going Brand Nazi they could have kept the charade going that it was an official effort. Now the jig is up and it doesn't feel genuine any more.

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