Trend: Fictional Character Twittering

UPDATE: The New York Times ran this story about the MadMen kerfluffle, hinting that AMC’s agency Deep Focus might be behind at least part of the apparent FanFic.

@ParamountPics, what do you say? My friend @twalk just suggested that Tropic Thunder‘s Les Grossman should be Twittering. He has a point.

Whether it’s FanFic, like AMC‘s recently controversial MadMen crew, or official content, like the CSI episode last November, Twitter is a fertile and potentially valuable place to flesh out character development and engage with fans of your property.

CSI’s “Twitter” episode (below) was pretty interesting and got a lot of buzz on Twitter, but totally missed its opportunity to carry engagement forward. The Actual account for @kiraEDGE (the murdered character from the show) didn’t even include the Tweets that were featured in the show itself. Accounts (likely FanFic) for her two love interests @TorchX and @DrummerBoy19 are likewise content-free and abandoned. Even @CSI is inactive or a mere squatter. WTH?

AMC’s period ad-agency hit MadMen had a recent microdrama on Twitter and in the blogosphere. (See VentureBeat reports on the DMCA Takedown.) Fortunately, AMC’s agency Deep Focus talked them off the ledge, as Silicon Alley Insider reports, and the accounts are definitely generating interest in MadMen. PRWeek’s somewhat confusing report (*Twitter issued the DMCA takedown notice? Really?) states that AMC is spinning it as a miscommunication. I dunno though, I’d guess a lot of companies are not preparing for this opportunity. (By the way, check out Ben Kessler‘s list of all the MadMen Twitterers.)

I recently asked my followers for their “dream Twitterers” and turned up an interesting mix of celebrities, fictional characters and intellectuals. Speaking of the potential future @LesGrossman, Chris Thilk put together this list of Movie characters who should Twitter.

People, if you have an audience for *any* reason, you can engage them on Twitter in ways that simply are not possible anywhere else. And, you can create significant business value from that IF you do it right and genuinely contribute to the community.

UPDATE: *Though PRWeek wrote: “Twitter, presumably on the orders of AMC, issued a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown (SIC).” Twitter was good enough to confirm, they do not issue DMCA takedowns.

UPDATE 2: Spooky and recursive: @bud_melman, one of the MadMen FanFic Twitterers just dm’d me a link to www.wearesterlingcooper.com. What fun. The FanFic crew have their own website now, for you to follow along. True confession? When I first saw that Sterling Cooper advertising was on Twitter I added them to a list of agencies to invite to our upcoming “What your clients should know about Twitter” webinar. (Did I seriously just admit to that?) Um, yeah. You did.

UPDATE 3: @bud_melman is an OC, (original character) meaning, he’s not even *in* the show. He’s a salute to the salute to the show, or a fictional fiction of the… you get the idea.