Bad, AMC, bad. BAD!
Many of you know that I’m married to an attorney, but I’m going to go ahead and say this anyway:
Stupid lawyers, why must you ruin everything?
What I’m referring to is today’s discovery that the Mad Men characters that have been happily coexisting on Twitter for the past few weeks have been unceremoniously taken down as a result of a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaint on behalf of AMC Legal.
These profiles were not being maintained by AMC, but by (semi) anonymous individuals with a passion for the characters and the show.
These profiles were brilliant. They interacted with each other and the Twitterverse as a whole. And they did it in character so convincingly that many marketers I know were pretty convinced that this whole thing was being beautifully orchestrated by AMC and perhaps the writers for the show.
Maybe that’s why AMC had the profiles pulled. Perhaps the rogues behind the idea were doing too good a job of pulling it off, and AMC had a “why didn’t we think of that?” moment. However, I’m thinking that’s not the case.
It’s very obvious by this action that AMC has no clue what today’s age of conversational interactivity is all about and that whether companies like it or not — the user is control of brands now. @soseman said it best in a comment on the original blog post:
Rogues don’t do things the way YOU want them to, they do them the way THEY want to do them. But clearly someone with such a passion for any brand just wants to help.
This was a terrible move on behalf of AMC. What initially started as what many of us saw as the best use of Twitter yet for a commercial property has become a black eye on corporate America’s perception of social media and its ability to stifle conversation surrounding its brands at any cost.
// UPDATE: Here’s another excellent point of view on this issue.