Don Draper lives to tweet another day.
I was not the only one writing about AMC’s decision to remove their Mad Men characters from Twitter yesterday. The Twitterverse and Blogosphere (two meaningless buzzwords in one sentence!) were on fire yesterday, lambasting the network for its short-sightedness in removing these profiles, especially given the high caliber of content being generated by these rogue tweeters.
Luckily, there was a voice of reason. Deep Focus, AMC’s interactive agency stepped in and helped show the error of the network’s ways. According to a post on Silicon Alley Insider, a Deep Focus spokesperson said that they advised that in this case it would be “better to embrace the community than negate their efforts.”
As I stated yesterday, these profiles represent a community of people passionate about the Mad Men brand, and as such were acting as powerful ambassadors of the brand through authentic communication. To take the profiles down was a mistake, and I’m glad that they were savvy enough (or at least scared enough of the growing negative online publicity) to reevaluate their decision.
I agree with Adrian Ho’s comment on yesterday’s post that AMC needs to hire these rogues to continue maintenance and development of these online personas. However, even though AMC could then control the quality of the content by offering creative guidelines, they need to be very mindful of the fact that the communications need to remain authentic and not commercially forced. If they were to control these profiles too tightly, they could ruin the integrity of what was created and find themselves back at the top of the online community’s shit list.
Finally, I have to tell you that my wife and I had a fantastic conversation about the takedown decision on the drive home last night. She brought the legal side of the decision into the conversation and made a great case for why the decision was made in the first place. I don’t really think we agreed with our opinions on the decision, but that was what made it great.
I really, REALLY wish we had been able to record it as a podcast because there was lots that she had to say that would be of great interest to everyone following this story. I’d be afraid to try to recreate the conversation too much because the spontaneity of the dialogue would be completely absent, but we may try to record something just because it was definitely worth sharing.