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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
Steal This Idea: Tweeting Don Draper  characters of the Mad Men TV series on Twitter, she hardly can believe media companies haven’t ridden this wave. “I thought when the Mad Men characters got a lot of press in August of 2008, and when I got the Shorty Award in February, I thought for sure this would be de rigueur for TV shows by now.” Bugbee created a Twitter feed in the persona of Mad Men copywriter Peggy Olson, and she was joined by scores of others who Twittered the fictional Creative Director Don Draper, the rest of the staff and even gave voice to the company Xerox machine in a feed. Bugbee, the head of BigDeal PR, is among five presenters at next week’s special edition min Webinar: “The Great Tweet Up: Getting Relationships, Referrals and Even Revenue from Twitter." But before next week’s presentation on what magazines need to do to get the most from the micro-blog environment, we wanted to go off-topic a bit with Bugbee to see how her experiences Twittering fictional characters might help magazine brands imagine new uses for the form. While many people took up Mad Men characters to Twitter, fewer kept it up the way Bugbee and her loose confederacy of fellow fans did. She now tweets for much of the creative department at the show’s Sterling Cooper, although the Peggy Olson character @PeggyOlson is her standout creation. Bugbee is also the person behond @Paul_Kinsey, @Sal_Romano and @Smitty_Smith, all part of the fictional team. Bugbee herself does not tweet the iconic Don Draper character. Several others have a feed in Draper's name. But Bugbee's Olson is widely praised for channeling the character's voice and even her cadence. @PeggyOlson has more followers than any of the Don Draper iterations on Twitter. Bugbee says there is an enormous opportunity for media companies to use Twitter’s unique properties to craft fictional worlds for readers. “It is a great improvisational medium,” she says. “When one character writes something to me that is provocative, then the onus is on me to make an interesting response.” In order to preserve the fiction, Bugbee will only direct questions to other Mad Men characters on Twitter but will respond directly to questions fans pose to her. “I try to be judicious in how much I post, in the same way I consider it a best practice for many brands tweeting. Don’t throw it all up at once. Don’t post five times in five minutes and then go silent. Try to spread it out.” In fact, she recommends that Twitter authors follow the medium’s less-is-more qualities. Let a persona build slowly via a string of small observations and comments, she says. “You don’t have to create a large narrative like a novel. It is iterative.” Crafting a character on Twitter is not much different than maintaining a brand’s image here, she suggests. Sticking with a reliable voice and staying on message are key. “You have to really get inside the character and decide what you want to say. Staying on message is a discipline that comes from the political realm, but there is no reason you can’t do it for your own brand.” Ephemeral and irrelevant posts are not as cute and conversational as you may expect. Respect the listeners’ time and make sure that the posts matter in building a story or providing a service. “If I can tweet for someone living in 1963 then you can stay on message,” she says. But the most important lesson about Twitter, Bugbee feels, is in learning to listen. No…really listen. “I don’t know if people have really dug in to understand what that means.” Simply harvesting comments and skimming the audience’s likes and dislikes is not listening. “If people are talking about your brand online and you spend a couple of hours a week listening to their conversations, there is no way to come away clueless about what your customer wants.” Bugbee is exploring a use of Twitter that few media companies seem to have understood. This is also a medium that can create new narrative channels, riff on subject matter in unconventional ways, and create a unique interactive experience for readers. There is more to Twitter than crafting a traffic-generating news feed. On Tuesday, October 27, at 1:30, Bugbee will be joined by some of the best Tweeters in the media business, from Meredith, Glam, MacUser, and Time Inc. for min’s “Great Tweet Up” Webinar. If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com |
 Manager, Digital Media, NCC Media
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It’s all about knowing your audience and defining a strategy – plain, old Marketing 101. I don’t tweet prolifically for @PeggyOlson because that would be out of character for her – or anyone on Mad Men. All the characters’ scenes and dialogue are brief. My mantra from day one was to treat @PeggyOlson like a job and execute the strategy (as I see it) as if it were a paid gig. I thought that would yield the most helpful insights. I didn’t want her to be rogue – I have plenty of other Twitter characters for that! ;-)
That said, I’ve ramped up many other client, non-profit and research-related accounts that are very verbose – and that works too. As long as updates are interesting, on-topic and not predominantly self-promotional, your audience may agree that more is better.