The Twitterverse was a-twitter yesterday due to AMC issuing take down notices to a series of fan-created accounts for the characters of their hit series Mad Men. When the accounts went up a few months ago, the characters were embraced by Twitter users, who probably skew on the side of an advertising/marketing/consulting tech-savvy audience. They didn’t care whether they represented AMC or not. No, this was a new and exciting form of fan-fiction.
Twitter playing nice, upheld to the notices and temporarily took down the accounts. What came after was a series of protests from blogs, but especially from Twitter users:
stjohn Wow AMC way to hate on your Mad Men fans http://is.gd/1Wt2
pheezy @martastrickland AMC gets lumped in with Hasbro for not realizing what their digital fan-base has already done for them.
mzkagan Why has Twitter hijacked my beloved @don_draper (and friends)? Looks like i’ll be drinking alone 2nite.
slange70 @martastrickland sounds to me that AMC was bummed out that they didn’t think of that first.
bryanfuhr it’s a shame that a show which celebrates innovation in advertising cannot embrace innovation in advertising
The irony was too much to bare and apparently Deep Focus, the web marketing group for AMC, convinced them, “Better to embrace the community than negate their efforts.” And so the accounts have returned, and no worse for the wear.
don_draper Doing what I do best – moving forward with my life like today never happened.
Marta Strickland