Joss Whedon

The original incarnation of this commentary, not previously published, was written prior to the sequence of events which started with Dollhouse being taken off the air for November sweeps month and ended with today’s news that the show has been canceled.

I’ve not made any particular effort to rewrite what follows to place Dollhouse into the past tense, and so some instances of urging action might no longer be directly or immediately relevant at present. I simply trust the reader will take into account when this was written, since the case study provided by Dollhouse in a social media context remains valid as an example, as does (I believe) the overall argument presented here.

This is not meant to be a comprehensive examination of Dollhouse-related social media activity. Examples and comparisons provided along the way represent my own contributions in that regard primarily because they were the examples with which I am most familiar.

It is entirely possible, of course, that there are convincing reasons why the below is not already happening. It also is entirely possible that in fact there are plans and intentions about which none of us have heard. Whatever the case, I thought I’d offer for perusal my take on Mutant Enemy and social media.

An Intro

In the age of social media, traditional “marketing” must adapt not only to providing information, but to engaging in discussion and problem solving as well. In a very concrete sense, marketing must become customer service, which increases both presence and reputation — core goals of marketing.

In most, if not all, of these newly-necessary activities, FOX Broadcasting has fallen down on the job when it comes to Dollhouse.

It is my assertion not only that Mutant Enemy can step in to fill that gap, but that it should, in part because Dollhouse needs some sort of official social media presence, but also because it will establish a presence for Mutant Enemy itself, benefitting it in the future for other projects.

What follows describes what I believe should be possible, not necessarily what is possible within the contractual rules and obligations of Hollywood (an issue mainly raised by the YouTube section). For me, it’s always been best to start with “in an ideal world…” and work my way back to the real, rather than artificially restrict ideas from the start.

On Twitter

FOX Broadcasting’s presence on Twitter when it comes to Dollhouse has been next to non-existent. Other shows not only have received routine mentions through FOX’s own account (@FoxBroadcasting) but have their own dedicated accounts as well (@FRINGEonFOX, @GLEEonFOX, @HOUSEonFOX, et cetera). Dollhouse, in the meantime, went almost completely unmentioned all Summer, until the day before the season premiere when @FoxBroadcasting seemed suddenly to remember.

Even then, the attention they paid it amounted to a few tweets linking to news stories and the pawning off of some promotional activities onto a fansite willing to do FOX’s job for free.

Weeks beforehand (in a reply to an inquiry of mine), @FoxBroadcasting said that an official Dollhouse account was “coming soon”. It did not materialize until much later, and even once it did was scarcely an improvement. And given the track record, I don’t believe it that was a surprise. @FoxBroadcasting is all too prone to errors, such as tweeting that Eliza would be on a radio show “tomorrow” when it had already happened earlier that day, and all too likely to treat Twitter (and all social media) as a broadcast medium.

Compare this with the months-long activity out of my own @watchdollhouse and then @UnofficialME accounts, and you’ll find that where @FoxBroadcasting fails at providing information, engaging in discussion, and problem solving, those efforts have excelled. They also are free from the restriction of having to only discuss FOX Broadcasting and have become involved, for example, in international discussions surrounding the show and its availability.

From the launch of @watchdollhouse back in May, one of my primary tasks has been to search Twitter repeatedly and routinely over the course of the day — every day — for relevant keywords to see if there are questions that need answering or problems needing to be solved. Compare that to @FoxBroadcasting, which barely (if ever) acknowledges anyone who tweets messages to them unless said anyone happens also to be a FOX-controlled account. On occasion, they’ll retweet a news story. That is not social media. And that is something people notice.

The opportunity being missed here can be illustrated by imagining if the activities of @watchdollhouse and @UnofficialME had been engaged in by an official entity. It would have built a positive reputation for Mutant Enemy online in the void left by FOX, amounting to a very real kind of marketing, in the sense that marketing in the social media age has become (for those doing it properly) synonymous with customer service.

Although @FoxBroadcasting was not directly at issue in the ordering process for the Comic-Con limited edition DVD and BD since that wasn’t a network problem but a studio/Home Entertainment problem, it bears mention here. As everyone knows, the process was fraught with errors, and the inevitable site crashes that occur when this fandom is unleashed upon something.

But since this wasn’t the network’s issue, @FoxBroadcasting remained completely uninvolved despite Twitter being perhaps the primary service through which people were discussing the problem. With no Twitter presence from the studio or Home Entertainment, it was left to fans (including one who works at FHE but was completely unconnected to the DVD process) to try to provide accurate information as it arose.

Here again, having some sort of official entity present in the discussions would have benefitted all involved, even if it might not have risen beyond the “I feel your pain” of simply trying to keep the information flowing and actually conversing with the affected parties. Since Mutant Enemy has a stake in the existence of level heads in the community and the smooth flow of information regardless of whether the FOX at issue is the network, the studio, or Home Entertainment, it would be in M.E.’s best interest to have an official presence established before the next such crisis arises.

Setting aside moments of crisis (hardly the chief reason for having a social media presence) one of the single best relevant examples of Twitter usage is Craig Engler, the Senior Vice President & General Manager of Digital for Syfy, who runs (naturally enough) the @Syfy account. Actively engaged in the community, behaving like the actual human being he is, and coming up with interesting ideas as well as responding to those of fans, Craig is resoundingly respected for what he does online in this capacity. It’s a good model.

The total sum of Dollhouse-related activity by the @FoxBroadcasting account on Twitter in the two weeks leading up to the premiere was not even a full page of search results, and in reality they all come from the day of the premiere or the day before — not one single other Dollhouse tweet during that two week pre-premiere period. All told, over those two weeks, the search results for all their tweets encompass about six pages worth of tweets — almost all of them about Cleveland and Glee, with a little Fringe and House thrown in.

On Facebook

FOX’s activities on Facebook as they pertain to Dollhouse have been marginally better than they are on Twitter. Links are somewhat more regularly posted to their Dollhouse page, but various elements frequently end up completely out of date, and they spend no time involved in the comments threads generated by those links answering questions or addressing issues raised by fans.

Not to mention the fact that after the sudden decision not to air Dollhouse during sweeps month, FOX posted to Facebook a link to an old article whose very first paragraph referenced an air date that no longer was valid. In doing so, FOX made no effort to present that new context, leading to confusion in the ensuing comments thread.

Little in the way of Facebook-specific issues need to be discussed here, as most of the points addressed regarding Twitter are applicable when it comes to Facebook as well. Let it be said, at the very least, that in the absence of any FOX presence in the comment threads on their own Dollhouse page, an official Mutant Enemy voice pitching in to answer the inevitably-arising questions certainly couldn’t hurt, and (a common argument here) would let M.E. itself capitalize upon FOX’s own inactivity.

It could also be held that establishing an official Mutant Enemy presence on Facebook now, during Dollhouse, benefits M.E. later on. But the most important point is that FOX’s current run of activity is the exception, not the rule, and Mutant Enemy could (and should) ensure a continually active presence even when FOX is neglecting its own.

On YouTube

Since most of the lessons and arguments I’m presenting here can be extended to all of the various social media sites, I’m not going to be exhaustive. But we need to address YouTube due to its importance and uniqueness. There’s further FOX failure on YouTube, and it’s the site which most raises the aforementioned possible problems in terms of the world of Hollywood contractual rules and obligations.

Heading into season two of Dollhouse, FOX utilized its YouTube account not at all until the day of the premiere. No teasers, no trailers, not even any of the television commercials once they started airing. This remained true at least until the day before episode two. Fans have been left with next to nothing to share and/or embed. In fact, the first thing released was a “sneak peek” via iTunes — which no one could share because you can’t embed from iTunes and the file itself was DRM’d and so no one could rip it and post it themselves. A complete and utter failure to take advantage of social media.

While FOX finally posted two Dollhouse videos to their YouTube account on the day of the premiere (too late to be of any use to anyone), the prior instance of them posting anything Dollhouse-related to their account was four entire months ago, in mid-May.

In light of the relatively minor traditional ad spend for Dollhouse, this is all the more baffling, because social media sharing was the one place FOX would have been able to get some sort of bang for a comparatively miniscule buck. More than disappointing, it’s actually inexcusable.

But there are smaller, no-budget, more guerrilla-style ways to use sites and services such as YouTube for marketing. While FOX itself would never take this approach, Mutant Enemy itself could, if it’s able. Setting aside discussion of those potential contractual issues, let me detail two examples that did occur to me.

Back when Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was cancelled and fans started to clamor for Summer Glau coming to Dollhouse, one TV critic tweeted that they’d be perfectly willing to just watch Summer read the phone book. Imagine, if Mutant Enemy had the leeway and was controlling its own social media destiny, grabbing a Flip HD camera (or whatever), a phone book, the corner of any random room at FOX (or even the Dollhouse set), and Summer, recording thirty seconds of her reading the phone book, uploading it to YouTube, and then tweeting “so-and-so asked for it months ago, so here it is”.

It doesn’t spoil the show. It doesn’t require a budget. It doesn’t even require an advertising campaign strategy. It just requires being willing, at the drop of a hat, when the moment strikes, to respond to some stray remark online in a way that generates attention and, yes, amusement.

Or, there’s a personal example. For the final week leading to the season premiere, I registered a domain and launched a site modeled after ones such as isobamapresidentyet.com, simply displaying “no” or “yes” as warranted (it displays something else now). Imagine, if this had been an official Mutant Enemy site, instead of displaying simple text, having a new embedded video each day, with some member of the cast delivering the “no”, culminating in a final video on Friday of all of them celebrating the “yes”.

Again, nothing about it spoils the show. It doesn’t require a real budget (beyond domain registration, web hosting, and the time of whoever is responsible for M.E.’s social media presence). It just gets put together on the spur of the moment, launched, and generates attention and, again, amusement.

In an ideal world, there also would be more material like this EW video of Eliza and Fran touring the set and being generally dorky. It would be nice if it didn’t always require a media outlet, and could simply happen “in-house” and posted to a M.E. YouTube account.

Some Bullet Points

* Social media is more akin to customer service than it is to marketing, and must be treated as a conversation not as a broadcast. * FOX’s failure to utilize social media to promote Dollhouse (or failure to utilize it well in those rare instances when they bother) is detrimental to the show. * Since in the age of social media some sort of official presence should exist, Mutant Enemy should take it upon itself to size the opportunity to be that official presence in the face of FOX’s failure. * Social media as customer service, combined with in-house guerrilla-style promotion, can be done on the (relative) cheap and without impacting any more traditional advertising campaigns run by FOX itself. * Seizing that opportunity benefits not only Dollhouse in the short term, but Mutant Enemy itself and its other projects going forward over the long term.

An Outro

In essence, I argue that it’s necessary for Mutant Enemy no longer to be beholden to FOX’s social media non-strategy when it comes to Dollhouse. Not merely because Dollhouse needs a real social media presence, but because Mutant Enemy itself can leverage this opportunity to establish for itself its own robust social media presence now, in advance of its future projects.

There is a kind of danger in Mutant Enemy not taking responsibility for its own social media presence in the face of FOX’s own dismal example. FOX’s failure to take advantage of social media to cheaply and effectively promote Dollhouse in the end has resulted in generating almost no publicity for the show in some circles, and (worse yet?) negative publicity and negative fan attention in other circles. Dollhouse suffers because of that, but Mutant Enemy can, I believe, do something about it.

Such a social media presence, if sustained and engaging, would become a critical part of the conversation and the continuous feedback loop.

This is especially true in the case of Twitter, where the conversation moves extraordinarily fast and new ideas either blossom or collapse seemingly in a heartbeat. But if the former, it then quickly spreads outward to other social networks. It is my belief, in addition to all the other benefits, that an active official social media presence will help accurate information and interesting ideas blossom rather than collapse.

There are, you might notice, in a sense two different levels to what could be done. Ideas such as those discussed in the YouTube section are more involved and require effort by people actually on the ground around the production. If necessary, think of those ideas as a kind of Phase Two.

The foundation is simpler, in that establishing an active official presence on social sites such as Twitter and Facebook is easier to accomplish.

It’s not especially difficult to envision what that Phase One (if you will) would look like, since it largely would resemble the activities of @watchdollhouse and @UnofficialME, but expanded to encompass something akin to what Craig does via @Syfy. Notwithstanding the usual necessary provisos and disclaimers that anyone tweeting isn’t talking to Joss Whedon, Craig’s use of the Q&A format to answer fan questions is something that easily could be adopted into an official M.E. account. In addition, an official M.E. presence on Facebook would allow for a credible voice with some authority to participate in the comment threads on FOX’s own Dollhouse page precisely in the way that FOX itself does not.

Much of the information would be of the same sort provided, for example, by @watchdollhouse and then @UnofficialME (as well as others) all along, but with the stamp of official approval on them would be spread and become solidified as credible that much more quickly.

Various people involved in the actual creation of Dollhouse (or, for that matter, Dr. Horrible) obviously use social media pretty much every day on their own. None of that would be supplanted by an official Mutant Enemy presence, and in fact they would compliment each other. But day-to-day personal use cannot stand in for an official presence, if only because the primary mission of those people is to actually create the show. They can’t also be, to use my formulation of social media, customer service. Someone else not from within the creative circles needs to have that as their dedicated task.

Of course, none of this matters in the slightest unless Mutant Enemy actually wants to do this, and the relevant parties might very well have good reasons why they haven’t done so already.

Presumptive as it is, I believe the above outlines fairly well why Mutant Enemy should do this. What’s more (and still just as presumptive an opinion on my part), I believe it shows why Mutant Enemy should want to.