twitter

Good news for all you Mad Men fans, you’re favorite stars are back on Twitter!

Apparently AMC, acting on advice from their interactive agency Deep Focus, has changed their minds and allowed Twitter.com to reactivate their accounts. I’m willing to bet that the “advice” given involved a lot of yelling, sighs and forehead hitting. Congratulations guys..you saved your client from alienating their brand from the very customers who were evangelizing it.

You can read about AMC’s initial decision to have Twitter.com suspend the fan-created accounts on my earlier post found here.

Thanks go out to Silicon Alley Insider and Daniel Terdiman from cnet for the update.

Welcome back Don & Peggy!

Twitter is buzzing with the news that last night the Twitter accounts for Mad Men characters Don Draper (@don_draper) and Peggy Olson (@peggyolson) were taken down. At first the outrage was pointed towards the folks over at Twitter, with reports stating that it was because these accounts fall under their new spam restrictions - The accounts were not real people saying real things (yet all were promoting a similar product).

Twitter employees fired back that it wasn’t their initiative, but rather a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice issued by AMC. Apparently these twitter accounts were NOT all part of a marketing campaign for the show! I will say this, each of the accounts (there’s more than just Don and Peggy on Twitter) seems to have stuck to the character they were portraying. While AMC has the legal right to protect their brand, why ruin a good campaign? Especially one that is free?

Ben Kessler found the rest of the cast who had Twitter accounts and posted them on his blog. They are:

and

- Apparently a new Peggy Olson account has been created, this time with an underscore in her name. One of her first ‘tweets’ was in regards to the account suspension:

MG Siegler from VentureBeat was the first to report of the DMCA takedown:

Twitter has responded back to me on the issue. Apparently it wasn’t a spam issue at all, but rather a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice that Twitter’s support team responded to, co-founder Biz Stone tells me. I guess AMC didn’t like others playing the roll of its Mad Men characters besides the actors who play them on TV.

I wonder if this was the inspiration for the influx of fake Mad Men accounts (taken from SomeEcards.com):

I don’t think this is the end of this story….

UPDATE! Mario Parisé from the StrategicText blog has come forward to reveal that he has been twittering under the Paul Kinsey (@paul_kinsey) account. It is still (as of 12:45pm EST) online. He’s got a great post about it over on his site. Go check it out.

DSW issued a press release yesterday stating that they were suing Zappos.com, one of the largest online shoe retailers, for copyright infringement. Zappos.com, a company who’s online presence has recently skyrocketed as a result of their adaptation of various social-media endeavors, has yet to be notified directly of this lawsuit (1:30pm EST 5/13/08) other than by the press release.

This strange lack of communication was mentioned by the CEO of Zappos in a twitter comment stating: “Weird, just found out through a PRESS RELEASE that DSW filed a lawsuit against Zappos. Maybe phone call, letter, or email more productive??” (keep in mind you can’t use more than 140 characters on twitter, hence the broken english seen in most twitter comments)

He then later made another twitter comment posted late last night stating that he “Just checked with Zappos legal team and haven’t received any communication (phone call, letter, email) from DSW, just press release. Weird.”

Zappos.com has taken an interesting approach to embracing social media - their online shoe-store features four separate blogs, one of which is maintained by the CEO and COO (who not only blog frequently, but are always replying to consumer questions/remarks/feedback on twitter directly), as well as a twitter feed that lets you see any Zappos related comments/tweets in one collective source. You can check it out for yourself (it’s pretty cool, not to mention that this is the first brand I’ve seen pull this off successfully) by going to http://twitter.zappos.com. They also have a feature that lets you see a collected feed of what Zappos employees are twittering and it looks as if a lot of them are frequent users of twitter.com.

The consumer response to this lawsuit has already been rampant across blogs and other social-networking platforms, all seeming to take the side of Zappos.com and pointing the nasty PR finger at DSW and their recently launched online site. According to the press release, “The suit alleged that the name DSW was being used in multiple URLs, along with DSW store photographs, in an effort to mislead consumers into believing they were on a DSW related website.” DSW recently launched their online site after “numerous” customer requests for a way to shop 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Taken from a BNet article comparing the advertising campaigns used by the two retail shoe giants - “Analysts weren’t expecting DSW.com to open until the second half of 2008, but the $26.3 million project soft-launched April 23. DSW plans no marketing other than promotional flyers and e-mails to its 8.6 million loyalty card holders.” Compare that to their comment saying, “Zappos doesn’t do a lot of advertising, but what it does is brilliant. When you take off your shoes in the TSA line at 15 airports around the country, they go into bins with Zappos ads on the inside.” That may account for how Zappos.com has seen growth from an initial $1.6 million in 2001 to over $800 million last year meanwhile DSW has been facing not only a decline in store-bought purchases but also started off the first quarter of 2008 already down 1.7%. That being said, DSW is still the big-dog in this fight - last year taking in $1.41 billion in revenue.

If you want to see for yourself how a company can use social-media to their advantage, take a look at the Twitter accounts for the top two executives at Zappos and see what they’ve been talking about with their customers/random people on the ‘net:

The CEO - Tony Hsieh - can be found on twitter via: http://twitter.com/zappos
The COO - Alfred Lin - can be found on twitter via http://twitter.com/zappos_alfred