Hashtag-a-Palooza

Television is starting to embrace Twitter. Hallelujah! But not everyone is doing it right.

For a lot of us, talking on Twitter while we watch TV isn’t new. We’ve been talking on Twitter about televised events for years now. The 2008 US Presidential elections, sporting events, season finales, and more were all discussed among fans online using Twitter and hashtags. Then it started happening not just for major events, but for regular episodes of shows. We used to gather around our TVs in person to experience and discuss television shows together. Now we do it via Twitter and hashtags. And what’s perhaps most interesting is the mainstreaming of hashtags. In the examples that have below, nobody is going out of their way to explain what hashtags are or to specify that they are for Twitter. Consumers are just expected to know, and most of them do. Given how slow mass media can be to embrace technology (how long was it before people stopped v e r y  s l o w l y pronouncing the http://www. in a URL on TV?), this is a major moment.

So while talking on Twitter while we watch isn’t new… what *is* new is that the networks and shows themselves are starting to embrace and even instigate it themselves.

Doing it Right: MSNBC, Fox, Logo, TNT

Rachel Maddow from MSNBC is on Twitter. Her show and staff have several accounts that they update. Conversations about the show while it’s airing (and sometimes for hours after) happen at #Maddow. So when the show was putting together their iPad app… what’s the next step? A “watch party” function, of course. You can tweet directly from the Rachel Maddow Show app. You can also read the tweets made from the app, tweets from the “All Stars” (TRMS staff and frequent/notable guests), and all tweets with the #Maddow hashtag. They’ve taken what was an organic third party experience and found a way to make it not only easy and convenient for their fans, but to bring it under their own branding.

Content on the left, conversation on the right.

It hangs there, all spooky-like. Must be from the other universe.

But even when shows embrace what fans have created, well… fans keep on creating. One example of this is the show Rizzoli & Isles on TNT. (Wow, you are really getting to know a lot about my TV watching habits, huh? Sorry about that.) If you’re not familiar… go immediately and watch all of Season 1 and the first two episodes of Season 2. Notice anything? Like maybe how the two lead actresses — Angie Harmon (Jane Rizzoli) and Sasha Alexander (Maura Isles) are… well… close? Like, really close? Like, your gaydar is WHOOP WHOOP WHOOPing like crazy… close? Well, you’re not the only one who noticed. The lesbians, we went mad insane for this show (which besides featuring two beautiful and kick-ass ladies, is actually a really good mystery/crime show) in a way that we haven’t since Xena. So when the new season of Rizzoli & Isles started up this summer, just having #RizzoliandIsles was not enough. The wonderfully brilliant and hilarious Dorothy Snarker from AfterEllen decided we needed a more… specialized hashtag for all the lesbian sub-text and discussion about the show. So she created #Gayzzoli, and it’s a very lively conversation each week. The stars and people who do social media for the show know about it, and while they don’t participate, they also don’t interfere. Which is just the right thing to do.

Ms. Snarker might be a complete genius.

Doing it Wrong: Lifetime and Project Runway

So all of those are great examples of TV embracing fans and Twitter discussion. But can you take it too far? I saw one example last week that just made me cringe. And that’s the new season of Project Runway on Lifetime.

But first, a short lesson in hashtags. The value of a hashtag is that it organizes content from many different sources but about the same thing in one place. So, logically, you’d want everyone to be using the same hashtag in order to create a conversation that is active, rapidly updating, and has as high of a usage spike as you can get. You want to centralize your efforts on one hashtag and drive all your efforts toward a single goal.

And that is not what Project Runway has chosen to do. Instead of pushing #projectrunway or even something as bad as #projectrunwayS9 (for “season 9″), they created an individual hashtag for each of their 20 designers and promoted all 20 hashtags on the show. Which, to me, is just way too much diversification. They are in essence creating 20 smaller conversations instead of one big conversation. They are dividing their audience into silos instead of bringing them all together to talk about the show. They are making it about the individual contestants, not about the show.

And the format of the hashtag is awful, too. Hashtags should be short and easy. They should be accurate and representative of the subject and nothing more. So using the format #pr9<designer name> is just wrong, wrong, wrong. Project Runway is not commonly abbreviated PR, so they are basically taking all the value out of their brand name by doing so in their hashtag. I get that the 9 is for season 9, but honestly I couldn’t have told you this was season 9 if you asked, and I’ve been watching every episode since the very first one. Even to a pretty big fan, that means nothing to me. And we already discussed that each designer has their name in their own hashtag. #PR9Becky (for example) is just a horrible hashtag (but I think the designer is cool, despite the fact that I keep accidentally calling her Betsy Ross instead of Becky Ross. (Get it? Because she sews? Oh never mind.))

Hey #pr9becky, can you sew me a flag dress?

They are using it as a way to use Twitter for “fan favorite” voting, which is a cool idea. But they missed a huge issue with the conversational aspect of Twitter in doing so. It’s probably too late to change it this season, and while I applaud their effort to embrace Twitter and hashtags, I hope they adjust their strategy next time.

All in all, I’m looking forward to seeing what the fall season brings with Twitter and hashtags and online viewing parties (oh my!).