Blogless

I’m going to have to apologize for what is going to seem like a non sequitur in the midst of Paul’s BP posts, but I ran into this the other day and I wanted to seem timely.

A while back, we posted a Twitter taxonomy which included the bot, “a character that spams non-original content as part of a larger kind of humorous or pithy zeitgeist”. Excuse of the Day is one example. But what about a character played by a person to similar effect?

The Mars Phoenix probe was the first one of these I followed, so although another name might be more appropriate, I’m going to stick with calling them bots. Phoenix was notable because instead of a quote-a-day it was used as a marketing/ educational tool of sorts. The probe would give updates on itself and answer questions. The gesture of Twittering gave what could have been a dry scientific mission some personality.

Until the mission ended, the identity of @MarsPhoenix was not widely known. I’m glad that they did this as it kept some of the magic alive. If you didn’t know who it was, then it might as well be from a robot on Mars. It was understood, however, that the Tweets were coming from someone at official at NASA. When you’re marketing something, accountability is important.

But what if you are marketing for someone, presumably as them, and they don’t know about it? That’s what happened over the summer as a group of fans pretended to be the characters of Mad Men on Twitter, without the okay from AMC.

On the web, anyone can be Don Draper, but should they?
Image from SNL short: Don Draper’s Guide to Picking Up Women.

Marketer Paul Isakson was the first to play a bot, taking on the role of advertising executive Don Draper. He was later joined by an entire troupe of writers playing his family and co-workers. As the show’s second season progressed, the Twitter feeds revealed tantalizing hints about the characters’ downtime between episodes, as if there was a portal between the Internet and AMC’s fictional world of 1962.

Although it was underground, the effort seemed legitimate: high-resolution backgrounds; Twitter pages linked to the official Mad Men website. Only when the accounts were shut down did it become clear that what seemed like a smart play by AMC wasn’t their play at all. This week, Isakson admitted to starting the project as a form of research. “Basically”, he said, “to see if it would work”.

While the project seems to have been successful, was it right for the troupe to tweet under false (or at least omitted) pretenses? At least Fake Steve Jobs tells you he’s fake.

AMC has assumed ownership of the accounts and the tweeting will likely continue in some form, but I feel as though the fun is over now that the works have been exposed. Which brings me to a conundrum:

It’s a better experience following fictional personalities if you don’t know who the writers are, but at some level, you need to know whether the character is sanctioned (or not) so you know how to take what they say.

What do you think? Sounds to me like a design ethics problem.

When I hear Tim O’Reilly talk about Twitter as an emerging medium, this is the kind of thing I think about. What does white hat microblogging look like?