"Fringe" on Fox
The series debut faired a little better than “just okay” with 9 million viewers. Many industry pundits were ready to throw in the towel after this much hyped and critically acclaimed debut landed with a bit of a whimper. That whimper turned into a roar with the second episode garnering over 13 million viewers, a 45 percent increase, which is very rare for a new series and practically unheard of between the series debut and second episode. A lead-in from the season premiere of Fox's popular dramedy “House” played a role in the increase from week one to week two; however, many are noting that the fans of the show had a tangible impact in the increase.
Social media and word-of-mouth go hand-in-hand these days. But in examining "Fringe"-related social media at MySpace and Facebook, the word-of-mouth reasoning behind the ratings increase doesn't necessary measure up. The tactics to promote this series at MySpace and Facebook were rather limited:
- MySpace featured a branded profile page that looks good but is fairly shallow on content and features.
- Tried as I did -- and I did -- I couldn't find an official "Fringe" branded profile page at Facebook. Just half-a-dozen Facebook Groups that had less than 1000 members combined.
- MySpaceTV has a "Fringe" Video Channel that has lots of video content to watch, embed and share. The missing link here was the actual link from the profile page to the video channel. The video channel features 20-30 minutes of video content, most of which isn't available on TV. I suspect that the "Fringe" profile page received a ton of traffic and it would have been wise of Fox to steer some of that traffic to the video channel to immerse viewers into the storylines and characters.
- There were no Facebook or MySpace applications, which in my mind was a real misstep. The show's creator, J.J. Abrams, is embraced by geeks across the globe. His show “Lost”, a ratings and critical juggernaut, is adored by the technorati. Facebook alone boasts some 40+ "Lost" applications, almost all of them created by fans of the show. The "Lost" audience is surely being leveraged by Fox to drive tune-in for "Fringe," and yet, there is a disconnection here when it comes to leveraging social apps.
I think Fox could have done a better job in delivering more creative and certainly more cohesive ways for social network users to engage with the show's content. Given the audience demographic and nature of the show, I expected the network to really bend the envelope here.
What's missing?
In all of the examples I ran across, a fundamental anchor of social media was missing: customization. Customization that is inherent in social media is a key driver in the psychology of why we share. The more personalized we can make the content, the more likely we are to share it with our friends and connections. YouTube was founded on the idea that you would rather “Broadcast Yourself” than anyone, or anything else. I would have liked to have seen an application that allowed me to either mash-up or create my own derivative content using the official content from these shows.
One final note here is how surprised I was at the lack of creativity in the applications that were available. Both of these show's storylines are steeped in mystery and suspense. We “join the search” to uncover these mysteries every time we tune-in. Creatively speaking, I wanted to see an application or even a branded profile page that drew me into a mystery -- something more immersive than “click, watch and share”.
Conclusions
I think these two networks did a decent job of leveraging social media. NBC wins out by a decent margin, but "Heroes" has had a couple of seasons and a few more million fans to help them. Fox needs to catch up and borrow from the social media success of "Lost" to deliver a long-term hit in "Fringe". Regardless, I'll be tuning in online and offline to see how these stories unfold. And I'll be thankful that I don't have to wait 10 minutes to watch a 2-minute online preview of an upcoming episode.
Have I mentioned that we've come a long way?
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Scott Meldrum is a digital marketing strategist and consultant.
