Links Roundup for 9 November 2011

Here’s a roundup of stories on fan relations with entertainment industries that might be of interest to fans:

• The Social Media Examiner did a video interview with Carri Bugbee about fan fiction and social media as a brand issue for creators. She was unfamiliar with fan fiction when she began tweeting as the Mad Men character Peggy Olson, so she seemed unaware there was a particular term for what she and the other characters do, RPG. She agreed that some people believed that the RPG was a campaign by AMC, Mad Men‘s network, especially as Twitter was not well known at the time. She explained though that she was more a fan of Twitter than Mad Men so that her participation was more of a social experiment. However, AMC’s response was to suspend the Twitter accounts of the RPG participants only a week after they began tweeting together. She described angry fan reaction, and how the accounts were restored in 24 hours with the request that participants should contact AMC’s digital marketing department. Her takeaway for companies is that if they don’t manage their characters across the web, that others would and the results might not be what the brands would want. The way she approached her participation was to avoid doing anything she wouldn’t do if she were getting paid for the job. The interviewer suggested that fan activities were a boon for brands as they were free advertising, but Bugbee warned that fans could not necessarily be co-opted and might be doing things brands didn’t like, so they should be bribed with attention and goodies from the brand owners. She concluded that given the usual marketing costs, these expenses would “be nothing.”
• In a guest post at AllThingsD titled Music for Nothing and the Fans for Free a venture capitalist concluded that “When the dust finally settles between the artists, labels, and distribution companies, everyone will finally realize fans are more valuable than recorded music. As traditional monetization models for recorded music sales slowly fade away, new monetization methods centered on the fan will emerge.”

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