Eureka - Brandweek: How SciFi Channel Twittered Its Way to 3,000 Fans

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Q&A: How SciFi Channel Twittered Its Way to 3,000 Fans

Social networking is quickly evolving as a powerful marketing tool for brand managers, though the math is still fuzzy when it comes to metrics, monetization and explaining to the chief financial officer why you have a social network like Twitter in the first place. SciFi Channel saw past some of these challenges and activated a Twitter site in July, several weeks before the third season premiere of Eureka, an original series set in a fictional town inhabited by geniuses. SciFi Channel's ad agency, Fallon, Minneapolis, discovered that Twitter users were talking about the show, and enlisted one of Eureka's characters, S.A.R.A.H., to talk to fans. S.A.R.A.H., which stands for Self Activated Residential Automated Habitat, is an artificially intelligent physical house that is able to communicate. As of Sept. 23, Twitteer.com/S.A.R.A.H. garnered 3,210 fans. Fallon's planning director, Aki Spicer, recently talked with Brandweek senior reporter Mike Beirne about whether the Twitter experience has produced any marketing eureka moments.

...BW: Why wouldn't blogging be enough?

AS: Two things. Twitter is right for our customer in a couple ways. The show is openly 'geek.' We suspected that many of our viewers would be ahead with participating in this medium. So before we even jumped in, we did an extensive sweep of Twitter to harvest conversations around the show. We found there were thousands of conversations that already existed.

Another pattern we saw is with TV shows in general, there are many fake characters already out there engaged and participating—from fake Steve Jobs, fake Borat, to all the characters in Battlestar Galactica, Star Wars and Indiana Jones. People want to connect to these fictional characters.

Suddenly social media arises and should it be so surprising that people want to bring these desires to this new technology? They want to live in this world with these characters that to them are real people. If we're not participating, they will do it without us . . . We want to lead that conversation.