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Timberlake, Twitter & MTV
I've just been reading about MTV’s latest offering produced by Justin Timberlake, 'The Phone'. It's an unusual experiment in hyper scripted reality television, that utilises Twitter and mobile phone technology to engage the viewer. 'The Phone' challenges four complete strangers, in teams of two, to solve a mystery and win $50,000 (in episode 1, contestants had to find a fake car bomber).
Instead of stimulating fan participation in the show, MTV and their agency Fanscape, have chosen to create a Twitter telephone game that encourages retweets of misleading clues and information.
Every week, in tangent with the airing of The Phone, the MTV Twitter account is tweeting random information and requesting their legion of followers to retweet and adapt one word of the original tweet. The goal is to emulate the original Telephone game, where a slightly adapted message is spread to new people, and the original message typically gets distorted beyond comprehension. Think Twitter meets chinese whispers...
Although on the surface this appears to be a novel and innovative concept, seemlessly attempting to mash together traditional broadcast TV with social media, it’s also a fairly transparent attempt to get tweets with the hashtag #thephone to quickly disseminate through the ever expanding global Twittersphere. The more tweets, the more possibility #thephone becomes a trending topic.
The desired result seems to be an attempt at engineering a viral Twitter campaign to raise awareness about The Phone. To this extent, the results are mixed overall, with just a minute smattering of retweets following on from the latest episode.
Is this is an innovative method by which to attract Tweeting eyeballs, or just a poorly executed game with no tangible winner? You be the judge, comments are welcomed below...
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