Ben Ayers

I remember vividly the tingle of excitement and anticipation when I sent off my pocket money to the Dennis the Menace fan club at the tender age of six. For days thereafter I would keep a keen eye out for the postman, desperate to get my hands on the badges, stickers and other bits of merchandise that would reward my unswerving loyalty to club Dennis.

Fangagement, a word I coined last year during a discussion about how fans of TV shows need to be loved, reached out to and enabled, could easily have been used to describe the ingenious approach taken by Beano marketers all those years ago.

It’s a fairly ugly word but it describes perfectly the need to reward fans with the heady bait of meaningful engagement with something they love.

Thanks to the internet, such a relationship between fans and content creators is as important now as it was then. And, driven  by a myriad of new communications tools, the need for ‘fangagement’ is changing and converging the role of publicists, stars and creators of content at an incredible rate.

There’s a great piece in today’s Guardian Guide by Anna Pickard about how fans of Mad Men brought to life the personas of the characters on Twitter.  Pickard points out that it was easy to assume that this ingenious use of Twitter was driven by digital spinners:

…in the hypermarketed viral PR world - where anything interesting online has a crowd of weasels in suits running just behind it with a notepad and rubber gloves, trying to figure out how they can make it poo money - who can blame them for thinking that the Mad Med phenomenon was a piece of in-house guff.

In fact, the use of the platform to spin creative yarns about the daily lives of the show’s characters was driven simply by the passion and limitless creativity of enamored fans.

For TV marketing and PR people the world over this is a valuable lesson. I’ve lost count of the number of times somone has said ‘let’s create a Facbook profile’ for a fictional character.

As it happens, fans don’t want half baked, fake Facebook profiles hashed together by half baked, half interested PR or marketing wonks. They are just as happy to create content themselves, as Madmen has shown. Besides, they are much better at it than PR people trying to juggle three movie releases or ten TV shows or writers keen to get onto their next project who’ve been asked at the last minute to tag on some ‘digital stuff’.

The phenomenal popularity of celebrities (as opposed to fictional characters) on Twitter has shown that when it comes to fans, only one thing will do - the real deal. When it emerges that a profile set up by someone purporting to be a star is a fake, it’s dropped faster than an ailing show on a US network . The Real McCoys, on the the other hand, are going great guns, cultivating a meaningful Twitter army of fans.

Thanks to his almost obsessive dedication in replying to every tweet directed his way and a steady supply of photos and videos of life at work and play, Phillip Schofield has proven that embracing technology can reap great rewards. There are 40,000 people to whom Schofield can promote his new website and, eventually, any number of initiaitives including those which can make him money should he chose to. It’s not too hard to imagine a time when Schofield will have his own live show filmed via his phone and broadcast to fans at set times via his website. Herein lies a business model for people and brands with serious Twitter kudos.

So, the role of publicists and even their management or agents, is being transformed by social media.  Celebrities can create their own direct touch points with fans to great effect.

Publicists still need to have one toe in the old media pond, providing stories and stoking up excitement around a show for the traditional media outlets but to stay on top of their game the other must be fully submerged in the swirling new media waters.

For in the new media world, the publicist must be a gatekeeper and enabler, opening and promoting channels through which fans can engage with the various seams of content - offical and unoficial - that crop up around a show or film or the stars therein. As in the case of print journalists turned online scribes, it’s the online audience that will increasingly put dinner on the table for the TV or film publicists and marketers.

It’s this need to enable fans that publicists and stars of TV shows and films will increasingly have in common. In future, their success will depend less on the whims of TV critics and mainstream media and more on meaningful engagment with true fans. The job of being a publicist in an age where social and anti social media meet is one fraught with challenges and opportunities.

Official channels that produce content and forums to engagement with TV shows and films must work hard to keep up with and promote the ‘unofficial’ ones that spring up on the web. Their relationship must be symbiotic and complimentary in order to stay relevant and in any way meaningful.

Publicists, agents and content creators must engage with their new media buddies to earn and keep their respect.

And whatever they do, they can’t fake it. Real fans can smell it a mile off.