Meghan McInverny Wilker

Fox Gets Social with Glee

Last year, I wrote about how television networks don’t seem to “get it” when it comes to figuring out how to deal with Internet technology (in that example, it was The CW’s lame decision to not put Season 2 episodes of Gossip Girl on their web site — a decision they later reversed).

This year, it seems that the networks have started getting savvier about using the tools they fear so greatly. Or, at least, Fox has. With their upcoming show Glee, Fox seems to be doing everything right in how they are leveraging technology to build an audience for a very quirky show.

It’s a hard show to explain, but it’s basically about a high school show choir. It’s got Jane Lynch in it. It’s funny and brilliant. But, weird. And a little hard to explain. Which means, if things were to go as they usually do, it would be off the air within a year.

There’s a reason why quirky shows die: they can’t build an audience fast enough. Arrested Development is more popular now than it was when it was on television. And don’t get me started on the tragic death of Pushing Daisies. These shows can’t generate the same audience right out of the gate as extensions of popular franchises (and seriously, how long until they start airing CSI: Des Moines and Law & Order: Animal Control?).

Shows that don’t fit neatly into the cop, hospital or lawyer genres attract a different kind of audience. GEEKS. Theater geeks, band geeks, computer geeks, book geeks. Most geeks — no matter their geek genre — use computers and social media. And they use those things a lot more than everyone else. We tend to be the early adopters and the heavy users.

It seems like Fox did the math.

So, Fox’s first smart move was to air the pilot after the American Idol finale. First, the potential to reach a staggering number of eyes and second, the likelihood that that audience would be open to a show that includes musical numbers (Yeah, you heard me. MUSICAL NUMBERS.)

After the pilot aired, it was made available on Hulu and the Fox web site (and perhaps other places as well), allowing it to build an audience in the months between the Idol finale and early September, when it premieres. By doing this, Fox is allowing Glee to build a passionate audience (mainly through word of mouth) before the show even starts.

To help things along, Fox has also released sneak peeks from the upcoming season (like Bust Your Windows), character outlines, and audition videos. The show’s Facebook page includes regular bits of news and photos, and each of the characters has a Facebook page of their own. (Okay, that one is less cool to me. I dislike it when characters act like people in the real world, but I’ll let it slide.) They’re on MySpace, Twitter, and there’s even a Glee Wiki. Jeebus!

Here’s why I think all of this is noteworthy, though: usually, fans of oddball shows don’t get a chance to rally around their show until it’s time to write letters to the network begging them to bring it back. Fox is using the social web to harness that energy on the front end to build an audience, and they don’t seem scared to put that content wherever we want to consume it: Hulu, Fox, Facebook, you name it.

I only watched the show because Nancy saw it on Hulu, and then texted me that it ruled. I watched it, agreed, and then made my husband watch it. I tweeted and posted to Facebook about it. I told co-workers about it. I’ve told countless people to go check out the show on Hulu. I’m even planning a Glee premiere party at a local bar. Now, perhaps you’re thinking that I have too much time on my hands. But, I prefer to think that it’s because I’ve loved and lost enough shows (I miss you, Ned the pie man!) that if I find something I like, I’m willing to spread the word in the interests of keeping it on the air. I have no interest in seeing another reality show; I’d rather encourage the networks to produce stuff that’s creative. Maybe even a little risky.

So, good job, Fox. I like your moxie.

As for the rest of you, I’ll expect you’ll be watching the first episode of Glee with me on September 9. Send me a note if you’re in Minneapolis and want in on the party.

Nontent: The Scourge of the Internet

Last week, I was ranting at chatting with some Clockworkers about something I dubbed “nontent.” Days later, I saw a tweet by @Carlos_Abler complaining of the same thing, “Sick of Blog article titles dripping w/gravitas, but w/articles a paragraph long. INTERNET: THE LARGEST LANDFILL IN THE COSMOS”

Then, @kylemeyer and I had the following exchange over IM:

Kyle Meyer: seen this? http://wprobot.net/
Meghan Wilker: wtf. that seems redonk! “do a blog without actually doing anything”
Kyle Meyer: most blogs right now are just gathering posts in to lists anyway
Meghan Wilker: my “nontent” complaint
Kyle Meyer: was that a GGG post?
Meghan Wilker: i’m working on one about it
Kyle Meyer: ah. well. perfect timing then

Nontent

What is nontent? Nontent is the useless crap that seems to be proliferating on the Internet now more than ever. The most maddening example of nontent in the wild are blogs that claim to create content which instead, post lists of links to other blogs (which may themselves be full of lists to other blogs and on and on) or nothing more than one to three sentences of barely-useful commentary. Light on facts. Light on anything useful. But with a damn good title designed to pull in a lot of clicks when it gets tweeted.

The fact that this nontent is now multiplying like rabbits on Viagra is, in my opinion, a combination of many factors.

Boost #1: Easy Publishing Tools
The idea of generating content has been gaining steady momentum as online publishing tools have become more accessible and, as a result, more individuals and companies have become comfortable with the idea of being content publishers.

Heck, we all know that publishing, sharing and linking information is the whole point of the Internet. And now that it’s easy for people of all technical levels to create and share information with tools like WordPress, weebly, Blogger, etc., it’s doing its job better than ever.

Boost #2: Search Engines
Search engine optimization techniques aren’t just about using the right keywords in your content, page titles, and image names anymore. They often encourage clients to generate as much content as possible, as often as possible, in an attempt to keep the search engine coming back to your site.

(Don’t get me wrong: this isn’t always a bad thing. If a company or organization has something of value to say, great. What I’m complaining about specifically are content facades; you think there’s something there, but it’s really a lot of nothing.)

In other words, we created search engines to help us find things. We designed them to give more importance to the newest and most popular things. As a result, the production and proliferation of nontent is rewarded by the holy grail of the intarwebs: TRAFFIC.

Boost #3: Social Media
And how do you get more and more traffic? Why, you get on Twitter, you read an article called “How to get a ba-jillion followers”, and you start tweeting about all the articles you are writing on your blog. Your tweet is indexed by the search engine. Your followers re-tweets of your tweets are indexed. Your blog post (nevermind that it contains only three sentences) are indexed.

Don’t even get me started on services like stufftotweet.com (which is, itself, a shameless rip-off of popurls.com) which help provide us all with links to stuff that PEOPLE ARE ALREADY LOOKING AT. Gar!

Rethinking Relevance

None of these things are bad in and of themselves. But, the ease of creating and publishing content and the importance we all lend to what is new and trafficked has also made it desirable for people to create and publish meaningless crap. Nontent. The digital kudzu of the Internet, choking out the valuable content with it’s newness and tweetability. At some point, I hope that we (and by “we” I mean Google) adjust our idea of relevance to mean something more than what is new and popular. I want my top results to be what is valuable, thoughtful and factual.

Content Curators

How to do this is a tougher question. As the ability for us all to create and share content with the touch of a button increases, and as search engines automatically index that content and help us find it, we’ve shifted the power from media outlets to we, the people. But, as part of this power shift, we’ve started to weed out those we used to rely on to curate content. The people whose job it was to separate the wheat from the chaff (like editors) and help us find what we want based on what we mean vs. what we say (like librarians). We must now figure out on our own if our information sources are reliable or not. We now rely on Google to take what we say in keywords and give us what they think we are looking for. We now generate the wheat, and the chaff, and it all seems to have just about an equal chance at gaining attention. Fact and fiction now travel at the same warp speed.

I’m not saying I want to return to the old models, or that I think that in the “good old days” of mass media domination all editorial sources were trustworthy and reliable, but I’m also feeling like the new model is starting to be too Wild West to be trusted. That it’s too easy to game the system.

But, maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe we, the people, will police all of this just fine. (Hell, when Wikipedia was compared to the Encyclopedia Brittanica it held up pretty damn well.) Or maybe nontent will just be another Internet pest to be tolerated and managed, like SPAM.

There are certainly plenty of good people and good sites creating good content. Perhaps they will win out over the nontent echo chamber. I sure hope so. The death of nontent can’t come soon enough for me.

Think I’m full of nontent? Let me know. I can take it.

Geek Chic of the Week: Your Browser

The other day someone asked me, “What is a web browser?” (They had just called a customer support line, and the person asked them what browser and platform they were using, and they didn’t understand why that mattered.) We’ve also gotten emails on the subject, but I thought the topic would be too elementary and boring. But, then I saw this video from Google that illustrates how little people really understand about what a browser is and why it even matters.

So, what exactly IS a web browser? And why should you care?

A web browser is the software that allows you to surf the Internet. Examples include: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Google’s new Chrome browser.

The browser takes all of the code of a site which looks like this: