Mindjumpers » Blog Archive » American Idol Goes Social

Posted by Jonas Klit Nielsen Feb 19th, 2010

Fox the producer of the most popular show on American TV for some years now, are taking the show to the social level. For the past eight years, American Idol has been one of the most interactive shows on television, and it’s now time to take it up a nudge.

Yesterday, one of the greatest stars of American Idol – the host Ryan Seacrest announced on his blog that with the 9^th season the contestant would have individual profiles on Myspace, Facebook and Twitter, to quote from his blog :

In a testament to the undeniable influence of social media in today’s day in age, American Idol producers and network executives, after nine seasons have finally agreed to allow contestants to maintain social networking profiles on Twitter, Facebook and Myspace. In previous seasons, all social networking was banned, and any pre-existing profiles were deleted prior to the start of live shows.

While we’re still unaware of the exact ‘rules of engagement’ for these profiles, considering they were all custom-made by Fox, we can imagine producers have established ground rules for what’s kosher to be discussed on Twitter and elsewhere.

As the statement says, there are no exact clear rules of engagement yet, and one of the big questions remains whether or not the contestants are going to control the profiles themselves. If so, my guess is that it will influence the contest a lot more than if Fox manages the profiles.

Looking at a few scenarios:

Imagine if one contestant has 1 million fans more than any of the other on Facebook, it would look very clear that he or she might be the winner, but what if some of the other fan teams coordinated and got that most likely to win contestant thrown of. Or how about the text votes, if it seems clear who the winner is, will people stop voting?

Can the young stars handle the influence they get, not “going to Disneyland” or how about telling some dirty behind-the-scene-stories on their Twitter profile.

No doubt that this season of American Idol from a social media point of view is going to be the most interesting ever, probably one of the largest TV shows on earth – making a huge buzz on these new media.