CNN covered Fox’s marketing campaign for their new hit TV show, GLEE. Their strategy of an early premiere and the embrace of social networking and new technologies like the Thingfo-powered social media game, “Biggest Gleek”, which channels and rewards fan enthusiasm, have payed off.

Some highlights from CNN’s article [with my emphasis in bold]:

The new show “Glee” had the backing of an innovative marketing campaign.

When Fox aired a sneak-peek episode of its new series “Glee” four months before the show actually premiered, it took a big chance that the audience would still care.

To help maintain the buzz, it delved into social networking, maintained a strong online presence, dispatched the show’s actors to malls across the country and held a fan contest.

In an era when episodic television is battling for ratings against reality television and broadcast TV faces the loss of audience to cable networks, those familiar with the industry said, such innovation may have to become the norm.

“Particularly for those networks that skew younger such as Fox, CW and ABC to an extent, they are going to have to really promote all of their shows all year long and find new ways to keep them in front of their viewers and remind them that they are there,” said Ed Martin, a television critic who writes for JackMyers.com….

“The ‘Glee’ premiere this fall did better than what Fox is calling the preview after ‘American Idol,’ ” Gorman said.

The result has been an strong fan base with a deep engagement who are taking to social networking to spread the message and buying the songs on iTunes, Earley said.

“What we have is this core of really passionate, very savvy fans, and they are definitely ambassadors for the show,” said Earley, who added that executives have been pleased with the ratings.
…

Our BrushFire social game system was designed to activate and channel fan passion. We think it’s fairly awesome that the Glee show drew higher ratings and “the ‘Glee’ premiere this fall did better than what Fox is calling the preview after ‘American Idol”, and are very happy to be part of their social media success.

Don’t stop believing. Want to start a BrushFire for your brand? Contact us.

NewTeeVee recaps the success of Fox’s fall digital strategy, including the Biggest Gleek game powered by Thingfo:

With only three episodes to its name, Glee gets a contest powered by Thingfo to determine the show’s biggest fan across multiple social networks, a karaoke competition on MySpace, Twitter accounts for its characters, and a “tweet-peat” Twitter conversation between cast and fans overlaid on a rerun of the premiere episode.

Meanwhile, The Glee cast rallies fans with 1 week left for a fan to claim the title of Biggest Gleek:

Our team here at Thingfo has had a blast launching our BrushFire social media game system with all the Gleeks at Fox.com.  It is truly amazing to see all that fan enthusiasm channeled across Twitter, Facebook and MySpace via the Biggest Gleek game.  Ok, you watched the video.  Only 1 week left to get your Gleek on, so get Gleeky. Want to channel and measure fan enthusiasm like the #1 TV network and their biggest new hit? Contact us, and we’ll start a BrushFire for your brand.

The hilarious new show from Fox, “Glee“, is using the latest product from Thingfo, code-named BrushFire, to create the Biggest Gleek social media game.

The show “Glee” is a great showcase for our technology, because even before their 1st season, the show has garnered a passionate fan base.  This new game (and the software that runs it) enables Fox to harness that fan enthusiasm in positive and measurable ways.  We think it is especially cool that a major company like Fox is using innovative social media technology and techniques, so here is a bit more about this social media game and how it helps channel and measure online evangelism.

Built with our new product, the BrushFire game engine, the game is designed to find and reward the top fan evangelists for “Glee”, who call themselves Gleeks. We do this in several ways by tapping into the social web to engage users, reward them for creating and sharing content and links, and engaging with Glee.  Fans can join and sign in to the game with their existing identities from Facebook, Twitter or MySpace. We award players with points for mentioning the show or its stars in updates to their Facebook, Twitter or MySpace status feeds. We give bonuses if content is commented on, @replied to on Twitter or Re-Tweeted, since all those actions indicate a measure of engagement if not quality. Importantly, we put limits on the numbers of times per day that players you can earn points for various activities (3x/day for status messages, for example) to discourage spamming.

Players earn additional bonus points for using the game’s customized short URL’s (http//glky.us) to share Glee-related content. With these short URL’s, our players can see how many clicks they’re driving — and get bonus points for each click!  (Our short-URL system is pretty awesome, with special thanks to our partner awe.sm who put in some serious work to provide us with the kind of granular data we needed in order to pull this off. Look for a follow-up post about the metrics that the Thingfo/Awe.sm partnership can provide to marketers.). Not only do we provide players with custom http://glky.us URL’s with links to Glee content like the pilot, the official site, the official Twitter page, etc… but we give a “link-of-the-day” which changes daily and provides bonus points if it’s used on that day.

In summary, our game engine:

• Enables sign-up and login from Facebook, Twitter and MySpace
• Rewards users for social evangelism such as:
  • Activating their social network identities
  • Inviting friends to play
  • Posting status messages
  • Receiving replies, Re-Tweets, and comments on messages
  • Following the official Twitter and Facebook pages
  • Using short-URL’s and driving clicks
  • Uploading photos
• Allows fans to move through levels based on their points
• Creates a leaderboard to reward and promote top fans

Most importantly, the game is rocking. Look on the leaderboard for the Biggest Gleek game and you will see some of the most passionate and influential Glee fans from around the web. Gabby Curtis, also known as “Gleeky4lyfe” on Twitter, is a determined fan who’s within striking distance. Other fans are climbing the leaderboard: Rob Black “GleekRob” who according to his Twitter bio, “runs www.GleeFan.com, a fansite and blog for Glee!” is now #4.

The Biggest Gleek game is fun, it’s drawing in the top social evangelists and channeling their energy and enthusiasm. We can do ROI analysis  by counting messages posted, numbers of followers and clicks driven, but the fan enthusiasm remains priceless.

All right, I know what you’re asking if you’ve read this far: can Thingfo create one of these social media games for my brand or campaign? Is it hosted? Can we customize the game play and look and feel? Are there built-in reports and administration tools to manage the game?  Yes, yes, and yes.

Rehashing things, the benefits of using our system:

• Find the top evangelists
• Incentivize your supporters to talk about and link to your content
• Build followers for your official pages
• Drive traffic to your content
• Customizable game play, points, and levels
• Easy-to-use administration panel
• Customizable look and feel
• Reporting on all key metrics
  • Players, social networks, status messages, and click-tracking
• Fully hosted with backup

So, check out the Biggest Gleek game. Then come on back, and contact us to get your own game going.

Here are some widgets you can use to follow the Iran Election. The first is a widget that follows 52 Twitterers on the ground in Iran. The list was put together by The Road to the Horizon. (thank you!). If anyone has another IranElection twitterer they think should be included, send a note via the “suggestion” box on the right-side of the larger widget, or email info at thingfo dot com directly.

The widget below is currently tracking 52 Twitterers. Here’s the sidebar size:

Embed code for this sidebar widget:
<script type=’text/javascript’>tfoSite = ‘514′; tfoHeight = ”; tfoHost = ‘www.thingfo.com’; tfoWidth = ‘300′</script><script type=’text/javascript’ src=’http://www.thingfo.com/socialsite/js/widget.js’></script>

Thanks again to The Road to the Horizon for putting together the list of Iranian Twitterers on the ground in Iran.

Greetings friends, Romans… fans of the social web. We’ve introduced a new view for your Thingfos — now in addition to publishing your social streams via mini-widget, you can publish them Full-Page style.

The Daily Galaxy made themselves a full page Thingfo to publish real-time news related to space science and environment news.

The DailyGalaxy’s new Thingfo-powered page beautifully displays the latest from all the best science Twitter feeds, gives a reply link to each post if the user feels compelled to join the conversation, and invites visitors to suggest more keywords and top users to follow!

This example shows how Thingfo can connect a website to the internet’s continual generation of content around very specific topics with a combination of user and keyword searches. And, the creators of this stream can keep on top of the latest with Thingfo analytics (login required).

Thingfo always gives great ways to plug into the universe of the Social Web, and now we offer whole new ways for you and your brand to interact with your virtual community. Check it out, your visitors will love the content stream, and you will love the spam control and built-in social analytics!

Great video of Mike getting inteviewed by Startup Lucky’s Aronado Placencia on Cinco de Mayo. Mike talks about ThingFo and has some really interesting things to say about getting a startup off the ground. Aronado is an excellent interviewer, he has great energy and an understanding of the startup scene. Plus, we always appreciate anyone who starts off an interview by playing an old Cheech and Chong scene. So freaking awesome!

Enjoy:

And here’s the video interview on its original page on StartupLucky.com. StartupLucky rocks, we hope to do more with them soon!

That’s right, we just launched a new, improved version of SocialSite, the CMS for the social web from Thingfo. First, we made the service faster and added more traffic capacity, to support our growing user base.

And because so many of our users manage more than one site, brand, or persona, we’ve added a key piece of functionality — now, instead of managing one widget with your account, we’ve given you the ability to manage multiple widgets (and the highly targeted social searches that go with them) with one login.

For each widget you set up, whether it’s tracking a bunch of Twitters or Twitterers, a mix of social media content for your site, brand or topic, you can independently moderate content, track activity levels and top users with reports, and customize the look and feel to fit in with your site. SocialSite now gives you access and control over social web content for your brands, sites or interests - all in one place.

Go ahead and try it out, you can sign up right here http://www.thingfo.com

We’ll be launching some more top-requested features soon, with additional ways to publish your content and connect with your audiences. In the meantime, we love feedback and ideas, so please feel free to say hello on Twitter at http://twitter.com/thingfo or shoot us an email to “info” at thingfo.com.

TGIF!

The New Media Summit and Celebration, presented by Netroots Nation and the Netroots Arts and Education Initiative, happens today at the Bently Reserve, The summit is sold out, but there are still tickets available for the evening celebration, where our founder Mike Grishaver may even give out some free pro SocialSite accounts to select progressive bloggers and websites!

The summit, which features speakers like Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and staff from sites like MoveOn.org and Daily Kos will focus on using new media to promote causes and organizations, which, of course, Thingfo’s SocialSite excels at.

Choose from sessions on blogging, viral video, mobile campaigns, social networking and much more. Then, stick around us for an open bar, hors d’oeuvres, special guests, live music and dancing into the night.

This event looks like so much fun we put together the SocialSite widget you see embedded on the right to keep track of all the twitters, flickr photos, youtube videos, delicious bookmarks, and blogs it will generate. Grab it for your site and spread the New Media Summit & Celebration, in inimitable SocialSite-style.

Hope to see you there!

Yet another great website has started using SocialSite!

OK, first - you might not have checked out FORA.tv yet, so if you have some free time please just click that link there and come back after you’ve explored a bit. It will take a bit to get decent taste, though, so if you want to wait until you have more time to kick back and really explore I don’t blame you. Read on and I’ll do my best to not waste too much valuable virtual ink describing this increasingly popular, ever-growing treasure-trove of timely, intelligent, fascinating videos which aim to “Fuel the Enlightenment” .

Check out that capture. How can any video site that organizes itself into the categories “The Economy,” “Green,” “Politics,” “Science,” “Technology,” and “Culture” fail to appeal to the enormous collection of thinkers and doers gathered around the internet?  If you’re not lured in by those top five videos (which, ok, may be a little specialized, although “Edible Education“? Yes, please!), right underneath begins the list of featured videos, which cover orgasms, Jesus on a pancake, military suicides, and the possible Skyping habits of Bernie Madoff. Still nothing? OK, try the tag cloud:

I know, right? It would be fun just to come back every little while and watch “Election 2008″ shrink and “The Bailout” grow. Or is that just me?

Regardless, this site is a powerhouse. It takes the success of TED and expands on it, posting new videos of important, active, dynamic speakers all the time, from everywhere, about everything. Such a smart collection, where every video begins with a woman’s voice intoning, “The World… Is Thinking,” brings in a smart audience, as FORA CEO Blaise Zerega recognizes in the video below from a BEET.tv roundtable.

The realization Zerega mentions that “our big value is our audience” has led FORA.tv to a serious engagement with the internet’s community and social-content driven evolution known as Web 2.0. The main FORA.tv site cultivates a free, full-featured membership based community, allowing comments, ratings, and saving favorites while providing feeds, downloads and podcasts. Meanwhile, a variety of the FORA.tv staff write a very cool blog which nicely appreciates and interacts with their audience. The blog breaks news (parnerships with WIRED and The Economist! available on iTunes!) and gives some behind-the-scenes insights about the business while exploring and encouraging the burgeoning FORA.tv community. Their regular “Twanks” feature, as an example, showcases the best weekly tweets about the site and even provides capsule bios of the tweeters who tweeted them.

All that said, I feel very happy to announce that the FORA.tv blog has begun using our always powerful, always flexible SocialSite widget system to enhance and follow-through on their commitment to their community while promoting the FORA.tv content and brand. Now they and their readers can see, from the blog page (or wherever anyone embeds it!), all the twitters, diggs, delicious, flickr photos and inbound blogs mentioning FORA.tv, as well as blog and YouTube posts. With our new administration features FORA will be able to track all the activity the widget displays - so they can not only find the best tweets, but see who’s tweeting most, who’s dugg them over and over again, and who’s written them and their content up repeatedly or started a fan blog. They have a growing audience, they have a smart audience, and I selfishly and sincerely applaud their smart choice of ThingFo’s SocialSite to interact with and encourage it.

Do you have a smart audience? Then I selfishly and sincerely urge you to let them know you think so with your own SocialSite widget. Request an invitation today.

You should be!

http://twitter.com/thingfo