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Deep immersive vs light social: an examination of fan engagement strategies of Game of thrones and Orange is the new black

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Deep immersive vs light social: an examination of fan engagement strategies of Game of thrones and Orange is the new black

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Content 1

Deep Immersive VS Light Social:
An Examination of Fan Engagement Strategies of Game of
Thrones and Orange Is the New Black

By
Yuanshu Xu

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS (STRATEGIC PUBLIC RELATIONS)

May 2016

Copyright 2016 Yuanshu Xu
2

Table of Contents
List of Exhibits ................................................................................................................................ 3
Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 4
Chapter 1: Background ................................................................................................................... 6
Participatory Culture ................................................................................................................... 6
Transmedia Storytelling .............................................................................................................. 8
Methodology ............................................................................................................................. 10
Chapter 2: Fan engagement strategies: What factors are in play? ................................................ 12
Ways of Viewing: Binge Watching versus Weekly Airing ...................................................... 12
Business Models: Quality Television versus Vast Catalogue ................................................... 13
Types of the Shows ................................................................................................................... 17
Different Fan Appeals ............................................................................................................... 19
Chapter 3: Engagement Routes: Deep Experience versus Light Social ....................................... 24
Social Media: The Frontline ..................................................................................................... 24
I. Game of Thrones ........................................................................................................... 25
II. Orange Is the New Black .............................................................................................. 35
Beyond Social Media: The Battle of Imagination .................................................................... 41
I. Game of Thrones ........................................................................................................... 42
II. Orange Is the New Black .............................................................................................. 48
Chapter 4: Response from Fans .................................................................................................... 51
Chapter 5: The Imitation Game: Fan Fiction in the Social Age ................................................... 56
Chapter 6: Engagement Is More Complicated than Ever ............................................................. 60
Bibliography ................................................................................................................................. 64

3

List of Exhibits
Exhibit 1: Key performance metrics of Netflix and HBO (Boluk 2015) ...................................... 13
Exhibit 2: US subscribers trend of major premium cable networks and Netflix (Boluk 2015) .... 14
Exhibit 3: HBO and Netflix profitability analysis (Boluk 2015) .................................................. 15
Exhibit 4: Genre of show and average time of getting the viewer “hooked” (Armstrong,
Schneider and Kessel 2015) .......................................................................................................... 18
Exhibit 5: Type of show and average time of getting the viewer “hooked” (Armstrong,
Schneider and Kessel 2015) .......................................................................................................... 19
Exhibit 6: Landing page of Game of Thrones official Twitter account ........................................ 26
Exhibit 7: Twitter and Facebook posts from Game of Thrones .................................................... 28
Exhibit 8: GoT’s Tweets on January 22, 2016 ............................................................................. 29
Exhibit 9: Instagram post from Game of Thrones ........................................................................ 33
Exhibit 10: GoT Tumblr homepage .............................................................................................. 34
Exhibit 11: Twitter and Facebook post of new poster of OITNB season 4 .................................. 38
Exhibit 12: OITNB Instagram post of season 4 ............................................................................ 40
Exhibit 13: Screenshots of the text messages and visions (Eccles 2015) ..................................... 48
Exhibit 14: Orange Is the New App interface (App store) ........................................................... 50
Exhibit 15: 10 most used hashtags on Twitter .............................................................................. 52
Exhibit 16: 10 most mentioned Twitter usernames ...................................................................... 52
Exhibit 17: Twitter conversation volume trends and key time points .......................................... 54
Exhibit 18: GoT characters’ accounts participating in #RoastJoffrey (Schlosser 2013) ............. 58
Exhibit 19: Tease on democratic debate from one of the Tyrion Lannistaer accounts
(twitter.com) .................................................................................................................................. 59
4

Introduction
The TV industry today is vastly different from what it was 10, or even 5 years ago.
Although content is still essential to the success of a show, content alone seems insufficient to
retain the audiences, as they can easily switch to other shows with the endless options they have
nowadays. Especially with the emergence of on-demand video streaming platforms, like Netflix,
audiences are no longer limited to the airing time of shows on TV channels, causing a potent
threat to the TV networks. In order to survive and succeed in this competitive landscape, TV
shows must expand beyond the hours of when the consumer views the content and create more
entries for fans to feel involved with the shows.
Among the major contenders in the TV show business, HBO and Netflix have been
frequently put into comparison as they are becoming more alike, at least from the outside. In
terms of content production, HBO is one of the leaders in the TV industry, with 43 Emmy
Awards won in 2015 (Otterson 2015), and now it is entering the streaming realm with the stand-
alone app, HBO Now. Netflix, which started from selling DVDs, has transformed into the most
popular streaming platform within the past few years. With the successful introduction of its
original series, Netflix is manifesting its ambition in joining the league of quality content
producers. With the two companies fighting against each other on both fronts, the competition
has been thus brought to another level. At the end of the day, there are only so many consumers
out there, how to gain the most consumers effectively retain the fans of shows has become
critical to winning the game.
Intrigued by this competitive dynamic, the author took the two companies’ most-watched
TV series, which are Game of Thrones on HBO (Hibberd 2014) and Orange Is the New Black on
Netflix (Ha 2013), as examples to compare their fan engagement strategies as a glimpse into the
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two companies’ fan engagement approaches. Although the two shows are quite different in terms
of genres, storylines, and fan types, they both are the most popular TV series on Twitter among
the shows of the two companies. How they have built and leveraged such large fan bases would
offer insights on fandom management for other shows alike.
While both of the shows have received successful engagement turnouts, the author has
noticed some differences in their social media activities. It seems that Game of Thrones, as a
fantasy show, has developed its engagement campaigns around the theme of expanding the fans’
experience of the mysterious world; Orange Is the New Black, a comedy drama show, has put
more emphasis on the characters in the show and on leveraging the fun elements to aid social
sharing. Indeed, such differences are rooted in the distinct characteristics of the two shows, but
there is never a set rule to determine which strategy would best serve the shows; a fantasy show
could take the social route, a drama could also choose to create a deep experience for fans. Thus,
in this thesis, the author intends to identify what specific factors have led to the two strategies,
what tactics have the shows deployed, how the tactics match with the shows’ features, and how
have the fans reacted to them as an assessment of the strategies’ effectiveness. By conducting a
comprehensive examination, the author will provide insights on what strategies and tactics would
be suitable for shows of certain types. Meanwhile, even though overall the two series are taking
different engagement routes, it does not mean that they could not borrow some successful tactics
from each other, or other TV series. Hence lastly, the thesis would provide insights on what else
could the shows have done and continue to do to keep fans entertained even during the offseason.

6

Chapter 1: Background
Participatory Culture
In the past decade, the way media content circulates has drastically changed as new
technologies of producing and spreading contents became widely available. As a result, the word
“circulation” does not simply refer to the commercial-driven publishing activities generated by
traditional content producers, but rather a hybrid model where “top-down and bottom-up forces
determine how material is shared across and among cultures in far more participatory (and
messier) ways” (Jenkins 2013).
Indeed, it is not a unique phenomenon that fans want to share their opinions about the
shows they watch and make their own creations based on the shows, because fans have done this
long before the Internet was introduced to the public. In 1992, Henry Jenkins coined the term
“participatory culture” which describes how groups of fans differentiate themselves from other
forms of spectatorship by engaging in activities that serve their collective interests through
cultural production and social interactions (Jenkins 2013). Over the years, the main activities are
still revolving around recreation and sharing; the most significant changes are the ways in which
fans create and share the contents, as well as the speed of spreading the contents. Aside from
traditional forms of creativity such as painting and writing their own spin-offs, the massive
creativity nowadays has evolved into more digital forms like shooting a video with smartphones,
making memes from the scenes, and sharing on social media platforms. With the help of the
Internet, fans from all over the world could gather online to form a virtual community where
they create and participate in various activities centered around the shows. Thus, participatory
culture has gone from rather private to mass creativity.
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As engagement has been introduced as a new measurement for fandom, there exists some
debates about meaningful engagement. In his book, Jenkins has included both cultural
production and social interactions as meaningful engagement, while some other scholars have
doubted whether this so-called “shift” from audience to producers is significant. Citing a 2007
Forrester survey of U.S. adults online, which had found that 52% of people online were
“inactive”, 33% were “passive spectators”, and only 13% were actually producers, Van Dijck
and Nieborg have thus concluded that mass creativity is merely consumptive behavior by a
different name (Dijck and Nieborg 2008). However, Jenkins has later argued in his book that
social interaction is contributing to mass creativity in the form of providing thoughtful feedback
and motivating the actual producers; hence, it also consists as meaningful engagement (Jenkins
2013).
The prevalence of social media has given the content producers more ways to hear the
voices from the audiences. In a 2012 article by José Alberto García-Avilés’s, he quotes Cesar
and Geerts when elaborating on the concept of “social television”, which refers to the connection
between content providers and social networks that enable “remote viewers to socially interact
with each other via the television set, smart phones, tablets or the PC, where viewers might be
separated in time and/or in space” (García-Avilés 2012) García-Avilés has also referred to
Harboe when he talks about how this constitutes a shift in how people interact and socialize
around audiovisual content (García-Avilés 2012).
Consequently, as content producers have grown aware of this shift, more transmedia
storytelling strategies are being used to catalyze fans engagement through participation.

8

Transmedia Storytelling
As defined by Henry Jenkins, “Transmedia storytelling represents a process where
integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for
the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience” (Jenkins 2007).
Jenkins has drawn this term first from the famous Wachowski siblings’ movie series, The Matrix
(1999 – 2003), where the story plots were not only dispersed through the movie trilogies, but
also among various storytelling channels including a set of comic books under the same title, an
animated series called The Animatrix (Warner Bros. 2003), two video games, Enter the Matrix
(Shiny Entertainment/Atari, 2003) and The Matrix: Path of Neo (Shiny Entertainment/Atari,
2005), and an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) entitled The Matrix
Online (Monolith Productions/Sega/WB Games, 2005) (Bourdaa 2012).
To distinguish transmedia storytelling from pure marketing strategy, in particular,
advertising, there is one aspect of the concept that must be emphasized. Citing Jenkins, “A
transmedia text does not simply disperse information: it provides a set of roles and goals which
readers can assume as they enact aspects of the story through their everyday life” (Jenkins 2007).
Looking from the audiences’ perspective, they are not simply receiving the same message over
and over again through different channels like traditional advertising, but in order to picture the
whole story or the world in the shows, fans need to gather the scattered information and fill in
the missing gaps themselves. This is where involvement and collective intelligence happen. In
this sense, participating in a transmedia narrative is like going on a scavenger hunt, which fans
complete by tapping on each other’s expertise to solve the problems one after another (Jenkins
2007).
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Naturally, when information is spread across multiple channels, there will be several
points of entry for different fans to join the conversation and let the producers experiment with
more types of media, thus expanding the potential market of a property (Jenkins 2007). For
example, Star Wars, whose fans consist of a large quantity of adult men, has been producing
action figures of movie characters, which could also be attractive to young boys as the toy
enables them to act out their own stories. The musical TV series, Glee, has held a national
audition tour that would let the winners take the three new roles in the second season (D'Zurilla
2010). This strategy does not only speak to fans who had already wanted to be more involved in
the show, but also to the musically gifted crowds in general.
Jenkins has listed ten key points in his illustration of transmedia storytelling, among
which the author has deemed the spread mechanism most interesting and worth studying. Jenkins
quotes Pierre Levy when he states, "transmedia storytelling is the ideal aesthetic form for an era
of collective intelligence”, which refers to new social structures that enable the production and
circulation within a networked society (Jenkins 2007). Levy argues that art, which for this thesis
means a TV series, acts as a cultural attractor which draws together like-minded individuals to
form new communities and let them benefit from each others’ knowledge in the common
exploration of the transmedia narrative (Jenkins 2007). What their arguments imply is that once
the strategy makers have determined the right initiatives and provided the right points of entry,
they could set into motion a chain effect of information gathering and sharing among the fans,
which could function as a promotion of the shows done voluntarily by fan actions.
While the outcome of transmedia storytelling is somewhat promising for marketers, it is
not easy to measure in current marketing metrics. Fortunately, some practitioners have offered
valuable insights on this matter. Robert Bole, Director of Innovation at the Broadcasting Board
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of Governors, has approached this issue from the elements in the process, which include
narrative attribution, conversion and pathways, segmentation format feedback, quantifiable
impacts, engaged loyalty, and audience-created enhancement (Sterne 2013). This scope has
provided a guideline for overall measurement, while Eefje Op den Buysch and Hille van der Kaa
offered an experimental engagement tracking model which focuses on an individual audience’s
engagement path to discover meaningful insights of the journey and engagement hotspots, which
then further sheds light on group behaviors (Goico 2014). Since it looks at the whole process,
this method is more qualitative and it might help solve some problems that cannot simply be
interpreted by numbers, such as how the impressions of a tweet lead to the growth of Facebook
followers.

Methodology
Based on these studies, this thesis will examine the various transmedia storytelling tactics
deployed by Game of Thrones and Orange Is the New Black to assess their effectiveness in terms
of how they have triggered fan engagement, and thus provided meaningful insights for TV show
fandom management.
The thesis starts from the notion of participatory culture and transmedia storytelling, as
they are very important theoretical elements in fan engagement. In order to guide this, the
literature review will analyze major publications, including books, journal articles, theses,
dissertations, and conference papers written by scholars in the field.
The second part of the thesis is secondary research on the multiple factors that shaped the
strategies. Sources of the research are articles from mainstream media, industry study reports, as
well as the data released by the two companies. The factors covered include the shows’ genres,
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the different fan mindsets, the companies’ business models, etc. The study then dives deeper into
their respective fan engagement efforts, which will be presented with a qualitative content
analysis on multiple social media platforms and specific campaigns within the transmedia-sphere.
In order to gauge fans’ receptions towards the engagement strategies, as well as testing
how the engagement efforts have been received by the fans, the author also conducted a
quantitative social media listening session and a qualitative content analysis on special voluntary
fan activities. The social media listening was done with Crimson Hexagon, looking at Twitter
and Tumblr
1
activities from four months prior to the release of Game of Thrones’ last season
through Febuary 2016, when the thesis was finished.
2

At the end of the thesis, the author will derive insights in successful fan engagement and
transmedia storytelling tactics. While the thesis will not conclude which approach is better, it
will focus on the successful parts in the two cases in order to shed light on how different
strategies could better serve different shows.

1
Due to privacy settings on Facebook and the software’s limitations of decoding imagery
content on Instagram, the author has deemed Twitter and Tumblr most relevant and worthwhile
to the study.
2
The time range has covered the promotion and release period of Orange Is the New Black,
which was released two months later than Game of Thrones.
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Chapter 2: Fan engagement strategies: What factors are in play?
Ways of Viewing: Binge Watching versus Weekly Airing
Perhaps the most notable change that Netflix has brought to the entertainment industry is
creating binge watching. Binge watching has greatly shortened the timeline of viewing. It only
takes approximately thirteen hours to finish a season of Orange Is the New Black. This creates an
intense viewing experience that is naturally generated, allowing fans to be totally immersed in
the storyline while watching. However, when fans do not need to wait a week for the next
episode, there is not much anticipation and speculation happening within and after the viewing
period of one season. Rather, it occurs before the release of a new season or in between seasons.
According to one article on Cinemablend.com, a Netflix original series is usually high-profile,
but its post-release conversation life peaks extremely early and generally dies down within a
couple of weeks. According to Nick Venable, “We would still be in the middle of
a Daredevil mania had Season 1 come out over a 13-week span, but many of us are instead just
already waiting to hear more about Season 2” (Venable 2015). Netflix is already good at building
up expectations before the shows are released, but it is also important to engage with fans after
the season ends.
While in the case of traditional TV airing, fans usually engage naturally with the ongoing
speculations about the plot, and the goal of the strategy here is to keep them interested at least
through the duration of the season. A lot of things can happen in the one week waiting period.
Competition from new shows, sudden changes of mind, or other various reasons could result in
the loss of certain fans. Although it is also important to create buzz before release, like every
other show or movie, the effort to keep fans engaged is more long-term-oriented and evenly-
distributed across the whole airing period as compared with the case of Netflix. Per the case of
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Game of Thrones, buzz is naturally generated by the content. The storyline itself is dramatic
enough to keep fans wondering what is going to happen next, especially which character is going
to die, and a lot of fan theories have been made into articles and videos that are published on the
Internet.
A Twitter analysis cited in a Forbes.com article has somewhat echoed with the point
above. The analysis looked at a period when the latest season of the two shows overlapped, being
the finale of Game of Thrones season five and the release of Orange Is the New Black season 3.
The data indicated that both shows have been tweeted hundreds of thousands of times between
June 10 and June 15. Interestingly, this was the only time that Orange Is the New Black was
tweeted out more than Game of Thrones – 710,000 times as compared to 550,000 times.
According to Madeline Berg, “It is important to note this disparity took place within a time
period centered around the Orange Is the New Black release date, rather than the Game of
Thrones finale.” (Berg 2015)

Business Models: Quality Television versus Vast Catalogue
Another aspect that contributes a different focus in fan engagement strategies is the
Exhibit 1: Key performance metrics of Netflix and HBO (Boluk 2015)
14

relationship between their contents and their revenues. Both HBO and Netflix gain their revenues
mostly from subscribers, and the differences, however, lie in how their contents are appealing to
consumers.
The winner of 43 Emmy Awards, HBO positions itself as a premium ad-free channel and
attracts its subscribers with the quality of the contents instead of the variety (Barua 2015).
Owning numerous premium content, the channel makes its revenues not only from subscriber
fees but also from selling the content to consumers as video products and to other companies as
intellectual property (IP). As is shown in Exhibit 1 above, in 2014, HBO has a revenue of $4.1
billion globally, with $2.8 billion being domestic subscriptions, and “roughly $500 million per
year by selling its original content to end-consumers via home video (DVD/Blu-Ray and/or
digital download) and since the second quarter of 2014, an additional $150-200 million by
licensing select titles to Amazon Instant Video” (Boluk 2015). HBO being the owner of much
premium content, as opposed to Netflix being the buyer, has resulted in its high profitability,
which translates to $1.3 billion (32% of revenues) to $0.2 billion (3% of revenues) of Netflix
(Boluk 2015). It is obvious that content quality is at the heart of HBO’s business, and so far it
Exhibit 2: US subscribers trend of major premium cable networks and Netflix (Boluk 2015)
15

has been successfully cashing in on its fine reputation as the leading premium content producer.
Accordingly, HBO’s fan engagement strategy would function as a way to position it as
the best destination for premium content. Although the most important part of this strategy
would be achieved by simply producing content that can get the audiences hooked, during the off
seasons, however, fan engagement needs to be reinforced with tactics such as deepening fans’
experience with each show using transmedia campaigns, especially when it comes to fantasy and
science fiction shows like Game of Thrones where world building is essential. Focusing on
deepening the experience may lead to relatively slow growth, as is mirrored in Exhibit 2 where
HBO’s growth line is rather flat, but it keeps the existing fans in the loop and over time fans will
appreciate the thoughtful complexity of the shows.
Exhibit 3: HBO and Netflix profitability analysis (Boluk 2015)
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Unlike HBO, whose content popularity could be indicated by the TV ratings data, Netflix,
on the other hand, does not have any ratings data of its original content, nor does it reveal the
viewership of the shows or of a certain time point. Therefore, the public needs to find other
metrics to indicate performance of the Netflix original shows. According to an article on
Forbes.com, social media buzz has become one important measure. According to Madeline Berg,
“The service does not release its number of views or repeat views per show nor the amount of
membership additions correlated to a particular show. For the public, the economic health of the
company is based on perception” (Berg 2015). The more people talk about it, the better the show
is perceived, and the larger the viewership or subscription numbers will be. As Netflix rolls out
new original shows one after another, binge watching has become like a seasonal fashion that
people chase after because they see it on other people.
It is not rare that a company in an early growth phase would use social media as a
growth-hacking method. Netflix needs it to quickly expand its subscriber size due to the growing
high cost of content that are required in building a vast library. With only a linear TV schedule to
satisfy (HBO Now is not making profit at the moment), HBO GO typically offers less than 350
films while Netflix needs 5,000 to make sure that every subscriber could find something to watch
(Boluk 2015). This difference in content distribution has led to Netflix having a far higher cost
on content than HBO does. As cited in a Forbes.com article, “Netflix signed a deal with Warner
Bros. Worldwide Television Distribution to broadcast the show Gotham for a reported $1.75
million per episode. It reportedly signed similar deals for other shows such as The Blacklist ($2
million per episode) and AMC’s The Walking Dead ($1.35 million per episode) among others”
(Trefis Team 2014). In the meantime, the cost of producing one episode of Orange Is the New
17

Black is $3.8 million (Bylund 2013), which when compensated by licensing is actually not much
more expensive than acquiring shows from other producers.
Consequently, Netflix would want to create more buzz and speed up the spread, and this
would presumably result in more spending on marketing. As is shown above in Exhibit 3, Netflix
has spent 13% of its revenues on marketing, while that of HBO was only 4% (Boluk 2015).

Types of the Shows
The type of a show often affects its appeal to certain viewer segmentations and how they
interact with the show. Thus, it is meaningful to interpret how this factor is playing a role here.
Having read a recent study by Netflix, the author is extending the meaning of “type” to include
both genre and the distribution of a show.
In terms of genre, Game of Thrones, based on a novel series which constructed a whole
new world where people in seven kingdoms go on wars for the ultimate power, with elements
like dragons, witches, and the undead, is classified as drama, adventure, and fantasy on IMDb
(IMDb 2011). In contrast, Orange Is the New Black tells the story of the prison life of an inmate
who is sentenced to fifteen months in prison after being convicted of transporting money for her
drug-dealing girlfriend. The show is filled with funny stories and witty punch lines, as well as
plots about the “previous” lives of the inmates; therefore, it is classified as comedy, crime, and
drama (IMDb 2013). Apparently, the explicit LGBT contents have strong appeal to certain fans
as well, and elements in both shows will be further discussed in the next section.
The study by Netflix examined the time it took for a show to get the audiences “hooked”
using the data of its 25 most watched shows. By “hooked” it meant “the point at which 70% of
viewers go on to complete the first season of the show” (Armstrong, Schneider and Kessel 2015).
18

For Orange Is the New Black, it took three episodes to get the audiences hooked, the same as
House of Cards, closely following Breaking Bad (2 episodes) and Bates Motel (2 episodes).
Such data is not available for Game of Thrones, as the first four seasons were aired on
cable TV, and there is no way to know whether a particular viewer has stayed with the show. By
the time HBO released HBO Now, Game of Thrones had already progressed into season 5.
Nevertheless, the data in Exhibits 3 and 4 indicate that it took fewer episodes for drama shows to
hook viewers (3.6 episodes) than comedy shows (5.3 episodes), and shows played on cable and
premium channels also are faster (2.9 episodes) in hooking audiences than those watched on
Netflix (3.8 episodes). So, presumably, Game of Thrones has gotten its audiences hooked earlier
than Orange Is the New Black. At the same time, with more seasons released than Orange is the
New Black, Game of Thrones is likely to have a more dedicated fan base, who are already
engaged and are possibly looking for a deeper experience with the show.
Exhibit 4: Genre of show and average time of getting the viewer “hooked”
(Armstrong, Schneider and Kessel 2015)
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Different Fan Appeals
Who are the fans? What do they like about the show? What are they saying about it? For
any public relations or marketing campaign, it is critical to know the audience and design the
strategies accordingly. By stating “mindsets”, the author is taking the size of the fandom out of
the analysis in this section, which will focus on the psychological aspects of fans, and size will
be later discussed in the section on social media.
Since fans are usually attracted to certain genres more than others, the author will start
the analysis of fan appeals from the genres of the shows, then illustrate the specific elements.
As addressed in the above section, Game of Thrones is a drama, adventure, and fantasy
show; it is reasonable to assume that the majority Game of Thrones’ fans of are the likes of sci-fi
fans, or so-called “nerds”. Per an article on the New York Times which issued a “nerd-alert”
against the show, Game of Thrones’ fans were classified as “Dungeons & Dragons type” who are
Exhibit 5: Type of show and average time of getting the viewer “hooked”
(Armstrong, Schneider and Kessel 2015)
20

drawn to magic creatures, killing, and nude scenes (Genzlinger 2012). However, there are other
voices arguing that this fan base is actually extended far beyond the particular fantasy group.
The original series’ readers, not all nerds, are a representative group of fans. Since the
show is adapted from George R.R. Martin’s book series, A Song of Ice and Fire, which begins
with A Game of Thrones and is now expecting the sixth book to come out, a considerable portion
of the show’s fans might have been fans of the book series in the first place. Besides the
“Dungeons & Dragons type”, these book fans are also expected to be general fiction lovers who
like to use their imagination, a very patient crowd as well since some of the books are 1000
pages long (Adalian, Bernardin, et al. 2012). They resemble the Harry Potter’s fans in terms of
creativity in reading. But unlike the Harry Potter series, which is intended for children, the story
of A Song of Ice and Fire does not only include a lot of violence and sexual plots, but has also
placed these elements as integral parts to the development of the story and the characters. When
brought to life on the screens, the show is expected to draw, if not just controversy, viewers who
are in for the visual excitement. The show also attracts fans with other interests such as history,
with its hints on the medieval times; fashion, with the sophisticated costumes and hair styles;
linguistics, with several fictional languages used in the show, and many more. Game of Thrones
has managed to build a world filled with fully fleshed out and highly relatable characters steeped
in magic and fantasy.
Extending the viewership beyond the fantasy genre is also the main goal of Game of
Thrones’ transmedia fan engagement strategy. In an interview with Mike Monello, Chief
Creative Officer of Campfire, HBO’s partner in transmedia campaigns, the first objective of the
transmedia narratives was “to give context for the story and fantasy world to sophisticated
television viewers, and get them to overcome any negative associations with the fantasy genre”,
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and the second “was to make the epic and complicated story of Game of Thrones more
approachable to those who have not read the books” (Bourdaa 2012). Overall, as Monello
summed it up, the Game of Thrones transmedia campaigns were aimed to make “the fantasy
world tangible to help people get a flavor of the show (p. 19).” The campaigns have utilized
different human senses and tied them to some special elements in the show to invite people in,
and details of how the campaigns were developed will be covered in later chapters.
As for Orange Is the New Black, which is classified as a comedy, crime, and drama show,
it appeals to fans with its distinctive depictions of prisoners and minority groups, especially
LGBT people. Surely feisty inmates getting at one another with a mouthful of witty punchlines
makes it a funny show to watch for hours, but what causes fans to think highly of the show, at
least for the first two seasons, is its boldness to touch on social taboos or sensitive issues
reflected through the life in the prison and the stories of the inmates. The women prisoners
depicted in the show did not get into prison for crimes that were black and white as people might
have thought; a lot of their crimes, including murders, happened under specific circumstances.
As the stories of their pre-prison life unfolded, a great contrast was created naturally and that
spoke to the audiences. As was written by a fan on her blog, “It's been a real treat to see these
people shown not so much as criminals, but, you know, as people. Like you and me” (Hernandez
2013).
Besides the humanization of prisoners, its depiction of race, sexuality, gender, and body
types has also helped the show win over critical acclaim as well as fans’ favor. On criticizing
season 1, Rotten Tomatoes’ Critical Consensus concluded that "Orange Is the New Black is a
sharp mix of black humor and dramatic heft, with interesting characters and an intriguing
flashback structure” (Rotten Tomatoes 2013).
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Characters in the show are a mix of racially diverse women: the heroine was a well-
educated white woman who was engaged to a man before she turned herself in for a crime she
committed many years ago with her drug-dealing ex-girlfriend. Several characters in the show
were of Black, Hispanic, and Asian backgrounds, although they were somewhat portrayed
through a white lens (Chavez 2015). On sexuality, other than the main characters, Piper and Alex,
who are a lesbian couple, the show has also illustrated several homosexual relationships, where
one party in the relationship might also be bisexual. On gender, a butch (a word used to describe
women with a male-like appearance) lesbian, Big Boo, was a both physically and mentally
masculine female, while there are a few other characters who possessed either mentally or
physically masculine traits as well.
In order to cast such distinctive characters, Netflix has managed to find actresses that
were rarely seen on network television. For example, a transgender character named Sophia
Burset, was played by a real transgender actress, Laverne Cox, who is also Black. Sophia’s story
was put under spotlight as she tried to fight against the bureaucratic procedures which would
stop her supply of estrogen, an important part of her gender identity. The viewers were able to
learn of the strained relationship with her wife and son as well as the credit card fraud that she
committed in order to get the right body but which also landed her in prison (Gold 2013).
Although LGBT representation has become more and more prevalent in modern television shows,
having a transgender character is still a rare scene in Hollywood, not to mention letting a real
transgender actress play it. By doing so, Orange Is the New Black is able to offer a more
sophisticated and thorough portrayal of LGBT women than most TV series.
Reasonably, LGBT characters being well-represented means the show would be able to
make more connections with LGBT fans. In the meantime, the humanization of the inmates’
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lives in the prison, their very complex personal stories, and their emotional entanglements
constitute the common elements of drama shows that appeal to female fans in general.
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Chapter 3: Engagement Routes: Deep Experience versus Light Social
In this chapter, the author conducted a content analysis of the two shows’ engagement
strategies on social media, other digital channels, and real life events. The author reached a
conclusion that the approach taken by Game of Thrones was focused on creating a deep
experience for fans, and Orange Is the New Black was trying to generate sharing among viewers.
By “deep” the author means that fans interact with the show through activities that span across
multiple channels, and often requires fans to complete rather complex tasks. While “light”, on
the contrary, implies that engagement is made through very simple activities like sharing. The
shows have taken different paths to reach the same goal of creating buzz; however, their specific
ways of producing, organizing, and distributing engagement content have mirrored significant
differences in their communication objectives, which were dependent on their business goals as
analyzed in the previous chapter. The effectiveness of the strategies will be discussed in the next
chapters where the author looked at the reactions from fans.

Social Media: The Frontline
Social media has already become indispensable to all entertainment campaigns nowadays
as audiences engage in multi-screen activities while watching TV. According to a Nielsen report,
84 percent of smartphone and tablet owners say they use their devices as second-screens while
watching TV at the same time. Consumers use second screens to deepen their engagement with
what they’re watching, including activities such as looking up information about the characters
and plot lines, or researching and purchasing products and services advertised. One of the more
popular second-screen activities is using social TV: roughly one million Americans turn to
Twitter to discuss TV on an average day (Nielsen 2014). This further indicates that live Twitter
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activity is a new and effective measurement of content response and general audience
engagement, especially during the off seasons; buzz created around the program becomes a
signal of program awareness on social media and can be used to evaluate how effectively
promotions are generating buzz (Nielsen 2015).
This section will be dedicated to drawing an overall picture of the social media handles of
both Game of Thrones and Orange Is the New Black on major platforms, including Facebook,
Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr. The examination will look at various aspects such as audience
size, engagement levels, quality and relevance of content, as well as other platform-specific
metrics, to get an overarching picture at their social media strategies.

I. Game of Thrones
Citing a fandom description, “George R.R. Martin's award-winning book series A Song of
Ice and Fire (which begins with A Game of Thrones and has spread through five novels so far)
is one of the best-selling fantasy sagas in the last decade… Emmy-winning HBO series based
on books is third-most-watched series in the history of the channel, averaging 10.3 million
total viewers per episode; most pirated show of 2012” (Adalian, Bernardin, et al. 2012). When
converted into social media, such a gigantic fan base has also resulted in large numbers of
followers and high engagement levels. Interesting enough and much in accordance to the
show, the fandom of Game of Thrones are referred to as “the Realm”, reflecting on their
unconditional submission to the mighty fantasy world.

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A. Twitter
The official Twitter account of Game of Thrones (@GameOfThrones) was created in
August 2010, months before the first season was released in April 2011. Up to December
2015, it has gained approximately 2.96 million followers and has published over 20,500
tweets.
As the fastest way to communicate with fans, Game of Thrones’ Twitter account has
become the fans’ go-to place for real-time events coverage, Q&A sessions, the latest show
updates, as well as the entry to interactive campaigns. The account does not make posts
daily; during off seasons the frequency is once every three or four days. Sometimes there
will be multiple posts in a single day, usually when there are new announcements
regarding new moves of the show or HBO, reporting on events like Comic Con, special
occasions such as Christmas and Halloween, etc. Making announcements is the most
common type of content on the page. When there are not a lot of things going on, the team
would post promotional content for Game of Thrones DVDs, toys, and HBO services
especially HBO Now to maintain account activeness. In the profile, the account
encourages people to “Tweet what is yours” using the hashtag #GameOfThrones.

Exhibit 6: Landing page of Game of Thrones official Twitter account
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Content on the page is not all original. The author conducted a content analysis of
the account’s activity from November, 2015 to December 2015, and discovered that
original content only takes up roughly a half of the total tweets. The account frequently
retweets from other handles, including those affiliated to HBO (@HBO, @HBOPR,
@hbonow), the accounts of the cast, official fandom accounts (@WatchersOTWall,
@WiCnet), and media accounts that are covering topics related to Game of Thrones (GoT).
Occasionally fans’ posts will also be featured on the page to encourage participation in
events through promotional hashtags, for example fans who dressed up as GoT characters
during the San Diego Comic Con were encouraged to tweet their photos using
#GoTSDCC. Original posts usually take form in short videos and GIFs made from scenes
in the show or the actors posing at events. The GIFs did not happen quite often until late
October 2015, before which the team used mostly quality pictures as visual appeal.
With a fan base of this size, the average engagement of the posts is quite high.
The number of likes and retweets of a post ranges from a few hundred to dozens of
thousands, with the most popular ones being new posters, video teasers, posts involving
the actors, and retweets from the actors’ accounts. The engagement level has increased
significantly since the team started promoting season 6 in late October 2015. Likes under a
post went up to slightly above one thousand on average as estimated by the author.
When promoting the new seasons or announcing news during off-season periods,
the account did not simply put the words out, but often used quotes from the show to stir
the nostalgic emotions of fans. The lines in the show were epic; the ones like “Winter is
coming” and “Valar morghulis” (meaning “everyone will die”) have almost become holy
to fans; other lines that are representative of certain characters also work like a magic spell,
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and the social media team knows it all too well. Quoting Kara Burney, “HBO has seen
above-average interaction on their social networks by sharing content that stokes the
repetition of memorable quotes and spurs the adoration of the fan base for each individual
character, rather than simply promoting the show at large” (Burney 2014). The account
made a post on November 23, 2015 releasing the new poster of season 6 with Jon Snow
rising from the ground after being stabbed to death, at least assumingly dead, at the end of
season 5. This raised tons of speculation regarding season 6’s story line. The post
immediately received over 60 thousand likes and 71 thousand shares, indicating that 2.0%
of the followers liked the post, and 2.3% shared it. That is a very satisfactory engagement
rate.
Exhibit 7: Twitter and Facebook posts from Game of Thrones
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In terms of tonality, the account has thoughtfully made itself a good alignment
with the show, from the choice of imagery to the crafting of messages. For example,
whenever it wanted to call upon the fans to take some action, it would use the phrase
“rally the realm”, which projected a sense of emergency and glory, much like how the
house leaders in the show would act when the wars were to come. The imagery it used
were all scenes from the show, immediately bringing the audience back into the
experience.

However, although GoT is good at making the immersive experience, the
management of its Twitter account could use some improvement. When looking at the
posts, the author had an overwhelming feeling that the posting frequency was not
Exhibit 8: GoT’s Tweets on January 22, 2016
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consistent. As shown in Exhibit 8 above, on January 22, 2016, GoT rolled out a new
series of teasers for season 6 where fans could get a short video when they tweet with the
hashtags of the houses in the show. It made over 20 tweets on that day, while the last time
it made an update was on January 19, 2016 retweeting Nathan Sykes, and before that it
was updated on January 14, 2016. A five-day interval is considerably long for social
media, not to mention that there were also times that it was not updated for over a week.
Also they tend to make more mistakes when the workload increases. During the same
teaser series release, GoT first made an announcement at 10:00 am PST with a plain-text
tweet, which received less than a thousand likes and retweets. Seven minutes later, they
made another tweet with a slightly different message and a picture, garnering 12 thousand
likes and 6.7 thousand shares. Rather than a deliberately planned experiment, this seemed
to be more like a mistake which had gone too far to take back. And there is a grammar
mistake in the third post of the day where it said “reveal more for on GoT season 6”. This
could either indicate negligence or lack of coordination within the team. And since tweets
can be scheduled ahead easily using tools like Hootsuite, these mistakes have made the
management seem quite unprofessional.

B. Facebook
It is not accurate to say that GoT’s Facebook page is a duplicate of Twitter,
because obviously the layout is quite different, but it does resemble Twitter in every
aspect, from content to the overall tones of messages.
The content on Game of Thrones’ Facebook page is the same as that on Twitter,
just without the retweets and live reports, leaving most of the posts to be media articles
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and multimedia content which is less time-sensitive. Thus, posts appear less frequently
and there were fewer interactions with fans. Part of this is due to the way in which the
related accounts are operated; they might not post the same thing on Facebook and
Twitter, so it might be viable to share their posts on Facebook. Besides, the sharing path
on Facebook is not as clear as on Twitter; it does not indicate the original account
explicitly. Another reason is that Facebook is different from Twitter on the timeliness.
Unlike the constantly refreshing real-time Twitter feed, Facebook uses a mysterious
algorithm to decide which contents will be shown to followers. Sometimes a post will not
be seen until days after being released. Facebook also does not seem to have a limit on
the length of text input, while Twitter only allows 140 letters per entry in one post.
Although content on Facebook is more visually friendly in that even shared contents or
links from outside websites will be presented with a preview that has a picture and a brief
introduction, so the original pictures, GIFs and videos display better in followers’ feeds
as compared to Twitter.
Although the amount of content is reduced as compared to Twitter, the sheer
number of users on Facebook still makes it indispensable in social media engagement.
The official Game of Thrones Facebook account has 16.2 million likes as to December
2015, nearly six times that of its Twitter followers. The number of likes for a post ranges
from several thousands to hundreds of thousands, even the advertisements for Game of
Thrones merchandise could receive thousands of likes. The same pre-season 6 Jon Snow
poster received over 690 thousand likes and 270 thousand shares on Facebook, more than
10 times of engagement compared with that of Twitter. The percentage for like was
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around 4.26%, doubling that of Twitter, although a 1.7% sharing rate was slightly lower
than Twitter.
It is not hard to tell that GoT has positioned its Twitter and Facebook accounts as
information outlets, and they have been synchronized well in terms of releasing the
contents. Yet due to the intrinsic differences, there were more emphases on real-time and
interaction for Twitter. For example, when the account wanted to “rally the realm” it
would retweet fans posts with comments; while Facebook was used as a bulletin board or
a database where content was abundant, but instead of displaying by time, it were more
or less “stumbled upon” or retrieved by fans sometime later.

C. Instagram
A host place for quality photos and videos, Instagram is known for being the best
social media platform for visual content. Not allowing sharing at all means all posts on
the platform are original, posing more challenge on the marketers’ creativity and
aesthetic sense.
The official Instagram account of Game of Thrones is very distinctive. Unlike a
lot of TV show accounts that post photos of the cast in real life or scenes from the shows,
all the contents on this account are made with the show characters’ Funko Pop figures. As
assumed by the author, this is an effort to portray the fantasy world through another lens,
as well as marketing the toys.
A lot of the posts are about show updates and relevant events, like the posts on the
other two platforms, achieving a fair degree of coordination among the three platforms.
Some posts are solely dedicated to display the figure of one character, with a picture of
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the toy and a signature quote in the description. With the help of the cute toys, the tone of
this account is lighter and more cheerful than the Twitter and Facebook counterparts.
The account is smaller in size compared with the Twitter and Facebook accounts,
but the engagement rate is higher than those two. The account now has 1.4 million
followers and has made 378 posts. Looking at the same announcement about the return of
season 6, 78.3 thousand fans clicked like for the doll-reenacted version of Jon Snow, that
is 5.6% of the total followers. The high engagement rate is not surprising because
Instagram is already recognized as the social platform with the highest engagement level,
according to a study conducted by Forrester Research in the first quarter of 2015 on the
top 50 brands’ social media engagement. The study has revealed that the average
engagement as a percentage of a brand’s total followers on Instagram is 2.261%, while
that of Facebook and Twitter is 0.216% and 0.027% (Elliott 2015). Compared to these
numbers, the three Game of Thrones’ accounts have all done a good job keeping the fans
interested.
Exhibit 9: Instagram post from Game of Thrones
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D. Tumblr
Tumblr is a very flexible platform that lets users display content of all forms and use
their own codes to organize them. Marketing teams could customize the page to suit
their unique needs. Game of Thrones’ Tumblr account is worth mentioning because it is
the only official platform of the show that is dedicated solely to fan creations, much in
alignment with the overall creative user base of Tumblr. The account features a vast art
collection of fan creations inspired by the show. The team comes up with different
themes every year and asks fans to submit their works through different channels to be
featured later on the Tumblr page. The campaigns will be discussed in the next section
of cross-channel engagement.
Engagement scale on Tumblr is not as large as the above three platforms, usually
there are only a few thousand likes, but the content is subject to more scrutiny and thus
Exhibit 10: GoT Tumblr homepage
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maintaining higher quality. When it is made obvious that this place is where you can get
your work featured, fans will know clearly where to head to. Moreover, with a large
quantity of art pieces being displayed, the Tumblr page could also function as an
inspiration source for fans, thus spinning out more creations.
If Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are providing entries for light-hearted fans or
those who are middle-of-the-road, the Tumblr page is designed for the hardcore lovers
(Beer 2014). In other words, it is a result of the tiered fan engagement strategy.
To conclude, GoT has built a successful social media presence with a clearly
defined function for each platform. When “traditional” platforms like Twitter and
Facebook work as information sources, Instagram is given the space to grow as another
version of the mysterious world. Tumblr, known to be a place to display all types of work,
was thus used to appeal to the creative hardcore fans. Although they could use some
better management, these platforms in all have generated a good mix of entries for fans of
all levels to participate.

II. Orange Is the New Black
Orange Is the New Black’s (OITNB) social media presence differs greatly from that
of Game of Thrones in terms of size, content, tonality, and interactions with fans. On
Facebook and Twitter, Orange Is the New Black does not have as many followers as Game of
Thrones, but it has built a more successful presence on Instagram, with more followers and
higher engagement rates. Its overall cross-platform coordination is well-organized and
synchronized in time and yet is adjusted to suit each platform. Compared with Game of
Thrones, more interactions with fans are seen in OITNB’s case.
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A. Twitter
The official Twitter handle of Orange Is the New Black (@OITNB) joined
Twitter in April 2013, three months before the first season of the series was released.
This fact has somehow echoed with the previous analysis on the importance of creating
social buzz before the release date for Netflix shows. It has also proved that Netflix has
been approaching social marketing with a quite mature strategy. Up to January 2016,
@OITNB has 1.09 million followers and has posted over 21.3 thousand tweets in total.
The average number of follower engagement under the posts is smaller than that of
@GameOfThrones, usually around 1 thousand likes and shares as estimated by the author.
However, it is worth noticing that the account has sent out likes to 28.5 thousand posts
while the number of @GameOfThrones is only 2,407, indicating that the account has
been actively reaching out to fans, the cast, and other stakeholders. This move, together
with the first-person narrative, the bright orange theme of the page, and the humorous
one-liners posted on the page has created a light and friendly tone for the account, at the
same time aligning well with the witty and humorous vibe of the show.
Content on the account have the same functional value as those on
@GameOfThrones, but they are created with a clearer social purpose in mind. All the
GIFs and pictures created by the team would have a “#OITNB” mark somewhere so fans
will always be reminded of which tag they should use to join the conversation. The way
the GIFs and pictures were distributed quite resembles the current trend of Internet
memes, where a situation was described in one sentence and illustrated by a funny GIF or
picture. Such content is designed for social sharing (Victor 2015), and @OITNB seems to
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know it well. Other than the meme-like posts, the team has also generated virtual festivals
to celebrate the fanfare. For example, fans are encouraged to upload their photos of
themselves wearing orange on Wednesdays using the hashtag
#OnWednesdaysWeWearOrange, then @OITNB will manually select from the posts to
feature on the page. Such activity could serve as a virtual party to bring fans together,
forming a community right on the social platform and letting the communicators hear
directly from fans. The copy that came with the post wrote "Let's show the world that
Orange fans are best! Wear Orange tomorrow and upload a photo with
#OnWednesdaysWeWearOrange!" (Buyer 2014). This sentence was well in alignment
with the overall tone of the account, at the same time showing the fans that the team was
just like one of them. This is notably different from GoT, since GoT does not have a
social media event set up for the airing day.
When interacting with fans, @OITNB is more active and tactful. The Game of
Thrones account took a more distant standing by using a neutral third-person narrative -
even when covering the events – the account was referred to as “the raven”, and it was
seldom seen responding to comments under the posts. In terms of forming a tone, this
approach is good for @GameOfThrones because it creates a sense of mystery and
superiority just like the show does, making it clearer that the team wants fans to live in
the show’s vibe even when not watching it. While @OITNB would respond to the first
few comments, usually within the first three, and to the fan pages like @PiperSchilling
(fan page for the heroine and leading actress) and @LikeAVause (fan page for the main
character, Alex). This small action could make the fans feel rewarded and thus more
devoted to the conversation.
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Compared to @GameofThrones, @OITNB is approaching Twitter more like a
professional social marketer will do. The account updates regularly and frequently,
usually everyday or every other day. Contents are funny and thus highly sharable,
although this has a lot to do with the show’s style instead of a pure social strategy. The
managers have also positioned the account as quite accessible compared to GoT’s, as
they would respond to fans and celebrate the fandom with them together.

B. Facebook
OITNB seems not to have put a lot of effort into the Facebook page. The official
Facebook page of Orange Is the New Black has about 5.16 million likes, much fewer as
compared to Game of Thrones. While GoT chooses to synchronize Facebook and Twitter,
OITNB’s Facebook is a bulletin board for both Twitter and Instagram. Like GoT, posts
on this page include information put on Twitter, with retweets and some visual content
taken out. The difference from Game of Thrones is that the posts on this page were
mostly multimedia content, either pictures or GIFs like those posted on Twitter or cast
Exhibit 11: Twitter and Facebook post of new poster of OITNB season 4
39

photos linked from Instagram; seldom has the account posted media articles. Much like
the show’s Twitter account, this account also displayed a proactive approach towards fan
interactions, replying to usually the first two comments under each post.
The page also received a higher level of engagement than Twitter like GoT’s did.
Comparing the same post of the new poster for season 4, the one on Twitter had 11
thousand likes (1% of total followers) and 12 thousand (1.1%) retweets, while the one on
Facebook had 177,177 (3.4%) likes and 147,839 (2.9%) shares. And the messaging of the
post was more eventful and sharable as it created a special hashtag #WelcometoLitchfield
for season 4, whereas GoT chose to use the more generic #GoTSeason6 and
#GameofThrones.
In general, OITNB’s Twitter and Facebook have the same functional values as
those of GoT, but instead of creative immersive campaigns, OITNB is more adept at
daily interaction and devising sharable content. The management of OITNB’s accounts
also appears to be very professional with clear measurement goals in mind.

C. Instagram
The Instagram of Orange Is the New Black is very successfully operated judging
from its function and the basic metrics. The account provides fans with unique sneak
peeks into the behind-the-scenes lives of the cast members, differentiating itself from
Facebook and Twitter and thus functioning as a meaningful addition to the whole
narrative.
The account is large and thus has gained a considerable power in generating fan
engagement. The account has 2.4 million followers and 1,430 posts in January 2016. It
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makes a single post of curated content from the cast every day, and sometimes fans’
photos will be featured as well. The same post about season 4 received 95.2 thousand
likes on Instagram, reaching a 4.0% engagement rate.
While Facebook and Twitter contents are well-synchronized, this Instagram
account enjoys more independence. Although it still takes part in the major conversations
like new season promotions and social media events, it is able to maintain the focus on
the people behind the show, instead of repeating contents about the show itself, thus
providing fans with the value in following the account.

The social media presence of the two shows have shed light upon how they were trying to
leverage the fan power. While both shows were quite successful in generating engagement, GoT
was more focused on presenting the fantasy world coherent but different from the show so that it
can add up to fans’ existing understanding of that universe; OITNB was portraying itself as an
Exhibit 12: OITNB Instagram post of season 4
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insider who spread out the news and behind-the-scenes scoops to the fans. They are both active
on major social media platforms as examined above – OITNB also has a Tumblr page, but not
fully dedicated to fan creations – it seems that they could do more in exploring emerging
platforms like Vine, Snapchat, and Periscope. Both Snapchat and Periscope are good for real-
time event coverage, while Snapchat also allows a longer watching period and space for
creativity. Although the two shows have already established their own Vine accounts and have
gained quite a mass of followers, GoT was using it to play moments from the show, and OITNB
was reporting events. However, the six-second video content platform is most used to find funny
contents or moments that stir emotions, the two shows could seek to put more creative effort into
Vine.

Beyond Social Media: The Battle of Imagination
Both Game of Thrones and Orange Is the New Black have made a successful social
media presence, yet for hardcore fans it is not enough to only make a weak connection with the
shows by reading social media feeds. They love the show, they want to be more involved with
the show, and thus they are willing to make some more efforts. This has created the room for
strategies that are much more sophisticated, either in storytelling method or participation
processes. In the meantime, it is also important from the transmedia perspective to look at how
the shows further created innovative campaigns that involve multi-channel coordination and how
they have stirred fan participation.

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I. Game of Thrones
According to HBO Digital and Social Media Director Jim Marsh, Game of Thrones
has one of the most passionate and creative fan bases in the world, so the key to engaging with
them is to “give them the keys to the car and let them take off” (Diaz 2015). At the same time,
they want to give fans a more personal and intimate engagement experience that goes beyond the
typical marketing methods, as commented by Kay Kinton, Director of Global Communications
at Twilio, developer of an interactive website for Game of Thrones’ mobile campaign. According
to Kinton, “They wanted fans to have the GoT experience in-world" (Jaekel 2015). This section
will look at some of GoT’s most innovative campaigns that spanned from the digital sphere to
real life.

A. Teasers: Storytelling outside the storyline
Starting from the end of season 3, HBO has been partnering with a creative agency,
360i, to carry out teases on the Internet. The past four campaigns were “Roast Joffrey”,
“Imagine Beautiful Death”, “Take the Throne” and “Catch Drogon (a dragon hatched by
Daenerys Targaryen in the show)”. As discussed in previous chapters, off season
engagement is crucial in maintaining the fans’ interest in the show. These campaigns were
uniquely designed using one element in the show to extend the fantasy world beyond the
main storyline, while creating entries for fan participation by utilizing social media.
In the first campaign, “Roast Joffrey”, fans were asked to post content in any form
berating the widely hated character, King Joffrey, with the hashtag #RoastJoffrey.
According to Sabrina Caluori, VP-digital and Social Media at HBO, this campaign was
inspired by the show’s most socially discussed episode, the Red Wedding, and was
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designed to keep the social momentum going during the off season by engaging fans in
activities that were not tied to the storyline (Diaz 2015). In response to the request, 360i
conducted a Sysomos social media auditing and found that Joffrey was the most-hated
villain on social media, with his named mentioned over 30,000 times when searching with
the word “hate” (Diaz 2015). Based on this finding, 360i had confidence that the campaign
would resonate with the hardcore fans and thus generate social spread. When launching the
campaign, HBO asked actors who were active on social media to create seed content,
including Maisie Williams (player of Arya Stark) and Kristian Nairn (player of Hodor),
while 360i invited social media influencers like Funny or Die to join the first round of the
roast (Diaz 2015). As they expected, fans responded with an overwhelming passion, or
anger – more than 45,000 posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Vine were created in
a single day (Making Game of Thrones Blog 2013). HBO then put together a video on
YouTube recapping the 48-hour social fest and featured some posts on the official social
media pages, as well as the website (roastjoffrey.com) created solely for this campaign.
The second campaign was different from the other three since it was not designed to
be a game for all, but following the success of #RoastJoffrey, HBO and 360i decided to
count down towards season 4 by launching illustrations on the deaths in the show one piece
a day for 30 days on Tumblr. The art work was created by a fan artist, Robert M. Ball, and
fans were encouraged to submit their own illustrations (360i 2014). At the end, the
campaign received “375 million total impressions, 2.6 million total interactions, 2 million
in-stream Tumblr views and 35,000 #BeautifulDeath mentions across social channels”
(HBO, 360i 2015).
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The third and fourth campaigns were much like “Roast Joffrey”, where the fans’
collective creativity determines the outcome of the campaign. In “Take the Throne”, fans
were asked to make social media posts using the hashtag “#TakeTheThrone” to win daily
prizes or a chance of sitting on it at the San Diego Comic Con. The words from the posts
were eventually made into a digital 3D iron throne by 360i (360i 2014). For “Catch
Drogon”, fans were supposed to pick or make a GIF bait from the “Drogon bait shop” and
post it on social media with the hashtag. If they spot the dragon in the GIF, they should
immediately repost to catch Drogon. Winners would be treated with unique contents or
physical prizes (Diaz 2015). The success of these campaigns have provided valuable
experience in constructing fan engagement strategy with participatory culture and massive
creativity in mind. It also witnessed the increasing power of fans in the engagement
dynamic.

B. Experience deeply with interaction
The teases surely have done a good job keeping fans entertained, but when leading
up to the release date, HBO also knows the importance of engaging fans with the main
storyline. While they could simply do it by broadcasting new posters and trailers on social
media, yet that is not the kind of engagement that could satisfy the fans of Game of Thrones.
According to Kay Kinton, the Director of Global Communications at Twilio, the developer
behind the service, “The GoT fan base is massive, but it takes more than Facebook
notifications, sponsored Tweets and website teasers to move a fan base of that size.” (Jaekel
2015). Game of Thrones took a strategy of creating intimate and personalized experience
with several interactive campaigns.
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i. Bring the fantasy world to real life: Experience Westeros with five senses
Prior to the premiere of the first season, HBO partnered with Campfire, a
marketing agency specializing in blending digital and physical elements (Beltrone
2011), to launch an interactive campaign that used the five senses (sound, taste, touch,
sight and smell) to provide a glimpse into the fictional world of Westeros.
The campaign was designed to attract both hardcore book fans and potential
new viewers, thus it had a clear two-tiered strategy (Bourdaa 2012). The first tier was
using the five senses to present Westeros. For each sense, there was a special element
that was used to make the participants feel as if they were in Westeros. For example, in
the part of smell, “the Scents of Westeros”, influential bloggers each received a box of
15 different scents representing 15 places in the Seven Kingdoms, together with a map
of Westeros. This quickly stirred social media conversations (Bourdaa 2012). The
second installment was about sound; Campfire created an online replica of the Inn at
the Crossroads where participants could hear gossip regarding the story (Andersen
2011). For sight, they virtually rebuilt the Wall of the North and let the fans play as a
Night Watch standing on the Wall, seeing the view below it. For touch, they launched a
mobile app that let users compare the weather of the filming locations of the Seven
Kingdoms (Andersen 2011). The last installment was taste, where they invited Tom
Colicchio, judge from the TV show Top Chef, to cook Westeros cuisine and delivered it
through two food trucks in New York and Los Angeles (Bourdaa 2012). Following
each installment, there was a quite difficult puzzle published on The Maester’s Path,
the website created for this campaign, and only hardcore fans would enjoy solving it.
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The rewards for solving the puzzles were exclusive content and glue stickers (Bourdaa
2012).
The campaign has led to 37,000 users registering on The Maester’s Path,
12,000 people downloading the Ice and Fire app, and 190,000 visitors interacting
with one of the campaign’s digital elements (Andersen 2011). The show's Facebook
also netted approximately 130,000 new fans (Beltrone 2011).

ii. The Sight brought by the Three Eyed Raven
Another interactive campaign that features transmedia storytelling, bridging
social media, and SMS was created by an interactive agency, Elastic, specializing in
innovative engagement.
Five months before the release of season 5, HBO launched this campaign with
a mysterious tweet: “The raven brings #TheSight. Receive the power at:
ThreeEyedRaven.com”, together with a short video clip with a message at the end
saying “Receive the power of the sight” and a link to www.ThreeEyedRaven.com
(Eccles 2015). After clicking on the link, fans then were directed to sign up on the
website to receive erratic installments of a series of 10-second videos with flashing
images hinting at the new season’s plots. To create an in-world experience, the videos
were referred to as “visions” involving one of the main characters, like what Bran Stark
experienced with “the power of the Sight” in the show, because “you can’t pause a
dream” (Taylor 2015). The videos were very short and would disappear quickly after
viewing, leaving the fans with no clue of what they had gotten into. Those who have
missed the time to click the link would not even have a chance to view the video.
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Visions were sent based on geolocation to ensure that people received different visions
from those who were in their vicinity. The team also used a randomization algorithm to
send the clips so not everyone was on the same page. When they could not share, and
could not even watch again, the only way to figure out what was going on was to talk.
Thus, fans have turned to social media and more effectively, the GoT fan forums, to
utilize their collective intelligence.
The campaign was genius from content distribution to anticipating fan reactions.
As Melissa Eccles, the Creative Director of Elastic, recounted, the team intentionally
mixed up past scenes of the characters with new scenes from season 5 so that people
who initially thought they were receiving trailers became baffled, and since they could
not watch again, they were pissed. “We knew people were going to be pretty angry, but
it’s the best angry you can have. They were frustrated, they were manipulated, and they
wanted you to do it again” (Taylor 2015). The team had anticipated the backlash on
social media after the first video was sent, but by the time the second video was sent,
the error rate had decreased significantly and people were starting to figure out what
was happening on the forums. Apparently, they knew how much sense of achievement
it would bring to human beings, fantasy fans especially, by solving the puzzle.
The emotional rollercoaster has helped the campaign catalyze further fan
engagement exponentially. According to Elastic, the raven has brought 1.375 million
visits to threeeyedraven.com, 72,000 new Twitter followers, 11,096,413 views of
visions and 46,948,082 total impressions (Eccles 2015). Viewers of season 5’s premier
has also reached a new record for the show at 7.99 million (Patten 2015), and increase
of over 1 million as compared to season 4’s premiere of 6.66 million (Adalian 2014).
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The two campaigns, although launched at different phases of the show with different
goals in mind, both fit well into the transmedia storytelling-sphere and enhanced HBO’s public
image of quality content producer. The narratives were sophisticatedly designed to connect real
life with the fantasy world, bringing the fans into a deep immersive experience which was so
unique that they wanted to share it with others. By giving fans such complex and intimate
experiences with the show, Game of Thrones has generated more social buzz than a pure digital
or physical marketing campaign could have done.

II. Orange Is the New Black
While examining the innovative campaigns of Orange Is the New Black, the author has
found that there were not many of them documented. It seems that the show’s transmedia
storytelling effort is mostly represented by the behind-the-scenes sneak peeks offered by the
Instagram account. Other than that, the show has created a mobile app with social sharing
functions, and hosted a fan event, OrangeCon in 2015. Although they did not create a complex
Exhibit 13: Screenshots of the text messages and visions (Eccles 2015)
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immersive experience like the ones Game of Thrones’ campaigns did, these two endeavors have
reflected the pre-release-buzz-driven engagement strategy of OITNB.
Introduced after following the first season, Orange Is the New App (OITNA) was
designed to let fans generate their own versions of OITNB moments with the built-in templates
and send the cards to friends via text message, social media, or instant messaging apps. There
were more than 100 templates and emojis featuring the characters in the show, and Netflix is still
updating the app with new elements. With the vivid recreations of the beloved characters and the
classic quotes from the show, OITNA has helped fans relive the experience of watching the show.
Fans were also encouraged to post their creations on social media using the hashtag #OITNA. In
an effort to promote the app, some pictures posted on OITNB’s social media accounts could also
be found in the app. The app was downloaded more than 100,000 times on Google Play and has
received a 4.0 star overall rating
3
(data of App Store were not available).
Held in New York right before the premiere of season 3, to date, OrangeCon was
Netflix’s biggest fan event for Orange Is the New Black. It was an invitation-only convention
featuring autograph signings, a panel discussion with cast and creators, and a special screening.
Fans could get tickets by following OITNB’s social media accounts. All the main actresses have
been present at the event (Spangler 2015). Netflix also announced the early release of season
three at OrangeCon, which created a stir on social media. However, there was no coverage from
Netflix or major media, only a one-minute video recap from Netflix, making it hard to gauge the
engagement generated by the event. The author then surveyed social media to find 44 Vine
videos and a number of fans’ pictures with the cast on Twitter (not able to see the total count of

3
Data collected from Google Play:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.netflix.orangeisthenewblack.app&hl=en
50

posts). The photos taken from at the site showed that the venue was full of fans wearing orange
shirts. Seemingly it has been a well-received event, but even if not, it at least indicated Netflix’s
progress in making further engagement with fans.
Fans of OITNB surely love the show, the characters, and the cast, but Netflix does not
seem to know how to better react to this passion. Although OITNB is not a fantasy series, which
might allow more room for creative narratives, it still has plenty of appealing elements that could
potentially be used for transmedia storytelling, such as the releasing clues on social media and
asking fans to draw a map of the prison. It certainly would make fans excited to let them meet
the cast face-to-face; however, that connection might not lead to loyalty towards the show since
it is not generated by the show itself. Once the fan loses interest in the actress or the actress
leaves the show, there is not much left for the fan to continue watching.
Exhibit 14: Orange Is the New App interface (App store)
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Chapter 4: Response from Fans
This part will use a social media listening tool to look at how fans reacted towards the
shows’ engagement tactics. The time period is set to start from January 2014 to Febuary 2016,
covering the promotion cycle and the releasing periods of GoT seasons 4 and 5 and OITNB
seasons 2 and 3. The data are generated in Crimson Hexagon, including conversation volume
trends, most retweeted hashtags, and most mentioned usernames. Due to Facebook’s privacy
settings and the technical difficulty in decoding Instagram pictures, the data are extracted from
only Twitter and Tumblr. When looking at Game of Thrones, the keywords used were "game of
thrones", "#gameofthrones", "@Gameofthrones", and "GoTSeason5"; similarly, the keywords
for Orange Is the New Black were "Orange is the new black", "OITNB",
"#OrangeIsTheNewBlack", and "@OITNB". The two shows were examined in one topic profile
for better comparison.
Overall the two shows have created a massive 74 million posts, with 29.4 million coming
from OITNB and 44.7 million from GoT. It can be further explained by how often the two shows
were talked about. In examining Exhibit 15 below, of the ten most used hashtags, six of them are
related to GoT while only two are about OITNB. And although #oitnb comes second in the chart,
the number of posts falls far below the first-placed #gameofthrones. The fact that #emmys has
made it to the list indicated a fairly high correlation between Emmys and the two shows,
presumably GoT since its winning the most Emmy Awards has made the topline of mainstream
media during the award season. This, in turn, contributed to the the higher conversation volume
than OITNB. It is not surprising to see GoT enjoying more buzz than OITNB, after all it has
been out there for a longer time, has a considerably sized book fan base, and has received all
kinds of appraisal from media to awards. Besides, GoT has put more effort into creative fan
52

engagement than OITNB; therefore, it is expected that GoT would have a larger volume of
conversation.

If Exhibit 15 shows what fans were talking about, then Exhibit 16 reveals who they were
talking to. The chart shows the 10 most mentioned usernames on Twitter, and @gameofthrones
is still the first with 2.8 million mentions. The official account of OITNB has 1.1 million fewer
mentions, therefore ranking second. This time the gap is much smaller than that seen in Exhibit
15. One interesting fact is that five usernames on list are the actresses in OITNB (@uzoaduba,
Exhibit 15: 10 most used hashtags on Twitter
Exhibit 16: 10 most mentioned Twitter usernames
53

@lauraprepon, @tayschilling, @lavernecox, @rubyrose), and none of GoT’s cast members was
on the list. It is not because the actresses have more followers than the GoT cast – in fact the
highest-ranking @uzoabuda has only 356 thousand followers while the most popular GoT
actress, Maisie Williams, has over a million – it means that fans have more on-going
conversations with OITNB actresses and that the appeal of the show has somehow been shifted
onto the actresses. This is actually not surprising since the actresses all resemble the characters in
real life more or less, like Laverne Cox played a transgender inmate, Sophie, when she herself is
transgender in real life. The show is receiving warm welcome from the fans for its diversity and
unconventional depictions of women; therefore, the actresses are what made the success possible
with their own diverse backgrounds, and this fact would gain attention as well. Unlike GoT stars
who usually just let the words out, the OITNB cast obviously like to talk with fans about
themselves and the characters they play. Apparently, Netflix has been leveraging this influence
from the making of the show to the actual fan engagement tactics, with OrangeCon and the
Instagram sneak-peeks.
Another interesting chart to review is the conversation volume trend over the the two
years. As shown in Exhibit 17, the conversation trend has obvious peaks and valleys, with the
peaks appearing during the time period of airing and the valleys seen in off-seasons. Both GoT
and OITNB have had a larger volume in 2015 compared with 2014, especially for OITNB whose
conversation volume greatly surpassed GoT during the release month, reaching 7.8 million while
GoT had 5.3 million for its ending.
Breaking down into the monthly volume, it is quite obvious that GoT has two peaks for its
season premiere and ending, while OITNB typically has one major peak for the release. Sure this
is because there is no such thing as “ending” on Netflix. The whole season was released at once
54

and everyone watches the show at a different pace, but the sharply declining rate afterwards and
the relatively low volume during off-season have formed a great comparison to the peak. This
has proven Netflix’s pre-release buzz-generating strategy, and it is working well judging from
the numbers. On the other hand, although GoT also enjoyed great peaks before the season
premiere, the climbing rates were not as sharp as OITNB’s because the teasers and other
transmedia campaigns have been brewing up the conversation for a while. OITNB has had small
peaks in January and April 2015, and the former was due to Golden Globe exposure of the
actresses, and the latter was due to the release of the official trailer for season 3. It seems that
OITNB could garner more attention if they choose to hold more events or interactive campaigns,
yet even though adding the campaigns would help with their fan engagement turnouts, it is not
necessary from a business perspective since the show has already managed to create a high
Exhibit 17: Twitter conversation volume trends and key time points
55

expectation before release.
Another theme of this chart is the off-season conversations, which happened in the other 9
months of the year excluding April, May, and June. In these months, GoT’s volume has
remained higher than OITNB most of time, rendering a smaller gap between the peaks and the
bottoms compared to OITNB. Although GoT’s massive viewership has helped in generating off-
season buzz, the smoother trend line over time has echoed with the previous analysis that HBO
does not rely on social buzz as a measurement for the shows. A difference between season 4 and
season 5 is that the ending month volume has surpassed the releasing month. One factor is that in
season 5, the story of the show has greatly shifted from that of the book, especially with the
death of Jon Snow, and fans were left clueless about what might happen afterwards. The
speculation has reached an all-time high. It is hard to single out the effect of fan engagement; it
could mean that the account became more active, or the fan base itself has grown overtime. But
compared to OITNB, whose off-season conversation volume dropped back to the same level as
2014, GoT has seen some growth in 2015, so it is reasonable to say GoT has put more effort into
off-season engagement.

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Chapter 5: The Imitation Game: Fan Fiction in the Social Age
Voluntary fan activity could be, if it’s not already, an indication of how much fans love a
show. Just like any other voluntary activities, people devote more time and energy when
participating in it satisfies the needs of those people. When not courted by content producers,
fans engage with the shows by themselves in various ways. The common voluntary activities
include creating art/music/fiction inspired by the show, discussing the show on fan pages or
forums, dressing up like the characters, and many other things. But on social media, some fans
have developed a new role-play game to showcase their creativity and manifest their love for
their shows.
The role-play game where a fan registers an account under the name of a show character
and acts in the way of the character has brought much joy to the account operators as well as the
readers, and thus has spread to several TV show fandoms, including Game of Thrones. The main
characters in the show all have been registered for at least one Twitter account by the fans,
claiming that the account is not affiliated with HBO or Game of Thrones. The leading characters,
Jon Snow, Tyrion Lannister, and Deanarys Targaryen, have more than one account active, and
the largest ones have hundreds of thousands of followers. These accounts frequently join
trending conversations with funny character memes or sentences in their tones, as shown in
Exhibit 18, where the three accounts joined #RoastJoffrey with character-appropriate one liners.
They also post updates about the show as well as photos of the cast, covering the various topics
favored by the fans.
However, this seemingly innocent game has caused disputations regarding copy rights. In
2008, Twitter shut down several fan-operated accounts under the names of characters from
AMC’s hit show, Mad Men, per AMC’s request. The network claimed that these accounts were
57

not authorized to use its copy-righted content (Terdiman 2008). When commenting on the
disputation, Jenkins has advocated that “Rather than seeking to silence or control them, creative
agencies need to observe, document, and wherever possible, join the game” (Jenkins 2009).
Although AMC has withdrawn the request and let the accounts keep tweeting at last (Terdiman
2008), the harm has already been done.
Indeed, these imitation games are not just fun for the operators themselves, but also work
as great off-season engagement catalyzers and buzz generators. According to a Nielsen study
cited in an online article, the ratio of people who tweet about a show to people who read the
tweets is about 50:1 (Flinn 2015). That means a small number of hyper-engaged fans could help
leverage the majority of the passive ones. Moreover, because these accounts are not official, they
can enjoy more freedom when posting in terms of wording, imagery, and topic choices while
using the dual-identity of fantasy characters and real-life people to connect the two worlds. For
example, as is shown below in Exhibit 19, @GoT_Tyrion joined the conversation of
#DemDebate with a picture comparing Hilary to a White Walker, as if Tyrion lived in the same
world as the fans. At the same time, such content might be considered sensitive or even insulting
if posted on the official account; it might be deemed as lacking calls to action as well.
As Jenkins has pointed out, fans are always in running ahead of content producers and
marketing professionals in developing the sense of potential “trasmedia planning” opportunities
(Jenkins 2009). When the communicators take transmedia planning as serious tasks, fans
approach it with passion and a much lighter heart; since they are fans themselves, they know
better about what contents fans would want to see. Therefore, these accounts, when leveraged
well, can help satisfy fans’ needs that cannot be met by the official account and the proactive
engagement initiated by content producers.
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However, engaging with these accounts might not be the best way to leverage them.
Interaction from the official account more or less serves as an endorsement welcomed by fans,
including those who run such pseudo character accounts. But since there are often multiple
accounts of one character, “endorsing” some over the others might trigger resentment in the
neglected ones. Thus, simply monitoring their activities and using them as trend indicators could
be a better way to help communicators keep up with the ever-evolving needs of fans.

Exhibit 18: GoT characters’ accounts participating in #RoastJoffrey (Schlosser 2013)
59

Exhibit 19: Tease on democratic debate from one of the Tyrion Lannistaer accounts
(twitter.com)
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Chapter 6: Engagement Is More Complicated than Ever
The prevalence of social media has propelled the growth of participatory culture by
providing fans with direct and real-time access to the shows. Fans nowadays have more
platforms to voice out their opinions and broader access to connect with other fans. The potential
fandoms have thus been greatly enlarged. Yet changes in the way that content circulates has led
to new dynamics in the communication process between content producers and fans. Traditional
top-down and one-way communication has been gradually replaced with more interactive
methods that focus on fan experience (Jenkins 2013).
With the shifting landscape and the growing competition of the TV industry, fan
engagement has been valued more than ever. More TV shows are being created everyday,
dividing fans’ attention into even smaller pieces. Maintaining the conversations to retain their
interest in the shows has come to the center of fan engagement, and that includes both on- and
off-season times. Fortunately, the emergence of innovative communication platforms has
provided content producers with more means to get in touch with the fans. On the one hand,
social media has enabled communicators to directly listen to and interact with fans; on the other
hand, studios and marketing professionals are collaborating closely to create immersive
transmedia experiences that could keep fans interested during off-seasons. When HBO took the
path of designing sophisticated narratives for hardcore Game of Thrones lovers, Netflix chose to
leverage the existing influence of the cast to garner attention and generate social sharing.
Although they did not make much effort in creating transmedia campaigns, the social sharing
mobile app, Orange Is the New App, and the fan event, OrangeCon, were well in alignment with
its overall strategy, and these have been welcomed by fans.
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When looking into the causes for the very different strategies, the author has found that
the types of the shows, the fan mindsets, and the needs in business have played significant roles.
While the deep-immersive route works well for fantasies like Game of Thrones; it might not be
suitable for the so-called “dramedy” (drama and comedy) show, Orange Is the New Black. On
the one hand, the major appeal of the show is not the whole concept of prison life, but the diverse
characters and the actresses who were representing them. On the other hand, since OITNB is not
a weekly airing show, and the quality of Netflix shows was somewhat measured by social buzz,
generating enough conversation during release season would be the focus for OITNB.
However, just like maintaining a friendship, if a show wants to have a long-lasting
relationship with its fans, it should pay attention to off-season engagement. This is where OITNB
is lacking, as proven by the same low off-season conversation volume in 2014 and 2015. Social
media sure helps, but simple social media alone is not enough; fans need some more
sophisticated and eventful activities in order to remain engaged. The beauty of a good immersive
campaign is that it builds up expectation towards the show’s release by intriguing fans with
samples of the show’s world, and it also generates buzz naturally as fans are left in awe after
participating. Although OITNB has given the fans some reward for bringing them closer to the
actresses, it could develop more tactics to give fans deeper experiences with the show, not just
the cast.
The reasons why OITNB or Netflix as a whole do not have many transmedia campaigns
certainly has to do with its business model. It started as a distribution business rather than a
production business. Even though the company has been rolling out lots of original content
recently, the main value it presents to users is still the vast library rather than the owned quality
content. But a good transmedia campaign requires a good understanding of the content as well as
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highly coordinated teamwork, and it surely calls for talents from creative, event planners, and
even psychologists, or criminologists as is the case in OITNB. An in-house marketing or social
media team oftentimes falls short in carrying out such campaigns, so the ideal way to do it might
be to hire an agency like Campfire and Elastic, which is what GoT did. It would create some big
pressure on the marketing budget even if Netflix designs just one campaign for each original
show; the financial breakdowns of Netflix currently does not look promising with regard to this
aspect.
If social sharing is the way to go, then the two shows have already made a successful
presence on major platforms, as they both have generated high conversation volume, have
clearly positioned each platform, and are synchronized well. While GoT could use more
professional management, Netflix could try to add more playfulness into its social media
activities. But for both of them, the emerging platforms are still left undiscovered. To stay on top
of social media, one needs to be constantly discovering new things, from latest pop culture trends
to the new platforms that might become the Facebook for the next generation.
Aside from proactively reaching out, marketers must also keep up with fans’ voluntary
activities. As the lines between producer and content consumers get blurred in the digital age,
voluntary fan activities have been elevated to a new level, where fans proceed to claim their
involvement in various ways. They create their own versions of the characters’ appearances,
their own versions of the story, and they like to bring those characters into real life. Content
producers should be aware that fans are often ahead of marketers in grabbing the potential
transmedia planning opportunities (Jenkins 2009). Such creative voluntary activities should not
be put into the opposite side of fan engagement, but rather be leveraged or at least monitored to
provide insights into the subject matter.
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Despite the many differences between the two shows and the two companies, the
question of how to engage with fans boils down to what they know about fans, and what they are
wiling to do for them. While both of the shows have made successful presence on social media,
attracting millions of fans, and generating a massive volume of conversations; it seems that
HBO’s own social team could be more tactful in managing the accounts, and Netflix could be
building more connections with fans outside the digital space. Although fantasy shows seem to
have more elements that are suitable for transmedia campaigns, non-fantasy drama shows could
also find such elements from the characters, the plots, or even the locations of filming,
everything that fans may want to experience or connect with. At the end of the day, fans are the
ones who are actually shaping the strategies; the job of marketers is to listen, and make the
wishes come true.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Xu, Yuanshu (author)

Core Title Deep immersive vs light social: an examination of fan engagement strategies of Game of thrones and Orange is the new black

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Strategic Public Relations

Publication Date 04/22/2016

Defense Date 04/01/2016

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag fan engagement,HBO,Netflix,OAI-PMH Harvest,social media,Transmedia

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Tenderich, Burghardt (committee chair), Bishop, Greg (committee member), Leveque, Matthew (committee member)

Creator Email lukiaxys@gmail.com,yuanshux@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-240947

Unique identifier UC11277851

Identifier etd-XuYuanshu-4358.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-240947 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-XuYuanshu-4358.pdf

Dmrecord 240947

Document Type Thesis

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Xu, Yuanshu

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA