Western Kentucky University
As mentioned at the end of my inaugural post, this site launched today in conjunction with @UnofficialME having become a finalist in this year’s Shorty Awards in the Entertainment Leaders category, along with two Castles, a True Blood, a Twilight, and the MythBusters. Here’s a bit about what to do if you want to support Unofficial M.E. for a Shorty Award.
First of all, my thanks to the most than 160 of you who submitted nominations for @UnofficialME (mostly under Brand, until the Awards moved us and our competition into Entertainment). The support is gratifying, and I appreciate all of it. In the end, I mainly wanted to see if all of us could get a nomination, and that experiment certainly resulted in a wholly satisfying conclusion. Anything else would be gravy. Delicious, unlikely gravy.
Second of all, if you nominated @UnofficialME in January, that counts as a vote in this final voting round. So, technically, you need to do nothing more to support that account for the award. However, the benefit of submitting a fresh vote (which would simply replace your nomination, not become an additional vote) is that it would send out a fresh tweet to your followers, which might prompt some new votes from people who didn’t submit a nomination. You can submit a vote either from @UnofficialMe’s Shorty Awards profile or from the above Entertainment category page.
Third, if you do cast a vote in this round, remember that the most important thing is to include a reason for your vote after the “because” in the provided copy. Votes without a reason, while apparently they don’t get discounted altogether, count for much less in the final consideration.
Fourth, finally, and however, I’m not particularly concerned or stressed about winning the final vote. Which is a good thing, because there’s a rather insurmountable lead being held by most of competition, and while the MythBusters started this round behind us I would certainly not in any way count them out. I mean, they’re the MythBusters.
So, go forth and put your support behind either one of two Castles, a True Blood, a Twilight, the MythBusters, or Unofficial M.E. The voting period ends Friday at 12:00 PM EST (9:00 AM PST).
I’ve used for the title of this inaugural post the gutteral noises with which a Mutant Enemy production closes primarily because it seemed one coudn’t help but do so, despite this being a beginning instead of an ending.
This site is something of an attempt to tame my at times over-zealous and over-reaching addiction to fandom by bringing everything under a single, intermittently-used umbrella, and has as its most immediate origins the @UnofficialME account on Twitter, which itself was a more general purpose replacement for an earlier account focused solely on Dollhouse. Both efforts arose from my half a decade operating a string of mostly now defunct fandom websites — including Session 416, River Is Made Of CHOCOLATE, Big Damn Commentaries, The (Browncoat) Invoice, What Is Mia Made Of?, Its Own Sub-Genre, and Dear Universal, FREE GONERS — as well as founding Can’t Stop The Serenity and maintaining the website for The Evil League of Evil during the DVD contest.
My activities through both Twitter accounts, at their core, were meant to address the failure of FOX Broadcasting to support that show via the web in general, and social media more specifically, in any meaningul or useful way.
Seemingly faced, as near as I’ve been able to tell in recent months, with the choice of total withdrawl from fandom or complete submersion in it, I’m trying for something of a third way. Rather than risk falling prey to my own constant compulsion (addiction?) to register new domains for every new Mutant Enemy (or related) project, even multiple domains for different aspects of a single project, we’ll see what kind of balance I can strike by having just the one, and focusing not on obsessive detail but on a more generalized support.
Late last year, I drafted a pitch document detailing at length my arguments for why I believed Mutant Enemy should have taken advantage of FOX’s failure and established its own web and social media presence (all of which was in the present tense at the time, as it was immediately relevant). Having no way of knowing whether or not that pitch ever was read by the relevant parties, and believing the arguments were worth airing publicly, that pitch document eventually manifested itself online in a shorter, edited version as On Mutant Enemy And Social Media. Any attempt at understanding my fandom activities last year, as well as the origins of this site, must start with a reading of that post.
(It should be noted that a careful reading will uncover that there’s an error in its suppositions about how Facebook page accounts work. The error remains uncorrected mainly because, well, it would be disingenuous to change it.)
As FOX’s own failures continued, and with no official Mutant Enemy activity to take up the slack and capitalize upon the network’s absence to build up its own brand presence, @UnofficialME was one fan’s meager attempt to help plug the gaps as best as could be done. An official voice always will have an easier time disseminating accurate information and solving problems, no matter how hard a fan works at establishing credibility. But there is no official voice.
While I continue to believe that such an official voice is necessary and that a fan voice simply cannot offer a fully viable substitute (and with the intent of using Unofficial M.E. as a way to balance and control my addiction to fandom, rather than either completely surrender to or outright walk away from it) my hope is to continue contributing in some small fashion both to the visibility of the Mutant Enemy brand and to the active discussion and problem solving — the customer service — which should form the basis of any so-called “marketing” in the world of social media.
It should be noted that this is not a spoiler site. The degree to which I try to offer coverage or insight on any given Mutant Enemy project will tend to be based upon the degree to which Mutant Enemy itself is discussing and promoting that project. For example, no one knew much of anything about Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog until almost right up to its release. In such a situation, I would not seek to be ferreting out information beyond the level and type that M.E. itself would be discussing.
On the other hand, press events and interviews with entertainment reporters were comonplace during the production of Dollhouse. In a similiar situation, while I wouldn’t be linking to casting sides or spoiler photos, the amount of discussion of such a project likely would trend higher.
But, really, this site simply is not meant to be comprehensive or all-encompassing. If for some unknown reason you’re not already, you want to be reading WHEDONesque regularly for that.
All of this is consistent with how I’ve operated @UnofficialME, and in the end this site is meant mainly to be an extension of that Twitter account, a place to address certain topics in greater detail than is possible in 140 characters, but not a place to mention every single thing.
Some final word should be offered on the matter of why this site is launching now. Simply put: the @UnofficialME account on Twitter has placed within the top six picks in Shorty Awards nominations under the Entertainment category, making it an official finalist for the brief February voting period which begins this morning and ends on Friday.
(Originally, the account had been competing for a nomination under the Brand category, but at nearly the last moment — two days before the nomination period closed — the Shorty Awards moved it, and, fortunately, its accumulated votes, from Brand to Entertainment. I would have preferred a nomination in Brand, because I was trying to make something of a point, but certainly I don’t dismiss a nomination in Entertainment.)
While I’m under no particular illusions as to the importance of the Shorty Awards, I do find it gratifying to have secured, through the efforts of its fans and followers, a nomination under Entertainment for a completely unofficial representation of Mutant Enemy, which I strove to make professionally-minded, reliable, and respectful. In the end, nomination was the goal. By all means feel free to vote for it in this next round to determine a winner, but I’m not going to lose any sleep over it — especially since @UnofficialME is up against two Castles, a True Blood, a Twilight, and the MythBusters.
With the nomination, Mutant Enemy (maybe?) gets some some sliver of social media attention, and what I believe was some worthwhile work on my part in 2009 gets a some small modicum of recognition. That, perhaps, ought to suffice.
All of that said, Unofficial M.E. now officially esablishes an outpost beyond the confines of its originating Twitter account. Just don’t ask me what, specifically, I intend to do with it. In the end, I’m always just making a lot of this up as I go along, and hoping it proves valuable.