Glee Tweet-Peat Lame Use of Social Media

Fox & Twitter Social Losers in Over-hyped Tweet-Peats
Once a gleek, always a gleek. Fox's "Tweet-Peat" rebroadcast of the funtastic pilot Glee in partnership with Twitter was a lame, over-hyped, excruciatingly frustrating exercise in how not to use social media that was being touted as the coolect application in social media.

Glee Tweet-Peat - The Hype
Pre-Tweet-Peat, Fox was heavily promoting through Facebook, Twitter and other media outlets for fans to join the broadcast to see live broadcast Tweets from Glee cast members. Fox thought it was being clever when someone in their social media department added the terms "Gleek" & now "Tweet-Peat" to the lexicon of hip, social media terms. But Glee's Tweet-Peats and what I hear of Fox's other Tweet-Peat experiment with Fringe has given Tweet-Peat a bad name.

Fox Stutters on Initial Glee Tweet-Peat
The Glee broadcast starts, tweets are flying on the hashtag #glee and @GleeOnFox with loyal fans eagerly anticipating the simulcast Twitter tweet-peats on Fox. Then for the first 14 minutes of the show, nothing. No Tweets. Just a regular broadcast. Now duh, you have Twitter to get out an instant message, why wouldn't the producers of Glee just send out a Tweet saying we're having technical difficulties? We gleeks patiently wait. Then a promising white screen blanks out one of the audition scenes. At least something is happening. Seconds must have spilled over into minutes and before you know it we're into the first commercial break with nary a tweet.

Lame Tweets from Glee Cast
The cast from Glee proved their social media manners were gleeky. No introductions like "Hey, I'm Lea Michele and play Rachel Berry, thanks you guys for waiting". Instead, the cast members chose to waste Fox's valuable broadcast time with self-indulgent personal shout-outs to their family and select friends totally excluding all the fans that had been standing by waiting for 140 character tidbits.

One-Sided Conversation
It seemed like the Tweets were unmoderated and in fact it seemed like the other cast members, Kevin McHale who plays wheelchair bound Artie Abrams and Mark Salling who plays football star bully Puck were in different locations and had not discussed what would go on ahead of time. Lea Michele proved that she could type the fastest and kept trouncing Kevin McHale's tweets but for what, her lame observations were as annoying as her character.

Glee Tweet-Peat on Fox Confusing
What made the tweet-peat so frustrating is that Fox would interject send your questions in and it was unclear if the hashtag #glee should be used or @GleeOnFox. It didn't matter because cast members weren't bothering to answer questions. The only person who attempted to answer viewer tweets was Kevin McHale. When questions were answered, it was sometimes out of context with no reference to the original question.

Glee Tweet Peat
The social media experiment between Fox and Twitter was an excruciating failure. A for effort. the p.r. department proved it could get the word out. F for the engineering team. D for cast members lame tweets. B for Kevin McHale attempting to rise to the social media occasion and actually do what the Glee Tweet Peat promised. Plus where was Cory Monteith who places Finn or the other Glee hottie Matthew Morrison who plays teacher Will Schuester or Jane Lynch's comedic touch would have been welcome. All Fox & Twitter proved is that pop-up video & DVD commentaries are still far more interesting than tweet peats. A C+ for Fox & Twitter on trying. Next time, perhaps, interaction with fans, moderated discussion and relevant talking points provided to cast members would have made the tweet peats less gleeky and far more cool.