February 24th marked the airing of Fringe episode 4.14 “The End of All Things”. The hash tag #LoveIsTheAnswer was selected not only because the 14th episode of each season has had “Peter and Olivia”-centric themes but because it represents many of the motivations of characters found on Fringe. Furthermore, we felt it expressed the heartbeat behind these weekly social media campaigns and summed up the overall sentiment Fringe fandom has for their show.

Just a day before this campaign, the buzz generated by Fringies through social media received some attention via several blogs (blastr, spoilerville). In addition, members of the Fringenuity team introduced themselves to discuss the genesis and desired outcomes of these social media campaigns (fringetelevision). All through Friday, we monitored activities anticipating an influx of new participants to the campaign.  And boy, did assistance come!

Within 3 minutes of the Twitter campaign start, #LoveIsTheAnswer hit Worldwide trending, a new and amazing record! US trending followed suit 5 minutes into the Twitter event and the hash tag found its way to trending topics in multiple countries including Brazil (who also trended ObserversAreHere), Canada, Spain and the UK. Worldwide trending remained strong over 35 minutes.

Of interest to note is that while Worldwide trending may have ended into the east coast airing of Fringe, #LoveIsTheAnswer was still the top story in Twitter’s Discovery section.

And this time, the Fringenuity team was able to influence one of the definitions for #LoveIsTheAnswer during trending (see top example).

Hours after US trending ended, #LoveIsTheAnswer emerged as trending topics for other countries such as (Germany, Ireland, Italy, and persisted in Spain)

A peek into the statistics (from @Nikolai3d) showed a significant increase to the base of participants, a 6-fold increase as compared with the average number of contributors druing the first 5 Twitter campaigns. With tweets associated with Fringe at peak trending, we hope that this truly represents new participants joining and staying with these social media campaigns.

Tweets: 42,442
Contributors: 13,532
Reach: 3,967,671
Exposure: 12,225,956

A quick comparison reveals that number of influential tweets exceeded those for the #BeABetterMan campaign. Congratulations Fringies, a new record set!

Fringies continued to check-in diligently to GetGlue keeping Fringe at top spots during airing of Fringe on both the East and West coasts. Remember that this is a simple but still very key activity to creating social media impressions.

A February 27th press release from TVGuide.com on a User Research Study indicate “social network discussions about television shows drive tune-in, loyalty and more live viewing”. When asked about impact of social impressions, top answers for starting to watch a show included:

1) people had good things to say about it (76 percent),

2) topics or storylines interested me (64 percent) and,

3) I like to watch what others watch (13 percent).

Asked how social impressions influenced them to continue watching a TV show, users said the top three reasons are:

1) impressions helped keep up my interest in shows (77 percent),

2) topics or storylines interested me (66 percent) and,

3) controversial moments (34 percent).

We move into U.S. hiatus of Fringe on a social media high!

Fringenuity will have fan-centric activities during this time and we look forward to your continued support and contributions when these social media campaigns resume in the second half of March. Thank you everyone for making these efforts meaningful and worthwhile. Fandom – “You have no idea how extraordinary you are.”

Promo vids: @dalliel, @sujeto13

Icons and other artwork: @cheribot, @zort70, @sarahproost, @berry_hearts, @birdandbear