Why ChuckMeMondays and Twitter are so important to Chuck

Another Monday has passed and for another week in a row, we didn't do so well. I talked about ChuckMeMondays a couple weeks ago, and I'm guessing very few people read it, but I would like to bring it up again and possibly add some reasoning why Chuck fans should participate.

The first week we did ChuckMeMondays, if I remember correctly, we tweeted fairly high on trending topics list(possibly 5th or 6th). Since then, we were able to maintain a spot on the trending topics list at least for a few minutes. Yesterday was different. We did not manage to get on the list at all. While I don't know the number of tweets week to week (you can look yourself in the Chucktv forum), we could have had more tweets than the first week, I don't know. What I do know is that in competition with other topics ChuckMeMondays simply did not do well.

From the falling position on the trending topics, I will make an assumption that the number of people tweeting is falling. On the other hand, Twitter continues to grow more popular, especially by the heavy coverage of Twitter during the Iran election fallout. To combat the growth, all Chuck fans must pitch in to help, join Twitter, invite others to join, and publicize the event as much as possible.

Now you may ask me, what exactly makes ChuckMeMondays so important to the show? I have the answer for you. Internet buzz is fairly important to the networks. Chuck was saved due to a large part of this. The Subway 5-dollar footlong campaign was crucial considering that Subway and Chuck now have a product placement deal. Dollhouse was renewed not only because Fox didn't want another Firefly disaster, but by the legions of Whedonites on the internet doing their crazy things. I know not all internet campaigns work, but being persistent is much more helpful than giving up.

I would like to tell some patterns that I've been observing on Twitter for TV shows that trend. This Sunday, True Blood, Entourage, and Hung all trended. There are not particularly large viewerships for these shows as they are on premium cable, yet they trended. True Blood especially has trended in the #1 every Sunday since the season premiere. While True Blood is a great show and deserves that spot, Entourage (people still watch that?) and Hung (gigolo? wtf?) still trended high still they follow True Blood. Once a topic stays on the list, more people see it and start tweeting about it. It is almost exponential how it works, more and more people tweet about a topic, so it gets more exposure to more people and the cycle continues.

There seems to almost be a direct connection to viewership and tweets on Twitter. True Blood is getting massive numbers (for premium cable) and corresponds to the position of trending topics. Burn Notice and Royal Pains both regularly get pretty high on the trending lists, especially since I never see any TNT show trend. Their numbers are also very high. If people see a TV show trending, there is a possibly that they will turn on their TV and find the show since others like it and it should be a good show.

If ChuckMeMondays trends high every Monday, people will see it and find out what it is, introducing more people to the amazing world of Chuck (if NBC refuses to do it, we'll have to pick up the slack). If we can keep trending high until the Chuck season 3 premiere, I am positive the Nielson numbers will be good. If not, I'm not really sure what will happen. NBC claims to have some viral marketing plan, but with those fools, who knows.