Matt Weiner reveals what Mad Men is really about

Wesleyan University kicked off a fundraising drive last night with a talk by its most famous '87 alum --Matt Weiner. The event was held in the Directors Guild Theater which enabled the event to open with a luscious, big screen sampling of all 6 seasons --up until S604. (No preview clips, natch.)

Some of the things that Matt talked about in (warm, relaxed) conversation with Wesleyan’s' president--a meeting of minds he presumably never foresaw when he was (by his own admission) a lackluster student in Middletown:

1. He actually wanted to be a poet. He wrote poetry in college and did a poetry thesis senior year which he brought to a poetry professor for feedback. The professor's response: We both know you're not a poet, don't we? "Actually, I hadn't known that," Matt said. "But it helped me enormously."

2. After graduation, desperate to live in New York, Matt took a job with a friend's mother, an interior decorator, who basically hired him to "stand around and make sure the workers weren't stealing stuff." After a while, he decided to move back to LA, where he'd grown up. "Because one day, standing in a room being decorated, I realized I'd be doing the same thing the next year. And the next."

3. Matt is fascinated by the late 50s "which actually lasted through 1962." He felt the same vibe played out when he was in college in the 1980s-- revival of diners, jazz, fashions, etc. He is not so fascinated with the Boomer 60s when "everyone wore the same thing and shouted, in unison, 'I'm an individual!"

4. He chose to set the show in advertising because "that was the glamorous job of that era."

5. On Don Draper's character: "Don is a person from rural poverty who is acutely aware of the fact that he ran away from death, in an act of cowardice. He actually killed someone, by accident, but never took responsibility for it. He is very interested in self-preservation. Fear was instilled in him as a child, by a hobo who told him that death was going to come looking for him, and that he should 'keep moving.' That was where I started the series."

6. Another thing that inspired the Mad Men story was the conundrum of expectations for men at that time: "They were supposed to be great dads and great husbands and work for the Little League and the PTA...but they were also supposed to drink as much, smoke as much and get laid as much as possible."

7. He's grateful for the creative freedom AMC provides, including the freedom to not to have to spell everything out. Like sex scenes. "I'm more interested in "the just before" and "the just after."

8. Don Draper is not an anti-hero. "It disturbs me when people call him that. Don't people have to murder someone to be anti-heroes? Don has his own code, his own moral center. But it is totally situational. Like most of ours. And that is what the show is really about."

9. And speaking of personalized moral codes: "Pete is my Democrat. He's right about everything, but he's from a screwed up background. And I do believe that you are the sum of your experiences."

[SPOILERS ALERT: Proceed at your own caution, if you haven't seen Season 6.]

10. When asked about heroism in the show, he said: "It's Don's support of Peggy. It's Betty going into town after that violinist. Heroism to me is any time you overcome your own weaknesses, push your own boundaries."

11. On Themes. The theme of last season (#5) was Success. One of the themes of this season is: How are you perceived by other people? "When Betty Draper goes downtown, people there make assumptions about who she is based on her weight and her hair and the fact that she knows how to cook. She resents that. "

12. "The show is not judgmental about human behavior, and that makes people uncomfortable, I think."

13. Don can't love the people who love him. He begins to emotionally withdraw from Megan when he sees she can't accept his 50s lifestyle.

14. "1968 was probably the crappiest year in the history of America. I have new respect for people who were there." When asked about how this will impact his characters, he was characteristically evasive about details, but said, “Bad stuff's gonna happen."

15. A question from the audience: Do you believe people can change? Tellingly, Matt paused a long moment before answering, "Yes. But I believe wanting to change, is a change." And we see where Don gets his remarkable ability to finely slice and dice the meaning of words.

betty!

Forgive me, non-Mad Men fans, I have to talk about...Betty! [spoiler alert for those who haven't yet seen last night's S6 premiere)

First shock to me that the writers left her plus-size. (Does one of them have a grudge against her?) I thought for sure that her added weight, a (brilliant) cover for pregnancy during shooting last season--so she wouldn't have to walk around behind laundry baskets--would have been done away with, now that a cover's not necessary. Or is it? Are Xander's days as an only child numbered?

And then--the hair! Is her Marilyn-to-Jackie move an attempt to spice up her marriage? Clearly she's NOT good at pillow talk, given her awkward attempt to turn on a distracted, straight-edge husband by initiating role play using fantasy--of all things--child molesting! Or perhaps it's an attempt to prove to the world (and herself) that there's more to her than a strung-out druggie on St. Mark's assumes. Speaking of which--didn't that scene make you just want to reach into the screen and tell her to buy the building, it'll be worth millions someday!?

OK, now back to our regularly scheduled programming...

@bettydraper hooks up with Abe Lincoln tonite

In a remarkable mash-up of 60s eras, @BettyDraper (1960s) will be joining @SavingLincoln (1860s) to talk about bringing characters to twitter. Tonite, 7 PM, Lincoln Center Amphitheater, 144 West 65th St. Hosted by Storycode, that awesome community of immersive storytellers. Disclosure: January Jones will NOT make an appearance. And neither will Abe.

Algonquin roundtable turns virtuous

If you're a lover of books (electronic or otherwise) you probably know about the Algonquin Roundtable where Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and other New York literati of the 1920's lunched daily for ten years, dubbing themselves "The Vicious Circle."

Yesterday, "The Virtuous Circle" gathered there, a group of tweeting authors, editors, publicists, publishers and book marketers, many meeting IRL for the first time, greeting each other with exuberant "You look much better than your avatar!"

@BettyDraper and I were honored to have a place at the table with circle organizers Bethanne Patrick and Denise Berthiaume, along with writers distinguished in mediums calling for far more than 140 characters: Susan Orlean, Martha McPhee, Jason Pinter, Erin McHugh, Julie Klam, MJ Rose. (And others, I'm sure. There wasn't one table, but several.) Prix fixe menu was surprisingly good and for several hours, the room reverberated with clinking glasses and buzz about publishers (how few are left), bookstores (ditto), readings (one writer had been dismayed to look down at a signing and realize he was wearing two different shoes) and, of course, e-publishing. Which turns out to account for just 5% of book sales these days, not the larger numbers I'd heard. Everyone in the business is trying to figure out how to make it make money. "The actual physical book--the printing and binding--is the least expensive part of publishing," an editor told me. "The real costs are the writing, the editing, the sales and promotion which don't change, whether the book is handheld or virtual."

Along with dessert, a book exchange. Kind of like a not-Secret Santa, in which I nabbed Road Trip. Other takeaways: I learned that Dorothy Parker tweets from the grave. And, on the way to the ladies, made the acquaintance of the hotel's most famous resident- Matilda, a glamorous cat who not only has the run of the place but her own email address.

good housekeeping brings down the house at city center

When I was growing up, reading Good Housekeeping was a source of titillation to me because my mother had declared it off-limits to kids. (Presumably not for its recipes, but because of its frank advice on marriage and other womanly topics that these days are included in lower school curriculums.)

Because of this, and also because I've been a longtime cheerleader of women making their mark (in prehistoric 90s, I helped launch the first Take Our Daughters to Work Day) I was gratified that @BettyDraper and I had the chance to attend Good Housekeeping's 125th anniversary celebration at City Center where glitterati gathered last night for "Shine On: Celebrating 125 Years of Women Making Their Mark", a benefit to build the first National Women's History Museum.

On stage, Meryl Streep channeled Susan B. Anthony; Marlee Matlin delivered a tribute to Helen Keller in sign language; Fran Drescher stole the show with her grab bag of impersonations, including a human rights worker from India, a young Latina with stage-fright, and a Jewish grandmother to whom a desktop is "a place to put your napkin." The program included songs, performances and video tributes from Jessica Simpson, Jane Alexander, Kristen Bell, Candice Bergen, Hilary Duff, Nora Ephron, Marlo Thomas, Martha Stewart, Ann Hampton Calloway and wrapped with a rousing rendition of "Respect" from Aretha Franklin who received a standing ovation for belting it out while floating across stage in what appeared to be a gown of white feathers.

The show was actually branded entertainment, sponsored by Maybelline which donated $50K to the cause and did a bit of sampling while offering free makeup touches to the incoming audience. The one-night production honored women from all walks: from oft-lauded names like Sally Ride and Margaret Mead to lesser knowns like Joan Ganz Cooney (founder Children's TV Workshop) and Virginia Apgar (neonatologist) to names I'd never heard of, pointing up to me the need for a commemorative museum.

Perhaps as a sign of recessionary times, no party bags, natch, just giveaways of the latest issue which honors 125 women in a special section sponsored by Maybelline. (A choice of two covers. One featuring a headshot of Michele Obama so enthusiastically photoshopped that it has evoked a bit of foam in the twitstream.)

Branded efforts for a publication across multiple platforms might seem like a post-millennial concept but, as Stuart Elliott reminded recently, it harkens back to the 1970s, when Fortune magazine hired the cabaret act Weeden, Finkle & Fay to write and perform travelling shows to generate goodwill for its advertisers⎯and additional ad pages.

@BettyDraper packing her hatbox for SXSW

Thanks to you who kindly voted on this proposed panel last Fall, I'm on my way to Austin where @BettyDraper will be presenting a session on Brand Fiction: what the heck is it? What can it do for your brand? How to integrate it into current marketing efforts? It's been recommended as a top SXSW panel for business and highlighted in SXSWorld and by the sharp folks at Razorfish. If you're putting your SXSW schedule together, hope you'll consider joining @Roger_Sterling (Michael Bissell) and me at 3:30 on Saturday for "Rules of Brand Fiction from Twittering Mad Men." A little fun before happy hour!

brand fiction wins big at Shorty Awards

The 2nd Annual Shorty Awards (for Twitter content) were held last night in Times Square and I'm thrilled to report that @BettyDraper won a Shorty in Innovation. Just as exciting for me was the fact that it was a big night for brand fiction. @FrankAdman (fictional art director from the 1960s) won for Advertising and @TrueBloodHBO (official profile of the show) won for Entertainment. Proof that a new kind of story telling for brands is getting attention.

A winner in the Brand category was @SesameStreet (tied with @WholeFoods) and one of the highlights of the evening was the chance to meet Grover and his "handler" Eric Jacobson.

For the first time, winners were chosen not only by popular Twitter vote, but by judging of a newly formed Academy whose members include Kurt Andersen and David Pogue. Congrats to the winners:

Advertising
Frank Adman, @FrankAdman
Application
TweetDeck, @TweetDeck
Art
deviantART, @deviantART
Brand (two-way tie)
Whole Foods Market, @WholeFoods
Sesame Street, @SesameStreet
Celebrity
Nathan Fillion, @NathanFillion
Cultural Institution (three-way tie)
Jonah Holland of the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, @lewisginter
Reduced Shakespeare Company, @reduced
Poetry Society of America, @Poetry_Society
Customer Service
Bonnie Smalley, @ComcastBonnie
Design
Smashing Magazine, @smashingmag
Entertainment
TrueBlood HBO, @TrueBloodHBO
Finance
Suze Orman, @SuzeOrmanShow
Food 
Foodimentary, @Foodimentary
Government
Cory Booker, @CoryBooker
Health
Rachael Dunlop, @DrRachie
Humor (two-way tie)
David Thorne, @27bslash6
Mrs. Stephen Fry, @MrsStephenFry
Innovation
Helen Klein Ross's Betty Draper, @Betty Draper
Journalist (two-way tie)
William Bonner, @realwbonner
Rachel Maddow, @maddow
Literature
Arjun Basu, @arjunbasu
Music (two-way tie)
Ivete Sangalo, @ivetesangalo
Ted Leo, @tedleo
News
The Diane Rehm Show, @drshow
Nonprofit
To Write Love On Her Arms, @TWLOHA
Politics
The Nation, @thenation
Science 
Jen Scheer, @flyingjenny
Sports
Bill Simmons, @sportsguy33
Tech
Mark Watson, @soldierknowsbest
Travel
Paul Smith, @twitchhiker
Weird
The Llama, @DoWhatITellYou
Special Humanitarian Award
Carel Pedre, @carelpedre

why i'm voting against @Adbroad in the Shorty Awards

If you've got other things on your mind besides social media, you might not have heard of the Shorty Awards. The Oscars of Twitter. Sans limos and red carpet and televised gala. Election is by popular vote and I'm jazzed to be a finalist in two categories: advertising and innovation.

The first round of voting was last week and there was a bit of a dust-up in advertising, the rare ad awards show in which Lee Clow isn't a frontrunner. @FrankAdman (a fictional art director from the 60s) accused @iwearyourshirt (a guy who wears other people's Tshirts for a living) of breaking the rules by getting robots to finagle votes. Turns out, boosting vote counts via robots (or humans in feverish imitation of them) isn't against the rules. But Shorty organizers reacted responsibly by re-weighting votes, assigning different values to tweets according to content and origin. Ah, the vagaries of life on the digital frontier.

Speaking of frontiers. Very few new ideas come along in advertising. But this may be one of them. Invent a fictional character---emphasis on invention. Don't appropriate a character from a TV show or film or book, a character you own no IP rights to. Invent an original character who can be made to do what you wish, gallivanting from twitter to facebook to youtube to...whatever the next social media platform will be. Use the character to build an audience. Then sell that audience like a media buy.

@FrankAdman appeared about the same time as AMC's Mad Men wandered into the twitterverse. He's a west coast art director living large in the 60s: chain-smoking, skirt-chasing, inventor of the virtual "Twittertini" which has evolved into the lexicon of social media-speak on Twitter. He now has over 14,000 followers. I don't know if @FrankAdman is for sale. But if I were Kodak or Clorox or Dewars or another brand with heritage in the 60s, I'd certainly put in a call. Er, a tweet.

I'm voting for @FrankAdman in the Shorty Awards because I love the idea of a fictional character winning in the advertising category again. (Last year's winner was the tweeter for Peggy Olson.) I want @FrankAdman and @BettyDraper to take home Shorty Awards this year. To help demonstrate the power of brand fiction in the digital universe.

I'm only sorry we'll have to pull AdBroad's campaign commercial.

To vote for Frank, go to the Shorty polls here. Vote for Betty here.

@BettyDraper goes Hollywood

At the kind invitation of Writers Guild West, I spent the week in Santa Monica, at Digital Hollywood, a four day thinklab exploring all that's erupting on the frenzied frontier of digital entertainment. Which is to say, entertainment.

I sat on a panel about Transmedia Storytelling with a distinguished lineup of fellow panelists that included Flint Dille, Dungeons and Dragons, Adam Armus, Heroes, Chris Ord and Matt Corman, Covert Affairs, and Jay Bushman, Orson Wells Sells His Soul to the Devil.

It was fascinating to hear how Flint is turning toys into TV shows. How Adam is working with Heroes writers to extend the show impressively across multiple platforms. How Jay is turning Halloween into Tweetplays. And Matt and Chris are turning Betty Draper's best friend into a spy for Covert Affairs.

I spoke as a Mad (Wo)Man on Twitter, about how to free TV characters from ordinary contraints of the medium, and how doing so can result in benefits for a show. I hate dealing with reading glasses on stage, so I used slides as talking points. Which I'm sharing here for anyone interested.

Future of Entertainment: Outside the Box

View more presentations from Helen Klein Ross.

Mad Men's Carla raises consciousness 140 characters at a time

Why do Mad Men fans write feeds for the characters? I know that for many of us, it's simply good fun. For others, it's fun and an interesting experiment in social media. For others of us, it's all that and...an opportunity to touch on controversial social issues the show bravely explores.

Latoya Peterson writing for Racialicious observes there's a twitter feed for Carla, the Drapers' African American housekeeper, which puts forth perspective that is "all but absent on the show".

Some critics have taken Mad Men to task for not dealing with social injustice in a more frontal manner. But Weiner's characters exist in a universe where concepts of feminism and racism are just beginning to take hold. Where sexual harassment not only doesn't have consequences, it won't have a name for a good twenty years.

HighJive, a popular blogger who writes on race and "cultural cluelessness" concedes that "finding fault with Mad Men’s rendering of ethnic minorities in the advertising industry is somewhat impossible because, well, they barely exist. They’re invisible."

Indeed, when the twitter feed for Carla first appeared in December, there was no profile pic. There wasn't a profile pic for Carla for weeks. The writer explained why in an email:

I have no picture because I'm invisible.

Carla remained without a profile pic until Jan 19, the day before Obama was sworn in:

Finally found one of my own pictures. Makes me feel like today is a holiday.

From time to time, the writer behind Carla touches on racial inequity taken for granted in the world of Ossining, circa 1963. Here's her exchange with Betty during a twitter-based Tea Party:

Carla: This uniform makes me feel uncomfortable. But I can't show it; must maintain my "quiet dignity" for the party.

Betty: And be sure and put out Cointreau for White Ladies.

Carla: Oh, won't all of your guests be white ladies at the party?

Betty: You are such a character! Gin + Cointreau + Lemon + Powdered Sugar = White Lady. Don't forget to iron your apron!

Carla: We could offer Black Ladies as well. Brandy + Grand Marnier + Kahlua. Paul Kinsey told me he likes Black Ladies.

Carla: And at least, I get to keep my own clothes clean if Betty and her friends spit up the White Ladies on the black lady.

Betty: And change the record on the hifi to Bing Crosby, would you?

Clara: Putting on Bing Crosby record, wishing I'd brought my Louie Armstrong "Christmas Night in Harlem" record to play.

Some tweeters have taken issue with @Carla_Madmen's sangfroid, wishing her to be more politically conscious:

re: Fixation on the Drapers' lives...don't you need to be marching for your civil rights or something?

But Carla on twitter remains in character. She is no Rosa Parks. She is like thousands of women were then as now: ordinary women trying to make the best of the cards they'd been dealt:

March? I get plenty of exercise walking to and from the train.

I do not know who writes @Carla_Madmen. But we have developed an email relationship in which we exchange views on racism and other issues that Carla and Betty can't discuss. I sent her the Racialicious piece and asked for her views on how blacks are depicted in Mad Men. She wrote:

African-Americans are the only grown-ups on Mad Men. To the limited extent you see them, they lack any discernible faults. Whether that's due to their minor roles, I'm not sure. I think it will be interesting to watch Mad Men develop larger roles for minority characters as the 60's progress -- single dimensional with quiet dignity or a more full range of human emotions and foibles. It's obviously a potential land mine for the writers.

And a gold mine of material for the writer of Carla's twitter feed.

live from Broadway! it's twittertainment!

The New York Times reports the first Broadway show playing simultaneously in theater and in the twitterverse. From May 12 to June 7, "Next to Normal" issued tweets during showtimes which appeared in the N2NBroadway twitter stream during pauses in onstage dialogue. The entire twitter performances can be viewed here.

What's exciting about this isn't only that it blasts open a new creative frontier (the 3 1/2 Wall?) but that it demonstrates that twittertainment can play a role in building audience. Before the twitter production began, the show sold $226,000 in tickets and filled 72 percent of its seats. The week it ended, the show made $363,000 and reached 99 percent of capacity, according to Broadway League. Some attribute the bump to Tony nominations. But as of this posting, the N2NBroadway feed has 572, 180 followers. Surely Janet Aguhob wasn't the only one who "saw the show because of the tweets...It was like Twitter was the appetizer and then I got the main course."

The idea of adapting the show for twitter was the brainchild of Situation Interactive, an online marketing and ad firm. According to the firm's president, Damian Bazadona, it successfully promoted the show without "banging someone over the head to say, 'Here's how to buy tickets'...The content itself was doing the selling for us."

Character posts were written by the show's playwright Brian Yorkey who was "skeptical when approached about adapting his play for thumb-typers, it sounded like 'a bit of a chore'." He soon took up the creative challenge, however, and began putting out tweets. Like the one during a scene when a manic wife is making sandwiches on the floor, from her humoring husband, "Do all wives end up sprawled on the floor making sandwiches for no one?"

Calling @BettyDraper.

(Thanks to @_EthelMerman for scoop from the dressing room)

adbroad IRL

Last night at the Shorty Awards, I passed out my in the real world info on recipe cards from the kitchen of Betty Draper. And agreed to be outed by The Wall Street Journal. What a scene, those Shortys. Turquoise daquiris (twitter's fail whale color), wandering astronaut in helmet, faces you're used to seeing half-inch square on a screen suddenly attached to a body and talking to you. Now that I'm outed, should I switch my avatar for my pic? But I like having a blonde wave and that 60s demeanor.

who the hell is adbroad anyway

When I was a kid, I was fascinated with the movie Three Faces of Eve. Incredible to me that three people could exist in one. Back then, it was called Multiple Personality Disorder. Now it's called Convergence. I'm finding it takes way too much energy to keep up separate identities. And doing so no longer seems important. I advise brands to aggregate their identities across platforms. Now I'm taking my own advice. Along with Peggy Olson, Betty Draper is "coming out" at the Shorty Awards. Spoiler alert: she looks nothing like January Jones.

7 things about me you might not want to know

One of my favorite bloggers, Dear Jane Sample (of whom my mother doesn't entirely approve) tagged me the other day in a post. Jane was asked to reveal 7 things about herself. And challenged 7 people to do the same. So here (because it's so tempting to work on something besides a project due tomorrow) goes:

1. Like Social Hallucinations who tagged Jane, I hate lending books. After I finish reading a book I love, I find it a home on my bookshelf where I can continue to admire it on occasion, as if it's a friend who's taken up residence in my hallway. People who ask to borrow books often fail to fathom the primal bond that forms between an avid reader and a book she hated to finish, or why ordering another from B&N just isn't the same.

2. I am the oldest of eight children. Who haven't been children, of course, for years. Funny how we tote our childhood identities into adulthood. Must we persist in using the term "oldest?"

3. I met my husband at Studio 54. Which makes us sound vastly more hipster than we actually were.

4. I was born in Tennessee.

5. Though it violates every principle I hold dear about women being worthy and equal, I love pre-feminist chic flicks like Cukor's "The Women" and "The Best of Everything." I can watch Joan Crawford's eyebrows in this scene again and again.

6. I speak Chinese. Not like a native. But I can hold my own at a meet and greet at a satellite office in, say, Shanghai.

7. Despite best intentions, I'm still tweeting as Mad Men's Betty Draper. In fact, my addiction has only intensified. I guess because against evidence to the contrary, I'm convinced the enterprise has a future, somehow. @bettydraper now has a blog! And (thanks if you voted) she's the number one nominee for a Shorty Award in entertainment! My (real life) family is researching 12-Step Twitter Recovery Programs. Wish me luck tonite at the Golden Globes!

OK, now it's my turn to tag people, asking them to share 7 things about themselves. Jane's already picked a few on my list, including Creative Beef and Joker (who just got engaged, mazel tov!) and Shaun at Prostituted Thoughts. But here are other bloggers I'd love to know better:

Advergirl
The Ad Contrarian
Advertising is Good For You
High Jive
Jetpacks
Toad Stool (Alan Wolk)
Make the Logo Bigger (Bill Green)
View from the Bottom

 
The rules (should you choose to accept this mission):

Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
Let them know they’ve been tagged.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled program.

i am @bettydraper

via ignite social media

If you thought you were corresponding with January Jones or one of Weiner's writers or a neglected housewife circa. 1962--sorry for the spoiler. I am one of the large (and still growing) cast of Mad Men characters on Twitter.

As has already been revealed, the cast of Mad Men twitterers is in no way connected with AMC or Matthew Weiner. Neither are they part of Deep Focus (AMC's digital ad agency) or any other PR marketing group, despite tweets like one from @ddrager yesterday guessing tweeters are paid or "they wouldn't go to the lengths they have, and for how long they've been at it!" Rational people, he means.

My life as a Mad Man began as a lark. On August 26, just after AMC lawyers changed their minds about closing down Mad Men twitter accounts (persuaded in part by bloggers and journalists who couldn't believe AMC would toss away a brilliant promotional idea that did not cost them a cent) I went on Twitter to see which character was still available, and signed up @francine_hanson. I found a nice photo of her on the AMC website and started to tweet, trying to engage @betty_draper. But she wouldn't tweet back. Instead, she sent me a nasty direct message. So I went back on twitter and registered @bettydraper; now I had a Betty to play with.

Naively, I believed at that point the Twitter Mad Men were connected with AMC, that we were in some sort of "playoff" for jobs as twitter-writers for the show. Surely no one would do this for free, I thought, as days went by and I realized how much, how VERY much time it took to properly twitter a character (the reading! the rewatching shows! the historical research into what was around in 1962 and what was not!)

By the time I learned that what I'd signed up for was a volunteer effort⎯I was too hooked to quit. There is a thrill that comes with taking on another persona, interacting with the world as someone else, especially if that someone is as complex and interesting⎯ and as sexy and glam⎯as Matthew Weiner's Betty.

I found myself scouting for back issues of Life magazines, searching for things for Betty and Francine to do together. I ordered books online ("The Golden Age of the 60s") and spent hours and hours googling 60s culture, making sure that my tweets were historically accurate. (Of course, it helped that I'd lived the era myself, but I didn't want to trust my tweets to the memory of a child.)

Needless to say, all this living in the past took a toll on my life in 2008. I began to resent time away from the twitter screen, began to beg off social engagements, turned lunch meetings into phone meetings, neglected my work, friends, my family. My blog!

"You're not tweeting again, are you?" my husband would ask, coming into the room, when he knew I had actual deadlines to meet, emails to answer, bills to pay. "Uh, no," I'd lie, feeling as guilty as Sally caught smoking, hurriedly switching the screen back to Quicken.

What are you doing, I'd ask myself as I googled an old recipe for German noodles or the television schedule for 1962. But I couldn't stop. Just one more tweet, I'd think, then I'll go back to work. But to write that one tweet, I had to find out the year that Tastykakes were invented…

At first, the follower counts of the two Bettys were too far apart for the other Betty to care much, except to send me a few nasty dms. (" I suggest you try your hand at being who you really are, some (real, ok) woman dreaming about Don, and we'll all get by.") I had a few hundred followers to her fifteen hundred. But as weeks went by and my count kept going up, she began to make noise, insisting the Betty character was "hers" as she'd staked the claim first. The people behind the Don and Peggy twitter accounts agreed, insisting that "First come, first claim" was the rule--which surely made sense from their own perspectives. But "landing rights" seemed to me an odd approach for creative endeavors, like Weiner hiring the the first actor who shows up for the job. And I found it ironic--hilarious, even--that the character who was a wild philanderer on screen was proving so monogamous in the twitterverse.

If I'd been a sane person, I'd have quit when I realized that @don_draper wasn't going to acknowledge @bettydraper in the public timeline, though he'd sent her husbandly direct messages in private. ("Be home soon, Birdie" and "I'll be home in an hour".) In fan fiction terms, not being acknowledged by the main character is the equivalent of being sent to the Siberian front.

But I wasn't a sane person. I had grown insatiable, driven by an almost physical need to communicate as Betty to my "fans." I had almost a thousand followers now. How could I let them down? My Betty had even begun to come to life in the blogosphere.

At this point, I gave away the Francine account, and a few other characters I'd picked up on the way, to devote my full energies and concentration to Betty. She was the main character, the most interesting one, the one I most wanted to "be."

My follower count grew. And grew. And I learned a lot about what fuels success on Twitter: your popularity is determined not so much by what you say, as who you are, saying it. If you want to build following, it's best to be (or pretend to be) an industry leader or a famous writer or one of the lead characters in a popular TV series. I'm not the first to observe that @don_draper's posts are pretty bland, considering the creative genius he's supposed to be. Yet this doesn't deter his 3800 followers. The person behind @pete_campbell doesn't post at all; he stopped after only four tweets in August, yet his follower list continues to grow, exceeding 760 as of this writing.

I also learned that your popularity on Twitter also has a lot to do with how many people you follow. For most twitterers, follow limits are capped at 2000. Which may sounds like a lot to you. But if you're building a fanbase, it's not enough. @don_draper has so many followers, in part because he follows over 3000 people. I somehow learned how to uncap my follow limit and @peggyolson sent me a friendly email inquiring how I did it. I thought about withholding the answer from her, knowing she'd pass it along to Don's Betty--but I recoiled at the thought of being so anti-social…in social media! Sure enough, the other Betty blew the cap off her follow count the next day.

Following people is tedious; a lot of hunting and pecking. Basically you're poaching from similar twitterers' follower lists or searching twitter for posts using key words like "Mad Men" and following the people who said them. Add following time to the time to research posts to the time to write them…what was I doing?

Yet. I couldn't stop. Now my fanbase numbered 2000!

For a while, Bud the Mailman made valiant efforts to get us to work as a team. He solicited our email addresses and circulated them but after a few rounds of enthusiastic exchanges (we could do storylines! product placements! sponsorships!) it became clear that we could never work together, as we could never agree on anything, not even on whether or not to meet up.

One of the most curious aspects of the whole experience is how true to character each of us stayed (except for the philandering); how even when dealing with each other we remained in character, as if we were actors instead of PR types, ad hacks and digerati for hire. In group emails, I found myself sounding housewifely and deferential; Peggy was earnest and fiercely loyal to Don (whom she'd never met); Sal was ironic and devil-may-care; Don was tacitly acknowledged to be the boss, and took an authoritative tone with us, as if he'd started a company instead of a twitter account.

My follower count at 2800 exceeded the other Betty's this week. Why am I outing myself now? I find I've lost stomach for our competition. I realize the lengths she is willing to go to, lengths that I am unwilling to match. I want my life back. But, you can take a valuable lesson from her, if you're looking to pump your popularity on Twitter:

1. Craft an auto-message that goes out to all the people you follow. The standard message people receive from Twitter when someone follows them is "Betty Draper is now following you on Twitter." But you can configure a unique appeal to accompany it. Something like "@Betty_Draper wants to be your friend and begs you not to follow fake @bettydraper."

2. Create a new character that will acknowledge you often in tweets, validating your character and sending you followers. (This means, of course, you'll have to keep up more than one character. Forget that day job.)

2. Set up a Twitter site ostensibly designed to impartially rate the quality of whatever category tweets you are doing. Like the @OnMadMen site run by ex-MM Twitterer @jimmy_barrett which claims to be "A critical look at Mad Men on Twitter…let's keep the game fun and healthy, shall we?"

This will allow you to:

a. Stage a contest between you and competitors
b. Dm followers asking them to "vote" for you in the contest.
c. Win the vote!

Inspired in spite of this post to launch your own Mad Men twitter account? Join the crowd. The latest cast count is 67, I think, including @ xerox914, the handsome new Sterling Cooper copier. You'll be helping to keep good TV alive by taking part in a small but effective branding campaign. How do I know it's effective? Lots of people post that they are inspired to watch Mad Men because of the tweets.

Which brings me to my bill, AMC. Given my day rate and the time I've put in so far, I figure you owe me $48,000.