Fortune Tech has a lengthy post up titled Conan 2.0, which is one of the first posts to go exclusively in-depth on Team Coco’s social media strategy. The post also contains some nuggets about how Conan O’Brien and his staff were stymied, and then perhaps saved by NBC’s apparent lack of consideration for new media.
Last year at The Tonight Show (Conan’s crew) had tried to get pre-show clips posted, but even that seemingly simple idea was difficult to execute because NBC.com ran the show’s site, and putting up such clips wasn’t part of its normal workflow process.
That old media focus may have bled over into the agreement NBC signed with O’Brien when he left Tonight, which kept Conan off TV for eight months, but not off the internet.
“What was interesting about it,” points out O’Brien, “is that all the legal prohibitions were coming from people in the old media. They were saying you can’t do all these things, and pretty quickly we realized, ‘Wait a minute!’ Someone said, ‘Does that include Twitter? No. It doesn’t include Twitter.’ And so I started tweeting.”
Naturally, NBC tried to put the kibosh on Conan’s Twitter account, but…
“The network isn’t crazy about you tweeting. They’re not sure that’s cool,” O’Brien recalls being told. His response was simple: “Tell them I would be thrilled if they shut down my Twitter account. I’d love it if that got out. You think PR’s been bad up till now? Wait till you take away my Twitter account.”
What’s ironic is that Conan confesses to Fortune that he’s a “Luddite” himself, and barely knew what Twitter was when he started his account last February with help from some of his staffers.
Of course, social media is what kept Conan visible throughout his eight-month purgatory, and continues to be a huge part of Team Coco‘s efforts to promote the show online.