A Twitter Mystery Solved

Posted by: Rachael King on February 11, 2009

Tonight, lots of folks are waiting for Peggy Olson to give her 140-character acceptance speech at the Shorty Awards in New York City. The Shorty Awards honor the best producers of content on the microblogging service Twitter in 26 categories including advertising, business, finance, food, health and technology. Peggy Olson’s true identity has been a closely guarded secret since August 19, when the Mad Men character first appeared on Twitter. Since then, @peggyolson has garnered more than 11,000 followers, mostly fans of the AMC series Mad Men, which is set in a New York City advertising agency in 1962. The character of Peggy Olson is an ambitious secretary-turned-copywriter who suddenly must navigate the male-dominated advertising industry.

In real life, the person behind the Peggy Olson Twitter persona is Carri Bugbee, the proprietor of Big Deal PR, a virtual public relations agency that’s based in Portland, Oregon. The Wall Street Journal first reported the news. My colleague Doug MacMillan caught up with Bugbee at the Shorty Awards in this video. In an interview, Bugbee told me that she decided to become Peggy Olson after she saw someone tweeting as the Mad Men character Don Draper. She and Draper had never met and in the following days, a number of random people scooped up the other Mad Men characters. Most of them didn’t know the true identities of the others. There was a mini uproar on August 25, as some of the accounts of the fictional characters were suspended by Twitter but then they were quickly restored.

Over the months that followed, Bugbee never broke character and told few of her friends. In fact, the first time I interviewed Peggy Olson – over Twitter and then over e-mail – for a story I wrote last September, she refused to reveal her true identity and she even answered questions I asked the way Peggy Olson might have done. The result was the kind of thing that I usually associate with people who go to Star Trek conventions in full costume (not that there’s anything wrong with that). In fact, in a phone interview before the Shorty Awards Bugbee told me that she watched each episode of Mad Men twice and then transcribed all of Peggy Olson’s lines to make sure she understood what Peggy would and would not say.

So, what would motivate someone to create over 1,000 updates on Twitter as a fictional character? “It was all about exploring Twitter as a marketing platform,” she says, adding, “I am a fan of the show but no way would I spend that kind of time doing this because I was a fan of something.” Bugbee has been a marketer for 20 years and she says that social media represents a sea change for marketing. She wanted to really understand Twitter and learn how she might be able to use the service to benefit her clients. She now has about 30 Twitter accounts besides @peggyolson and feels that she’s learned enough to put together effective campaigns for clients.

To that end, Bugbee and eight other people are creating SupportingCharacters.com, a consortium of social media pioneers who want to help brands be successful on services like Twitter. One of Bugbee’s partners for SupportingCharacters.com will be Helen Klein Ross, the person tweeting as another Mad Men character, Betty Draper. Bugbee met the twittering Betty Draper after they both started playing the roles of Mad Men characters and the two have since struck up a friendship.

Overall, Bugbee says that she’s learned quite a bit about using Twitter for business purposes. “It’s more about listening, than talking,” she says, adding that Twitter can be a veritable gold mine of data for brand marketers, if you just know where to look.

So what do you think? Does Twitter really work for business purposes?

Photo courtesy of AMC