CBS is launching a new web series on Monday called Novel Adventures. Kelly Lynne Ashton, alerted me to the series with this note in my Facebook inbox:
Check this out - online web series sponsored by Saturn for CBS. After I joined the fan page 3 of the characters befriended me. The show is actively using FB to extend the experience. Sound familiar?
Familiar? Indeed. (If you don't know the backstory, you can find it and associated links here, here and here.)
What interested me is this: Is Novel Adventures getting a free ride on Face by virtue of the fact that they have CBS and Saturn behind them?
Doesn't seem so. Although KLA was almost immediately friended by the characters after joining the fan page, I haven't been three days later. And this message appears on the wall of the Novel Adventures fan page:
I have to assume that the creators started friending the people who joined their fan page but then started to get warnings from Facebook that their actions were considered spam... as the wall post above suggests. So they stopped doing it.
Among the fans, I found Facebook profiles for four of the series' characters.
Oddly, their privacy settings are high, so you can't actually visit their profiles. You can however look at their friends. I did and in addition to lots of friends from CBS both in New York and Chicago, I found a number of friends from "Digitas", who bill themselves as "the first global interactive agency network" and are presumably the agency behind Novel Adventures.
Novel Adventures is also on Twitter, but not much is happening there as yet and on MySpace.
There's more of this story to come, I'll be watching it unfold.
