All you have to remember is that if you’re traveling from the North Side of Chicago to the South Side, your quickest route will be to drive north to Milwaukee, take a ferry across the lake to Muskegon, Mich., then drive south to Indiana, hang a right, and before you know it, you’re in Hyde Park.

If you’re traveling into the city from the west suburbs, simply drive west to Des Moines, Iowa, catch a flight to Detroit, rent a car and drive to St. Joseph, Mich., rent a boat and then head straight for Navy Pier, keeping an eye out for any military jets that might try to shoot you out of the water. (Security will be a titch tight.)

TV networks, in an effort to make television viewing more “social” are taking this idea a bit far, though. If you watch TV, particularly on one network I won’t name here, you’ll see that these sorts of integration efforts are becoming ridiculous and, I suspect, have more potential to confuse and alienate people than to create a grand unified conversation.

Hashtags that encourage people to join the conversation on Twitter are now being flashed on screen on TV for a multitude of purposes. Not only do many shows sport a persistent hashtag that’s generic to the show all during the broadcast but lately certain sub-plots or segments within a show are getting their own. So an hour of television can sport two to up to six hashtags for a single show.

While the idea, again, is to get people talking about the show on Twitter – and therefore in public – in a trackable way the plethora of choices and prompts that are being thrown at them are, I’m guessing quickly becoming overwhelming. How closely are people going to be watching the show itself if they’re looking at their other devices and trying to figure out what hashtag to use at any given moment and for any given topic?

There’s a lot to be said for encouraging people to categorize their conversations. But what they’re really being asked to do is, as I said, participate in a very public conversation and do so in a trackable way.

Aside from all that, though, is the fact that by so heavily hashtagging programming marketers are bringing the same ugly experience to TV that was just starting, I think, to get sorted out on Twitter. Those hashtags, which are now links to a Twitter search for that term, appear as a big flashing speedbump to the natural conversation. They’re nasty looking and hard to read. I may be getting my curmudgeon on more than a little here but there’s nothing about a hashtag that says “good user experience.”

Watch for how many times one or more hashtags begin appearing in the TV shows you’re watching and consider what the call to action really is behind them. Is there something of value for you as a viewer to participating in those tracked conversations? Or do you feel your attention is being split too narrowly to make them worth your attention?

But then I started to realize what the movie is about and my interest all but faded away. What I started to focus on wasn’t so much the romantic tension between the married woman played by Williams and the single guy she meets on a flight who winds up living in her neighborhood and who she develops something more serious than a crush on.

Instead it was the fact that the single guy in this situation, played by Luke Kirby, doesn’t simply get up and walk away from the situation once he finds out she’s married. No, he continues coming around the house she shares with her husband (played by Rogen) and says he’d like to spend the day with her and al sorts of other tender and emotionally vulnerable things.

What I realized is that while the movie on paper was right up my alley I had almost zero interest in watching such an awful, amoral character. Any guy who’s not a hedonistic asshole hears “I’m married” and drops the mic. He’s done. He’s out. That’s all she wrote. He doesn’t continue to hang around making puppy dog eyes saying “Hey, it’s cool if you cheat on your husband because we’re, like, soul mates.” Those are the guys who will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.

This isn’t about “asking questions” as the movie’s synopsis would have us think. This is about the kind of people who feel that unless they are happy and entertained ALL THE TIME they should be free to change their situation without giving a tinker’s damn about anyone else. And that adds up to a movie about awful, inconsiderate people that I’d rather not see.

‘The Muppets’ Lands Sequel After Box Office, Social Media Successes.

Are the Muppets getting a sequel to last year’s movie? Yes.

Was the movie successful at the box-office? Yes.

Was the social media component of a MUCH BIGGER CAMPAIGN fun and engaging? Yes.

But trying to tie together the idea that social media played a role in the green-lighting of a Muppets sequel outside of the notion that that part of the campaign contributed to the movie’s box-office success is kind of ridiculous for a number of reasons. Not only does it overlook the fact that, to a very large extent, there’s no way to tie the number of social media engagement points to the number of tickets sold but it also overlooks the fact that there were so many other ways that people were exposed to the campaign that may have had a bigger impact than one or two online videos that they may have seen.

There was a time – less than a year ago – when everyone was tripping over themselves to be among the first to declare Quora an integral part of a company’s social publishing strategy. At the time I expressed my opinion that if the introduction of Quora (or any other Q&A site) was the first time a company was considering integrating answering fan/audience questions there were probably bigger problems to be overcome. Now the site is looking to make the case that it’s more than just Silicon Valley conversations since I’m guessing it’s going to be hard to survive on just that niche.

Did ‘Hunger Games’ Create A New Digital Marketing Template For Hollywood?: Maybe it’s that I wasn’t totally tuned in to this campaign but the amount of press about what were some apparently terribly original tactics seems a might over blown to me. Some OK stuff, sure, but I seem to have missed a lot of stuff that really knocked people’s socks off. Plus, while the box office has been good I haven’t seen any social marketing take those numbers to any sort of next level. Again, maybe it’s just me.

Today’s MPAA Ratings Hold Little Value for Parents: No, you can’t make an informed decision based on ratings. And you likely will never be able to because the last thing that studios want is to discourage people from seeing a movie. If you’re disappointed and appalled after seeing it, well, they already have your $12.

Movie Trailers Have Become a Main Event: This story gets written every couple years so there’s nothing really new here but it’s good to read this year’s version.

Movie tickets: Charge more for hits, less for flops, analyst urges: This is such a bad idea it’s hard to even fathom it. The sudden jump in prices that occurred when every movie starting being released in 3D caused enough audience anguish and came close enough to a complete revolt that you’d think any further discussion of tiered pricing would be dead on arrival. Creating an environment where people were unsure what the ticket price was going to be from week to week would, I’m pretty sure, complete the trend of audiences choosing home video over theatrical.

Movie recommendations and the time-shifted self: Netflix out-thought itself and essentially rendered its vaunted algorithm ineffective because behaviors involving all-you-can-eat streaming are much different than they are around physical discs that require more of a commitment.

Marketing Movie Marketing Takes Meta-Promo Too Far: Anne Thompson is *not* a fan of studios teasing the release of a trailer – a trailer – with a series of snippets and such. More specifically she’s not a fan of the movie news sites that willingly play along with and feed into this because they want the traffic that goes along with posting such things first.

via 12 thoughts about the 2012 Diamond Retailer Summit and C2E2 | The Beat.

My client-related time at C2E2 was fantastic – great people to work with, a great vibe at the panels and a definite uptick in fan attendance and excitement from Friday to Saturday. As one person I was working with said, “Then I realized I was in Chicago, where people work 9 to 5 and don’t take off just to come to a comics show.” Yep, pretty much. Plus the Sox opener was the same day and anyone who *was* skipping work was probably doing that.