Dear Twitter,

I’ve tolerated you as you made me feel old and out of touch, while simultaneously making Ashton Kutcher appear relevant and important. I’ve pushed aside my frustration that the pound sign on my telephone and the number sign on my foam finger are now apparently hashtags. I’ve even come to grips with the fact that I will likely never be “trending”. All of this I could deal with, but now you’ve invaded my television – and that’s going too far!

One of my guiltiest pleasures is the new NBC hit, The Voice. If you’ve ever watched the show, then you know that social media is a huge part of its appeal. There is constant and multi-layered interactive engagement throughout the entire show, and most importantly, it’s reciprocal. Not only are fans reaching out to the celebrity coaches and contestants, but the coaches and contestants are actually responding. It’s not uncommon to see Blake Shelton reply to a tweet on his iPhone, or Christina Aguilera rallying fans to vote for her team via Facebook post – all while the show is taking place.

And it goes way beyond the live shows. The Voice employees a full-time, 10 person digital team responsible for managing multiple Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, NBC blogs and over 110 pages of constantly updated online content.

Personally, as a viewer and avid Twitter hater, I’m slightly annoyed by the constant tweets scrolling along the bottom of my TV and could care less about the regular trending updates from the “V-Room”. However, as a marketer, I’m in awe of the level of engagement that The Voice has created with its audience. The show’s aggressive use of Twitter as a means to create instantaneous word-of-mouth is nothing short of genius. During the show’s premier, Twitter was so abuzz with posts talking about The Voice (200,000 to be exact)that it didn’t take long for it to become one of the top trending topics, which in turn caused other Twitter users to change the channel to see what they were missing. As a result, the premier ratings increased every half hour as more and more viewers joined in to participate. Maybe Twitter isn’t all bad.

Touché Twitter, touché.