Technology

Orange Is the New Back: Netflix Ladies-in-Prison Show Debuts Second Season With an Online Splash

Just sayin’ -- Silicon Valley really should steer clear of Fancy Band-Aid if it knows what’s good for it.

Jun 7, 2014, 3:08 PM UTC

https://twitter.com/OITNB/status/474808189473406976

At 12:01 am on Friday morning, Netflix posted its full second season of its popular non-“House of Cards” online series, “Orange is the New Black,” with a flurry of online activity to spur users interest in the show about a really sassy group of women and their various and sundry machinations while in prison.

We’ll see if the premium video streaming company gives out any cogent stats on how many people are actually watching it — so far, Netflix has been as stingy on real viewership info on any of its programming as Red has with Piper’s food.

But the Silicon Valley company is certainly flooding the Internet zone, trying to attract attention.

That included a new app — apparently, Orange is also the new app — that offers the ability to put your picture inside the mustache of mean prison guard ‘Stache.

https://twitter.com/netflix/status/475303960283463680

And also a series of funny photos with captions and animated GIFs, such as below.

And, of course, ads from companies like the maker of Oreo cookies.

https://twitter.com/Oreo/status/474943805930881026

It’s probably a smart move to make a lot of noise, given the show has many more Facebook and Twitter fans than “House of Cards,” according to Variety:

Research firm ListenFirst examined how “Orange” is trending across Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia in advance of its second-season premiere Friday and found the numbers well ahead of where “Cards” was in the same four-week time period prior to its own second season launch in February (data collected below as of June 3rd).

The combination of Facebook fans and Twitter followers for “Orange,” currently 1.4 million strong, is more than twice the amount “Cards” attracted at the same juncture prior to its premiere. As of three days prior to the premiere, the number of hashtags for the show (124.0K) is over 3.5 times higher than that of “Cards” (33.3K). “Orange” is also faring much better on Facebook across both the number of likes and the “people talking about” (PTA) metric.

Naturally, there is a prison nickname generator too on Zimbio, complete with prison assignments and cellmates.

For the record at Re/code, so far:

Joe Brown = Cheeky Pancake

Ina Fried = Wicked Gun

Ken Li = Crazy Gun (and he will also be working in the hair salon)

Bonnie Cha = Jittery Cupcake

Liz Gannes = Scary Cupcake (Drew Houston just learned this important lesson!)

Eric Johnson = Catty Devil

John Murrell = Freaky Devil

Nellie Bowles = Wicked Hurricane

Lauren Goode = Fancy Clown

John Paczkowski = Sweet Pickle