Due to the success of her tweets as Mad Men character Peggy Olson, PR practitioner Carri Bugbee is to establish a Twitter-based ad agency for media and entertainment companies.

The show, which has just begun screening on SBS in Australia this month, gained popularity in the US due to the buzz created through social media platforms such as Twitter.

Bugbee recently won a Shorty Award for best content producers on Twitter in the advertising category, despite undertaking the role as a fan rather than under any official Mad Men capacity.

Main character Don Draper’s Twitter account has attracted more than 7,092 followers but Bugbee’s Peggy Olson has amassed 12,623, easily beating out her boss. She also has her own LinkedIn profile.

At the beginning of the series second season, characters from the show started appearing on Twitter. Fans mistakenly thought the Twitter characters were part of an AMC marketing push on behalf of the show’s producers and when lawyers for the network asked Twitter to suspend the accounts of the characters believing there was a breach of copyright, within a week they had returned.

Bugbee believes that marketers can learn a lot from the Mad Men fan fiction, including that producers should strive to reserve the Twitter accounts for all the characters in whatever show or film they are making.

She also advises producers to overcome their need to control all aspects of their work and to use their fans to their advantage.

Bugbee now plans to build this success into an expansion of her 15-year-old business, Big Deal PR.