Instead of encouraging fan participation in the show, MTV and their agency Fanscape, have opted to create a Twitter telephone game that encourages retweets of misinformation.
Each week, in conjunction with the airing of The Phone, MTV's Twitter account is tweeting random information and asking their followers to retweet and change one word of the original tweet. The idea is to emulate the original Telephone game, where a slightly altered message is spread to new people, and the original message typically gets distorted beyond comprehension.
Even though it's kind of a fun idea, it's also a fairly transparent effort to get tweets with the hashtag #thephone to quickly disseminate through the Twittersphere. The more tweets, the more chances #thephone becomes a trending topic.
The end game seems to be an attempt at engineering a viral Twitter campaign to raise awareness about The Phone. So far, the results are a mixed bag, with just a small smattering of retweets since today's MTV #thephone tweet.