Participation

Activities

• Building the story
• Inviting to engage

Tip: Really social media like hosting a party without the cleanup. To play a good host, you should provide a comfortable environment, interesting topics to discuss and make sure

Benefits

Conversations
Evangelists
Identified audience

A note about Google-juice

Results

Festivals, distributors
Buzz – bring your own audience

Planning

Like any successful endeavor, your promotional campaign will be more enjoyable to execute with more success with some planning.

Start with analyzing objectives – each project varies somewhat, but, in general your production promotional campaign is designed to:

1. Create awareness with potential audience to build excitement about the film
2. Generate interest from festivals and distributors by engaging audience
3. Create archive of documentary material to tell the film’s back-story

Producing Promo Content

Tip: Look for shooting days with lots of action and visual interest, i.e.: choose stunt scenes, action sequences, or lots of extras rather than dialog-heavy scenes

Tip: Purchase a couple of FlipHD camera (less than $200) for casual video blogging by cast/crew – let them have fun with it

Outreach

Once the videos, photo, articles and news are live, it’s time to let people know and invite them to engage.

For starters:

1. Twitter updates – Set up an account to provide micro-updates to captures your brand name and “back channel” info
2. Build links – Add links to your MovieSet Sitelet from IMDB, Wikipedia, studio page, Facebook page etc.
3. Submit socially – Contribute interesting articles or videos to Digg, Stumble Upon, Delicious for the public to review, rate, share

Here are a few more tactics:

1. Invite friends to become “Fans” of the movie – and comment – on Sitelet
2. Comment on blog posts discussing the movie
3. Create video blogs answering fan questions
4. Provide ways for audience to promote to friends
5. Set up a Facebook page – Note: MovieSet integrates seamlessly with FB

Optimizing Content

Stills – Standard promotional stills are good but also candid behind-the-scenes shots of cast and crew at work and conceptual art are fantastic

Tip: Be sure to take the time to label with images with a specific title and a detailed description – this is nice to people and great for search engines

Video – Both casual, unedited video blogs and/or more polished featurettes are both highly desired for movie fans & archival use – find unusual stories and unlikely characters

Tip: Set up a space on set where cast/crew can sit down for a comfortable 5 minute conversation when they have time between shots – find unusual stories and unlikely characters.

Blog – Think of the blog as a production journal or scrapbook – blog articles use text narrative to
provide story context to stills and videos

Tips:

• Break it up – Use block quotes for long quotations  and subheadings to organize long stories
• Specific headlines – Write descriptive titles including people’s name – a spicy adjective helps too
• Tags, you’re it – Include names of actors, including misspelling, plus film jargon like actor, director, adventure, love scene – whatever is applicable.

Links – Point fans to other resources about your movie like IMDB, Wikipedia, studio, production company, distributors, cast personal blogs … it’s up to you

Tip: Acknowledge bloggers who promote your movie with a link back from links or in a blog post – build enthusiasm to evangelize

Resources

Notes for Cinema Enthusiasts blog – Miscellania about using social media to promote movies and culture

IndieAGoGo – Raise money and find collaborators

Without a Box – Submit to festivals

MovieSet.com – Free promotional Sitelet (like indie, optimized EPK storage)

Toolbox

• Twitter
• Facebook
• MySpace
• YouTube
• Flickr
• IMDB
• Wikipedia
• Google Alerts
• Tubemogul

Glossary

• Google Juice
• Web 2.0
• Social media
• Social networking
• SEO/SEM
• Blogs, Vlogs, Podcasts
• Web apps
• RSS
• Blogs
• Video-blogs
• Podcasts