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:
- Create awareness with potential audience to build excitement about the film
- Generate interest from festivals and distributors by engaging audience
- 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:
- Twitter updates – Set up an account to provide micro-updates to captures your brand name and “back channel” info
- Build links – Add links to your MovieSet Sitelet from IMDB, Wikipedia, studio page, Facebook page etc.
- 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:
- Invite friends to become “Fans” of the movie – and comment – on Sitelet
- Comment on blog posts discussing the movie
- Create video blogs answering fan questions
- Provide ways for audience to promote to friends
- 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
