Bridging Media Session Two: Buzz Builders

Buzz Builders: Using Multi-platforms To Build A Buzz and An Audience Around Your Project

“From film to television to the internet, defining your audience is an integral portion in the conceptualizing stage of a project. Are you using the accessible channels of communication to speak to your audience, draw a crowd and create buzz around your work? This panel will focus on, and show examples of, the use of various mediums and technologies to build a community and get your project to your audience.” [Bridging Media – Session]

Panelists:

Colleen Nystedt : Movieset.com
Darren Barefoot: Capulet Communications
Mark Leiren-Young: TheTyee and the film The Green Chain
Nilesh Patel: Roaming Pictures

Colleen gives an introduction about people are spellbound by the process of movie making, “people will pull over and watch us park the trucks.” Her goal was to put these insights into the film production world, online – so the filmmaker can draw in fan experience and it won’t have to interfere with the actual production of the movie. “You can build community around your film,” saying how exposing films to an audience in their infant stages you can get a feel for the audience, get stats, data metrics etc. you can take that information to the distributors.

Mark’s introduction gives his background in theatre and as a writer for local newspapers. He’s making a movie, writing on blogs, and even created a podcast series on The Tyee, which has ended up being longer than the movie and has been picked up on the National Film Board site. He’s got some insights about selling his columns online, and if he were to give the rights to one news organization he wouldn’t be able to sell it to another since it would then be syndicated online.

Darren’s talk was brief until Carol prompted him to speak about his eBook, the Social Media Marketing Playbook. He delves into social media, its powers, its downfalls, and brings up the “Scoble Starfish”.

Nilesh Patel is a filmmaker who directed a picture that is surrounded by much controversy but has thrived online, Brocket99.

Darren quickly mentions Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 true fans, an essay about how to be an innovator and have a true grasp on an audience, you need 1,000 true fans.

Colleen brings up a point that studios shouldn’t be building seperate websites for each picture but use social media tools instead, and quite of few of them are embracing this already. It’s about the content and engagement.

Mark follows up by saying the first thing he was told to do by his distributer was to build a Facebook page, MySpace page etc.

Comment from the audience notes that social media sites own the content you upload, so how do studios work around that. Darren states there are many sites that allow you to state your own license, like Flickr although you should check out the fine print on every site, Darren says he hasn’t heard of anyone who has said YouTube has hurt them… yet.

The topic is shifting from building a buzz, to the tools you use for the spin, and if these tools allow you to maintain all of your rights and content.

Someone from the audience is trying to explain that using the MPEG format costs money, which is why YouTube would never let you upload videos that were over 10 minutes long. Kris chimes in from across the room to say that’s not true at all, many video sharing sites use flash and you can find many videos on say, Google Video that are of varied lengths.

My own thoughts here, I just uploaded a 17 minute video on to Viddler and Blip.tv it was a .mov and on Viddler or Blip.tv it goes to flash format for embedding. Yeah, no issues about paying anything here. Darren explains that many familiar terms and formats like JPEG have governing bodies etc. but it’s just a big scary faceless monster.

Another comment from the crowd, how do you avoid audience fatigue or how do you avoid over saturating? Darren says it’s all about targeting your audience using an example of a documentary film about pianos and how he’d market it to a Facebook group about pianos, or about jazz, and break it down even further from there – focusing on the citizen journalists and fans that will drive your marketing machine for you – finding the people that would want to know about this.

Colleen states, over 70% of people research movies they want to see online, meanwhile studios spend about 4% of their budgets using online media and advertising.

With that, we’re going to wrap for lunch provided by Vera’s Burgers mmmm… more of this discussion will continue during the monetization session in the afternoon.