The Keys to the Social Network Marketing Kingdom
By Sheri Candler
This post was originally published on the Sundance Artists Services blog on March 26, 2012
To start with, I’d like to say that filmmakers should focus on the word social and less on the word marketing. This type of promotion is about relationship building and it is really difficult to build a relationship that starts from the premise that you are only there to sell something. Also, I take the position that all artists should be connecting directly with an audience not on a project-by-project basis, but on a personal one. Instead of starting over again for each project that is incredibly wasteful of time and money, you strive to keep building up the audience base for all of your work, really for you as an artist with a unique vision and a unique voice. No one else can tell the story the way you can. Even behind the scenes crew have a unique vision and unique talents. They should be sharing those with the world.
We all sell every day, we sell a concept of ourselves in how we speak to people, how we present ourselves and I think we inherently understand this. But before I want to do business with someone, I want to know I can trust them, and that I am not being used. I think many corporations still don’t get that about this medium yet. People don’t join your Facebook page to be your word of mouth sales force. Building up trust with your audience is paramount and you do that by giving first. You have to give something, and often for a long time, before you can ask. In fact, if you do this right, you won’t have to ask, they will ask you, they will offer to help.
Don’t attempt this begrudgingly or because everyone says it is something you are supposed to be doing. Start from the place that you are trying to find the people who would love what you do and you want to interact with them. Unless you are anthropophobic, this should be human nature, to connect with kindreds. There are people in the world who are like you and now you have this amazing tool to find them wherever they live in the world. Leave behind the notion that this is about numbers, this is only about sales, this is about buzz and think of it as a way to meet those who will love what you love. All of that other stuff is a by product of this. It will come, but it won’t come immediately and you need plenty of time to build up to that and it will take consistent effort daily.
I realize this is not the stance that most businesses take or understand. They want numbers, they want quantifiables. Utilization of social is no longer something that needs to be justifiable for business goals. Along with advertising, it is a business tool, increasingly a major one. Internet users expect to find you on social platforms whether or not you feel like that benefits the bottom line yet. It is and it will continue to do so.
Also note that this will not be your only tool when you are ready to start selling. Publicity, advertising, and email communication still very much have a place in your overall marketing efforts, but if you build a following consistently, your reliance on those more expensive tools will be minimized.
The key platforms for social network marketing:
I believe pretty much any site on the web is a social networking site. Any place where people can post links, comment, upload information, follow others has a social aspect to it. So those could be blogs, forums, publication websites (New York Times, WSJ), photo sites like Flickr or Instagram, video sites like Youtube and Vimeo, podcast sites like BlogTalk Radio, streaming sites like Ustream. I think people hear social networking and mostly think Facebook and Twitter, but really to be effective in reaching an audience, you have to know where they particularly hang out and it may be on Facebook and Twitter, but it also may be a LinkedIn group, or on Amazon, Meetup or certain blogs.
Any priority ranking to them?
It is hard to argue not being on Facebook since they have over 800 million users worldwide and 435 million are using Facebook from a mobile device. While 155 million of those users are from the US, 43 million are from India and the same from Indonesia. Other top countries are UK, Mexico, Brazil and Turkey.
Based on Alexa rankings, the top social networking sites for the US market are:
- MySpace
- Google Plus
But there are surprising ones in the top 15 such as: Tagged, deviantArt, Orkut, Ning and CafeMom. Don’t underestimate the power of Pinterest too.
It really depends on who your audience is and what they respond to, where they spend their online social time. You will have a mixture of sites, not just one and you will need to test which ones are giving you the most interaction. Maybe your audience really loves watching videos or they really love deep discussions at the end of blog posts. You will need to test what posts are popular and elicit interaction, even from your own website, which I will say you also need. You should never be totally dependent on a third party site. Just ask those who had free Ning sites instead of websites. When the free option went away, they risked losing their communities and had to pay to upgrade or start from scratch again. The same with Facebook and their EdgeRank algorithm. If Facebook deems that one of your fans doesn’t interact with your page enough, they remove it from their newsfeed, often unbeknownst to that fan. Since you haven’t been able to message them directly, there really isn’t a way to bring them back into awareness of your page barring spending money to advertise.
A website you own is the only true online real estate you can control. It is the central hub of all of your activity, everything else is just a spoke on that central hub. Collecting email addresses is also extremely important, but that is for another post.
There is no magic formula for being successful at social, everything has to be tested and the results will vary with each project.
Does it depend on the nature of the film?
No. The decision to be social really isn’t up for debate anymore. Americans spend 22% of their online time each day visiting social networking sites, 65% of all adult internet users have a social network account of some sort. This is not a fad that is going away, the upcoming generation doesn’t even know a time that social networking didn’t exist. It will get bigger, not smaller. Deciding which sites to spend time on will be determined by the kind of audience with which you need to connect.
What are key tips for social network marketing?
- Get a personal account going on the sites where you think your audience hangs out and start using it. I am astounded at agencies that sell social networking solutions and don’t have much of a presence themselves on social sites. How can you advise how to use them when you don’t personally do it for your own business? How can you handle someone else’s account when you don’t have one of your own? Every filmmaker hoping to connect with an audience needs an account.
- Start by listening first. This is best accomplished when you don’t need to build an audience by tomorrow, you know what I’m saying? If you have this pressing need to start connecting, people can sense it right away and they won’t interact. It is like the insurance guy who walks around a networking event handing out cards in order to meet a sales quota, not actually speaking to anyone other than a sales pitch. No one likes it in real life and they don’t like it online either. This is not a one-way message medium like advertising. If you want to speak, but not interact, just buy an ad. Listen first, determine how best to interact and then dive in.
- You are now a publisher. No way around this, it is just the way it is now. A new term for this is social business. A business that can collaborate, share insights and knowledge, and provide value to their audience is going to be way more profitable and sustainable than those who remain closed off from them. This means publishing content of some sort, either generated from your production or generated by your fans, but probably a mixture of both. It needs to be entertaining, insightful, worthy of discussion and sharing, and pulls the audience back for more again and again. We just entered an era of waaaay more work than we used to do. Not one piece of creative advertising, but hundreds of pieces in different mediums and across multiple channels that are meant to lead to discussion with the brand (yes, you are a brand) and with others also connected to that brand.
What are some key mistakes? Some “Don’ts”:
Waiting too late to start and using social only to self promote. Remember, self-promotion is about helping OTHER people. It sounds counterintuitive, but when you help others, THEY promote you. If they don’t, then you weren’t really helping (the help originated through clearly selfish motives) or you just haven’t connected with the right people.
A couple of examples of filmmakers who really get it right:
I hate to give the same examples as everyone else, but the best I’ve seen as far as sustainable interaction (meaning they aren’t clearly doing it just to promote their latest project and then drop out of sight again) are Kevin Smith and Edward Burns. They are consistent, they interact, they use multiple mediums, they don’t use social as a one-way shill mechanism and I don’t think they have an outside agency cultivating their communities.
I also really admire Tiffany Shlain, she has a great grasp of the power of social networking even though she advocates unplugging (gasp!) for a day each week. Her film, Connected, is about the power (and the curse) of the Internet to connect people, but Tiffany was doing this long before she made the film.
I know there are now more and more filmmakers building up their own audiences, but they may have only started in the last few years and they didn’t come out of the old machine so their followings aren’t as large as those examples. People like Gregory Bayne (Driven), Zak Forsman (Heart of Now), Kirby Ferguson (Everything’s a Remix), Jennifer Fox (My Reincarnation), Ava DuVernay (Middle of Nowhere) are all building up their own followings, not just around their films, but around themselves as artists. Even people like Hal Hartley and Abel Ferrara are now starting to embrace social networking and crowdfunding. I really hope to be able to list tons more doing this every year.
It is completely perplexing to me that those who already do have a following from the traditional machine, do not reach out, really have no idea who watches their films and have no interest in knowing. This mentality is not going to serve them well with the consumers coming up in the world today who are used to interacting, who expect to have a dialog. The only thing I can think is, well, no one is popular forever, no one retains power forever. There will always be a new crop coming up behind and I think indie filmmakers who are embracing this concept now are well positioned to be the new crop.
Sheri Candler, social network marketing strategist can be contacted at info@shericandler.com or sheri@thefilmcollaborative.org and found at SheriCandler.com
Orly Ravid April 24th, 2012
Posted In: Marketing, Social Network Marketing, Uncategorized
Tags: Abel Ferrara, advertising, audience building, Ava duVernay, building trust, Edward Burns, Facebook, Google Plus, Gregory Bayne, Hal Hartley, independent film, Jennifer Fox, Kevin Smith, Kirby Ferguson, LinkedIn, MySpace, online marketing tools, Pinterest, publicity, relationship building, self promotion, Sheri Candler, social networking for filmmakers, The Film Collaborative, Tiffany Shlain, Twitter, website, Zak Forsman
Ai WeiWei The Buzz Maker: A Study in Viral Marketing
This piece by Jeffrey Winter originally ran on the Sundance Artist Services blog on March 22, 2012
We all know that the vast majority of folks make their film-viewing choices based on what they are hearing about a film — be it from friends, traditional media, the blogosphere, or social media. They’re not likely to go out of their way to proactively research a film, and if they haven’t heard anything about a film, they aren’t likely to see it. Whatever you want to call that…be it “buzz,” “word-of-mouth,” “going viral,” etc…it is the name of the game in contemporary grassroots marketing.
But how much can a filmmaker actually control that? We all know the ways they can try – by playing film festivals, hiring publicists, engaging their community via social media, reaching out to organizations, etc. Of course it helps if a film is actually good…really good, in fact….as the last thing today’s marketplace needs is another mediocre film. And the values of passion and hard work can’t be overlooked here either, as creating buzz and engagement for a film is often arduous and time-consuming…and for many filmmakers nearly as daunting as making the movie itself.
Often it feels like independent films are at the whim of the zeitgeist, and the most important aspect is timing, and the receptivity of the marketplace to the ideas in the film. Consider the cycle of elections, and the way political/environmental/social issue docs can explode into national consciousness around certain hot issues. Given the time it takes to make a film, it’s hard to know whether anyone can actually craft a film to hit at just the right time to capture a “trending” topic.
In the case of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival Special Jury Prize winner AI WEIWEI: NEVER SORRY, all the factors mentioned above came together in the final months of post-production to land the film this January at Sundance as an unlikely “buzz” film of the Festival. On the surface, it’s a straightforward documentary by a first-time filmmaker about a Chinese artist/ political dissident completely unknown to the majority of U.S. filmgoers. Hardly a guaranteed formula for indie marketing success.
Sundance key art
But just below the obvious, the twitterverse was ablaze promoting the film; the Kickstarter campaign was raising funds and attracting attention; art magazines were giving the film covers; and filmmaker Alison Klayman had already done numerous appearances on CNN, MSNBC, and The Colbert Report as well as print features in the likes of the Wall Street Journal, The Economist and The Hollywood Reporter. A few weeks later (by mid February), the trade publications were filled with the announcement of its purchase by Sundance Selects, and the New York Times was running a feature article about the film’s upcoming Summer 2012 release.
How does something like that happen for a debut filmmaker with no special access to funding, shortly after finishing a film about a Chinese artist?
Well, of course this wasn’t just any artist — Ai Weiwei is an internationally renowned art star and political provocateur whose unyielding criticism of the Chinese government has earned him legions of friends, enemies, and fans alike. And Weiwei isn’t just an average political dissent, he is a dissident for the digital age, who because of the rigors of Chinese censorship has taken his activism specifically to twitter through linked computers to the West, and therefore has mastered the art of social media all on his own.
This is the study of a modern documentary subject, who is just as likely to be able to spread his/her own message through the media on their own, through the accessibility of social media, even in free speech-challenged China. In this case, it becomes the story of the filmmaker that becomes the mouthpiece of the subject…which many might argue is the way that it should be.
Filmmaker Alison Klayman began her work with Weiwei in 2008, as a recent Brown University graduate living abroad in Bejing and working as a freelance journalist. Her housemate was curating a show of Weiwei’s photography, and Klayman was asked to make a video for the show. Klayman and Weiwei hit it off creatively, and Klayman began to follow Weiwei as his documentarian — capturing his daily life, his frequent battles with the Chinese authorities, and his travels abroad for major international art shows.
Weiwei’s daily use of blogs and videos to spread his artwork — especially his videos criticizing the government’s response to the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan province – became a driving narrative in the film, as well as a grassroots vehicle for spreading Weiwei’s fame and fan base. When the Chinese government finally cut off his locally-sourced blog, Weiwei was able to migrate his work to an ungovernable network of twitter-linked computers, untraceable to China. As such, his network was able to dramatically expand globally, while remaining accessible to tens of thousands of Chinese willing to access these quasi-legal networks.
From 2008 thorugh 2010, Klayman’s documentary follows Weiwei through major international art shows, startlingly intimate private moments, and incredible courage in the face of political adversity. And whenever Weiwei had a run in with the Chinese authorities, the encounter went instantly viral, through a devoted staff who filmed his every move and posted it immediately to twitter.
In late 2010, Klayman returned to the States to begin editing, without the financial means to complete the project. As such, in addition to applying for grants, Sundance labs, and bringing well-connected executive producers onto the projects (largely through Weiwei’s connections in the art world), Klayman strategized and launched a Kickstarter campaign, scheduled to go live on March 29th, 2011. And that’s when the film caught a kind of lighting in a bottle.
Only four days after the Kickstarter launched, Ai Weiwei suddenly disappeared on April 3rd…apparently arrested by the Chinese Government, but without any official announcement or confirmation of his whereabouts. A global outcry went up throughout his social networks, the art world, and then the international press caught on to the story as well.
As a journalist and Ai Weiwei’s documentarian of record, filmmaker Klayman quickly emerged as the “journalist of record” on the Weiwei story, and the international press began flocking in her direction. Suddenly, it was the twitter feeds that Weiwei’s staff and Klayman had been maintaining throughout the documentary filming periods that became the main source of worldwide news for Ai Weiwei updates. Klayman and her social media teams ramped up their efforts in the U.S. and China, and started working on a rotating schedule to provide 24 hour updates on the story for several months. For all of 81 days, as Weiwei’s secret detention continued without any official response from the Chinese government, the international press continued to feature Klayman’s twitter updates on the story, and interviewed her about the story for numerous high-profile news programs.
Of course, Klayman was careful not to try to turn the story into a shameless plug for her movie…after all, her friend and colleague was “disappeared” and detained, and concern for his well-being was the first priority. But inexorably, in today’s hyper-media culture, Klayman’s sudden thrust into the mainstream became completely entangled with the finishing of the film…and catapulted the project into a far larger spotlight.
The film’s Kickstarter soared above the original asking goal of $20,000 to a final tally of $52,175 from 793 backers…even though it was only originally expected to bring in money from friends and family. The film attracted additional producers and lab invitations that Klayman freely admits it probably wouldn’t have. All in all, the film became a “cause célèbre” for an issue in the news, a fact which filmmaker Klayman could hardly have counted on while making the film.
When Weiwei was finally released, with a dubious charge of more than 1 million dollars in tax evasion, support from the community-at-large continued to pour in, with donations to the cause far exceeding the amount of the government fine. And filmmaker Klayman was finally free to turn the enormous pouring of goodwill towards deliberate promotion of the film, helped in large part by the incredible networks built during the crisis on twitter, and to a lesser extent, on Kickstarter and Tumblr. It is also worth noting here: because the Kickstarter campaign included a number of incentives/prizes towards donation, the film now had a wonderful amount of merchandise it could also now leverage towards wider buzz about the film.
Given this backstory, we can demystify the process of how a small film sometimes gains “buzz” beyond expectations…as was clearly the case with AI WEIWEI: NEVER SORRY and its incredible fortune of timing combined with passion, hard work, technical savvy, and community networks. Sometimes a film that seems the most difficult to market actually has the most subtle niche communities that can be reached…whether they be political activists, art-world enthusiasts, devotees of Asian culture, social media junkies etc.
However, according to filmmaker Klayman, perhaps the greatest takeway is this…. in today’s hyperlinked/hashtagged environment, it is ciritical to remember that today’s documentary subjects no longer solely rely on their documentarian to spread their message, and social media makes potential distributors and activists of us all. Sometimes, today’s filmmakers just need to choose their subjects wisely, and hold on tight for the ride.
Here is Klayman’s interview for Sundance’s Meet the Filmmaker promo videos
Orly Ravid April 9th, 2012
Posted In: crowdfunding, Film Festivals, Marketing, Social Network Marketing
Tags: activist documentary, Ai wei wei, Alison Klayman, art documentary, blogs, documentary, Kickstarter, Never Sorry, social media, Sundance Film Festival, Twitter, viral marketing