Twitter keeps growing on me, and my roommate keeps mocking me for it. Earlier tonight I posted something and my phone rang in response 30 seconds later. That doesn't happen with, say, Facebook.
At the same time, some girl I've never met started following me. She knows some of the other movie people, and... got me thinking.
She's PR, so she's been Tweeting (virtually every two minutes... it gives Tweeters a bad name) about branding and advertising.
Coincidentally, I've been personally attempting to protect Kinkos from the recession in preparation for this premiere. (Posters start going up Thursday.) Considering that we're already over $400 over our original budget, I'm sort of in a Catch-22. We have to spend as little money as possible, but at the same time we have to try everything we can that might bring more audience to the show.
This girl linked to a post, that basically said pushing name recognition isn't enough; you need to engage your target audience. This is really obvious. Using Facebook alone, I could gather an audience of 200 people for a show, because these are people we know and who know what we do.
But that's Facebook's upper limit.
For anything more, we have to actively engage people.
Flyers don't work. Last year, prior to the screening of American Gothic (first feature), we plastered campus and downtown. Within 48 hours, every flyer we posted came down.
Nobody was walking around stripping flyers, they were just covering them up. There were so many groups, bands, businesses and the like that were trying to drive a message that our ads couldn't stay up for more than a day before someone else came along with their own flyers.
Did people see the flyers? A few, but I've heard much more about the Marquee over Missouri Theatre. So instead, we're trying new things: printing larger, color posters and putting them in coffee shops and other local arts-supporting businesses. Emailing other groups, people, etc who are interested in indie film... We'll see how well it works a week from Saturday.
Which brings me to journalism. A few days ago I saw a TV ad for the New York Times. It's true (in part by design) that the press sort of has a bad rep. In the meantime, newsrooms are adopting Twitter like it's will magically solve all their problems.
But Twitter is all about engagement, and plenty of journalists would be appalled by the idea of building a brand around their paper.
At the same time, all journalism serves PR goals. Talking to people/sources is engagement. It counts. But I don't think I've ever heard of anyone talking about the identity of a newspaper.
The Broadcast world does. Anchors are all about personality and identity. Even in the midst of a straight news story, the reporter still has a face, voice, and a demeanor.
Newspapers don't. They have reputations, but when was the last time we saw a newspaper publicly communicate identity to its entire audience?
It's an odd line of thought.
On the other end of the spectrum, Newsy has apparently had success growing astroturph. Digg and the Web 2.0 world are designed to disregard this stuff... who knew it might actually work.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Friday, March 20, 2009
That's right, I owe you a blog post this week...
It'll have to be brief because... I need to pack.
Xampp works. I'm going to take a shot at our MoneyCommons to-do list over break. In the meantime, I'm helping Jenn Kovaleski and Liz build their portfolios... they look really good so far.
On an unrelated note, since all those people called into KOMU about the rumored gang initiations at Walmart, I've had an uncontrollable urge to see how far this can go. I mean, if so many people will freak out over something that sounds so sketchy, what else will they believe?
Plots of B-movies? Bad conspiracy theories? Zombies?
And I always thought all this technology made people more skeptical.
Xampp works. I'm going to take a shot at our MoneyCommons to-do list over break. In the meantime, I'm helping Jenn Kovaleski and Liz build their portfolios... they look really good so far.
On an unrelated note, since all those people called into KOMU about the rumored gang initiations at Walmart, I've had an uncontrollable urge to see how far this can go. I mean, if so many people will freak out over something that sounds so sketchy, what else will they believe?
Plots of B-movies? Bad conspiracy theories? Zombies?
And I always thought all this technology made people more skeptical.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
My attention needs to voluntarily divert, so this'll be brief
Quote of the week: "Journalists are supposed to make people smarter." I'm going to start using that... As much as I dislike being anywhere but bed or a shower at 8:30 AM, I'm really glad we woke up early to see him.
Missed Twitter hashtag opportunity of the week: #Liz_Coffee.
And we have a running theme too: technology that doesn't work. To put matters in simplest terms, KOMU's ability to get content online collapsed Wednesday night. The input switch was messed up, the deck crapped out, and all of a sudden we were getting severe distortion on the live input.
Add in the small fits of misbehavior from ACM, and I think Tara got it right in her tweet: "crazy fun night dot comming."
It's funny how the most stressful, dysfunctional nights can actually be fun when you're doing it with other people.
Now, doing it alone, not so much. After trying a few more times to make sense of the WordPress theme files without doing too much damage, I'm taking a shot at installed xampp, starting in about 15 minutes.
I have absolutely nothing else that I need to do this weekend aside from make this work. So if I break my own setup in the process, oh well, I'll fix it Sunday night.
Of course, the big news of the week is the premiere of Salad Daze.
Missed Twitter hashtag opportunity of the week: #Liz_Coffee.
And we have a running theme too: technology that doesn't work. To put matters in simplest terms, KOMU's ability to get content online collapsed Wednesday night. The input switch was messed up, the deck crapped out, and all of a sudden we were getting severe distortion on the live input.
Add in the small fits of misbehavior from ACM, and I think Tara got it right in her tweet: "crazy fun night dot comming."
It's funny how the most stressful, dysfunctional nights can actually be fun when you're doing it with other people.
Now, doing it alone, not so much. After trying a few more times to make sense of the WordPress theme files without doing too much damage, I'm taking a shot at installed xampp, starting in about 15 minutes.
I have absolutely nothing else that I need to do this weekend aside from make this work. So if I break my own setup in the process, oh well, I'll fix it Sunday night.
Of course, the big news of the week is the premiere of Salad Daze.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Fun with Wordpress, and Creeds
A summary of my work this week comes courtesy of Bradley Halpern: "Wordpress is easy to break."
I know two guys on opposite sides of the East Coast who manually configured WordPress installs. I successfully confused both of them, which is usually bad news.
I'd go into detail about what wasn't working and what we tried, but honestly, if you just picture me beating WP with a stick while it laughs defiantly, you've got the idea.
Speaking of things that are broken, or allegedly broken, or in the view of Mike Fancher, not broken at all, I need to talk about the journalist's creed.
For reasons that sane people don't understand, I really like philosophy. It messes with your head, because in real life, something like ethics is really fluffy. It's the 21st century, we're big on moral relativity, and it's completely unintuitive to take something like that, and discuss it using extremely high standards of logic.
That's the creed: it's an Aristotle-esque declaration of the nature and characteristics of a journalist. I hadn't seen it in well over a year, and I'd never seen it in that light.
And why? Fancher was talking about the creed the way Walter Williams wrote it: the hard way. It's empowering, really.
The day after Fancher talked to us I read this article about how the press in Baltimore, which used to be a really good watchdog, doesn't have the resources to do it anymore.
If hyperlocalism and the like is what it takes to save journalism, we've missed the point.
Unfortunately, this semi-rant can't actually go anywhere, because that would require me to have something resembling an original thought on what can be done about it. I do agree with Fancher though, that the solution is in the ad money.
And I'm willing to bet it has something to do with the online ad money.
I know two guys on opposite sides of the East Coast who manually configured WordPress installs. I successfully confused both of them, which is usually bad news.
I'd go into detail about what wasn't working and what we tried, but honestly, if you just picture me beating WP with a stick while it laughs defiantly, you've got the idea.
Speaking of things that are broken, or allegedly broken, or in the view of Mike Fancher, not broken at all, I need to talk about the journalist's creed.
For reasons that sane people don't understand, I really like philosophy. It messes with your head, because in real life, something like ethics is really fluffy. It's the 21st century, we're big on moral relativity, and it's completely unintuitive to take something like that, and discuss it using extremely high standards of logic.
That's the creed: it's an Aristotle-esque declaration of the nature and characteristics of a journalist. I hadn't seen it in well over a year, and I'd never seen it in that light.
And why? Fancher was talking about the creed the way Walter Williams wrote it: the hard way. It's empowering, really.
The day after Fancher talked to us I read this article about how the press in Baltimore, which used to be a really good watchdog, doesn't have the resources to do it anymore.
If hyperlocalism and the like is what it takes to save journalism, we've missed the point.
Unfortunately, this semi-rant can't actually go anywhere, because that would require me to have something resembling an original thought on what can be done about it. I do agree with Fancher though, that the solution is in the ad money.
And I'm willing to bet it has something to do with the online ad money.
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