More on Twitter, and branding media

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.