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.

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.

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.

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.

Guts

I'm going to keep this short, because I need to get back to installing MySQL on my laptop. After digging through some very thick CSS just to change the color of the links in the CODA (slideshow thing... named after the first guys to do it, who are geniuses) I realized that I had to go ahead and install MySQL+Wordpress so I can get a full working duplicate of MoneyCommons in a safe place where I can - how should I say this? - break it.

I'm almost there... I just need to get it to interact with my PHP install.

Of course, this is sort of over my head. I'm improvising. And so far... well, I'm making progress. Slowly.

KOMU went smoothly. Two reporters spent the duration of our shift debating if Ash Wednesday was a Catholic holiday.

My response: "Wait, Ash Wednesday is the beginning of Lent? Go figure... I didn't know that."

Tara looked at me like I was nuts. That seems fair.

Embedding things

Weekly rip on ACM: All of our problems tonight could have been avoided if ACM had a decent "preview" button. (Of course, we could've double checked everyone's work more carefully and get the same result, but blaming the technology feels better than admitting fault.)

On an unrelated note, the draft of the MoneyCommons Widget is coming along. I'm really surprised that the hardest part so far was embedability.

That's really weird. I started using php because it allows for Includes. You can type a short line of code that literally splices documents together. And for some reason that I think involves the positions of files after they've been rendered by WordPress, including the widget on the page gave me an error.

I wound up going the iframe route. And yes, I'm one of those web-standards people doesn't like iframes. But it's cross-browser compatible, it looks okay, and it's very embedable.

I'd never been a big fan of Flash. Partially because the first large project I ever did on it became corrupted. True, it's good at animation, being a video player, etc. But as far as interfaces go, Javascript + CSS are easier to use and do a better job.

But at the same time, my dog could embed a Flash object in a page with no real extra work of the developer's or the dog's part. Not true for the sort of js/php/css interfaces I built for PRX and (sort of) the widget. (Entire stylesheet had to be restructured to make the iframe work.)

Does this mean I'm warming up to Flash? Maybe. I'm still convinced its overused (although not as much as it used to be), but that doesn't mean I don't want to learn it.

And that's why I'm seriously considering that Flash authoring class for next semester.

Mobile things

I was arguing with myself about what to include in my ePortfolio (more on that later) when I found myself stumbling around on the RJI Collaboratory for no particular reason. I found this:

Mobile App Standards:(From mobile session): The Collaboratory can work towards creating standardized platform of mobile applications/interfaces

Whoa...

RJI admits that's out of its league - it belongs to Google, Apple, and Amazon. But that's an interesting question nonetheless.

I have an HTC Tilt. I don't read news on it. Partially because I refuse to pay $500 per year for a data connection when there's WiFi virtually everywhere I go. But for the most part, I don't want to read anything longer than a quick email on a tiny screen.

Does anyone else agree with that? Not at all. Every iPhone user has a special relationship zooming in and out of CNN.com.

On the other hand, I understand, and agree, that mobile devices have limitless potential for breaking news. Especially with the coming of the Integrated World (a less dreary version of The Cloud), which will let you receive a newsbrief, and push a button to send the developing story to your laptop. Not to mention streaming video and audio - especially on mobile devices - is in its infancy.

Here's a question: do we need new standards, or do we already have them?

RSS is very good at deploying headlines. H.264 is incredibly efficient for video. MP3 streaming (or download) is easy. And some of this is stuff you can do with Twitter, which is already very mobile friendly.

So it seems what we need isn't new standards, but new software... Songbird style projects that "revolutionize" the web. The problem is, we need it for iPhone, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Palm OS and it's successor, Web OS, Google Android, and Symbian.

I doubt these applications will be standardized. Why should they be? iPhones and Palm Pre may work well with a touchy, glassy interface, but when RIM came out with a finger-oriented Blackberry it got really bad reviews, because that's not what Blackberry users want.

And of course, there's still the Kindle, which kept selling out despite the fact that it was a Generation 1 proof-of-concept that was not easy to read. Generation 2 is supposed to be a sweeping improvement, but what will it look like in 2015? Will there be a day when the New York Times simply stops printing and delivers a daily digital paper to millions of subscribers' eReaders?

And that, for the record, is something people seem to be willing to pay for.

Hmm...