Socially Networked: The Plugged-In Producer
I’ll be moderating an interesting panel this Saturday am at the Producer’s Guild “Produced By Conference 2011″ on the Disney Lot at 9:45-11am.
Socially Networked: The Plugged-In Producer
Social media outlets are now an essential component of a project’s overall production plan. Even if you’re a low-budget indie that doesn’t have millions for traditional P&A, you can now build a strong target audience through savvy use of social media sites and tools. Whether your project is a traditional feature or television program, or expressly created for digital media, this session gives you the answers: What do producers need to know and do when navigating social media for production, marketing and distribution? What are the best social practices for film, television and online? Most importantly, what methods give producers more control, and what approaches should you avoid? Jump into the debate and tweet questions: #sociallynetworked
MODERATOR: Adrian Sexton, CEO, New Medici (former EVP, Digital at Participant Media; Head of Digital at Lionsgate)
SPEAKERS:
- Brent Weinstein, Head of Digital Media, United Talent Agency
- Bedonna Smith, Producer, Stand Up To Cancer, Digital Media Producer, 83rd Academy Awards, Co-Developer, BMW Film Series ‘The Hire’
- Nick Turner, Senior Vice President Digital Media, Relativity Media, LLC/ROGUE, Limitless, The Fighter, Catfish
- Elias Plishner, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Digital Marketing, Sony Pictures Entertainment, The Social Network, 2012, Battle: Los Angeles
TEDxTercek: Reclaiming Personal Narrative via Social Media
Via TEDxMarin, Robert Tercek is a master of digging beneath the surface of media. His recent TEDx talk about story expression and acknowledgment or validation on a global level is a must-view.
“For the past 60 years, we’ve outsourced our storytelling through professional media” … and now it’s time for us to do it via social media… “It’s like a great lover, and why we’re falling out of love with television.”
Infographic: Real Cost of Going Social
While there are still companies that hold back on social, the network effect that happens when people share content, the sheer content management ease of use and low customer acquisition costs are simply overpowering arguments.
With an “are you crazy?” quote from Seth Godin to kick it off, the infographic below reveals the resource costs, “if you build it, they will come” fallacy on cost-free social advertising and a real-world breakdown or anatomy of a social campaign.
Social budget/ROI example: $52k for a social media strategist, $93.6k for a community manager (well paid imho), $15-30k for a micro-site, $20k for a mobile app (too cheap imho…). The ROI benefits: 85% customer engagement, 65% direct customer communications, 60% speed of feedback, 48% brand building and 42% market research. With Twitter, a 43% ROI, the monthly value of a follower is $2.38 and cost per follower: $1.67. Low CPA (cost per acquisition), indeed.
Social Filtering Beyond Friends
Social filtering sounds a bit like whittling down your friends (or wannabe friends) with their throwaway wall posts, but it’s going to be a very big business not only for Facebook but other companies like Gravity, founded by MySpace’s Amit Kapur. In a recent Techcrunch article, Kapur talked about the info overload situation.
Today, we live in a world where we’re constantly overwhelmed by information. There are over 90M tweets per day, 34 hours of YouTube video uploaded every minute, and every Facebook user has an average of 130 friends who are becoming more and more active all the time. We also experience this with content farms flooding search results and with the thousands of articles available everyday on traditional websites like the New York Times and ESPN: of which only a handful appeal to each of our individual interests.
What’s interesting here is the idea of personalizing larger form content or utilities to users – we’re talking bigger social integration than you typically get with the NY Times, HuffPo’s social news or iTunes’ Genius Bar and the newly created Ping.
Of course, will the consumer respond or even pay for this personalization? Our predilection is that the early-alpha adopters will certainly pay with their feedback and “pro benefit” upgrades of a more personalized web (that’s a lot of potential onamotapoeia), but the masses will just enter it via osmosis.
Branded/Social Engagement: Embracing New Economic Models
From my former boss and mentor, Jon Feltheimer, CEO of Lionsgate, speaking at MIPCOM.
I especially liked his paragraph below – which I’ve sliced up – as branded and social engagement is where audiences now permanently live; whether consumers “own” legacy technology or “rent” the next-generation digital devices…:
We need to create new relationships, relationships with people who install telephone lines and build mobile networks, relationships with people like billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, 26 years old, who connects millions of people through bits and bytes.
Ironic that tv networks have since been surpassed by social “networks,” where the direct to consumer, or network effect, moves the needle faster to the right than any and all traditional marketing and distribution means. Read more >>
Social Media Next Video
More video from the iHollywood Social Media Next conference – from my two panels that night:
Quick Take on Google Instant
From the iHollywood Forum event – jump to 0:48 in for my take on Google Instant:
Facebook: Transparency and Personality
The New Yorker puts together a great “Letters From” series, and Facebook’s press team is smart to begin promoting a POV (“Letters from Palo Alto”) from Zuckerberg and others (Vanity Fair’s “With a Little Help From His Friends” piece on former Facebook President Sean Parker written by Facebook Effect writer David Kirkpatrick).
Whether these personality pieces are timed to upstage (or upstate) Sony’s “The Social Network” film is an interesting question, but more importantly it reveals individual depth on the 21st century’s next media king: Mark Zuckerberg. (Of added note, Zuck is #1 on Vanity Fair’s top 100 media power list). Read more >>
Social Media’s Conversation Prism Map
For those looking to better comprehend the sinews of social media platforms, apps/utilities and publishing players in the space, Brian Solis and JESS3 have a fine looking prismatic aperture diagram below. [More sizes via the link.]
Social media is moving beyond a quantity palatte – just how many platforms can you splatter brand paint on, really? – into a quality distribution play where you niche out your followers and program content and community to them individually. And then, think out of the Facebook and Twitter “shared” box that 99% of companies subscribe to, as well. Think consumer-generated media beachheads (insert inane acronym)…
Twitter Tools and Tricks
Reflecting on how mobile media has come to encompass “social media” – especially with Twitter leading the charge – below, please find a few helpful tools and tricks to support your Twitter addiction:
Twitter Tools:
- Seesmic Desktop (Adobe Air client for fast multi-account tweet management and search)
- TweetDeck (alternative to the above)
- Tweetie (the best iPhone client)
- MrTweet (search submission tool to help get followers)
- @geofollow (keyword submission tool)
- Twitpic (for better photo tweeting)
- Twitterholic (follower rankings and stats)
- Last, click here for an exhaustive list of 3rd party twitter apps… Read more >>
The Launch of Twitterbook
Much of the social media news in the past couple of weeks has focused on Facebook’s release of a number of new features. Some of the features have been welcomed, while one in particular has garnered most of the attention and criticism.
Social Media vs. Privacy on the Web
I’ll admit it. I’m a social media junkie. And it’s not difficult to satisfy my addiction, considering the large number of social media sites that are quickly popping up as of late. But it has also got me thinking – considering the popularity of social media sites these days, should we be more concerned about our privacy? 5 years ago, it was only the early adopters who were on sites like MySpace and Friendster and most people were weary of sharing too much on the internet. These days Facebook has well over 100 million registered users, and over 222 million visitors per month. After the jump, a list of some of latest and greatest social media sites, along with ways you can ensure that the whole world knows everything about you… Read more >>