Keynote at Sydney Film Festival

A quick thank you to all the kind folk at the Sydney Film Festival and Screen Australia for inviting me to speak at their recent Industry Conference Day in Sydney.

It was great to be part of a line up including the legendary Thomas Mai and his wonderful insights into the future of film distribution. The need for connectivity and ease of sharing that Thomas spoke about certainly resonated with my own experiences and I was humbled to hear his opinions on crowd-sourcing, database development and hyper-distribution.

On top of his clearly well thought strategies, he is also a disturbingly nice guy.

Also thanks to Alex Fleetwood whom I had an engaging conversation with about the technological cultures of Australia versus the UK (and who inspired me to spend $20 on a Sherlock Holmes DVD).

So thanks to all and I look forward to many more presentations on social media in the coming months.

Licensing Songs For YouTube

It's been the curse of every guerrilla filmmaker with ambitions of social stardom on YouTube - making a kick-ass video only to have the soundtrack ripped from its infant heart by the all-hearing cyber watchdog that monitors the site for copyright infringement. What's left is a modern throwback to silent movies and a certainty viewership won't peak beyond your mum and immediate friends.

For a while there's been talk of building a financial model into YouTube that allows filmmakers access to popular music whilst also remunerating artist for their performances and recordings. It made some bold steps with the introduction of "Click-To-Buy" last year that directs viewers to iTunes or Amazon instead of enforcing strict censorship of the sound. It also had a major victory last week against Viacom which paves the way for a more liberal application of copyright law.

With this in mind there's great news coming out of Portland that a company called Friendly Music will begin allowing filmmakers the opportunity to buy music rights for as little as $3 for movies on YouTube. The license is for non-commercial use, but I think it's an amazing step forward in removing the ambiguity that filmmakers face between "fair use" and "criminal" when it comes to online distribution.

Hopefully the format will take off and provide an additional revenue stream for artists whilst helping to lift the quality of the content posted to YouTube.

Well, in theory anyway. (I'm sure there's still many more "Funny Cat Playing Piano" videos to come).

Check out Friendly Music HERE.

Beached Az App Number One

Just a little bit of self-promotion to say our Beached Az app for iPod/iPad/iPhone came in at #1 on the App Store for entertainment programs.

Macca and I nearly killed ourselves with the hours of design work, wire-frame models, and game-testing that went down to make the app work. It's been extremely rewarding to see it outshine the thousands of other apps and make the front page of iTunes as well as Top 5 in a few categories on the App Store.

So this is just a thank you message to all the fans for downloading the app and giving such great feedback.

The Art of Social Media Competitions

So you want to tether your brand to the social media landscape. You want to engage the millions of people that access and interact through social media every hour with your message. You want the metrics to reflect an infiltrating, low-cost campaign.

But what to do?

The art of social media competitions posses the same headaches for brands and businesses as it did in the pre-digital age. The advent of consumer technologies means film competitions are no longer limited to art school graduates and offspring of "old money" (heck, I can shoot, edit and post HD video on my mobile phone these days). Digital photography is now an everyday activity whilst every second primary school student is a radio broadcaster (read: "podcaster") or newspaper columnist (read: "blogger").

So... What to do?

It all starts with knowing your marketing goals. Any competition needs a clear and measurable marketing objective to guide the social media strategy underneath it. These goals need not be overly specific (raising awareness, driving traffic to company social media sites, collecting customer interest and buying habits, building new customer relationships) but they do need to set the end game objective and justify using a competition as the driving force to achieve it.

From here you can outline your competition objective, which is the most important (and most creatively fun) part. What is the competition? What do people have to do to be a part of it? And what are they rewarded with for engaging?

There are some classic competition structures that are tried and true:

• Make a new commercial for our brand.
• Make a short film about your experiences with our brand.
• Make a print campaign based on our brand.
• Write your favourite experience in 50 words.
• Invent something new for us and be rewarded.

The trick in all these approaches is treading the line between creative freedom and creative challenge. The technical bar must be low enough so that everyone can jump over it, but in the interest of not attracting rubbish you need a level of quality assurance that attracts talented and creative people. It's why Tropfest charges $50 for each entry... You need to be invested in your idea!

Once you have a clear understanding (or brief) for your public netizens, it's time to sppread the word and bring in the crowd. Cross-platform promotion is the best way to go in my opinion as no single platform on the web or in the media can give you the reach achievable from a well-thought social media strategy. Connecting through Facebook and Twitter is great, but you need to drive interest and get people engaging in your competition by seeding and searching for the communities that are most likely to fit your original marketing objective. Couple this to other email, print, mass media and in-store promotional tools to ensure your distribution and awareness is maximised.

If you're going to host the page yourself, ensure the site is easy to share. Embed tools like Facebook Connect, RSS, Twitter feeds, etc, to make it as easy as possible for a community to grow. These channels of communication are also great for informing your entrants where to go, what to do, how much time is left, and other updates/promotions throughout the contest.

It's also crucial to give the competition a timeframe and stick to it. Extensions to the deadline are usually an indicator of poor integration with social networks or your target market, and also is annoying/offensive to those loyal fans that played by the rules.

Stick to your competition dates, and keep engaging your community even whilst judging. Keep the suspense and give participants a reason to keep spreading your brand. Ensure you announce winners clearly and boldly. Make a song and dance about them to ensure a sense of reward. Everyone loves grabbing a few minutes of fame, so ensure winner announcements are also easily passed onto grandparents and loved ones.

Always, ALWAYS, offer the opportunity to sign up to a newsletter. Databases are the future!

Finally, the all-important measuring and evaluation. Consult your metrics and compare them to your objectives from the start. Check the tangibles like sales, web-traffic, Facebook likes, twitter followers, subscriptions, blog mentions, etc and assess what could be done better, lessons learned and any other observations for next time.

Like anything drawing on human interaction, there is an art-form to doing it right and getting ideal results. Starting with a strong and clear marketing objective should guide your actions all the way through. Be open and engaging with your community and you can't go wrong.

Are Smartphones Making Us Dumber?

In January Vint Cerf (AKA "The Father Of The Internet") answered some questions from the Californian folk who watched his keynote.

One of the questions raised (and the mantra of most tech un-savvy parents) is the idea that "Smartphones and the internet are actually making people dumber". It's a compelling argument that having a 3 billion page encyclopedia at our fingertips means we no longer have to store any facts in our head, and subsequently, pub trivia is now a dying experience.

(That said, if hard drive space has taught us anything these last ten years, it's that we can always fill empty space with something).

Vint's answer was the need to teach more critical thinking, and on this point I think we all agree. People who blindly follow Google Map directions onto footpath-free expressways or charge into the wilderness with an iPhone for navigation are the horror stories of the information age (THIS is what I'm talking about).

If the spamming culture of social media has taught us anything it's that critical thinking is a prerequisite to avoid failing Natural Selection 101. We will always have people who like the easy path of being told what to do. All the rest of us can do is highlight these mistakes to enlighten those people about to repeat them, and to also provide a good giggle for those who put critical thinking in the realm of "common sense".

I think the generations of the future will be aware, even more so than those today, that it doesn't matter if you have every answer at your fingertips, you still need to be able to ask the right questions.

You can see an extract of the Vint Cerf's presentation HERE or find the whole interview at www.fora.tv.

What Makes A "Social Media Expert"?

Interesting article in today's SMH on the topic of Social Media Experts (Read it HERE).

As brands and businesses start to see the amazing power of social media (or more correctly, "social markets") the role for a Social Media expert to slip in between HR and Accounting seems like a likely future for companies keen to please their shareholders who probably engage in social media daily. Having a dedicated social media department might become th competitive advantage some businesses need to get an edge over the competition.

But how do you find a social media expert? What is it that gives someone the right to hold that title?

With Facebook taking over Google last month as the most visited site on the internet, it's clear "social media" is the new "search"... And companies need only glance at Googles market value to see how important it is to be a player in the social media game.

Personally I think understanding that social media is essentially a new way of delivering mass media through conversations and communities (that subtle difference between "telling" and "talking"). It's about tapping into people's wants and engaging with not only current consumers, but the people around consumers. Essentially (from a business perspective) it's about fostering a desire to re-communicate a core message amongst people and businesses that matter to you.

Ian Lurie at Conversation Marketing outlines some great questions (and comedic reactions) CEO's should ask any potential "expert" in social media to find out if they're worthy of the title (read that article HERE).

For me, I think trying to couple the term "expert" to a field of knowledge that is in such a constant state of evolution, development and expansion seems futile. Anyone with experience in social media is free to advise on their experiences, but if there's ever an expert way to analyse, strategise and implement social media campaigns then we can be sure the human race is dead and the world is being run by robots.

New Radical Love Clip

Here's the latest clip I directed and produced with the absurdly talented Anthony MacFarlane. Currently in the seeding phase we'll wait and see how far this clip can go.

Also, if you pay close attention, you might just see some familiar faces waiting for the bus :)

Check it out:

Ernest Ellis - 'Want For Anything' from Radical Love/Dew Process on Vimeo.

Expressing Loyalty In The Online Community

I read an interesting article at YouAreNotSoSmart.com last month and have been meaning to share it's insights for a few weeks now. It attempts to dissect the behaviour of online communities, forums and blogs to become so heated and aggressive in their opinions in digital conversation. We see lines being drawn constantly between Brand Lovers ("fanboys") and Brand Haters ("hostages") on the digital battlefield of web forums, comments pages and status updates.

David McRaney offers an interesting insight into the psychological aspect of fanboyism:

The Misconception: You prefer the things we own over the things we don’t because we made rational choices when we bought them.

The Truth: You prefer the things you own because you rationalize your past choices to protect your sense of self.

I find it an interesting argument for why people become so anonymously aggressive in the world of digital debate. To imply we respond (in any way) to a comment about a brand to defend our most private sense of self is powerfully intriguing...

It's the reason why Apple would rather show us the people who use their computers (I'm a Mac!) rather than the (rational/empirical) features of their computers. It's the same with McDonald's, who not longer tell you what's on their burgers, but rather show the people that find solitude and satisfaction by consuming their burgers. It doesn't matter if they're healthier or cheaper or faster, it's the lifestyle and image they're trying to push (even if it is more artificial than their flavourings).

At the end of the day, when making decisions, it's just easier to go with emotions than rational thought. There's too much to consider if we try and rationalise everything. Emotions are far more efficient at convincing us we've done the right thing, made the right choice, and bought the right product. "Gut instinct", that most primitive of concepts and enemy of the rationalist, still serves society with more impression that any of us would admit to.

Anything you own by choice, like it or not, you are consciously a slave to defend. Brands are the colours that signify which army you aline with in this fertile digital war of words. By protecting brands we are protecting ourselves... Loyalty doesn't get much better than that!

Read the full article HERE.