The other day I was tweeting with Tiffany Shlain (IMDb), director of Connected: An Autobiography About Love, Death & Technology when she came out with this amazing zinger I thought I’d share:

Twitter tickles my gray matter…

I thought it was so great I’m reproducing it here, adding a few additional flourishes (hey, would you have expected any less here?) about my overall usage of Twitter and why I’m now a believer. Tickle away!

I’ve been on the platform since ‘08 (or at least according to HootSuite), but didn’t devote much to it prior to this year. Honestly. I think I was languishing around 1,000 or so followers for a couple of years back there.

As you can see from my paltry present 1,800-weak follower count, Twitter’s not a place I’ve spent an inordinate deal of time over these four years. By all accounts, I should have at least five times that number considering the sheer amount of hours I devote daily ‘netting and for entertainment purposes, in general. Still, the number refuses to budge skyward and I seem to be stuck in, I dunno, third gear over there. What’s up?

Why is this the case?

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If you’re into online marketing at all you might have already come across the new-fangled Chief Content Officer’s (CCO’s) position.

It was a relatively new designation created over the past couple of years to address the critical need for those companies actively engaged on social media channels to be present on all of the platforms. As part of their aggressive rollouts, there would be a twin concomitant requirement to aggressively spin out contents on a regular basis to address deliverables requirements of their content production departments. Someone would have to take point on this.

Basically, if you’re going to play well anywhere near Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the half-dozen other value social media platforms which make any shred of an online difference, someone needs to be in the driver’s seat designing and sourcing the content which features over in those places.

They must make it their full-time occupation-cum-obsession to write the best stuff which has the potential to lure the most readers and supporters as they can possibly draw. The CCO must learn to craft stuff which has the potential of going viral at any given moment. They must remain on top of your site’s traffic, views, metrics, not to mention the dozens of other emerging trends shaking up the online space several times per week. They must be ubiquitous. They must be always-on. They must be relentless. They must read and research and digest constantly. They must be tireless. They must sleep a maximum of four hours a day.

Well, you get what I mean…

Because this space is so quixotic, the marketing industry, in general had to give this position a name. It could no longer sate itself with the knowledge that content could be something left to the marketing department, attended to twice weekly, and hoping for the best.

Office space had to be carved out and a full-time salary allocated for this new position if the job had any expectations of being done well.

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The Holiday Season is upon us – the Friday before The Big Sleep, The Downtime, “Xmas Eve Eve,” it is – and folks around the indiesphere are wondering what sort of Yuletide gifts they’ll be getting beneath the pagan tree for their respective crowdfunding activity.

Given how popular crowdfunding platforms have become over the past couple of years – Kickstarter and IndieGoGo, namely – now’s the time for indies to think about the sorts of gifts they’d like to reward their high-value pledgers when the time comes for sending out gifts and squaring fair with the ladies and gentlemen kind enough to help bootstrap your dream.

I was getting into a chat about this with some colleagues the other day, about the sorts of things pledgers would really appreciate. The sorts of things that Jason Fried, of Chicago’s 37signals.com discusses in the recent edition of Inc. Magazine speaks about. Granting memorable gifts that aren’t easily dismissed, or gifts that have a sentimental and useful life beyond the mere granting of the gift on the day in question beneath the pagan tree.

So here are my suggestions for the sorts of pledge rewards which would probably go down exceptionally well for some of your higher-value crowdfunders.

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So what’s newsjacking, you ask? Well, depends very much on which industry we’re discussing. But as concerns the independent filmmaking game, newsjacking outlines a process whereby filmmakers can insinuate word of their projects or stories into prominent breaking news items, whereby they capitalize upon the rampant buzz swirling around a particular hot-button issue, topic, or cause, luring some of that spiked attention and Google Juice to spillover onto their film. This is my loose definition, paraphrased as it is, after my listen of Mitch Joel’s interview of David Meerman Scott, the man who coined the term.

Newsjacking is a highly delicate game because filmmakers can (and often do, like in any industry — so be prepared for brickbats!!!) get accused of carpetbagging the news with pap-like drivel which dishonors the dead, perhaps even disparaging the extent of whatever tragedy (egs. Asian earthquakes or tsunamis, the death of prominent political figures) has befallen. If this defines your situation, you’ve got quite a  bit of a brand “repair jobbing” to do. Alas, that’s the subject of another blogpost, interesting in and of itself. Maybe I’ll return to this if someone can supply a specific case-study example of a film which has sunk itself into this sort of hot agua.

Today let’s talk about several of the techniques you can implement to insinuate yourself into prominent news stories as they’re occurring. More importantly, this is also how you can engage audiences more effectively, promoting your independent film or documentary in the process.

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I’m often asked by clients why I don’t prefer automating elements of my marketing function for their films or docs. Why I devote countless hours to achieving a kind of rhythm with their projects’ marketing in a more “manual” – or hands-on – manner. Why I like to lay on hands and make contact – viscerally, tactilely, and real-ly – with their works as opposed to having a computer handle elements of the promotion function.

I have an answer, and it usually involves a wink and a nod to the carpentry/cabinetmaking profession and how carpenters work best when they go gloveless; that is, when they work with their bare, raw, and sometimes battered hands.

In the same way, I prefer working with my “bare hands” when marketing a picture or a documentary because I find this achieves the best results.

In general, I don’t dig automated anything – from automated relationships, to Frankenfood, to Frankenspeak, to form mails, to automated creativity, to auto-eroticism with devices. Imagine the gull gamut of things that can possibly be automated, and I’ll typically eschew it and chuck it in the bin. There, I said it.

Let’s – yes, let’s — discuss several examples of things you can automate as part of the marketing function. As a bonus, I’ll add my reasons why I – in almost all cases – refuse to go this route in favor of the tremendously more time-consuming manual approach.

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As I go about preparing content production schedules for my clients, I often make a point of advising them to design and craft contents that have long-tail value built-in from the get-go.

By “long-tail value,” I’m referring to the ability to re-use contents at other stages in your marketing rollout(s), such that the piece you’re designing today can last long beyond just the single session on the day you draft it. You don’t want to be spending all that time churning out content only not to be able to use somewhere down the line when things become that much more busy for you. By busy, I mean when you’re engaged with your festival run, when you’re too tied down managing relationships with your distributors and suppliers, or when you’re perhaps too preoccupied running around searching that make-it-or-break it completion financing for your picture at the proverbial “five minutes to twelve.”

Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn – incidentally, and as luck would have it – “like” this sort of content repurposing and award high algorithm scores to this sort of thing.

Crossposting to your own content from right within your post is great for Google Juice and also draws attention to the full slew of contents you offer, as part of your massive archive.

It grants “second life” to contents which didn’t make its rounds on the first occasion and reveals to your readers the full web of potential posts and ideas that you’ve been generating for the past several weeks or months. I call this the “Dan Brown Effect.” It means, few people knew about his first mediocre sales effort of a novel “Angels and Demons” until his subsequent “Da Vinci Code” benefitted from all of that international stardom.

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Securing distribution: the success ratios between films trying to do so versus those films which fail…

Yeah, I suppose I could share with you several rough stats from my own portfolio of indie docs and features I’ve PMDed for over time. But because what I’m about to describe is so rampant in the indie industry, I don’t even think it’s even necessary to get into a specific breakdown of the numbers. The mere description of it will tip you off to how prevalent it actually is…

Look, it’s not surprising that securing distribution of any kind – be it indie, conventional, non-conventional, or some form of hybrid distribution – isn’t an option for filmmakers if marketing fundamentals are not adhered to from the get-go.

There exists no distributor – be it a content aggregator dealing with a number of VOD platforms for streaming distribution and cable (egs. iTunes, Amazon VOD, Comcast, Warner’s, etc.) or one of the more established traditional distributors – who wants to represent a client who:

• hasn’t devoted a considerable amount of energy in shooting the absolute best picture they can buy for their money.
• is sloppy with the overall marketing and promotion (formerly, P&A) of their projects.
• is sloppy with their legal and other paperwork (nothing scares off a potential distributor more than “chain-of-title” doubts).
• demonstrates laziness in getting things organized, in general (what I’m going to call being “arty”), or
• has done poor research on the current distribution landscape with weak knowledge of what’s possible/what’s not.

I’m going to dive into just a few specifics preventing eligible indies from securing good distribution for their projects…

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We’re well past the mid-way point of December oh-eleven, on a beeline for Xmas.

‘Round about this time of year, you should be well into your “trial run” of your 2012 New Year’s Resolutions. You should either be suffering a tremendous amount difficulty in keeping your Resolutions firmly intact, or you should be chugging ahead full-steam, steeling your nerves, hardening your resolve to keep your Resolutions rock-steady well into the next calendar year. I write Resolution rather than the lower-case resolution, given all the annual hype surrounding the former, what with the attached consumerism which has cropped up in its wake.

Either way, you’ll already have had plenty of time to determine whether or not whatever you’re trying to do is working for you. Whether you’re attempting to:

• lose that spare time around your flabby, hirsute midsection.
• save more cha-ching-ching-badda-bing.
• stop sucking back corrosive poison-infested Satan sticks, aka cigarettes.
• stop pummeling your liver with vodka and artificially-colored alcoholic mixed drinks.
• be a more attentive Parental Unit.
• be a better Daughter or Son Unit.

…or in my case, to stop rapid-stuffing my yob with so much chocolate throughout the course of the workday that I feel like bouncing off the jip rock. Needless to say, that’s not the reason why I’m growing the beard in the video below, as you’ll shortly see…

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My colleague Brett Bumeter –the “brother from another mother” and the man who shares the same father as me — recently performed a free video analysis of my old YouTube channel. The fact he did so as part of his overall reply to me in email was cool in and of itself (and something I’m grateful for), but that wasn’t the best part about his diagnostic.

It was the insights. What I learned in 15 minutes about YouTube videos and the like was a short videoblogging primer in and of itself, so allow me to share just a couple of the tips I got from Brett during his review (which you can watch in full here). This is the way to improve your overall standing on that channel, if your goals include generating greater revenues through video views is part of your long-term content delivery strategy.

While some of these approaches will require a degree of precision and online dexterity, presenting a bit of a learning curve for those who aren’t familiar with the ins and outs of the YouTube interface, none of what I’m about to suggest, by the way, obviates the need for top flight content, well-produced, often, and compellingly-done. The kind of content that your viewers will ultimately want to pass around and fan, to share with each other and to evangelize.

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