As previously stated, many distributors will have marketing procedures in place to help sell your film when it is ready for distribution. The true use of a social networking strategy comes long before your film is ready for distribution.

A social networking strategy will take many months to a year to implement and it will be an ongoing effort. This effort starts with you and your team first. You will determine whom you are trying to attract into your community and what you have to offer them of interest. It is NOT all about your film, in fact very little direct mention of your film is best. Follow the 80/20 rule, 80% of your assets are about the interests of your audience, 20% of your assets are telling them about the film. You will build your engagement pages and populate them with interesting and valuable content. You will not be asking your supporters for ANYTHING, merely building a solid base of supportive fans who will be there when you are ready for distribution.

You should never do anything that will make them feel that you have formed the community in order to use it for your own purposes. Companies and filmmakers who do this stand to ruin the very thing they have spent so much time developing; a genuine and authentic community that is very loyal and connected to you and your film. That kind of loyalty is extremely difficult to accomplish with advertising and it is really the ultimate goal of all brands.

We have mentioned what the platforms offer as far as marketing, but they should not be solely depended on to do this work.

Unless you have a real budget to buy significant internet real estate, you will be connecting with your target market via websites and bloggers. You may find it necessary to incentivize those sites in order to promote your film. The most common tactic is contests and giveaways — meaning you provide the website with something to give away to reward their loyal readers….i.e. merchandise, sponsored travel, or free copies of the film. Creating online games themed around your film are another possibility — but of course not all independent films lend themselves to gaming. And if you’re asking the cast, crew, and everyone else you know to FB, tweet, and blast about your release, consider creating an incentive for them as well.

If you’re working far enough in advance, you MAY be able to find an appropriate brand or agency to sponsor some marketing, but know that you’ll need to start this work many months in advance of release.

In strategy, you first have to determine what is the goal. Is it to build up a solid base of supporters? Is it to activate them to do something (buy a DVD, go to a screening, donate to a crowdfunding effort, tell others about your film)? Usually that is a goal. But if you begin with a campaign where you launch into selling and goading without first building up the base, you will never accomplish that goal. To build up, you have to allow time to do that.

A social networking strategy will take many months to a year to implement and it will be an ongoing effort. First, you will determine whom you are trying to attract into your community and what you have to offer them of interest. Then, you will start to put those assets out there. You will build your engagement pages and populate them with interesting and valuable content. You will not be asking them for ANYTHING. Ideally, you will not need to ask them at all because when you become a valuable resource, they will want to help you in any way they can. You may call on your group for help in achieving a goal every so often and if they can truly see how helping you will help the community in general, they will be happy to do it. You should never do anything that will make them feel that you have formed the community in order to use it for your own purposes. Companies and filmmakers who do this stand to ruin the very thing they have spent so much time developing, a genuine and authentic community that is very loyal and connected to you. That kind of loyalty is extremely difficult to accomplish with advertising and it is really the ultimate goal of all brands.

Too often, filmmakers and companies wait to start considering social networking until they need to achieve set goals and they need them now (usually when selling something). The problem with that is they don’t have a base of support in place from which they can achieve anything. In order to use the tools of social networking effectively, you really must commit the time to grow your base, feed and cultivate it. If you cannot commit to that, social networking tools will not work for you and you should turn to more short term tools like mass advertising.

Chances are that whatever your subject matter/theme/niche audience for your film, there have been other films in recent years that targeted the same audiences. Most filmmakers feel some camaraderie with each other and many may offer you advice on how they reached their audiences.

Connect to fellow filmmakers and don’t be shy about asking them to at least mention your film on FB to their folks, or tweet about your film. We can’t emphasize enough how many filmmakers find themselves building lists of organizations and emails from scratch when someone else probably has already created a similar list. Consider the community spirit of DIY filmmaking and ask for a little help, or offer to compensate a filmmaker for their efforts on your behalf.

This is the idea behind TFC’s The Film Collaborators site, a place where filmmakers can share resources

Plant your marketing and distribution seeds at pre-production / production stage. Think about your audience in advance of making your film and think about your title carefully from a marketing point of view too. Do a little research to see if the title has been used recently and might cause confusion with another film currently in the market.

Buy up all related and possibly desired urls and start on the site, draw in traffic and collect names and contact info.  Make sure your set photography is top-notch from a marketing and publicity point-of-view. Start building community around your brand as a filmmaker and the film itself, and possibly even sharing parts of the content with your future audience.

TFC has a marketing services menu that includes options for access to a DIY Marketing Toolkit to guide microbudget filmmakers in their own marketing initiatives.

This is another excerpt from my interview with Mike Monello. I wandered a bit off track from audience engagement to ask him what he thought of THAT manifesto (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’ll do fine without knowing). Mike’s the MAN, obviously he was preaching to the choir with me.

MFM: Recently in some indie film publications and on festival panels, the idea of filmmakers striving to reach an audience has been reviled by filmmakers who believe their sole purpose as artists is to make great art, not worry about the audience. If they have a great story, people will just find it. The cream will rise to the top. What do you think about that?

Monello: “Yeah, my daughter wants to be a princess when she grows up. And that is my response to those filmmakers. Good luck with that, would be my answer. I would hope that we are adult enough to say that the ‘art’ part of your work is already a given. We have to think about the business because this is a business. At what point will you acknowledge that you have to deal with both? If you insist on being a princess, well, I can’t help you with that. Go and play the lottery while you’re at it.”

“As for the idea that if you have a great story people will just find you. We know that is not true. When I worked with the Florida Film Festival in my early days, I saw great film after great film and they never went anywhere. It is just not true, absolutely not true. Here’s a test. Post your film to YouTube and see how many views you get, if they will just find you.”

“There is a minute percentage of films that hit the right zeitgeist and for some reason do build from word of mouth. Blair did hit at a time when the horror films were SCREAM, the ironic and funny horror films. We consciously decided to make a film that would scare people, we were serious about being a scary film. And we hit at a time when the audiences too said ‘I want to be scared’ and that was pure luck. If you want to gamble on hitting that luck and being found, I wish you well with that strategy.”

“As an independent filmmaker who has a hand out for money, you have a responsibility to be honest. If you are making a personal film, only for your vision and exploration, and you don’t care if anyone sees it, then you need to be honest with the investor when you present that investment proposal. I don’t think you will have a lot of success raising money, but hey maybe you will. Most investors want to see that you are confident in your skills of being able to pull it off and that you have a lot of enthusiasm for the story and that you have an understanding of what to do with the movie after you have made it; that you have a plan to earn the money back. The biggest problem is too many filmmakers are motivated by the sexiness of having their film up on a big screen. The best filmmakers are not motivated by that, they are motivated by reaching people with stories.”

You can read the entire article here.

I have written two articles for next month’s issue of Microfilmmaker Magazine that will go live on Sunday August 1, but I am so excited for you to see them, I will give you a sneak preview here.

About a month ago, Randy Finch made a post entry on Ted Hope’s fabulous Truly Free Film site explaining a MFA track he teaches at the University of Central Florida called Entrepreneurial Digital Cinema. For some reason, this post turned into something controversial. You should read that post and the comments and then read my article. I decided to follow up on what Randy and crew are doing down there in Florida and a story excerpt is here:

“We wanted a program that did not stress the goal of blockbuster in the first three months. Rather, the filmmaker would take a longer view for a ROI and would develop low cost works that could withstand such a strategy.  Individual filmmakers would have the chance to be more personal with their work while at the same time better equipped to meet market changes and make these changes work for them. One faculty member saw us as creating ‘pirate ships’ with tiny crews, braving the waves of change while the larger entities moved inland for protection. Our ‘pirates’ could be taught how to read the weather, the waves and better assess their risks. The collapse of the distribution models was the proverbial ‘opportunity’ we all hear about – it will redefine everything: the art; the audience; the filmmaker; the business,” said Steve Schlow.

This month I attended the ARG Fest conference in Atlanta and one of the featured speakers was Mike Monello of Campfire.  Coincidentally, Mike is a graduate of UCF film school! You may remember that Mike was part of the team around The Blair Witch Project and helped to shape the early audience engagement that made the film such a spectacular success when internet marketing was barely a term and certainly not being used to market an independent film. I sat down for a chat (and a brain pick, come on!) with him to talk about what techniques they used then that are applicable to the tools we have now (and we have many more than they did in 1999) to market indie films. This bit is about what they did after they got the initial enthusiasm for Blair started.

“The more we put up, the more the people started to devour it.  It was a combination of seeing pieces of footage that were really intense, with a history that had massive holes in it because we didn’t put the whole thing up,  and it gave a space for people to imagine what they wanted and tell each other stories. The mythology was based on stories that were around, urban legend. I don’t want to say they were historically accurate because none of it was factual information, but it all had resonance with people. It gave people a reason to talk about their own local witch legends and their own scary camping experiences and it just all ballooned from there.”

“We were conscious of the fact that we needed to keep everyone engaged until we had the film available to see.  So, we would read the forums of what the fans were saying and looked at the topics they discussed and we’d think ‘that’s interesting, they are curious about this thing in particular’ and we would look at the information we hadn’t released yet and release what spoke to that curiosity. If we had holes in the information people wanted to know, we would fill those in.”

To read both articles in their entirety, visit www.microfilmmaker.com