Last week, I spoke with participants in the National Screen Institute’s FeaturesFirst and Drama Prize programs in Winnipeg about gathering an audience for their projects. One of the first things I touch on in building an audience for a film is that the filmmaker should already have an audience for him/herself. Build a personal brand. This community of supporters, “fans,” will help perpetuate the word of your project and help in any crowdfunding and public screening initiatives you are planning. There is no reason to wait until you have a project ready for production to start this process. Go and do it now.

Today, I was directed to this great presentation by Peter Shankman from Help A Reporter Out (HARO) a really good site for connecting with media folks. It is entitled How Self Promotion Will Save the World. I think it is meant to be facetious, but the sentiment is right. By self promotion, Peter doesn’t mean you should be tooting your own horn. He advocates getting others to do it for you, so back to that core community of supporters that you must build for yourself and then for your work.

The presentation is long, around 50 minutes. I have included it here if you want to watch, Peter is a pretty funny guy. But here are some of the points he covers if you don’t have that kind of time:

1. Get people to WANT to do your publicity for you-There is a big difference between getting someone to do it and getting someone who wants to do it. You can hire a PR firm to do publicity for you and that has its merits if you are trying to reach the media. But, just as in advertising, it is not as genuine to hire someone to speak well of you because you are paying them as it is to have people speak well of you to their circle of friends because they really believe it. Fans know you and can vouch for your talent.
2. If self promotion is done correctly, no one should ever tell you “You’re such a self promoter”-when self promotion is done correctly, it is HELPING. You are trying to be THAT GUY, the one who can tell people how to do something or get something done. The very resourceful person. Everyone talks about THAT GUY, he doesn’t have to do it himself.
3. 4 rules of self promotion 1)be transparent in all you do 2)be relevant to the person you are helping  3)be able to write with brevity 4)be at the top of mind
4. Be a finder. Finders are loved because they connect people and concepts. Twitter is run by finders.
5. You must be mindful of the value that you pass on. Don’t do it just to hear yourself talk, really consider your followers and what they want to know before you pass on your info.
6. Just be helpful, common courtesy really. Have no other motivation than to help someone and it will be returned to you tenfold. When someone is thinking of someone to hire or recommend, your name will come to mind.
7. Self promotion is getting what  you want by making sure everyone else gets what they want. If more people in the world inserted helping into their self promotion, more people would be helped, including you. Hence the Save the World part.
8. Using the word “I” is a self promotion failure. Post things online without the word I in it because when you do it, people tend to be turned off and not use the advice. This includes posting trailers and productions stills as the only thing you offer to your audience. Bring in other content relevant to what they are interested in. This is great advice for websites and Facebook pages. If you only use them to blatantly self promote, you will lose your value to the audience and they will stop visiting.
9. Give people a reason to want to promote you. As an example of your core followers, give them access to you, your crew, your cast, a visit to the set, VIP tickets to your premiere, something they would value in being associated with you and your film that the average person wouldn’t get. A part in your film as an extra or whatever. A chance to shoot a scene and use it in the Extras content. They will for sure want to talk about the experience they had with you and the film.
10. Be thankful. Personally thank people who mention you or your film on their blog or in their tweets or on their Facebook page. This is a dialog opportunity and your will do more to build up that fan base by just saying thank you than you ever could with advertising.

These are all great points and I hope it gets you thinking of ways you can build your personal brand, you reputation, that will result in building an audience for yourself and your work.

This week I attended an edition of the roving conference put on by WBP, filmmaker Lance Weiler’s outfit. It followed on nicely from seminars and conversations that were going on AFM the week before. I covered AFM for Microfilmmaker Magazine and the article will be out on December 1, but I wanted to share my notes from this event first.

The first speaker of the night was Weiler and his topic was Social Media for Storytellers. “There is more opportunity now than there ever has been to reach the audience,” Weiler proclaimed. He cited examples of his own work with his film HEAD TRAUMA where he used multiple media to engage the audience with comic books,  ARG, mobile phone components and live interaction during screenings. He also cited the work that the Mad Men TV show did to target different audience segments during their seasons to broaden the reach of the show. Their campaigns grew from building a buzz in the ad agency niche, then moved out to the entertainment media, early adopters WOM and then wide audience promotions.

He cautioned before you get a conversation going you need to decide what kind of voice you want to use. Should you engage from the characters’ perspective, a location- centric perspective, the voice of your staff or your own voice? There is no right or wrong to this, it just has to be determined and stay consistent.

He also advised to be realistic about time and resources. Choose outlets and accounts to use that will reach your audience best and these will change over time as new platforms come into fashion. Interaction will take up a measurable part of the day and there needs to be a routine. He utilizes interns or a full time community manager to handle this work. This has to be a conversation, no one likes to be talked to without any way to talk back or feel that no one is listening. Give them the tools to talk to you and to each other.

Weiler insists that building trust with your audience is key. You can’t just jump into conversation with them, you must slowly cultivate a relationship and it will take time to gather your audience. You must reward your audience by giving them access to content or access to you not widely available. You must respect them by not overusing your email list or making your content only self serving. This is important because you can’t control them and what they say. They can make or break you.

He closed by listing a few of the platforms he recommends for filmmaker audience building. WordPress, Flikr, Twitter, Feedburner and Delicious. He cautioned that you should mirror your audience list details from your online platforms because you do not own that information, the platform does. If you should ever lose privileges on a platform or want to change platforms, you want to have that information in your personal files for future access.

In part II, I will talk about Jon Reiss’ talk on theatrical releases and why the term needs to encompass more than cinemas. He has a new book out now called Think Outside the Box Office, the ultimate guide to film distribution and marketing in the digital era. I have read it and highly recommend it. He talks about his new philosophy in it in detail but highlighted it in this talk.

The keys to gathering an audience for your film via a successful word of mouth campaign are twofold 1) creating compelling content that people will share and/or talk about and 2) finding your ”sneezers,” as Seth Godin calls them, to help pass the content around and bring their people into your circle.  Sneezers are the people who spread the “gospel” of your work. They are influencers who generally have a following within a particular niche. People listen to a good sneezer and if the sneezer talks to them about you or your film, they will check it out. So how do you find these sneezers?

Identify the niche audience that your film will attract. Within that niche, there are people who stand out as “experts” or are “the voice” of that niche. Most likely they have an online platform (blog or website) that they use to speak to their audience. If you can identify them by name, do a Google search to find out where they hang out online and get an approximation of their following. Do they have a lot of Facebook fans? A large Twitter following? A YouTube channel with many views? Once you find one sneezer, you are likely to find more because they tend to follow each other, comment on each others’ posts, speak on Twitter or are active on the same forums. You want to know what vehicles they use to communicate with their audience; your audience.

When approaching them, you have to be cautious. Their credibility is at stake any time they recommend something so you don’t want to undermine that or bombard them with requests from an unknown entity. Start by listening. Monitor what they say, read their blog posts and twitter posts, subscribe to their newsletter or RSS feed. I know it sounds a little stalker-like and it is, but you aren’t going to be malicious. You should have interests in common with this person if they are part of your target audience, they just don’t know you yet. After you get a handle on what they talk about, try commenting on their blog posts or their Facebook page entries. Suggest topics unrelated to your film but interesting to their audience. In other words, engage them in conversation, but not a one sided, all-about-you conversation. Keep in mind that their content is also something that you can perpetuate on your platforms. If they have a good video or blog post, repost it. Your followers will be interested in what they have to say. This should lead to some reciprocity.

This is a time consuming process, but totally worth it in terms of gathering an audience for your work. If you can get some of these sneezers into your circle and they help you enlarge the circle, you will reap the rewards of a large following. When you find your sneezers, embrace them and empower them, because they are your strongest “viral” marketing tool.

Once again, I must defer to the wisdom of marketing guru Seth Godin from a post he made this week on his site. I see in the things that he posts many parallels of what is happening in the traditional marketing and advertising space and what is happening in the independent film space. No longer is it the duty of a company’s marketing department to simply find space on media company sites (TV, magazine, newspaper, billboard, websites etc.) to advertise wares. The duty has shifted to creating a company’s own space (websites, social media sites, blogs etc.) on which to engage with customers and build a loyal fan base. No longer are they “renting” an audience on a short term basis, they are building one of their own that is easier to keep and grow than it is to start from scratch when a  new product or campaign comes about. This also has become the duty of the independent filmmaker.

A filmmaker can no longer, nor should any longer, depend on a distribution company (the said media company) to find an audience for his film every time a new film comes out. It is up to the filmmaker to build that audience and keep them engaged with all of his projects, not start over every time a new one is completed. A platform needs to be built in order to nurture, engage, educate and convert an audience to seek out the projects. First set up the platform (website, blog, social media page) and then fill it with people, your people, not rented-for-a-certain-amount-of-time people.

In his analogy, Seth uses authors. He recounts how authors used to rely on publishers to bring them readers. The author gives up the majority of the income to the publisher and, in turn, the publisher brings them the readers. In the traditional distribution model, filmmakers make a film and give up the majority of the income to the distributor to bring an audience. But when an author or a filmmaker builds his own audience with his own platforms, using a publisher or a distributor is a choice not a necessity. If the filmmaker owns his own media distribution channel (on YouTube, Vimeo or any of the multitude of online viewing sites), the majority of the revenue goes to him, not the outside media company. 

Compared to the loss of revenue that ”renting” an audience from a distributor means, building a platform is cheap. Filling it with people eager to hear from you, well that’s the expensive part, mostly in time and effort. If you don’t invest in the platform, you’ll be at a disadvantage, now and forever. To build a loyal and eager following the smart way is to invest in the elements of the platform… a great film with a great story,  a whole business team not just the production team, the online presence  and the systems you need to make it easy for people to find your project and become engaged. And then embrace these people and shoot for 90% of the revenue, not .5%. Good investments are often expensive but worth more than they cost.