Posted on: September 2nd, 2010 Top 10 Rules for Spam and the Independent Filmmaker

1. Be a conversation, NOT A MEGAPHONE! Interact. Engage.

2. Never give what you don’t want to receive.

3. Spam is in the eye of the beholder so you should be looking through your recipients’ eyes, not your own.

4. Social Media has its own unique rules of conduct that are constantly evolving.

5. Be a conversation. Be the kind of social media contact you enjoy.

6. Every platform is different, so what is spam varies by where it is.

7. Be professional, even when being personal, friendly, casual. No one owes you or your project anything.

8. Be creative, unique and offer your followers more than your love of yourself and your project. (Though passion is important.)

9. Report spam. It sucks and the more people that report, the faster we kill it and the sites that send it or benefit it.

10. Did I say be a conversation?

We all get spam all the time, but as independent filmmakers, sometimes we give it. For most indie filmmakers a media-heavy, web presence is extremely important from day one.  Crowdfunding is becoming a reality for a growing number of projects. With more and more open mouths in the nest, filmmakers have to maximize their chances of getting a worm. Most projects that stand a reasonable chance of success in raising funds on platforms like InvestedIn, KickStarter and IndieGoGo start with multimedia like trailers, artwork and pictures of cast and crew. A webpage is another important piece not only for people to check out your project but to give depth to your web presence and add a note of professionalism. Engaging possible audience members on multiple platforms like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and even LinkedIn not only draws supporters to your funding drive but creates an energy for the project and draws followers who will ultimately want to see it.

Getting the word out and getting traffic to your funding point is absolutely critical and here’s where the spam comes in. There is a very fine line between aggressive marketing and spam. Getting the word out is essential, but if the word that gets out is that you spam people relentlessly and are annoying, you not only aren’t building your support base and audience, you’re doing the opposite.

Each form of communication and each platform has standards specific to it and these generally accepted standards are evolving. What was true yesterday may not be true tomorrow and you had better keep up or you’ll end up in the MySpace vortex of millions of voices screaming and nobody listening.

For example, on Twitter, if you build a support base first by mutual engagement-that means a two way conversation- then tweet repeatedly about funding, your followers will likely help you by retweeting and at least be forgiving of multiple tweets. If you follow a large number of people, only to unfollow most of them to give the appearance you’re popular and pursued, you’ll now have most people also unfollowing you back. Some will block you and you’ll have lost your chance at any empathy or interest. If you send automatic DM’s with a pitch for funding or even request for a like on Facebook, a large number of people now consider this spam. And worst of all, if you don’t bother following anyone, but send out @ replies about your project, you’ll probably not only get blocked, but Twitter will shut you down. It’s against their TOS.  And just like on Facebook, there is such a thing as overshare.  There are a lot more media savvy filmmakers out there now and you are sharing attention. You can’t grab a larger piece of the attention pie by sharing every single detail of your day, your shoot or even your hopes and dreams. Your interactions have to be interesting and engaging and not just for you. That’s a general rule for all media platforms. And only sending out a small update every other week is just as bad. Twitter has to be a conversation to be successful. In fact, if you need to be talking to people to increase your authority and presence on Twitter. All the auto follow bots in the world can’t help you.

Facebook has taken over from MySpace as the profile driven interactive site of choice. With their fan pages, your project can have a page that you can share that has updates, media, links and discussion. Listen carefully people: IT’s NOT A MEGAPHONE! That means some of the same generally accepted standards apply. You have to engage people with things that will interest them. Nobody owes you their time or attention just because you decided to make a movie- even other filmmakers. The signal to noise ratio from people who call themselves filmmakers is getting very out of proportion.  After a while on MySpace, people began ignoring bulletins, invites and updates because there was just too much. People tried posting more frequently so as to float on top a little longer, but that only made things worse. Filmmakers are starting to do the same thing with Facebook. A few pictures that are interesting posted at intervals are good. 900 lame pictures of your editing station (read desk and computer in the living room), for example, are not. Behind the scenes video clips are cool. A ton of clips of people standing around saying and doing things that are only funny if you were there, are not. Building an audience is what you’re after. Friend raping- friend requesting the friends of everyone you’re connected to is so not cool. One independent filmmaker (and I use the term loosely in her case-anyone who keeps saying, “I’m a producer. I can do anything” and denies people water on set in the desert should be ridden out of town on a rail) forced all of her crew (including all the underage high school students she illegally used in crew positions without pay as if she were doing them a favor) to connect on Facebook and then proceeded to friend request EVERY SINGLE ONE of their friends.  Most people accepted. She then proceeded to inundate everyone with gratuitous and near constant updates and cute little spamtastic efforts like tagging everyone on pictures and updates that didn’t relate to them. She can’t figure out why she’s constantly in trouble with Facebook and her profile has been suspended so many times. Don’t be that person. Yes you have to get attention. Yes you have to keep yourself in front of everyone’s eyes. But if you cross the line, you’ll get blocked and/or reported. You have to be creative now to keep interest and attention up without beating people over the head. Try something different. Offer a resource. Have games and contests.

The old die hard is email. You create a list of friends, family, supporters and pretty much anyone who is in your contact list and send them information about your project. Your family may have to forgive you. Your friends will probably forgive you. Everyone else is going to get tired of you and either block you or just delete your emails unread.  Again, same rule as with Twitter and Facebook, give people something interesting. Put some effort into it. Please give me money. Please buy my dvd. Please watch my movie. Please vote for my movie. Those are not effort. Create a real newsletter. It’s easy to do in a multimedia format that subscribers can choose either to receive in plain text or html. Check on Word (and the Word webpage) for templates. There are templates all over the web. If you want to use a service like ConstantContact, they offer support and templates and wizards. Offer some updates and info on your project but expand it. Crew bios are cool and make people feel like they know you and are connected. Links to their other projects create a web of connections. And then put something extra in like a note about a cool blog you like about horror movies or maybe a charity you support.  Genre news, industry news, festival news are all tidbits you can add. Contests, especially that give followers a tiny piece of control in the project, like choosing the prop the murderer uses to kill the first victim, or choosing a character name or even getting a credit/thank you engage people by creating the feeling they are stakeholders. It’s really important to have that link you frequently see at the top of emails and newsletters that says “if you can’t read this, click here to go to a webpage.” Make sure you have a copy of the newsletter as a webpage so that people can tweet or blog or facebook the link (and having a service like AddThis that automatically will send a tweet or link makes it easier and more likely to happen.)

One of the best ways to engage followers, build audience and support and maybe even get some contributors for your funding drive is to allow a conversation among followers and with them. It should be part of your process on all the social media platforms, but it should also be part of your webpage.  Web platforms can be cheap. Hypermart has specials all the time for $2-4 a month, for one example. They offer 500 email addresses (your project, crew and principals can have an email address that they can access through webmail). They even have a newsletter handler so you can manage that all in one place. It can host a WordPress blog. It gives you statistics on visitors and what pages they’re looking at, updated anytime, so you can see what’s successfully reaching people. Most other hosting services like GoDaddy offer similar tools. With a blog you can write your updates and have it sent to Twitter and then to Facebook and LinkedIn as links with a service such as Twitter Feed. You should allow comments with approval. It’s a pain to check them-a spamcatcher like Askimet is a huge help-but people want to talk to you. Make it a conversation. If you really want to engage people, allow an even greater degree of interaction. Check out HitRECord.org, Joseph Gordon Levitt’s amazing space for collaboration and interaction with media. You’ve probably seen that even the major studios are getting this idea with sites such as the site for cutting a trailer for Sweeney Todd. If you have the web savvy or can get someone to help you having a place for supporters to post their own videos or links (you can use Vimeo or YouTube as the host and then place it on your site-a bit cheaper on the ole bandwidth). you can have forums-these are massively difficult to deal with both from a spam point of view- the bots that will attack and use your forums are endless and approving is an onerous task- and from a moderating point of view- the maturity level on the web is pretty low-people who think they are anonymous descend to a creepy low in behavior. Nested comments both on the blog and postings seem to work better-again see HitRECord.org for a good example. YouTube is an example of how not to do it- hundreds of nasty, off the subject, unmoderated comments. The fact that many big players allow a stream of negative comments and off topic comments and even comments of users abusing each other, doesn’t make them look like they are big enough and cool enough to allow criticism and freedom of expression. It makes them look like they aren’t listening and can’t be bothered. It’s not a conversation. Be as creative and out of the box as you can and make your website a destination.

Finally there’s LinkedIn, a very misunderstood and often badly used platform. LinkedIn is meant to be more professional. If someone tries to connect with you just for the sake of connections numbers or to spam you, you can report them as unknown to you. Three strikes and they get put on suspension. There are very, very, big players here from multimillion dollar producers to studio execs, distribution execs and big money investors. You can make excellent business connections. You can get your work in front of important people. You can wreck everything and label yourself as an amateur and an annoyance with spam. Groups can be helpful. They tell people immediately what you’re associated with. But, they are now full of spammers, even the invitation/approval only groups. Choose carefully the ones you join. Toggle off the switch that says people can contact you from the group. If you don’t, anyone can email you and you can’t mark it as spam or mark them as unknown. If people see you on a group and want to contact you, they can still contact you and request a connection. And don’t be that person. DO NOT request connections from everyone, especially the bigger fish. You’ll get suspended quickly. Do not spam the group discussions. Here’s an example from Independent Filmmakers and Screenwriters . It started off well, but too many people are attention whores who don’t care that they have nothing to do with screenwriting or filmmaking but just want to grab Twitter followers. Plus there’s the guy who posts repeatedly and only sort of fits the brief.  I’ll bet he keeps reposting because he can’t figure out why people aren’t following him. Then there’s that conversation thing again. A lot of people posted. A lot of people not only didn’t bother to follow anyone else, they didn’t bother to follow back. Unfollow.  And don’t message spam people. Have interesting updates about what your doing. Have a well written resume. Ask and answer questions. Connect to your blog. Have a picture. Link to your project and post a pic or video to draw people to the site to see more. That will get you contacts and followers. Stay well away from the LION/ Open networking people. They are usually contact whores. They’ll spam you on LinkedIn and even subscribe you, unasked, to spammy crap newsletters-with the arrogant comment that because you are a contact that means you want their junk. They are by and large useless. They aren’t interested in your project. They want hundreds of followers and they’ll just jam up your inbox and feed with their endless self promotion (See? That could be you if you aren’t careful.) Use LinkedIn as if it is a 24/7 interview for your dream job. be careful, but never sell yourself short.

Finally, there is the other side of the coin. Inevitably with a heavy web presence, you are going to be the victim of spam. The best way you can help yourself and help everyone else is to report it and block it. On Twitter hit the button for Report for Spam and Block. If you follow a link and the site is not legit, then (after you make sure someone wasn’t hacked) block and report and then report the site. McAfee Site Advisor lets you submit a report. You can report phishing sites at US-CERT. Do it. It takes a few seconds but if everyone did this then crap wouldn’t float around and the percentage return for spam would be much lower. On Facebook you can also report messages and profiles for spam. Do it. It helps you and helps everyone else. If you think it’s a simple case of bad judgment or inept management, you can send a nice message. Be prepared not to be thanked. Arrogance and stupidity seem to be strongly linked. We’ve already talked about what to do on LinkedIn and that just leaves email. Most of us have spam filters. click a button and it reports spam to your host and also fine tunes the spam filter. But try, at least sometimes (like for those obnoxious newsletters from LinkedIn contacts that you didn’t opt in for) to take it a step farther and report it to SpamCop. SpamCop will not only report the spam to leading lists of spamming isp’s and websites, they’ll identify the true senders and who hosts the websites and email and make complaints there too. It’s a great, free service-that should also be supported if you can.

Be the content and the conversation that you would like to enjoy yourself. DON’T BE A MEGAPHONE. Be cool.

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Posted on: September 1st, 2010 YouTube Plans Mainstream Film Rentals … Again

Google is reportedly in talks with the major movie studios to launch full-length video rentals on YouTube by year’s end.

YouTube has already experimented with film rentals, offering selections from the Sundance Festival earlier this year when it would not rule out the addition of Hollywood movies. And the site was reportedly in talks with the same studios around this time last year, so this does not come as much of a surprise, the Financial Times’ “scoop” notwithstanding

via YouTube Plans Mainstream Film Rentals … Again | Epicenter | Wired.com.

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Posted on: September 1st, 2010 YouTube Pushes Free Full-Length Movie Section – Here’s What to Watch – Cinematical

After becoming a mecca for everything from fan sobbing to music videos and pirated films, YouTube finally decided to get into the legit film rental business. Sundance films were offered up for a small fee, but it was deemed a flop, having less than 1500 rentals for five films. They followed that up with allowing filmmakers to put up their own films and charge a rental fee. Now, after the money aspects seem lackluster at best — especially in a world with unlimited Netflix streaming “rentals” — YouTube has jumped into the free market, fueling films with commercial interruptions.

Though, as The New York Times pointed out earlier this year, there has been some free, older titles on the site for a while, YouTube is now primed to battle Hulu and other free-film sites with their own selections. Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of B and C schlock on the list, and many movies already available on free platforms, which we’ve detailed in our on-going Free Flick of the Day (Open Your Eyes, Smiley Face). But there are some gems to check out as well. Hit the jump and dig in.

via YouTube Pushes Free Full-Length Movie Section – Here’s What to Watch – Cinematical.

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Posted on: September 1st, 2010 10 Great Free Film Financing Tools, Downloads and Samples

Many free film tools and samples exist across the internet and here is a great starter list of free budgets, guides, books and more for the Independent Filmmaker.

via Free Film.

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Posted on: September 1st, 2010 Free Webinar for Screenwriters: creenwriting for New Media’ Reveals: How to Get Paid Handsomely to Write for Mobile Devices and the Internet

Attention: Ambitious Screenwriters! You’re invited to attend an exclusive live, streaming video event. Best Part – it’s absolutely FREE!

Foremost Authority on ‘S- Which Can Ultimately Lead to Lucrative Opportunities in Film and TV Writing!

Watch this short, minute and a half video to see how Frank Chindamo – President and Chief Creative Officer of Fun Little Movies – can show you how to write for new media, get paid for it, and in the process – create a wealth of new opportunities in film and TV writing! PLUS – you get to ask your questions, live and in real time!)

via The Business of Show Institute.

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