What the revolution looked like in 1895

I got my start working in indie film during one of its most exciting boom times: the late 90s. Miramax was ascendant, million-dollar deals were being cut at Sundance, and digital video technology (and the abundance of credit card offers) was putting feature filmmaking into the reach of regular people.

What the revolution looked like when I was a teenager.

What a difference 10 years makes! Miramax is gone, along with much of the studio interest in small projects, and it’s becoming harder and harder to mobilize large groups of people to turn out for challenging fare at the movie theater.

As much as some of our most beloved institutions have crumbled, there is a bright side:

• Digital video technology is now finally something to get excited about. Low-budget filmmakers now can choose the medium that fits the message, whether its the crappy-looking VHS used by Harmony Korine in Trashhumpers or the crisp and polished DSLR cinematography of of Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture.
• Digital video communities like Vimeo are creating a vibrant alternative space for creators to get their work out there, interact with kindred spirits, and get seen by an appreciative community.
• The rise of social media and the omnipresent nature of an incredibly vibrant array of independent media via the Internet allows for tremendous new exposure to powerful cinematic innovation outside of the traditional system of seeing films on television or at the movie theater.

But with technology so rapidly changing the way we both make and see movies, with audiences abandoning the movie theaters and getting rid of their televisions, those in the motion picture arts are left facing an uncertain future.

Should this be frightening or invigorating? I guess it depends on your investment in the past. Too often the discussion around where film is “going” enforces old and outdated dichotomies–studio vs. indie, videos of cats playing the piano on YouTube vs. “art.”

“We are in the silent age for storytelling,” said Lance Weiler of the WorkBook Project, during his speech at the Open Video conference in October. And over the past year, as I have been immersing myself as much as possible in emerging areas for motion picture making, I’m inclined to agree.

A variety of really interesting events that I’ve recently attended, including Vimeofest, Open Video, and earlier in the year, The Conversation, had different ways of grappling with the challenges of the future, but all were pretty clear about one thing: the most exciting things happening in film right now are increasingly not happening in the movie theater, or at least in our traditional concept of the movie theater space, where an audience passively sits in padded chairs and takes in something projected on a screen.

Films in new containers and new spaces

Vimeofest, which was held in Chelsea at the IAC building on October 8 & 9 was full of vibrant illustrations of the frontiers of creative movie-making, both on the high and low end.

The Disposable Film Festival, which presented a small showcase of films at the gathering, provoked a huge amount of delight. The mission of the festival is to showcase creative work that is made on non-professional devices such as laptop video cameras, cell phone cameras, and FlipCams. Just take a look at the ingenuity of the following:

I love this stuff–it’s handmade with a passionate ingenuity, portable and bite-sized. Which is exactly on point with how what we see is changing, along with how we see it.

On the pricier and larger-scale side of the equation, there was English collective Seeper Arts, with a brilliant demonstration of what “projection mapping” can be. I admit that after reading the press notes, I was not all that excited about watching something projected on the side of a building. But the performance truly was breathtaking, an inspiring feat of contextual, three-dimensional use of motion picture technology.

What the revolution looks like circa 2010?

Alternative business models of distribution

While the theatrical distribution business slumps, novel, DIY methods of distribution and broadcast seek to bypass the gatekeepers and put more power in the hands of the audience.

By now just about everyone is familiar with OK GO from their fantastically successful viral videos that incorporate all manner of quirky accouterments, including dogs, treadmills and pale hipsters with good dance moves. At an Open Video keynote, frontman Damien Kulash led the audience on his band’s circuitous journey from low-priority conglomerate pawn to grass roots YouTube sensation.

When the band first made their famous treadmills video, the record company’s lofty chief digital strategist told them: “if this gets out, you’re sunk.” The band gleefully continued, grew a tremendous fan base, cut the record company loose, and now do things the way they want to. “The fact that we can live in harmony with our fans is Valhalla to me,” Kulash said of a much more open and socially integrated model of the distribution of media.

Arin Crumley, who spoke at both The Conversation and the Open Video conference, is an inspiring upstart and a new kind of indie film mogul, posing a completely different form of exhibition and distribution. After making the scrappy feature “Four-Eyed Monsters,” he decided to distribute the film on his own, by creating a grass-roots online mechanism where audiences could request the film–which is a great model for film that the powers-that-be might term “hard to market.”

Check out Crumley’s DIY distribution case study:

Lance Weiler speaks frequently (he was at all three of the conferences I referenced above), and if you get a chance to see him, don’t miss it. He’s a new media pioneer and a champion of the world of transmedia storytelling. That’s storytelling that transcends the ordinary containers of “feature film,” “television show,” “novel.” It’s a more expansive view of what narrative can be and how it can fill in the spaces between old media conceptions of entertainment.

And it’s worth noting that amid all of the hue and cry about audience “abandoning” film and books, they are not actually abandoning narrative or storytelling. Lance is doing a great job of opening up a thrilling view of what’s possible in a world where choices of media don’t enforce strict (and some might say old-fashioned) divisions. I love hearing about how Lance has tweaked the concept of “interactivity” to encompass both real-world and virtual spaces.

So…what’s next?

A recent AdWeek column asked whether people will really adapt to watching television on their computer screen. My response is that they already have. As soon as the analog signal was switched off, broadcast TV’s goose was cooked. People are sick of cable monopolies and are simply turning to other forms of entertainment, such as games, in ever increasing numbers.

Add to that the stunning possibilities offered up by ever-more accessible filmmaking technologies, social media and online video communities like Vimeo, and it simply no longer makes sense to cling to outdated models that have reigned for just a blip in the overall human tradition of storytelling and image-making.

The revolution is much closet than you think on your iPad, your mobile phone, your computer screen, and maybe even the building down the street. Get ready.

Just in case you want an easy way to follow what some of the people I mentioned in this article are doing, I’ve created a Twitter list right here.

One of the most interesting discussions in our class was about measuring the impact of your efforts within the social media space. If social media is more about building community, affinity, and conversation, are there ways to express those efforts in numbers, or analytics?

It’s a complicated question that takes a little investigation to unpack. Yes, the impact of our efforts in social media are measurable, and growing more so everyday, thanks to the Facebook Open Graph Protocol. At the same time, social media practitioners lack a master dashboard like Google Analytics that will help us link up the insights across the different networks.

Further, a major challenge we face is that we want to track two different kinds of behaviors: what users do when they interact with our brand presences on Facebook and Twitter, and what they do with our content on those networks.

So which numbers matter in social media?

There are more than I can possibly catalog in this post. But let’s start with…

The big one:

Fans and followers–despite what anyone says about quality vs. quantity, your follower count (especially as it compares to other organizations like yours) is still the simplest way to measure the effectiveness of your work in the social media space.

Informative numbers that are easy to eyeball:

Retweets–For a quick read on the “shareability” of your content, just look at how many times it is retweeted.

Facebook “likes”–A great innovation of the Facebook Open Graph Protocol was that it made interacting affirmatively with a website so darn easy. You don’t have to log in or do anything except hit a button that says “like.” Further, now you can do more than just like a brand or organization. You can like content that they post, or even their status updates.

Slightly harder to track but still important:

Facebook shares–To me, a “share” requires more effort than a “like,” and also requires the user to be more of an evangelist for your content. By “sharing” your content, a user is putting their support of your content into a newsfeed that her friends can see. “Liking” is a lot less visible and more personal.

Tweets of your content not including your handle–A bit harder to track, but you can see this by using Bit.ly or HootSuite, or Backtype.

Comments–This is another great innovation from Facebook, making comments incredibly easy via their interface. That’s why you will see more comments on Facebook for blog posts than on your blog itself. Comments on Facebook are worth counting when you are looking at the quality of the interaction you inspire on the social nets.

@ Replies–How much interaction are you inspiring and/or participating in? It’s a metric that’s worth keeping an eye on.

Stumbles and Diggs–can be important, depending on what your priorities are.

What tools exist for tracking these numbers?

Not a ton, I’m afraid to report. Here are the ones that I’ve come across, please let me know if you know of more.

On Facebook:

Facebook Insights–gives you an idea of what users are doing on your Facebook page, and how much they are interacting with your organization there. The drawback is that only gives you intel on a contained space (your Facebook page). It doesn’t tell you how users are using your branded content across Facebook.

Facebook’s Activity Feed Plugin–this allows you to enter your main URL and it tells you how your content is being shared on Facebook. Very interesting to see these stats, but I wonder how comprehensive it really is.

Third parties:

Radian6–this seems to me the major player in social analytics. Unfortunately I have never used it because it costs money! But from what I understand it gives you a social media dashboard that helps you understand your impact across networks.

Bit.ly–Twitter’s ubiquitous URL shortener, Bit.ly comes with a free dashboard that offers a quick hit on where your links are showing up and being shared.

HootSuite–like Bit.ly has a social media dashboard. This one tells you the links that you have used the ow.ly shortener for via HootSuite. It has an added feature of integrating Google Analytics, though it doesn’t give you a tremendous amount of insight about your total impact on social media, i.e., what users are doing with your content.

Backtype–this is a “marketing intelligence platform that helps brands and agencies understand the business impact of social media” and it served the main requirements for my needs–it was free! You just type in a URL and see its impact in terms of share, likes, comments, you name it. My main problem is that I wonder, how reliable are the stats?

Beyond numbers into nuances

So you’ve got a great following going. The next question to ask yourself is how are you using social analytics to improve the performance of your campaigns?

To answer this question, I reached out to two of the most socially-savvy organizations that I know of: The New York Public Library and the Tribeca Film, the organization that puts on the yearly Tribeca Film Festival, as well as other events and online initiatives.

Susan Halligan is the Director of Marketing at the New York Public Library, an institution that’s really using social media in a progressive way throughout the organization. Susan’s past tips have completely changed my Twitter game, making me a passionate convert to the HootSuite application, and her insights into social analytics inside of a large organization like the Library gave me new perspective on how analytics can and should be used to shape strategy and content development.

Last spring, the Library was confronted with an impressive number on their social media dashboard: several million views of their Ghostbusters video on YouTube, a project made in collaboration with Improv Everywhere. The brainchild of Heidi Singer at the Library, this serendipitous coming together caught the public’s imagination, and also served a purpose: supporting the Library’s public advocacy campaign during an important political season.

An impressive showing, but one-to-one interactions still matter quite a bit within the numbers they track via the social analytics tools at their disposal such as HootSuite, Google Analytics and Radian6. “Who are these people who are sharing things and are we making it easy for them to share our material?” Susan asks.

The analytics they track help them identify areas for new content creation and distribution, Susan explained. “For instance on Facebook, the most sharable type of content is pictures. Anytime we put up a picture it’s like ‘boom.’ I want to make it really easy for people to share those images and I want to know who is sharing those images,” she told me.

Further, analytics helps the library stay focused on core services: “People look to us for program/events and service, so anything we can offer around change in library hours, and what you can put on hold, gets massive hits. And what that tells us that there is a market for that.”

At Tribeca Film, the numbers that count are the ones that show they are successful in inspiring conversation. “The more people comment on our site, the more exponential our reach will be, as comments show up in [users'] personal news feeds,” explained Kristin McCracken, who is the Director of Web Content and Operations at Tribeca Film. To that end, most status updates pose a question and seek to engage a discussion.

On that note, Kristin gave me some great advice that I have taken to heart: repost your blog content to Twitter and Facebook by hand, without using automation tools such as Twitterfeed or Networked blogs. The reason? Context is everything. You need to be smart about the types of users who are on each network, and the action you need to take to make your content engaging and shareable.

If you want to know how to run a wildly successful fan page on Facebook, check Tribeca Film out for sure. Their posts connect to both the mission of the organization, and to what’s hot in the pop culture–and are extremely successful in sparking a high number of comments and “likes,” two incredibly important measurements when talking “engagement metrics.”

The bigger picture on social analytics

A couple of weeks ago I had a chance to explore the big brand perspective on social media while I was attending the AdWeek Social Media Strategies conference. “Shareability” was quite the hot topic–to the point where one panelist called it “the new SEO,” signaling a shift away from the preeminence of search and into a new focus on the power of social networks to raise awareness around brands.

Different brand marketers and ad people present at the conference had different ways of looking at social analytics as well. Important measurements of social media effectiveness were posed as the following:

• Numbers–how many followers?
• Engagement–how much commenting and interaction?
• Virality–how much is content being shared?
• Action–is this messaging causing the user to do anything (buy, join, sign up)?
• Advocacy–is this messaging turning the user into a “convert” who with positively influence others?
• Awareness–is this messaging contributing to an overall positive awareness of the brand?

All of these are the vital questions that those of us engaged in social media must ask ourselves regularly.

But the question that launched launched my investigation in the first place–how can we track social media metrics? ultimately left me without a satisfactory set of solutions.

It’s obvious that those of us engaged in the social media space need better tools for analyzing our efforts, both because it will help us run more effective campaigns and because great analytics are an essential “proof source” on the value of social media in organizations.

I’d love to hear from others though–how do you track your social media efforts, and what’s on your wish list?

Something pretty extraordinary happened between the time we developed newdirectors.org and were set to roll out the New York Film Festival website. That was, of course, the rapid adoption of the Facebook Open Graph Protocol, and how it almost overnight created incredible new social dimension for sites on the web.

Obviously, it’s no longer enough to just have a Twitter and Facebook profile floating around out there that you maybe link to from your homepage or email newsletter. And so when it came time to build the New York Film Festival website, I wanted to be able to use the tools that the big publishers like Huffington Post and CNN were using. Ambitious? Maybe. But I think that you’ll see that by using WordPress, unlocking those sorts of tools is actually pretty easy.

The New York Film Festival website 2010 incorporated Facebook and Twitter widgets in the sidebar. We specifically set out to make each film page “shareable” content, so each page presented the opportunity to tweet the page content (via Tweet Meme), and to “Recommend” via the Facebook interface.

We also included comments in many of the pages (though not all). For this interface, I chose to use a plugin called IntenseDebate. Many use Disqus for comments, but I liked the numbers of different useful features that IntenseDebate offers, including Facebook and Twitter login, and it also seemed a bit quicker to load on the front end.

Soon after launching, an article that we published by Scott Foundas on The Social Network, went completely viral–spiking up our traffic and leading to a lot of retweets and comments. It was a great launch for a site meant to inspire conversation. I was thrilled to see how many new people were coming to our content via Facebook and Twitter. The question was…would the effect last, and would people start using the tools that we had put into the site to share and discover?

Favorite features

Some of my favorite features might be a little hidden from the casual glance. Chief among them were a number of “recommendation tools” that go to one of our central challenges of offering a number of movies from all over the world during our film festivals. A plugin called “Related Posts” was easily tweaks for our use to return a list of related films at the end of each page.

Categories and tags helped us out in another way: they allowed us to create (and automate) customized feature pages for various aspects of the program: French, Latin American, Documentaries and many others. Finally, one of our incredible digital media assistants, Curtis Laraque, came up with another fabulous discovery tool via a dynamic tag cloud on the homepage:

What’s to come

While presenting to WordCamp NYC 2010 this year, I explained to the assembled crowd of bloggers and small businesspeople that we learned by doing, and how some of the mistakes that we made were as instructive as our successes.

Chief among those mistake was selecting a theme to customize that is no longer being actively developed. When I learned all of the things that are being developed around WordPress 3.0, I see even more potential as a vehicle for nonprofit web development. Multi-site holds a lot of potential for developing a number of sites around one branding, and custom taxonomies could potentially make WordPress a much more powerful content management system. I’m already attempting to experiment with Twenty Ten, and I’m impressed by all the variations and innovations that are already happening amongst the WordPress community.

Is a DIY approach for you?

I’d never claim to know every organization’s inner workings, goals or capabilities, and I’d certainly never suggest that there’s a one size fits all solution for growing a nonprofit via the web. I know too many experienced professionals–information architects, digital strategists, filmmakers and content creators–to respect the fact that every project has its own unique demands and parameters.

Plus, a DIY approach to web development can be crazy-making. In environments where it’s easier just to do nothing or where trying something new could inspire criticism, why try? (As an aside, just imagine my chagrin when I was called out by an SEO blogger in Texas for my insufficiency in deploying the optimal number of keywords in an article! When you make a site that performs at a high level of visibility, nobody cares how you made it, or how limited your resources were).

But another lesson from the world of filmmaking occurs to me know. For years I worked as a teaching assistant for NYU’s beginning film immersion class. It was an intensive film production class where we handed the kids a couple of rolls of black and white reversal film, an MOS camera, and a gigantic list of what they couldn’t do: no sync sound, no complicated story lines, no budget. There were always a few student who came back in and gleefully smashed all of our rules. That’s what made the class such a joy. Later on, when the same students were given bigger resources and more options, they froze up. Their work became less inspired and less inspiring.

Anyone can make a serviceable website with an “appropriate” amount of resources. What is exciting to me is seeing the innovation that comes from limitations, and how WordPress can allow even resource-strapped publisher achieve and perform on an extremely high level.

Then there was the Brooklyn Flea, a homespun hub of folksy branding for purveyors of lobster rolls, vintage cowboy boots and kimchee-strewn hot dogs.

Now there is the Greenpoint Food Market, an incongruous oasis of scrumptious micro-enterprise in a church basement in North Brooklyn. You can only catch it once a month, and I was there for the May edition on Saturday, May 22nd.

I admit that what drew me initially was the novelty of what was, essentially, a bake sale in hipster drag. I wanted the chance to scope out what a new generation of culinary mischief-makers would plate up in a subterranean space much better suited to church mixers and girl scout troop meetings.

To wit, hand pumped hibiscus soda:

But in between mouthfuls of handmade chocolate and pork buns, I had to stop and marvel at what a weird and wonderful time it is to be a creative person with an idea and just a little bit of gumption. It takes risk to start a business, but thankfully venues like these make that risk much more manageable.

In social media circles, we talk a lot about the notion of “self-branding,” that is, bringing all of the disparate channels of your online self into a coherent package. Nowadays anyone with can appropriate the trappings of “branding” from an elite world of ad agencies and corporations. Bring incubators like the Greenpoint Food Market into the picture and a robust trend toward micro-branding can transcend a set of snapshots of your pooch or plate of brunch. It can suddenly make creating a business within the reach of a lot more people.

I stumbled across Greenpoint Food Market not through press but through social media channels. I was watching a “haul video” and the young woman at the center had just received a package from a baked goodie company called Fanny & Jane. As soon as I heard the word “chocolate-covered red velvet cake,” I was on the case. A few Google searches connected me with not only the Market’s website, but also some of the vendors’ blogs and Twitter presences.

I’m well acquainted with a whole constellation of craft blogs that extol the virtues of the “passionately handmade” and it was enjoyable to see the hand-made food crowd doing much of the same, while trading the yarn for free-range eggs.

Jen Curran of Fanny & Jane runs a blog that is called, appropriately, Follow My Bliss, about her path from desk job to baked goods artisan and comedienne. The baked goods at the Market did not disappoint, and it looks like Jen and her partner have set up a great online shop with very reasonable prices and shipping for what are products of exceptional quality. I would highly recommend one of these bundles as a gift.

Another nascent business I found fascinating was Milkmade Ice Cream. I frequently make ice cream and consider myself a tough critic. The friend I had brought to the event was skeptical of Milkmade’s pricing structure–$50 for 3 pints of their ice cream, delivered to your door on a monthly basis. However, I tasted the product and after checking out the various web properties of the small company, I have to say I’m rooting for this duo to succeed.

They’re doing three things really, really right:

• Their ice cream is not a product, it’s the manifestation of being a part of a very small and selective club. Like the late-night TV pitchman says: “This amazing ice cream is not available in stores!” To get it, you have to buy a three month membership. At the Film Society, we’re currently working on membership campaigns and this sort of model, applied to ice cream, appealed to me. Instead of a simple transaction, it creates a relationship–and to me that’s essential for a grass-roots business to succeed.
• In cultivating scarcity, they enhance their efforts. Building off the above, offering fans membership into a small, select group, Milkmade further burnishes the specialness of the experience by vowing to never make the same flavor twice. I’d be more than willing to pay a premium to enjoy an incredibly rare experience.
• They are using the web and social media to great effect. Blog, check. Facebook page, check. Twitter, check. The photography they’ve got going is utter food porn, and the only pointer I might give them is to create a luscious gallery of those images on their site. That, paired with a list of flavors that just aren’t available to anyone else, is sure to drive up the mania for their product.

My excursion into Greenpoint was just a taste of the vitality that’s been gathering steam in Brooklyn over the past few years. And even though the Greenpoint Market was filled with whimsical notions that would surely make your typical product marketing manager blanch, I was thrilled to see  all the initiative–and the creativity packed into this unlikely space.