It was the first time I got paid to write actually, during the heady days of the dot com boom, when you could barely walk down the street without a venture capitalist hitting you with a sack of money.

Picture, if you will, the late 90s. I was recently out of the NYU film program, scrapping together a living writing coverage on zombie film scripts for Dimension Films and working as a camera assistant on independent films. Those were more profligate times, and luckily enough a plum writing gig landed in my lap: a start-up entity called Indieplanet.com needed someone to write for their film “channel.”

My beat was how technology was reshaping the independent film scene, notably how digital video was creating an atmosphere where anyone could make a film.

At the time, I was a bit enamored of true celluloid (I was a camera assistant, can you blame me?). I cast a slightly cynical eye on the disappointing flatness of the video technology of the day. If you can score a name actor for your film, I remember thinking, couldn’t you shell out a couple of bucks for some short ends?

A decade later, video technology has come a long way, people are shooting movies with digital SLR cameras, Indieplanet is long defunct (thanks for the launch party, though, guys, it was raging!), and yet somehow I’m still preoccupied with DIY uses of technology.

Only, now I’m not as focused on lenses, grain and the inherent limitations of digital. These days, the DIY technology I care most about has to do with the web, and specifically how the little guy (whether that’s an independent artist, a nonprofit, or a small business) can create compelling, socially integrated website on a low budget.

Toward a more social web

I’m talking about WordPress, of course. But I’m also talking about an approach to web development that is more than the sum of its technological parts.

Everybody’s needs a website these days. We all know that. But having a website is not enough.

Your website needs to be a jumping off point to a whole set of aggregated conversations, peripheral social networks, and connections.

It’s simply no longer enough to give users a destination on the web.

Now, when we are successful as website creators, what we are giving users is just an entry point, a fluid, dynamic and evolving way of touching and engaging in a conversation that happens well outside of any particular web address.

This year, in developing a website for the for the New York Film Festival, I was cognizant of that significant change, and so all of our efforts were aimed at achieving a sophisticated social integration with the website. Twitter and Facebook live on top of all pages; we opened up many pages to comments, and via Facebook Open Graph, were able to offer our users an easy way to hook into the conversation with their Facebook logins.

Shareability was central to our vision of how this site would look and perform, and in many ways, we were hugely successful. It helped that we were able to push out the web’s first review of the new David Fincher movie, The Social Network. But more than that, we were able to take advantage of the trend toward greater social integration to create a website that does a lot more than simply serve up information or transactions.

Not bad for a blogging platform and a virtually nonexistent budget.

The background

Another lesson from independent film still resonates with me now: limitations breed innovation.

Before coming to the Film Society, I had only worked on large websites with large staffs and sophisticated divisions of labor. Being in a nonprofit setting forces you to handle web projects in a completely different way. I knew the organization needed web properties that were dynamic and socially integrated. But when resources for significant web development projects were scarce, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I wanted us to be able to be in new spaces and platforms.

View from the Avant-Garde 2009

The first custom project my team took on for the Film Society was for a yearly film series called Views from the Avant-Garde. The programmers of that four-day series of film felt that the web didn’t fully do justice to the visual and innovative nature of their series.

This unfortunately happens with many organizations that handle many different types of content on the web; the infrastructure you build to treat core issues comes up short when confronting the specific or the idiosyncratic.

The Views microsite, 2009

So in confronting this challenge, I set out to make some specifically suited to Views, something highly visual and something that would offer the web visitor an entry point that was as enticing and unique as the program itself. WordPress was an obvious tool for such a task, and this early experience in hacking a template and reverse engineering proved to be a fruitful one.

Newdirectors.org

Onto a biggest festival and a bigger set of challenge: New Directors/New Films.

My second major custom web development project for the Film Society brought two major brands into one coherent web destination for the very first time.

For many years this wonderful festival of new works has been stymied by a diffuse set of web presences on the Film Society side and the MoMA side. Newdirectors.org changed all that, and helped this festival gain a stronger purchase in the consumer’s mind and lifted this year’s fest to it’s best ever sales performance.

It was great to be able to deliver a streamlined consumer-facing product, but some of the most exciting things we developed during this project took place on the backend. Instead of static HTML we had easily editable pages. Pages we could schedule for publication. Slideshows that impressed but didn’t have to be painstakingly developed by our graphic design team.

I was ready for a bigger challenge. This year, the venerable new York film festival opens with none other than the social network, a film about “the Facebook” as it is referred to in the film.

I had talked the social media talk, but had I really walked the walk?

With this new website, I knew I needed to raise the bar considerably.

In Part II of this article, I’ll talk about some of the successes, and challenges, we faced in creating a socially integrated film festival site for this year’s New York Film Festival.

The answer is, match the right tool to your objective, and you’ll have a killer online campaign ready in no time. So in crafting these resolutions for the “little guy,” I’d like to share some of my favorite DIY tech tools and how they can be used for maximum impact online.

Resolution for creative individuals: go beyond the resume

2009 has been a tough year for those working in both traditional and online media. People with fabulous qualifications and skills are having to knock on a lot of doors. So in these challenging times, creative types need to use every tool in their arsenal to set themselves apart. It’s not enough to have a killer resume. You also need a killer online brand. The good news is that technology is on your side.

A few months ago, I stumbled across a startup called Flavors.me. The concept is simple and readily graspable–a Flavors.me page is meant to bring together all the various strands of a person life in social media–but in practice you can see there’s also a lot of ways to use this platform for a quick, high-impact branding initiative.

Easy-peasey online portfolio

By setting up some affiliated content on Vimeo, Flickr and the like, I was able to put together a quick online portfolio in no time at all. In fact, I had such a positive experience that I recommended the platform for a new young donor cultivation initiative for my organization; you can see that here:

Quick, pop-up campaign site

Resolution for Small Business People: Get Yourself Seen Online

Using a simple aggregator to pull together various online strands of social media activity is an excellent strategy for small businesses as well. But too often, I hear that small business owners are intimidated by the online space. An instructive example: A friend of mine’s father-in-law is a talented potter who sells his goods in craft markets in the midwest. His one-of-a-kind product is the kind of thing that could certainly find an appreciative audience via the web, not to mention, he could certainly stand to find great advice on growing his business via a fine network of craftspeople on Twitter and Etsy.

The bottom line is niche is great when you’re talking about the online space. If you are a distinguished purveyor of distinctively glazed ceramic pieces or one of a handful of establishments in Brooklyn who fills growlers, all you need to do to expand your business is learn how to stake your territory online. The barriers to entry aren’t difficult, but they do start with becoming a part of the conversation, whether through starting a blog or being a part of Twitter. Anything you can put up online becomes a trail of breadcrumbs that will lead new customers to your product, whether through the social networking space or through search. After all, it doesn’t cost anything to try, and the rewards of getting an online presence established can be enormous.

Resolution for folks working in nonprofit marketing and development: use more video

It’s never a bad idea to use more video. We know that the word “video” increases open rate for email newsletters. And there’s just something about a personal appeal that make a huge difference when you are working on a donor campaign. Take a look at this example from City Opera. It instantly creates an urgency about giving, and it sets itself apart from the million other direct mail pieces that are competing for donors’ attention.

While I believe that paying professionals to produce great video is worth it, take a look at a couple of DIY-rooted pieces I produced for the Film Society. In the first, we were just hoping to raise more awareness of a new rush ticket program during the New York Film Festival. This piece was made with a Flip Cam, an intern, and some willing colleagues.

Below, you’ll see a more professional looking product that I nonetheless made on a shoestring budget, with the program After Effects. We paid for professional-quality sound work, as well as royalty free music on this one, because those are two things that are hard to fake, even with all of these great DIY tools. I’m proud to say that not only was this commercial running on Time Warner Cable for several weeks, it also garnered over a 1000 hits on YouTube on an incredibly short space of time. It was also a great entry to the program on our website–making a change from our usual text-based introduction.

So how do you get started? Don’t be afraid to experiment. Find great spokespeople in your organization (nonprofits are generally wealthy with passionate people) and capture them on camera. Come up with a fun skit to put on YouTube or Facebook. Learn to use a cheap or free program like iMovie. There’s no reason to be intimidated! This is another area where there is little to lose, and much to gain.

Resolution for bloggers and other webbies still using tired-old templates: master WordPress

I love reading blogs and know many bloggers who have great content, but they’re still using the tired old basic WordPress blue template or something shopworn from Blogger. My question is why when incredibly sophisticated design work is available for cheap and it’s easy to implement.

My favorite tool is Worpress, and not just for blogs. But in order to unlock all of the magic that is WordPress, the first step is to move to a self-hosted setup. You need to pay for a hosting account (Bluehost is my personal fave), which costs a couple hundred bucks for a couple years of hosting. With that, you get your own url, plus the ability to put together a custom site on a shoestring. Just google “cool wordpress themes,” look through the WordPress.org theme directory, or look in the footer for site credits of blogs you enjoy.

Customization is a topic that could merit its own post, but I warn you, once you get hooked, you will want to make sites for everything!

I’m always on the look-out for creative uses of DIY tech, so if you’ve got your own, I hope you’ll share it in the comments!

Amanda McCormick creates online and multimedia for the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Follow her on Twitter, or connect with her on Linked In.

One of the most interesting discoveries I made while at South by Southwest Interactive was all of the exciting stuff people are doing with Advanced Programming Interfaces, or APIs. Did I lose you at “advanced” or “interface” and you want to go back to reading about Terminator? Don’t worry if you have no idea what an API is–I didn’t either, until I did a little poking around the Internet. Shelly Bernstein of the Brooklyn Museum wrote a very helpful explanation for all us non-programmers. Simply put, organizations can use APIs to open up their vast libraries of information (the New York Times archives, the collections at the Brookyn Museum) so that outside developers can develop new ways for users to access that information.

The next time you get something useful from Twitter, a Facebook ap or your iPhone, thank a movement that is goosing large, information-rich organizations to get more of their information out there via APIs. A badge on your blog that serves up relevant content from your favorite publication, or a mini-gallery straight to your iPhone are two ways that the collaboration fostered by APIs can manifest.

It turns out that “social networking” is more than just updating your Facebook status. And as organizations begin to open a two-way conversation with the public via social media, we would be remiss in failing to recognize the opportunities in the kind of information sharing that can grow out of APIs. This is a different type of social/online interaction–inviting in talented collaborators from the tech world to help us do a better job of getting vital information into new spaces–but as mobile devices begin taking over the world, an increasingly vital one.

And while the Film Society of Lincoln Center isn’t equipped yet to offer our visitors creative and/or mobile access our deep reservoir of knowledge on classic films and festival selections from the New York Film Festival and New Directors/New Films, it isn’t hard to imagine a future in which we will be able to index exactly that sort of content, and serve as a resource for students studying film, offer movie-lovers a mobile gateway into a deeper understanding of what they’ve just seen, or to simply help someone select a new discovery from our diverse offerings.