I recently participated as an audience member in Hurst, “the first ever Twitter horror movie,” written and directed by UK filmmaker Kristi Barnett. It unfolded over the course of three weeks via Twitter as a girl named Karen Barley shared her day to day life through real-time tweets, Foursquare alerts, and pictures, audio and video clips from her phone. (You can find it all archived here.) I went into it knowing it was unlikely to have a happy ending, but was highly curious about how it would feel to have a story delivered to me in this manner. Here are my thoughts about what worked and what didn’t, and (because I just can’t help myself) some ideas about the digital marketing for such a uniquely delivered story. Continue reading “Scary Tweets – My Twitter Horror Movie Experience” »

I’ve been seeing the term “social TV” a lot lately. This phrase describes the practice of using your computer, tablet or smartphone to connect with your friends (perhaps through social media like Twitter) or to access interactive/community enhancements while watching a live television program. Statistics show this use of a second screen (or even third) during TV viewing happens half the time. The older audience is checking email, but the younger demographic (18-24) are interacting and chatting with their friends about the content they are watching. Some futurists see this as the saviour of traditional TV programming where people will once more gather to watch shows at the scheduled time of broadcast in order to share or enhance their viewing (advertising included), instead of watching pre-recorded shows and jumping over all the commercials. Others see social TV as nothing but distraction media, another multi-tasking, disruptive element in our already busy and over stimulated lives. How has social TV evolved? How will it change how screen media producers think about and plan their content? And what are the online marketing opportunities coming from this phenomenon? Here are my thoughts. Continue reading “Social TV – The “Second Screen” Elephant in the Room” »

Last week I looked at YouTube SEO for screen media creators. This week I turn my attention to some of the other big social media players that are not necessarily video focused, but should still be a priority for any search engine optimization strategy. As I’ve stated countless times, social and search are so integrated now you really cannot have one without the other as part of an effective digital marketing plan for your film, TV, web series or transmedia project.  Here are my six tips for getting the most out of Internet search with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn: Continue reading “6 Tips for SEO of Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn” »

As a screen media content creator, one of the most important online venues for your work is going to be YouTube. Not only is the video site being used as a search engine in its own right (second only to Google according to Comscore), but video results from YouTube dominate Google’s search results. It is extremely important to have a strategy to help your online video do well on YouTube searches as well as on the more traditional search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. Here are my six top tips for YouTube search engine optimization (SEO): Continue reading “6 Tips for Optimizing YouTube for Internet Search (YouTube SEO)” »