Indie 2.0: Inspiring a Generation of Artists

As you may recall, in a previous post I talked about how filmmaker Kevin Smith announced he planned to market his next movie, Red State, using just social media and entirely without studio support. He has since not only made back the cost of the movie, something several recent summer blockbusters have failed to do, but also launched an internet radio station, filmed a pilot for a new TV talk show and started work on his final film, Hit Somebody.

The story of Kevin Smith is enthralling, but what’s more exciting is that it is far from unique. As far back as 2004, the British director Franny Armstrong made the eco-documentary The Age of Stupid, pioneering “crowd-funding”, a method whereby the financing (£450,000) was raised by selling shares to individuals and organisations, who all received a pro-rata share of the profits.

Now with the decline of the printed book and the rise of the eBook, supported by recent announcements by both Borders and Penguin books publisher Pearson, many authors are self-publishing and promoting their latest page turners.

For example, Toronto writer Blake Northcott decided to launch a Kindle version of Vs. Reality, a “comic book-inspired urban fantasy novel” on Amazon.com. During the nine months she spent writing the comic and movie blog, she amassed a 16,000 strong Twitter following, more than 1,700 personal Facebook friends and 4,500 page views providing real-time feedback on her work. To put that into perspective, it’s more than Image Comics, the world’s largest independent comic book artist publisher.

Even those authors that still have the financial and marketing support of their publishers are realising the opportunity around social media in promoting their work.

John Green’s latest book, The Fault in our Stars, recently landed the number-one spots on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com. This isn’t particularly strange – expect the book won’t be published until 2012. Using a variety of social media tools, including Twitter, Tumblr, community forums and YouTube, he has created a community around his work and unprecedented pre-orders have followed.

This presents a conundrum for any artist. Consider the extra blood, sweat and tears that self-distribution requires; engaging with followers via social media instead of getting that final chapter done, which is surely self-defeating, but also becoming an intrinsic part of the marketing mix which was traditionally handled by the publisher.

Thanks to social media however, artists across the globe are writing their own rules about branding and fan engagement.

Communications today is about relevance say Brodeur

A great blog from Andy Colville and our friends at Brodeur on the changing world of communications and how ‘relevance‘ now sits at the core of their agency’s mission. Brodeur is committed to helping clients become—and remain—relevant in an increasingly noisy and turbulent environment. Relevance moves people from passive to involved and actually gets them to act. As we know, simply shouting louder does not make you relevant. For communications to succeed in today’s rapidly changing communications world – campaigns have to be ‘relevant’. Here in Europe, onechocolate is doing something similar – listening to each client’s particular communications challenges and then delivering campaigns that have them joining the important conversations and getting them talked about in all the right places. Like the blog Andy and good luck with the new vision, it’s very exciting.

Social networks? Watch out for friends’ posts while you are searching for information online

Last week Google announced that it was planning to implement changes to its Google Social Search platform to include posts from people’s online friends into its standard search results. The social search results, which previously appeared at the bottom of the page, will now be mixed throughout the list of results based on their relevance. Another interesting change in the search engine functionality is that users will be prompted to connect their social networking accounts any time Google’s algorithms find a public account that might belong to the same user.

As social networking profiles become more interconnected, people will be able to see publicly shared links posted by online ‘friends’ and connect their Twitter, YouTube, Flickr or Quora accounts. However, the upgraded social search engine will not include posts from the social networking giant Facebook. This does not come as a surprise as the two companies have a long history of trying to ‘steal’ each other’s market share with Google tapping into social media and Facebook developing its own email platform.

Despite excluding Facebook, Google’s Social Search platform will offer access to much more information about users than it was previously available. Some people will question whether this is entirely a good idea. Google seems sensitive to the privacy issues and allows users to opt out of the social sharing service by not connecting their online accounts to the search platform. However, if any of your online friends is ‘connected’ and shares or retweets your posts, they will become publicly available in the search results. Moreover, it remains uncertain how you would be able to control who sees to your online posts once you have connected your social networking profiles to Google.

Overall these changes highlight a number of trends which will potentially impact social media PR and marketing. As social networks are increasingly woven into online search engines and online profiles can be easily linked, businesses will be able to reach wider audiences and niche customer segments. SEO practices will be adjusted to take into account the rising importance of social networks for placing content in the top ranking of people’s search results. This will result in more intricate and subtle integration of social media tools into PR and marketing campaigns and will place higher importance on online networks.

Yeo Valley Farm – a truly integrated and memorable campaign

It was no coincidence  that just before Christmas, I was reading an interesting editorial profile in the Sunday Times magazine on the family behind Yeo Valley Farm when their ad campaign was also breaking during the finals of the X-factor.   This editorial along with many other articles were appearing in conjunction with a TV ad campaign that’s edgy and also quickly became a youtube hit . The Yeo Valley campaign is one very recent example of a powerful PR campaign working alongside advertising and also integrated with social media.  The campaign  introduced Yeo’s digital presence encouraging viewers to access their new website. Very quickly, Yeo Valley has 19.3million tweet impressions, and 1.5 million youtube views. Great to see a campaign that had such a strong mix of marketing tools and working so well together.

New era, new job titles

I love Brian Solis – whenever you wonder whether your social media thoughts and experiences are going in the right direction– you can always count on Brian and his industry friends to put some perspective on it.

His latest piece is well worth a read as he talks about the ‘beginning of the end of business as usual and the socialization of business’. He argues that there is a new business  role model that is currently unwritten. This reminded me of something my son’s headmaster said at prize day recently, that our children are being educated for roles that don’t currently exist!

In Brian’s latest thought piece, he talks about the need for a corporate social media strategist who is neutral and can change the business and drive social media through every aspect of the organisation – without that – social media is all a bit tactical and piecemeal – a bit of blogging here, a bit of tweeting there but it’s not really making a real difference to the business and the way it performs long-term. 

This is definitely the beginning of an era of a new phase in business. Without someone driving it from the top – it just won’t happen in a way that will impact the performance of any business.

So in five years time will the job title of coporate social media strategist be in every organisation and not just the ones who have embraced social media as part of their business strategy’. What will their skills be made up of  – consultancy thinking, digital skills and marketing knowledge?