Tag: Target

Promoting a Film Festival for the Long Tail: a Digital Marketing Case Study

Paul Burani asked:

Since the birth of the moving picture, film has played an important role in the way people experience culture worldwide. This is apparent at the 400 film festivals which take place around the globe each year. These events give talented artists a venue to promote their work in front of a qualified, interested audience.

Like any dynamic art form, film is forever changing. New digital media have placed unknown independent artists on the same playing field as their more established, commercially-backed counterparts. Moreover, as access to cyberspace has become more universal, reaching the right audience has never been so easy.

Why is this? Because of “The Long Tail.” Originally an abstract concept introduced in a WIRED Magazine article from 2006, The Long Tail is now a mantra of digital marketing. Applied to marketing in film, the pre-Long Tail mentality was to conceptualize an artistic work with a specific target in mind, and then develop it to invite as big an audience as possible. Marketers would then direct their resources toward the audience within distribution range.

The goal was to make the next big summer blockbuster. But according to Chris Anderson, the author of the article, “hit-driven economics is a creation of an age without enough room to carry everything for everybody.” In other words, a new day has come.

In a post-Long Tail awakened world, we’ve found that most people’s taste in film goes beyond just mainstream appeal. With the recent onset of a limitless distribution range, the audience dynamic is changing. An American producer whose film deals with even the most esoteric subject matter now has its niche audience at arm’s length. Using the right digital marketing tactics, the filmmaker can draw those people in without burning through resources they way they might have during the pre-Long Tail era.

Filmmakers, now freed from the shackles of heavy distribution burdens, can finally create that masterpiece that was once deemed implausible. And with a continued stream of artists looking for exposure, the film festival industry now has the scale to reach far and wide…and find willing consumers around every corner. This is why, according to Anderson, the “cultural benefit of all of this is much more diversity, reversing the blanding effects of a century of distribution scarcity and ending the tyranny of the hit.”

Step-by-step: How to market a film festival to a Long Tail audience.

1) Create a home for your festival on the net.

Give your contestants a platform on which they can share a trailer of the film they plan to promote at your festival. Allow visitors to vote on the trailers, with a thumbs-up/thumbs-down or one-to-five-stars approach. This allows the best ones to rise to the top, creating a channel of the highest quality content, which can be used to draw in a large audience. This widens the timeline for audience engagement, and gives you a vehicle to convey supporting messages related to the festival itself.

You want a website where entrants can upload a trailer with minimal technical know-how. The easiest way to do this is to use YouTube as the host. Users worldwide simply create their own profile and/or channel on YouTube, submit their content, and then provide your site with a URL or embed code to the video. Each trailer then has its own landing page on your festival’s site, and should be accompanied by “Send To A Friend” and “Download To Your iPod” links, along with submission links for social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us.

(Note – It is important to limit the length of the trailer (two minutes would be a good round number), and make sure that the actual length of the YouTube video is clearly visible on your site. If a video requires a time commitment, a lot of people will click away without even looking.)

Make sure your site is scalable, in the event that you receive ten times the traffic you expected. Even if you are focused on quality content, be prepared for massive quantity as well. Your web developer needs to make you very confident that your site won’t buckle under pressure.

You’ll also want to add search capability (this is easy with Google Custom Search) do some user testing, or consult a usability expert on making your festival’s website as navigable as possible. Invest in good analytics software to follow trends in visits,

pageviews, referrals, keyword-driven traffic, and so on.

2) Give your festival a personality.

If your festival has a theme, make it very evident. Brand it consistently, from the copy writing to the graphic design to the outbound marketing communications. Everything must boil down to the seminal concept of what your festival is about. If it’s abstract, e.g. “good independent film,” that’s fine as long as you remain consistent.

Offer an incentive. Partner with local organizations in the host city, e.g. the Chamber of Commerce or a local Arts Council. Find a major event taking place which could benefit from a partnership; your contestants’ work might be a major asset to their program. The grand prize, apart from whatever you already decide to offer the winner(s), is the visibility of being associated with these organizations…and thus get in front of a large audience.

3) Define your stakeholders.

Your directors and producers are the ones supplying quality content–the lifeblood of your site and your best promotional asset leading up to the festival.

Your visitors are your primary source of feedback. Leverage their opinions wisely and you’ll find many ways to bring them back to your site, and to your festival–along with their friends.

The general public is the 6 billion people living on this planet. Some don’t have computers. Some don’t like film. But in line with The Long Tail concept, reaching just about everybody else is relatively easy…and the enthusiasts will come out of the woodwork.

Keep these people satisfied at every stage of your campaign, and your marketing engine will keep things moving with minimal intervention on your part.

4) Establish measurable goals.

How many directors do you think you could get to sign up? How many people would you like to visit the site and vote on trailers? How many views do you think a trailer of an eventual award-winner ought to receive? Arrive at a low, medium and high estimate, with a timeline of projections, and constantly measure your progress.

5) Leverage digital media channels to the fullest.

Social Networking. With a little bit of research, you can find the right social networking sites to target for your campaign. To leverage Long Tail potential to the fullest, use a network like Facebook or Myspace to co-brand content and engage new groups of people.

Facebook – Create a Facebook profile for each member of the organizing committee, and use this to administrate a dedicated Facebook Group. Have your developer create a Facebook application allowing artists to embed their trailer in their profile, with a module to solicit ratings on films. For viewers, the application should offer “on-demand” rankings of all trailers posted (across the entire Facebook network) to encourage healthy competition. It is also helpful to add calendar integration for notification of important dates in your mini-feed, and of course links back to the festival website and blog. If your festival features content from around the world, why not add a real-time updating

world map showing geographical location of all participating artists?

Myspace – On this network, you’re faced with a tradeoff. This is still the best place for artists (and art lovers) to nurture their passion. However, it may also be harder for you to cut through the spam and build a meaningful campaign. Compared to Facebook, spend far less time administrating the Myspace profile. It should simply be a “content dump” with regularly rotating trailers and blog content.

If you have a lot of manpower at your disposal, also consider a targeted approach to some of the industry-specific sites such as Flixster, MatrixMovies and Revver.

Search engines. Getting your festival to appear prominently in search engines requires an orientation toward dynamic content and inbound links. Start a festival blog in which organizers can collaborate to upload content on a daily basis. This will push a variety of relevant keywords out into cyberspace, tied to your website to bring people back for more.

For added juice, open the blog up to the general public — if the public is properly engaged, the volume of content will grow at a furious pace, along with the number of inbound links to your site. With a little creativity, you won’t have trouble coming up with original content: event news, featured films, press mentions, staff picks, etc. Make sure all blog content is accompanied by chicklets (links for easy posting) to popular social media sites, to increase the number of viral touch points.

If particular video content speaks to a particular audience, weed out the leaders of each category and make them aware of what you’re doing. Use Technorati to find the most prominent bloggers in these categories, and approach them personally and individually, offering them your content and/or reciprocal links.

Find every event site related to film, digital media, arts & culture, as well as the city where your event will be hosted. Create a reference sheet containing your event’s title, a short description, a long list of comma-separated tags, a shorter version of the same list, and other pertinent information which will need to be standardized across all submissions. Put on a pot of coffee and hammer away.

It would also help to hire a search engine optimization (SEO) consultant to handle the keyword strategy and tactical implementation. This will make your pages friendly to the spiders sent out by Google, Yahoo! and the like.

Email Communications. Decide your strategy from the very beginning: do you force everyone (directors and audience) to register, thereby creating a nice long distribution list? Or do you scale back the mandatory registration, requiring registration only to post content? You can also find a middle ground, offering certain incentives for opt-in (such as winning a pair of free all-access passes to the festival). The registration module will allow you to also collect additional demographic information (city/state, age, gender, etc.) but if you go this route, make sure you have given some thought to your privacy policy.

Sponsorship. This will vary based on your resources and network. If you have advertisers on board for a lot of money, your marketing communications will give you a variety of venues to feature them (website banners, emails, plus your entire arsenal of offline marketing assets). If you have no major sponsors but still want to explore advertising revenue, you can always use a program like Google AdSense for a very customizable on-page sponsored link campaign.

Downtime. After your festival, you’ll be faced with a decision: do we want to do this again next year? You may not be ready to decide right away, but there’s plenty you can do to capitalize on the momentum of your event, to keep marketing your concept.

Ongoing global link sharing campaign with partners of various categories

Blog coverage of other major film festivals

In-depth profiles of festival award-winners

Discovery of worthy short films not originally submitted to the festival site

Film industry interviews (available as podcasts)

Conclusion

Once all these elements of your digital marketing campaign are off the ground, the last thing to do is convey your scope to your artists. You’re in the festival business, which in 2008 means you’re hardly concerned with the manufacturing and distribution concerns of the filmmakers. But this talented constituency is still waking up to the opportunities of the Long Tail economy.

If you have the numbers, give your artists a pat on the back by showing them the geographic reach of your festival. Repackage the most compelling feedback on submitted videos into a rotating “ticker” in the banner of your website. Do whatever you can to give these filmmakers–the authors of content without which you’d be in business–an extra incentive to keep going.

In a world in which, as Anderson says, “popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability,” we’ll all be better off because of it.

Parenting Secrets For Keeping Your Kids Safety

Joyce Jackson asked:

There are Five Safety Secrets that truly make kids safe. These Secrets set the foundation of true safety for a lifetime in children, and can do the same for your child.

These Secrets will also surprise you. They work quietly and effectively beneath the surface of your child’s brain. If you use these Five Secrets, they will make any safety technique that much more effective. Without these Five Safety Secrets, your child will never be able to keep themselves safe. Ever.

Secret #1: Confidence.

Confidence and a positive self image are crucial in good child safety. Confident kids are less of a target for sexual predators. Not only do they stand taller and keep their heads up higher, they represent a problem, a less than easy victim for sexual predators.

Confident kids project “struggle” for any predator trolling for kids and more often than not, predators will pass them by. More often, predators will choose kids that appear weak and sad, a child in need of a friend. These are the kids that hang their heads, shuffle down the street and have a hard time looking anyone in the eye when they talk to them.

Confidence is a powerful deterrent.

And yet, there is something more, something deeper when your child is confident. Confident kids display certain structural changes, physical changes in their bodies that serve them better than kids that have poor self-images. Confident kids can control their physical movements a little bit better. At the same time, they can move more quickly and with finer control of those movements. We find confident kids can actually focus better mentally and for longer periods of time.

In other words, these kids are better equipped physically, mentally and emotionally to learn the actual safety techniques that could save them from sexual predators than kids that feel bad about themselves. Kids that hang their head, shuffle around, are tired or ill, cannot move with as much control or quickness or think as clearly as kids that are healthy and confident. A high degree of self confidence and a positive self image matter in good child safety.

Secret #2: Empowerment.

Empowering your child to take care of themselves is one of the most powerful Safety Secret you can learn.

When you empower your child, you truly teach them to make choices for themselves. When you mentor them as a parent you actually guide them into learning to make good, positive choices for themselves on their own. When they can do this, they will truly be safe for a lifetime.

In its simplest form, empowerment means your child feels like they have a measure of control over their life. They feel they can make their own decisions. Most kids don’t feel this ability. Most kids do not have it, either. Parents and adults are constantly making decisions for children:

-When to eat

-What to eat

-When to get up

-When to go to sleep

-Where to go

-Who to go with

-What to do

The list can go on endlessly. Life for a child can feel completely out of their control. Kids will engage in a struggle with their parents to get some control of their lives. In doing so it usually comes across as conflict.

-No! I don’t want to go!

-I don’t like that!

-I’m not eating that!

-Stop it!

-I don’t want to!

-Leave me alone!

The Secret to empowering your child, even at the youngest of ages, is in giving them their own choices to make. Give them alternatives to situations in their lives, let them make some of their own choices.

This too, can be pretty simple. For example, instead of serving them broccoli, ask them to choose between carrots, peas or broccoli or another vegetable. Give them a choice to make instead of just putting one on their plate. Instead of the green dress, ask your daughter which one she would like to wear. Instead of forcing your child into the brown shoes, ask them which ones they would like to put on today.

These are pretty simple examples, but this about as easy as it gets in empowering your child. Giving your child choices is crucial in their development. It is crucial in their ability to keep themselves safe, too.

Making choices matters to kids. When you do this simple, easy thing, miracles will happen within them. An empowered child starts to feel good about themselves. And what would consistent, good feelings about themselves lead to? Confidence!

Will your child always make good choices for themselves? No. That is where you, Mom and Dad, come into the picture. You, as a mentor to your child, can guide them through the array of choices they will face. You can guide them and teach them about good choices and the benefits of making good choices for themselves. It is what safe kids are all about.

Secret #3: Catch Them Being Good.

When your child makes a bad choice, it’s important for you to stay calm about it. Yes, this is easier said then done. However, it is critical in your child’s ability to keep themselves safe, that you learn to take their mistakes in stride.

You have to spend more time and energy catching your child being good.

A subtle prodding towards better choices is more effective than highlighting, in a big emotional way, any bad choice they make for themselves. If you have to highlight negative behavior, be very careful in saying, “That was a bad choice,” rather than “You are bad.” Take care to say, “You can make better choices,” instead of saying, “How stupid!” Things like, “You’re a great kid but that choice could have been better,” keeps your child’s image of themselves solid and highlights the choice only, not them, as being bad. Your child is good, the choice is bad.

Building confidence, building a solid self image in your child, builds safety. Capitalize on this and highlight the good things they do more often than the bad things. As a matter of fact, focus on highlighting as many good things as you can rather than making a big deal about the bad things they may do.

Catch Them Being Good.

Positive reinforcement is a much stronger teaching tool and technique for child safety than negative reinforcement. Praise your child when you see them doing good behaviors. Lavish the praise and adulation onto them when they do really great things. This is also positive mentoring. This is channeling your child into learning how to make good, solid and positive choices for themselves. It builds and fosters that ever-so-critical confidence in themselves.

It is easier to notice the bad behavior. We are tuned by society to notice the negative and bad things people do. It is very easy to notice the bad things your child does. It is a focus of many parents, naturally. Reverse the trend and make your focal point the things your child does well. Positive reinforcement will teach your child to repeat those behaviors you want and make it easier for you to guide them into those good choices.

Secret #4: Listening.

Another crucial Secret in teaching kids to be safe is to let them know you are listening to them.

Listening to your child goes beyond the standard, “Yep. Un huh. Sure.” These kinds of responses they get daily. True listening, the kind that allows your child to feel like they are really being heard and understood, is a special parenting skill.

Listening to your child happens in two ways: one, you allow them to say what they need to say, in their words, in their way, however they want to say it. It may be challenging to follow this advice, especially when your child speaks in disjointed sentences or jumbled words. They may take 5 or 10 minutes out of your busy day, but just let them talk without interrupting them. You can tell when it is important versus when they are just mumbling or making noise. Sit and listen to them. Take the time, make the time.

Two, listen to what they say without judgment. Even if you do not like what you hear, even if you feel upset by what you hear, listen to it. Be quiet, look them in the eyes with your full attention and simply listen to them.

Your child is coming to you. They need your attention. They believe at that moment you will listen to them. Do it. Reserve judgment and negative feelings about what they are saying for another time.

When you do this you are building on the future, on your child’s safety. They need to feel, deep inside, they can tell you about anything. They need the security of knowing you will listen to them and what they have to say. If your child is threatened in any way, they will need to come to you, Mom or Dad, and tell you. That rapport and comfort for them needs to be established at a young age. You start by simply listening to them.

Secret #5: Repetition.

This last Secret is probably the most important of all. You must use it and apply it, day in and day out at home.

True learning for your child comes with repetition. That is your job. You need to do it at home.

Repetition does not need to be boring, either. Make games out of things you want to teach. Use fun words and phrases your child uses when talking about safety. Fold in your child’s favorite toys, cartoon characters or things they like into activities you do several times a week. These are simple yet exciting skills for reinforcement activities. It’s repetition with excitement. What a great way to learn for any child!

Working with our techniques is also something to do a few times a week. Stay away from daily practice routines as if this was a sport as this is the surest way to bore your child and lose their attention.

Make learning safety fun. Make it exciting. Fold in the whole family and enjoy learning about true safety for a lifetime together.

Two games you can play online

Yanita asked:

The internet certainly has a lot of games available for anyone to play. Two of the most popular games played nowadays are online shooting games and sports online games.

Of course, since these are games, you have the nice animation, sounds and images that these games offer. But perhaps what contributed to the popularity of these games is that these games are simple to play but also pose quite a challenge. They have simple game instructions and rules, but they are quite hard to win. This keeps up the interest level in these games without putting people off as a game that’s too difficult or impossible to win.

Shooting games are simple to play. As the name suggests, you just have to shoot the enemies to win the game. Though the concept is simple, the rules and actual gameplay can be varied and complex. You have different challenges such as moving targets, limited ammunition, target obstacles and the like. These elements make shooting games more exciting and challenging since you’re drawn into the objective of hitting your enemies and targets. Aside from just shooting the targets, you also have online war strategy games that incorporate planning ahead to win games. So not just pure shooting, you also get to exercise your mind a bit. So these games add another dimension to the appeal of these games.

Sports games on the other hand, simulates actual game play of a particular sport. This is a hit for sports fans as they can get to enjoy the excitement of their favorite sports even when online. The appeal of these games is that they offer the same challenge of their favorite sports, and simulates the feeling of playing the actual sport. Examples of the games that you can play are tennis, golf, and motorsports, just to name a few.

If you haven’t played one of these games, they are pretty easy to find. Just use any major search engine like Google or Yahoo and you can find several of these games online. And what’s more, most of these sites offer free online games. You can play free adventure games and sport free online games on these sites. Aside from the games already mentioned, you can also find free action games in these sites. You can play games all you want since the games can be played for free.

So if you haven’t played any online game yet, you can try shooting and sports games. They are not only easy, but challenging to play, most of them are also free.

Fisher Price Happy Giraffe Bouncer that Helps Animals | Charitable …

Fisher Price has a line of baby products called Precious Planet. These toys and baby accessories have the same high quality as all other Fisher Price but have.

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Fisher Price Happy Giraffe Bouncer that Helps Animals | Charitable …

Wolfire Blog – Games vs. Life — Handguns

Over the years I’ve played hundreds of games about shooting, and made a few myself, but had never fired a handgun in real life. As a game designer, I was.

Excerpt from:
Wolfire Blog – Games vs. Life — Handguns

Making Cents of Savings: Trouble Printing Coupons?

Do you have problems printing Bricks coupons? Here’s a solution that could fix your problem! Bricks coupons require a different URL to be printed in Firefox, IE and Safari.

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Making Cents of Savings: Trouble Printing Coupons?

Samo Soviet – Crazy But Funny

SamoSoviet asked:

, and context. For example, young children may possibly favour slapstick, such as Punch and Judy puppet shows or cartoons (eg, Tom and Jerry). Satire may rely more on understanding the target of the humour, and thus tends to appeal to more mature audiences. Nonsatirical humour can be specifically termed “recreational drollery.”[1][2] … Samo Soviet Screamo Emo Christian Metal Jordan emo how to be Emo-Style Emo-Love Emo-Boys music comedy Screaming Outward Inward ******** Emocore Crazy But Funny …