For me, the social web has always looked like a bunch of tools for story telling. I love bringing characters to life to tell their own stories through Twitter, Facebook and the rest. What intrigued me when I first heard about Conducttr, was that is was created as a tool for story telling. I couldn’t wait to find out what it did.
This week Robert Pratton gave me a personal tour of his new transmedia control tool. It was great just chatting with Robert and I’m really excited by the potential of Conducttr, which you access through Transmedia Storyteller.
Robert Pratton is someone I’ve “online known” for a couple years I think. He contributes great stuff to the discussion of creating interactive story but we’d never actually spoken before. And although, I’d known for a while that he was creating some kind of transmedia tool, I wasn’t really sure what the heck it was going to do.
It became clear to me almost as soon as Robert and I started talking. Conducttr is a tool for people who are allowing their characters to tell a story through their activity in the social web. It allows you to the social media accounts for all of your characters from one central control.
If you’ve done distributed story telling, you know that just keeping track of a half dozen characters twitter, Facebook, YouTube and blog login information is a challenge. If that was all Conducttr did it would be a small miracle for me.
But it does more.
Once your story is planned and you have the blog posts, videos, tweets and status updates that are the spine of the story created, you can input them into Conducttr. Not the video, that gets uploaded to YouTube, but on a private setting.
With your assets in place, you begin the task of scheduling. Conducttr allows you to trigger the release of one of your assets automatically. You can schedule by time and date, but there are other triggers as well. Conducttr can monitor twitter for certain phrases and send reply tweets. It can read the subject lines of emails and choose the reply based on that. It can monitor the number of times a video has been played.
The triggers aren’t unlimited, but the product is new and if it becomes popular, I’m sure more features will get added. But just the simple elements that Robert and his team have chosen to put into Conducttr could make a huge difference in the creation and running of an online transmedia experience. Most importantly, it allows you to put a story in place and run, freeing you up to spend your time interacting with the audience.
Kellie Ann Benz has an interesting piece on the NSI blog about How Internet Networks are Connecting Web Series to Audiences. I like it not just because she quotes me, but because she highlights an important piece of the new model.
When you’re a web series creator, you quickly learn that there is no end to the work. All your episodes maybe online, but there are always people left who haven’t seen your show.
That’s where an internet network can come help. For Ruby Skye P.I., we’re working with a few of different networks each a wonderful support in its own way.
I can distribute the video to them fairly easily using BlipTV or Tubemogul, but still have to go to each site, set up a channel and profile, add pictures and tags, check each upload to make sure the tagging and thumbnail are correct. And then I still have to go spend lots of time on the site to build an audience there.
There are other downsides to these sites. Did I mention the porn ads next to our tween friendly videos? And although some of these sites have huge numbers of users, it can be hard to be seen on the sites. With millions of videos, how do you make sure people find you? Even with excellent tagging and video SEO, there’s no guarantee you won’t get lost in those crowded spaces.
Plus many of these sites have 100 MB upload limits which limits the quality and length you can offer on their sites. Or their conversions downgrade your video quality. Shot in HD and with lengths of 5 minutes or more, many of the Ruby Skye P.I. episodes aren’t on many of the sites we have channels on. I will eventually get around to creating lower quality (and thus smaller) versions of those episodes, so we can get them on those sites, but at the moment I have neither the time nor the heart to downgrade the quality of our work.
This is where networks like Clicker, Digital Chick TV and MingleMedia TV start to make a lot of sense. They are smaller spaces with selected content and engaged audiences.
They feature content that’s created for the web, which means there’s less clutter. They also have a vested stake in seeing your show do well, because they have less on their shelves, so to speak. It can’t hurt to have extra people on your team, helping to promote your series. Each of our partners has already provided us with something unique and wonderful and we’re just at the very beginning of our relationships.
For examples, the Best of Clicker is an opportunity for the community to vote on their favourite shows in various categories. Ruby Skye P.I. got nominated in the Best Kids category and miraculously came in third in a field of TV series! This has been great for us, brought in new viewers and raised our profile, among other things attracting this wonderful review from a new fan.
DigitalChickTV mentioned us in their What You Should Have Watched in 2010 review. We’re their only series in Digital Girl section right now which makes Ruby Skye P.I. very easy to find!
We are just at the beginning of planning some cool promotions with MingleMedia TV. Founder Stephanie Piche is very hands on and marketing savvy, working hard to promote the series and creators she is working with. I don’t know how she gets anything done, because it seems like she’s almost always on Twitter!
MingleMediaTV has interesting ways to help web creators keep current on trends and get their work seen, including supporting meetups, industry panels, a new media film festival and Twitter’s weekly #webserieschat.
This is why internet networks are so valuable and growing in importance to web series creators. Because promoting your work is an endless task and it’s great to have supportive partners working at with you!
It’s January 6th, a time when most reasonable people are dropping their New Year’s resolutions and reverting back to normal behaviour having realized that it is impossible to do more.Alas, I am not now nor have I ever been reasonable — at least not when it comes to time management.So, yeah, I’ve just read an article by Lee Odden about community managing and I’ve cut and pasted a huge section of it which I’m blowing up and pasting on my wall as a reminder:
6:45 am Check and reply
to company blog(s) comments.
6:55 am Scan news feeds
for interesting articles, blog posts, media to share. Write tweets, updates etc with short URLs. Schedule messages for sharing throughout the day.
7:10 am Check Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn
comments, Retweets, messages and reply as necessary.
7:20 am Scan persistent search
for topics, keywords and brand terms to reveal commenting opportunities on industry news websites and blogs. Make comments, take notes for future blog posts.
7:30 am Revisit company blog comment
management tool for new replies.
7:35 am Revisit Twitter,
Facebook and LinkedIn for specific follow ups.
7:40 Scan social media monitoring tool
for mentions, links (alternatively alerts can be used to surface events as they happen)
7:45 am Review Social Dashboard
and web analytics for the company blog for notable links, trending traffic sources and relevant conversion metrics (RSS subscribers, email subscribers, downloads, webinar signups, sales inquires)
I’m also changing my alarm setting so I can add an extra hour to my day.If you’re going to build an audience or a following on the web, it’s work and it takes time. Lee’s schedule is a great framework and he points out lots of relevant tools and strategies.Sometimes I find myself killing the day by jumping on Twitter or Facebook with no real plan, looking for opportunities to connect or comment. Having a strategy and timeline makes way more sense.A good set of Google Alerts to keep you up to date on the topics you’re interested in helps keep you in the loop and target your commenting and community building activities. A well organized newsfeed of carefully chosen subscriptions gives you great fresh content to contribute to the discussion. A Twitter scheduler allows you to keep your voice in the loop all day without having to take your focus off of other work.So, along with making sure I take time away from my desk in 2011, I’m going to try to put an hour of community management into my daily schedule this year. Wish me luck.
I happened on some very interesting stats about video viewing online. These are from the end of 2009 but I’m pretty sure YouTube’s still king:
Popular video sharing platformsYoutube : 81.9%Vimeo : 8.8%DailyMotion : 4%MySpace : 1.1%<
The demographics have probably changed somewhat since 2009, but I think a trend toward youth is probably still there — but I’d bet it’s moving toward less dominance of that demo. I’d guess both younger and older people are watching videos a year later and it will continue to even out.
Age Demographics20-35 year olds : 77% of all visitors90% of visitors from Asia and Oceania and 66% of North American visitors are under 35 years of age
I wouldn’t imagine either of these stats have changed much, but who knows?
Top Five Countries (with bloggers embedding videos)1. USA2. Brazil3. Spain4. UK5. Canada
Top Five Cities (with bloggers embedding videos)1. New York2. Sao Paulo3. London4. Madrid5. Paris
And from February of this year:
Nearly one third of online videos on Youtube has less than 100 views, and another quarter have between 100 and 500 views.
Great news for web series producers — and aspiring web series producers. The Independent Production Fund has confirmed that they will be financing more web series! The IPF’s financial backing is what got Ruby Skye P.I. off the ground so we think this is spectacularly good news. An influx of cash from the IPF can really get a project going and gives the industry the chance to test creative ideas and business models.
“The creativity of the web series format is exciting and inspiring, but there are a few mysteries yet to solve in this experimental format” noted IPF Chair, Charles Ohayon, “Time is needed to develop appropriate marketing, distribution and business models”.
Yesterday’s press release offered these interesting stats:
The 2010 Pilot Program invested $1.2 M in the production of 11 drama series in English and in French, created for audiences from pre-schoolers to adults, representing 942 minutes of linear drama as well as interactive activities and social media strategies. Budgets ranged from $300 a minute to $5,000 a minute. The funded projects were selected from amongst 166 submissions made by Canadian producers and writers from across the country. The IPF created its own web series dashboard for the series it funds, Wip, available at www.ipf.ca/webseries
Ready to apply?
The deadline for Requests for Proposals for the 2011 Web Series Program is March 2, 2011 March 1, 2011. The selected short-list of finalist projects will be available by March 28 and complete production applications will be required by May 2. Funding decisions will be announced in mid-June. Eligible projects must have a Canadian web host and URL, and be original content designed primarily for the web. Guidelines are available at www.ipf.ca.
Of course, you probably shouldn’t apply without doing some research. So start out by studying one of the projects IPF has already funded, like, say… Ruby Skye P.I..
Go to http:youtube/trends and all you’ll find is a blog. You need to go to the dashboard, here: http://www.youtube.com/trendsdashboard to actually find YouTube Trends as see what it does. God only knows why they didn’t mention any of that in the video.
What does it does? It allows you to search for most viewed and most popular videos, limiting your search by age range, sex and geographic location.
Yesterday, I needed to distract myself from the fact that so many people were enjoying themselves at mergingmedia10 without me (she said trying to keep the bitter disappointment out of her voice). I ended up in a long tweet session with @_creeboy @wcdixon @garryoakgirl and @RobboMills about online rollout.
Will kind of started it all by asking me why I was rolling Ruby Skye P.I. one episode at a time instead of putting all the episodes up at once. He says that every example of a web series he’s studied, there has been a big spike in viewership at launch and a drop off after that.
A lot of smart things were said in the thread and it really made me re-examine my thinking about roll-out… or lack of thinking about it. It’s an area I probably haven’t put enough thought into. Will may be right, I’m still locked in the TV model. For the web, rollout needs some shaking up and turning on its head.
The roll out for Ruby Skye P.I. is a very traditional TV approach. And I mean that in the worst possible way.
One of the things that bugs me most about TV? They’ll only allow me to watch on episode at a time. Appointment viewing is possibly the most annoying part of TV.
But there is some part of me that keeps saying narrative is linear and should emerge in a linear fashion. If I give them the whole thing at once, they might see it out of order. They might meet up with a spoiler that will ruin the whole thing for them.On the other hand, storytellers in other media hand over the whole story at once — on a dvd or in a book — and people manage to enjoy them. People don’t consume it all at once and still the endings to films and books have an impact. People don’t all peek at the last page — and if they do? It’s their choice.
People who don’t want to know, protect themselves from hearing and seeing parts of the story they aren’t ready for. I know tons of people who won’t go online if they missed their favourite TV show or put their fingers in their ears when the dinner party conversation rolls around to a film they haven’t seen. People don’t blurt endings in public to spoil stories for their friends (certain company excluded). And sometimes, the skip the descriptions of distant sunsets or fast forward through the icky bits and still enjoy the story.
So rolling out morsel by morsel doesn’t just annoy the audience, it shows a complete lack of faith in their ability to consume the story in the way that suits them.
And where does audience building fall in all of this? If you’re doling out the series episode by episode, you certainly have something new to promote once — or twice — a week.
The downside of that plan is that we’re in week 1 and I’m already exhausted. I’m probably going to alienate everyone I know on Facebook and Twitter in the next 6 weeks with my incessant jabbering on about what amounts to less than 10 minutes of video weekly.
The other thing is, that in my head I’ve seen the rollout period — the six weeks during which we’re doling out episodes at a rate of two a week — as our opportunity to build on audience. How incredibly old-think of me. Once all the episodes are up and the story is there for the consuming, promotion and audience building can continue for… ever.
Which all adds up to me looking at the rollout in a whole new way. Not that we can suddenly put all the episodes up on the web next week. They’re not ready. They’re rolling out of post at a rate of two a week — just in time to be posted. And that’s why we’re rolling out two a week. That’s what we have. That’s what was can manage.
Promoting the series is a different story.
On Monday, we made a bit of noise on Twitter and Fb about the first episode and the website going up, but we haven’t made our really big promotional play yet. That was just “our friends and family launch”.
We’ve been holding off making a really big to do — calling in the old media and sending the link to friends we haven’t seen in 30 years — until we had a little more content. We’ve been toying with doing it after Chapter 3: Break-In. We won’t quite have the 25 minutes that Will thinks is enough to really engage with, but we will have upwards of 15. We’ll have more than 20 if we wait till after Chapter 4: A Real Green Dress.
Is that too soon? Maybe we should wait to do our biggest promotion till after all the episodes are up. Then people could watch the whole thing as they see fit. It’s probably less than an hour’s entertainment in total. Quite a few people will find time for that in one sitting — and we don’t have to worry about them ever remembering to come back to the site to see more. Most of the kids I know are on the computer for hours after school. Just a guess, but I don’t think it’s all spent doing homework.
We could do several small pushes. We could lay on a promo blast — a little less intense that what we did at launch and each of the teasers — every 2 weeks, when there’s a new meaty sized chunk of story on the table.
But save the big promotion till everything is up on the web.
I like the idea, but also hate it. I like it because it gives us forever to build the audience. I hate it because I was looking forward to sleeping again in about 5 weeks.
This model makes the rollout of the additional material very different. If I know we’re still in audience building mode for quite a while, I won’t bring out additional features that reflect on plot points. I have tons of pictures and videos that are great but have spoilers in them. Our plan was to get them out there as soon as the episodes in question aired. But if we start to visualize the audience building phase as longer, we can hold them for longer and put them out in two, three or six months.
Or we could put some things out on limited release. “Watch it in the next two days because we’re pulling it off the net after that.”
A world of possibilities is opening up.
For more on this topic, check out Scott Alberts’ In Defense of Slow Roll Out
Everyone of my web launches has been fraught with disaster — not that my experience launching things on the web is so deep and wide, but here I am on my fourth web-based storytelling project and fifth website and I see a pattern:
Launch is hard.
For the launch of Ruby Skye P.I. on Monday, I made some mistakes. And then there were the usual unforeseeable obstacles: inaccessible passwords, crashing servers, FTP issues. Throw in the unpredictability of how long it take the DNS to do it’s thing and the fact that I’m tossing around terms like DNS and FTP and you’ve got a big fat mess at 3 a.m.
On Monday, there was a frantic period when we were madly directing people to watch Chapter 1 on Vimeo.
Then the site went live, I blurted out the great news to Twitter just in time for the server to crash. Twice.
I’m not a quick study
That’s about when I decided to take my furiousity walk.
In the end, we got rubyskyepi.com online four hours later than we’d hope. It was a hairy day.
Next morning, I made myself a list of rules for launching new web endeavours. When next time rolls around, please remind me.
Launch is the coming together of three forces: the site, the host and the content. Content is all the posts, pictures, video and games. The site is the design and layout which holds the content. The host is the server that the site and it’s content live on. Next time, I’m going to make sure everyone understands the process from everyone else’s perspective.
Public launch on the same day the site goes live? Never again. You kind of want to because it’s all new and shiny and you just want to go ta da. With Ruby, we’ve had our production blog sitting at rubyskyepi.com since July. We’ve been getting great numbers. I thought that as soon as we transferred over to the new site, we had to announce it. Really, why? So what if a bunch of regular readers came and played around and enjoyed the space before we yelled about it from the roof tops. It was just lack of imagination that prevented me from seeing it that way. It would have been better to quietly make the change and have some time to tweak and fiddle. Some people would have found it and taken a look around, but that would have been fine. And we could have invited the world in when we had everything fluffed and shined to gleaming.
Launching at a specific time is a great way to drive numbers. But you just can’t do it with a website. You can do it with a video but it’s just stupid to even attempt to get your site up at an exact hour. You upload the web design to the host site and then you set the DNS to the new address. How long the DNS takes to switch over is completely unpredictable. They say up to 24 hours but in my experience it’s usually more like a couple. (Please excuse me if anything I said in this paragraph is wrong, I don’t know what any of those words mean and my understanding of all of this is sketchy at best.)
Do not launch on a Monday (which I wouldn’t have done, had I spent more time talking to my developer who knows things I don’t even know that I don’t know). That just means being up all night Sunday when you can’t reach the one person in the world who has the key piece of information that you can’t launch without. Mondays are good for traffic, but you’ll have good Monday traffic next week and the week after. Launch mid-week and take the weekend before to sleep. Because once your site’s live, you’ll never want to leave Google Analytic’s side again.
