The following is a proposal for a social media strategy for promoting the upcoming independent feature film, Rising From Ruins, part of the Independent America documentary series produced by HRHMedia.
About Independent America: Rising From Ruins
Independent America: Rising From Ruins is the 2008 follow-up to 2005′s Independent America: The Two-Lane Search For Mom & Pop. Both feature-length documentaries are directed by Hanson Hosein, former CBC and MSNBC reporter and current director of the Master of Communication in Digital Media at the University of Washington. As a series, Independent America focuses on the struggles and challenges faced by small businesses and business owners, as well as those communities such businesses occupy. 2005′s Mom & Pop took the documentarian road-tripping across the United States, capturing stories of hardship and determination in the face of growing mega-corporate encroachment. Unfortunately, August 2005 brought devastation to one location the filmmakers were unable to visit until much later. 2008′s Rising From Ruins returned to the scenes of post-Katrina New Orleans to document the growing struggles faced by NOLA residents and small business owners as both government and big business attempt to execute a difficult and controversial recovery – one that hardly includes ‘mom and pop’.
Independent Production meets Social Production
In 2005, Independent America took a pioneering approach to crafting their first entry, Mom & Pop. Hosein and his partner established a TypePad blog and wrote about the day-to-day journey and production of the film, even posting the day’s edited footage and allowing users to comment and help guide the production process. In essence, Mom & Pop is a marriage of independent filmmaking with user-generated content, while maintaining a cohesive voice and leadership under the film’s helmer. When the picture was completed a more traditional marketing approach was implemented to get the word out about the film. This included an official website, IndependentAmerica.net, and distribution through Open Door to outlets such as The Sundance Channel, as well as features at Yahoo! and in other on-line spaces. Currently, clips and other promotional vignettes reside both on the official website as well as other social sharing sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Vimeo. Not surprisingly, Rising From Ruins has taken a similar approach to promotion, allowing transparency during the production process as well as securing premieres at the 2008 New Orleans Film Festival and on Canada’s SuperChannel. Ruins returns to the festival circuit at this year’s Seattle Internation Film Festival. Again, Ruins follows Mom & Pop‘s strategy closely, with an official website/blog and clips and trailers on sites like YouTube, Facebook, and Vimeo.
Rising Above Challenges
As an independent feature, Rising From Ruins faces myriad challenges in today’s social media space, a space that is continually leveling the playing ground for both studio and independent productions (think of the de-evolution of web promotion from the successes of The Blair Witch Project or Napoleon Dynamite and An Inconvenient Truth to today’s onslaught of countless on-line campaigns for major studio films, and so forth). Already faced with potential waning public interest in Katrina-related features, the scattered presence of this project’s promotional content in several web services, like Vimeo and Facebook, may not produce the scale of impact Independent America is looking for during Rising‘s roll-out through the course of 2009. People just aren’t talking about Katrina much anymore. Even a more concentrated approach to engaging chatter and to sharing content about Rising From Ruins in certain social networks and with micro-blogging tools like Twitter might have a less-than-worthwhile effect – Independent America already knows that such concentrated engagement alone is not what this project needs. That’s why they’ve struck a deal with AOL’s Snagfilms, which has secured distribution on both Snagfilm and the increasingly popular Hulu.com. Despite such achievements, though, Rising will need a stronger social media campaign, on that raises the bar, to compete for attention at a place like Hulu and whereever else the picture lands this year.
A Grassroots Strategy
Like Barack Obama, California’s Proposition 8, and the so-called Picken’s Plan, Independent America has at its core a foundation rooted in widely discussed ideals and hotly contested issues. And, like those three movements, each successfully connected the grassroots of the real with the digital echochambers of social media. How? By not merely encouraging that their messages be shared by believers and openly debated by naysayers, but that these carefully protected ideas should be set free to be literally owned by the masses. Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky, and Eric von Hippel would all agree. If Independent America wants to engage independent America, then it will need to tap into the conversations (aka the social cultural production) already taking place surrounding the issues Independent America covers, namely: big business versus small business, and, small business recovery in the wake of natural and other disasters. Hosein shouldn’t just document these conflicts, he should establish a space for others to do likewise AND to continue to play the conflict out. Independent America is too one-sided for its own good.
Proposal
It’s simple: build a new social network, perhaps with Ning.com or from scratch, called “Independent America: Where Do You Stand?”. This new social network will exist to foster and drum up the debate surrounding the place of big business in “small town” America (and by small town, that could be any neighborhood in America – what we’re really talking about is gentrification and corporate greed, both of which know no geographic boundaries). Users can create profiles, write their own in-network blogs, and start forum topics about whatever they want related to mom & pop America. Most importantly, though, they’ll be strongly encouraged to post videos documenting their own stories, local communities, and political or idealogical positions. In other words, this site will take a scattered on-line conversation floating in many different spaces and give it a focal point, a gateway to this debate. A social media director can guide things along at first and get the ball rolling. Prominently feature Independent America: Rising From Ruins through embedded video promotional content and trailers, all of which point users to the full-length film exclusively at Hulu.com. Now, although directing traffic to the Hulu launch of Rising will be the primary motivating factor of this new social net, the purpose of the site will be to establish a place that anyone who is interested and passionate about the subject can make their voice heard and debate the messages and opinions of others. Users can take on the role of documentarian in their own communities and cover the subject in their own way, posting these stories and mini-docs to this new “Where Do You Stand?” site.
Tools Needed
Creating the new site, using Ning or otherwise, will only be the first step. To generate buzz for both the film and this new story-sharing space, some of the tools already in use will be exploited. Here are some steps to take:
- Create the new public site, probably using Ning.com. Hopefully the ambiguity of the name will bring traffic.
- Post badges indicating partnership with the University of Washington, Open Door, HRHMedia, SnagFilm, and the UW’s I-School. These would link to appropriate sites that either feature Rising From Ruins or the site as a story-sharing venue itself (such as the I-School would do).
- Create Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter profiles, all of which are named “Independent America: Where Do You Stand?”, all of which direct users to the new site. Consider purchasing ad space on Facebook if financing to do so is available.
- Populate each of the above with embedded videos from existent HRHMedia-maintained Vimeo and YouTube accounts.
- Create a central blog in the new site, authored primarily by Hanson Hosein, with entries that discuss the film the same way the current official site for Rising From Ruins and the old IndependentAmericanFilm.com TypePad blog have already done. However, intermixed with that, blog about any and every article related to the overall big business vs. small town America debate. Basically, this gives people a launchpad and something to read. Nevertheless, ALWAYS stay on message and be completely open about using the site as a vehicle to promote these films and the Hulu debut, but, more importantly, express that the site is here to establish a venue to debate the film and the issues it presents.
- Start three primary discussion threads in the new site’s forum area: “Recovering from disaster?”, “Fighting big box stores?” and “Small Business Resources”. Fill these threads up with as much helpful content as you can find, linking to third party locations. Watch the crowd do the rest.
- Start a fourth forum for local meetups to be organized – where people can plan get-togethers to organize initiatives or simply host BBQs. Perhaps the first could be initiated by Independent America and be for NOLA natives to meet and have a viewing of the film.
- Find videos on social networks that already tell stories about independent America, and add those to the video area. Encourage users to post their own videos or share from other sites.
- Develop link partnerships with websites dedicated to small business.
- Run searches for community activist bloggers and email them about your site.
- Tweet every action on the site through the Twitter profile. Be noisy. Post highlights from the site to the Facebook and Myspace profiles.
- Ruthlessly comment and drop references to the new site at politically-oriented blogs and newssites across the web, on both sides of the debate (meaning, when stories about big box stores ruining small communities are run, or stories about small business disaster recovery issues crop up, at sites like the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, Crooks and Liars, Free Republic, National Review Online, CNN, Fark, Digg, and so forth, jump in and drop word). Be shameless.
- Lastly, in terms of long term strategy, as the site increases in noteriety and revelence, publish a page about your new social site on Wikipedia.
Conclusion and Forecast
This is an exhaustive social media strategy, but a necessary one. A grassroots discussion underlies the themes at the heart of Independent America’s films, and this grassroots discussion must be tapped. Merely focusing on generating buzz for Rising From Ruins will wind-up being intolerably less effective. An on-line home needs to be established that fosters the debate and allows users to take ownership of the ideas behind the film. Without doing so, Independent America: Rising From Ruins becomes just another one-way salvo in a two-way world. I predict that the site will take on its own meaning as users mold it to their individual needs, and this social media strategy will evolve with the needs of the users. Nonetheless, this site will become the go-to place and authority for the big box debate because it will be a place everyone can shoot and share their stories.
For more on social production, see…
Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Shirky, C. (2008). Here comes everybody: The power of organizing without organizations. New York: Penguin Press.
von Hippel, E. (2005). Democratizing innovation. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Prepared for Hanson Hosein’s Social Production course, Spring Quarter 2009, Master of Communication in Digital Media program, University of Washington, Seattle.
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Tags: hanson hosein, independent america, MCDM, mom and pop, rising from ruins, small business, social media, social media strategy, uw