By Reid Rosefelt
You’re posting interesting content on Twitter every day. You’re blogging. You’re active in other social networks. You’re doing everything that you’ve been told to do. But you’re getting nowhere.
Maybe you have the wrong goal.
Your Goal is Not to Get as Many Followers as Possible
If you want followers, you can buy them.
By Reid Rosefelt
Making a great movie is hard. Marketing a movie might be even harder. There are many good movies every year, but there are far fewer well-marketed ones. The list of people (and studios) who market films successfully year after year is a very elite club.
When I began working as a publicist, most American filmmakers weren’t expected to be able to promote his or her own work. Nowadays every filmmaker is expected to be able to shoulder that burden.
How scary this must be for filmmakers.
By Reid Rosefelt
Social Media networks go through phases in their lives, just as we do in ours.
Most of us go through periods of adjustment which we handle with varying degrees of success. Many of us don’t climb very high up the ladder of success, and it’s a rare few that become superstars like Justin Timberlake, Jennifer Lawrence, Facebook or Twitter.
By Reid Rosefelt
When you finish reading this post you will possess the key to becoming a mighty internet power user.
For no charge, I’m going to share a huge breakthrough I made. That’s the kind of guy I am.
It all started just as the Chris Christie Bridge-ghazi scandal was gathering steam. Like many, I googled the besieged Governor to see if there were any new developments.
One day, I saw something that surprised me: on the first page, right under CBS News, MSNBC, Chicago Tribune, the Office of the New Jersey Governor, Christie’s Wikipedia entry, the Chicago Tribune again, and the Washington Post, was a link to something from my friend, celebrated indie film man Ira Deutchman. “Wow,” I thought. “Ira must have generated something pretty big to generate a search engine smasheroo like that.” As you might imagine, I was on pins and needles to find out what Ira had come up with.
By Reid Rosefelt
Have you ever thought about the miracle of the humble one-sheet poster?
Whether a film costs a hundred thousand or a hundred million–it gets the same 27” by 40” poster in the display case.
Now imagine you prefer squares, so you make 40” x 40” posters for your independent film. Or maybe you’re nostalgic for the good old days of Lobby Cards, so you make your posters 11” x 14” on sturdy cardboard stock. So now there’s room for 27” x 40” but you’ve elected to leave most of it blank.
But why would you do that? It wouldn’t make any sense.
But that’s what people often do in social media.
Image orientation and size makes a huge difference on different social channels. A tall picture on Pinterest is striking; a wide one is tiny. Tall pictures look great on Google+ too. On the other hand, wide aspect ratios look best on Facebook and Twitter.
By Reid Rosefelt
Who was the person who decided that the plain vanilla word “content” was going to stand for all the stuff that gets put up on social media?
Whoever it was should hang their head in shame.
If the history of human experience is an empty vessel, I suppose if you were a dullard you could opine that “content” is what fills it up: literature, music, movies, religion, politics, sex, joke-telling, criticism, talk show hosting, blogging, Power Point presentations, tweeting, posting, and pinteresting–it’s all content.
But I don’t think that Steven Spielberg, Kathryn Bigelow, Steve McQueen, Lorde, Vince Gilligan, Banksy, Jim Jarmusch, Louis C.K., Jane Campion, Jay-Z, Guillermo del Toro, Zadie Smith, Dave Eggers, Jony Ive, Park Chan-wook and Sara Bareilles, woke up this morning and said, “I can’t wait to start making content!” There is no poetry in “content.” There is no transcendence in “content.” There is no glory in a life devoted to content.
People who live to make beautiful things know that language is a glorious stew–spicy, subtle, sweet, sour, creamy, crunchy, familiar and foreign–so they aren’t aroused by the bland mush of words like “content.”
By Reid Rosefelt
In May of 2012 I decided to try an experiment. I wanted to see what kind of Facebook Community I could create over the course of three months. I created a page called “Save the Supreme Court–Re-elect Obama.” I did this because I was concerned about what might happen to the Supreme Court if President Obama lost, but I was also thinking about it as an experiment for promoting a documentary, something I had done as a marketing consultant, for films like “The Island President.” I could be getting ready to make a film about the Supreme Court, and using Facebook to promote that would involve essentially the same work– utilizing targeted Facebook ads to assemble a community of people who were interested in the activities of the Court.
I gave myself a budget of $100.
My hundred bucks purchased a wide variety of tiny ads that turned up hundreds of thousands of times on the Facebook pages of people I felt might be interested in the Supreme Court, or had progressive politics. My $100 took me to about 800 members, but then I found myself unsatisfied and hungering for an even thousand. I threw caution to the wind and splurged on another twenty bucks to get there.
