I’m often asked by clients why I don’t prefer automating elements of my marketing function for their films or docs. Why I devote countless hours to achieving a kind of rhythm with their projects’ marketing in a more “manual” – or hands-on – manner. Why I like to lay on hands and make contact – viscerally, tactilely, and real-ly – with their works as opposed to having a computer handle elements of the promotion function.
I have an answer, and it usually involves a wink and a nod to the carpentry/cabinetmaking profession and how carpenters work best when they go gloveless; that is, when they work with their bare, raw, and sometimes battered hands.
In the same way, I prefer working with my “bare hands” when marketing a picture or a documentary because I find this achieves the best results.
In general, I don’t dig automated anything – from automated relationships, to Frankenfood, to Frankenspeak, to form mails, to automated creativity, to auto-eroticism with devices. Imagine the gull gamut of things that can possibly be automated, and I’ll typically eschew it and chuck it in the bin. There, I said it.
Let’s – yes, let’s — discuss several examples of things you can automate as part of the marketing function. As a bonus, I’ll add my reasons why I – in almost all cases – refuse to go this route in favor of the tremendously more time-consuming manual approach.
Automated tweets, kicked out to your Facebook Wall in reflex fashion: In a word, don’t. I discourage usage of these techniques and any service you use which you need to grant the stray OAuth authorization for in order to perform this on your behalf is bad on three counts: one, it’s annoying for an audience to observe how you don’t take the extra time to ensure that what you post is done so personally. Second, it introduces the possibility of content errors, that a process which is generally automated might be prone to mistakes you don’t notice until much later. And third, those random OAuth’s might also act as backdoor entry points for gremlins and other security threats to infiltrate your workstation, making keeping track of those prior authorizations you’ve already granted much more complex to administer. You feelin’ me?
Automated blog posting software to Twitter and/or Facebook: there are plenty of blog plugins which will do this for you handily. Again, I can see it from the client side in that it’s more time-efficient to have a service do this as opposed to a producer, whose time comes at a distinct lucrative premium, especially during critical fundraising phases for finishing funds in the latter stages of production. I don’t like this for the same reasons as I don’t like kicking tweets out to your Facebook Wall automatically. It usually formats poorly and for those of us in the business who know how these work from the inside-out, it looks terrible. Just about the worst thing that could happen is for errors to creep into the process, which you’ll notice only much later, and hope this doesn’t happen to you. By that time, the damage inflicted may already too grave. So use these auto-posting services at your peril.
Privacy settings for Twitter: Don’t know about you, but unless you’re Kevin Spacey and you’re running a double-authorization for your Twitter followers – in which you’ve got to approve the follower in advance before permitted them to view your tweet stream – you’re seriously treading on thin ice, bub. If I were to toss out a random stat on how often I see this happening, I’d say two times in 100. Maybe even less than that, and there’s zero reason for it! Privacy settings on social media platforms are absolutely useless anyhow, and people who remain overly precious about their so-called online privacy – outside of family protection reasons against peds and pervs – are ignorant of the online realities. Moreover, for artists in search of a large fan following, any roadblocks you erect for fans wishing to engage with you on popular social media platforms is just a recipe for failure. Don’t believe me? Keep doing it and suffer the buzzkill.
“Automating” your content-generation workflow: Okay, so here we’re not technically going fully-automated, but the effect is similar. This is when you hire out personnel to perform the lion’s share of your blog writing, tweeting, or Facebooking, and lean back to collect the cream. This is where producers don’t take an active role in the sorts of contents being pushed out across all channels, where they get someone else to assist them in designing, writing, posting, or in other words – wrangling down the entire marketing strategy – the whole kit and caboodle, I mean. From experience, I’d also say this also comes off as slimy and insincere, like a producer is “too important,” “too diva,” or “too busy” (whatever that means!) for the all-critical audience engagement stage, hence the need to hire somebody to administer this. Again, your supercore audience – the supercore targeted audience for your picture, and every film has one, believe me – will peer through the veil of what you’re doing (or more correctly, not doing) yourself. They’re know it isn’t you, and they’ll probably resent you for it.
Automated tweeted to LinkedIn: yet another kiss of death. If you’re a sloppy tweeter, in that you don’t watch your P’s and Q’s there, using all manner of “@” symbols in your RTs and basically not minding your language, cursing like a drunken mariner, you could very well be deep-sixing your LinkedIn strategy, and quite possibly, your professional filmmaking career. Depending on whether or not this is a part of your rollout, you’ll want to be very careful about this. LinkedIn is a professional network where 4- and 7-letter words absolutely do not belong. Watch your Twitter settings from LinkedIn and if you’ve presently got them kicking out tweets to LinkedIn, knock it off.
The overall impression with anything you do which is automated is that you leave the impression in your audiences’ minds that you simply don’t give a hoot – neither about your film, nor about them. That your time is more important than theirs. That you don’t take the “engagement” process of your marketing function seriously, and that you’re basically being flip about the entire flow.
In terms of the brand equity you wish to leave, that could be seriously harming your ultimate success. And if “going for the money” is one of your film’s cardinal goals, you could be doing your project’s long-term financial prospects a whole world of hurt and pain which you might never recover from.
Don’t automate, I say. Feel the workmanship, the materials, and your craftsman’s tools with your bare hands. Put in the time. Do the work. Don’t be miffed by the amount of hours it requires. The entire world is going fully-digital nowadays.
Audiences don’t care about your particular priorities; they care about theirs. Acknowledge these and them in the process, and they’ll respect you.
Make it all about yourself, and you’re gone. It’s that simple.
Adam Daniel Mezei, PMD | Producer of Marketing and Distribution
http://pmdforhire.com
Marketing and Distribution Services for Indie Films and Documentaries
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