Sol sat me down a couple weeks ago. He showed me the light and I got religion.
He basically told me to start building the film's fanbase now via Twitter, so that when we're ready to open the film and sell DVDs, the audience is waiting for it. This is exactly the type of advice I tell students, so it makes total sense -- except I hadn't factored in Twitter. In fact, he had a couple really interesting ideas on how to do that. These included both marketing-related and plain-old-storytelling ideas.
Got me thinking.
From my perspective, Twitter basically is the best of both the social networking worlds: Facebook and MySpace.
It's got the awesome outreach power of MySpace -- you can literally have hundreds of thousands of followers/friends. And the barrier to entry for these followers is pretty low. Not much pain to follow someone else. And pretty easy to get them to follow you.
However, like Facebook, it's got a very clean and simple interface. No wacked-out backgrounds or auto-start songs or annoying cursor animations. I feel like I control the experience, which is what Facebook is all about.
We did a great job of using MySpace to get the word out about Quality of Life, but Facebook has been too restrictive. As our audience has moved to Facebook, we've been left behind. Twitter can change that.
Granted, Twitter has something like 7 million users, compared to Facebook's 120 million. But that will change.
Ideas are stewing.
Comments