Celebrated documentary filmmaker Ken Burns talks about what makes for an interesting story in this short film, “Ken Burns On Story” (via Alltop HolyKaw via Kottke).  It’s always interesting to see what storytellers see as the building blocks of story, or even the X Factor for what separates an ordinary story from a great story.

This video reminded me of an old favorite – Ira Glass from “This American Life” explaining how he approaches story in this series of videos.  Check them out if you’re interested in the art and structure of story.

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This article from Street Fight reminded me of a post we did way back when in 2010 about Content Marketing and the power it possesses if done right.  Author Patrick Kitano goes on to examine whether or not small business owners should start marketing with their content.

I think The Man With No Name was sort of, um, gray hat, probably.

Welcome to the first installment of Demystifying Optimization With Teddy Lyngaas.  Teddy is our Optimization expert here at AboutFace.  This is where I ask Teddy about stuff I don’t understand and he explains it and then hopefully I understand it (and if not, I will definitely pretend I do so that no one thinks I’m stupid).  If you ever have any topics in Optimization you’d like us (read: Teddy) to tackle, email me at murphy@aboutfacemedia.com and we’ll see what we can do.

This post focuses on bad guys versus good guys – black hat versus white hat – and what the bad guys are up to.

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John Murphy:  Thanks for taking the time.  So yeah, so basically this all kind of started from the Trutanich thing, right?

Teddy Lyngaas:  Yeah, I think you brought it on yourself.

JM:  (Laughs)  Can you talk a little bit about the black hat, grey hat, white hat, sort of, what all that means?  As far as ethics…

TL:  Yeah definitely.  It’s derived from old westerns.  I don’t know much about old westerns, but apparently bad guys would wear black hats and good guys would wear white hats.  And it kind of evolved from there in the hacking world and later adopted in the marketing and SEO world: the search engine optimization world.

I was actually just reading a couple of articles about how if you just Google “black hat social media” there’s a new term that they call crowd turfing.  And what crowd turfing is, basically, is this billion dollar industry of hiring these people overseas to do mundane tasks.  So stuff like posting user reviews on products, watching videos or clicking on ads or any other internet activity.

So it’s all just trying to dupe the system, because with everyone using social media and peer reviewed or user generated content, anything you can do to kind of shift it momentum and statistics your way is helpful.

I’m just looking at, right now – I just did a Wikipedia search for search engine optimization, and they have a section on Black Hat vs. White Hat.  So this is SEO, and I think they have a good definition of it on here where they say, “An SEO technique is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engine guidelines and involves no deception.”  And, so that is kind of the same thing for social media, right?  If you’re not following Facebook or YouTube‘s terms of use, essentially, which no one reads anyway – black hat.  Even if you don’t read it, though, you can use common sense to know that they are not going to like some of this stuff that’s considered black hat.

Then it says that Black Hat SEO “attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved by the search engines or involve deception.”  One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either the text is a similar color to the background or is invisible.

So, basically, what that means is that Google will crawl websites to figure out what the subject matter of the content.  And instead of having the page show up as what it is actually about, they will put text color that is the exact same color as the background color so no one can actually see it.

Google will actually crawl it and think that that is the content of the website.

JM:  Right right.

TL:  Basically black hat is anything that you are not supposed to be doing that you are anyway.

There are good things you can do and then there are bad things and there are some things that sort of fall in the middle.  That’s gray hat.

All of these technologies are new and we are kind of inventing the rules as we go.  There is always going to be someone out there that is trying to game the system.

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In the next installment, we (Teddy) will talk about more ways people do game the system.

The new American Masters documentary on Johnny Carson debuted last night and it reminded me of a story that I was told by the late, great Charles Nelson Reilly. It was 2004, and Johnny was still alive. We were filming a documentary on CNR and some of us who were working on the film were hanging out at CNR’s house in Beverly Hills, discussing the film.

Charles liked to tell Johnny Carson stories.  He loved the man. In fact, a significant scene in the film, The Life of Reilly, revolved around Charles appearing on the Tonight Show doing the “To be or not to be” scene from Hamlet:

When Charles told stories, you have to realize that he always put the story first… even if it involved a bit of a… let’s just say, evolution of the truth.  One time he would say he had been on the show 103 times.  The next time he would say 105 times.  We settled on 104 times for the movie, but as best we could tell, it was actually 99 times.  I guess he thought 100-plus something had a better ring to it.

Charles lived near the NBC studio, he told us, and he had a tux hanging in his closet standing by just in case Johnny called.  When a guest was a no-show, Johnny called Charles and he came right over.  The conversation was genuine and funny. Johnny would always ask about Charles mother. The clips are a riot.  The loose, rambling, improvisational comedy seems very different than today’s late night world.

But the story Charles told us that night in his house came to mind when I was reading about the American Master film — the complication that was Johnny Carson. We asked Charles why he hadn’t appeared on the show for the last couple of years that Johnny was on the air.  Johnny, Charles explained, had banned him from the show.

The reason?  Charles had gotten a call from his good friend Joan Rivers, asking him to appear on her new show.  He did so. And that was it for Charles on The Tonight Show.

I asked Charles if he ever saw or heard from Carson again?  He had not.  It was the late night death penalty.  Charles didn’t seem upset about it. It was just show biz. Charles mixed us up another Manhattan and went on to tell some pretty good Joan Rivers stories.  ”My Joanie” he called her.

But when it came to making the film, we contacted Carson Productions to ask for clips to use in the movie.  Their reply was swift and gracious.  ”We love Charles.  Anything we can do to help.”

They sent over several great clips, free for us to use, although the one Charles talks about in the movie was gone… part of an NBC snafu where they bulk erased video copies of several years worth of material.

In the end we barely used the clips in the film, but several can be found on YouTube.  They remind me of good times with Charles Nelson Reilly — a great and complicated talent himself. And his friend, the great and complicated Johnny Carson.

We miss them both.

The Ridebook: Prohibition Tour is a documentary video presented by Harley-Davidson that follows a group of riders on a California road trip.  It culminates in the director, Butch Walker, and pals (Butch Walker And The Black Widows) playing a rollicking show for some enthused fans.

The video itself reminded me of a series we did for Can-Am Spyder – only our videos were two minutes, not five.  Nevertheless, it’s good documentary work by Butch and Harley, even if I would have broken it into a couple of episodes for the sake of engagement.

Here is The Prohibition Tour video and episode one of our Spyder Five videos:

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Michael Tucker (director of such documentary films as How To Fold A Flag and Gunner Palace) recently did an interview with Movie Jungle’s Upcoming-Movies.com about his latest – Fightville.  Check out the article and watch the trailer below.  The film examines the world of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighting.  After debuting at SXSW, you can now get it on iTunes (US only), XBox, VUDU, or On Demand via Comcast, Cox, and Time Warner Cable.

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Check out this awesome article at The Atlantic by Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg.  It’s about Chevrolet’s short branded documentary from way back in 1935.  That was even before “Dogtown And Z-Boys”!  The film, “Sky Billboards”, is a good example of how a brand can offer content to its target demographic that isn’t an ad, that isn’t about the brand or its contents, but that instead offers entertaining stories the audience will actually want to watch.

A little excerpt:

While brands and advertising agencies look for new ways to reach audiences in the age of the Internet and TiVo, it’s worth taking a look back at pre-television advertising that worked so hard to create compelling, informative content like “Sky Billboards”.

And the Chevy film…

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Here’s a documentary video from Dupont showing how their company and partner Repshel are using science and technology to improve living conditions for people in poverty.  That’s a good thing to do, obviously, and they do a good job telling the story.

Here’s a nice little video series from online backup storage provider  Backblaze that tells the company’s story via a little good, old fashioned documentary series.  We likee.

I was surprised to read the statistics in this iMediaConnection article.  Should I have been?  Apparently not.  Video is apparently MUCH bigger than Search.  Check out this excerpt and then go read the rest at iMediaConnection.

 

Quick, which do Americans do more each day: watch YouTube videos or conduct Google searches? Hint: According to Google and comScore data, Americans do one of these activities four times more than the other.

According to comScore, Americans conduct about 12.5 billion Google searches each month. According to YouTube data, Americans watch about 40 billion videos per month. By that math, we’re watching four times as many videos as we are doing web searches.

JM:  What’s been the strategy for getting the video’s out that and seen and all that?

MM:  It’s been very very very grass roots. We literally put each video up, we have a small mailing list, we announce it, we put it on Facebook, we tweet it, and then we approach blogs that might be interested in the videos either because they are interested in that band or because they seem to be friendly to this sort of thing.

The dividends of this have been greatly varied.  I have had episodes that have gotten 20,000 unique clicks and I have got episodes that have gotten 200 unique clicks.  It has been hard to predict.  Because I am not making these to make any kind of profit off of them, you know, my idea was to just make something that I can put out into the world, you know, as opposed to the experience I have had with my features.  I did not want to fight to get this work out there.  I kind of wanted to tie it up with a neat bow and put it out there and let anybody who stumbles upon it have this little gift.  I mean, I think every little video is its own treasure.  Every episode is a strong stand-alone episode.  I just kind of wanted to leave them out there in the world for whenever people found them, and however people were going to find them.  The goal is never to make money with it.  It was just to have it out there and have people see it and the satisfaction of that is that people do stumble upon them and really do fall in love with those videos because I think they enter it with little expectation, you know?

JM: Some of the documentary interview stuff gets really pretty personal, especially the one with the Rebecca Schiffman on her OCD and stuff.  How do you get people to be that open about themselves personally and everything?

MM: You know I, like I mentioned, every time I find a subject I sit down and do a pre-interview with them and it usually lasts about an hour to two hours.  And I use that as a way of understanding what this person is willing to talk about.  When I met Teddy Blanks for the first time, I had no idea that he that his partner in the Gaskets had committed suicide.  He revealed that to me and then I asked him frankly if that would be something that he would be comfortable sharing on camera.  And when I met Rebecca, similarly, she immediately found that she trusted me and opened up about her OCD with me.  And for her I think there was probably a need to talk about the OCD because she is so proud of the fact that she has overcome so much of the limitations of OCD, that she has forced herself to be better, to do better, and to get better work out there.  So for her, speaking of this was, I don’t think it was easy, but I also don’t think that it was hard  because there was a measure of vindication for her in talking about these things.

Now, I have had subjects that are much more personal in their approach in pre-interview than they are willing to then be on camera.  Once they realize the cameras rolling, they clam up a little bit, which just means that I have to work that much harder.  My interview sessions for these 5 to 7 minute videos, they usually last 2 to 3 hours.  What I do is I basically pitch softballs in the interview for about an hour to an hour and a half, and then I slowly start to aim the conversation to the subjects that are really interesting to me.  And if along the way I find another topic of conversation that is worthwhile exploring, I will.

If I find that I need to, I have learned to be a good listener and an active listener as a director.  It comes probably from the same comfort I have working with actors which is just that if you pay close enough attention, you usually understand what someone needs to tell you or wants to tell you or that someone is having a problem.  You understand what it is that people might need to talk to you about  in a different way.  I find that by being an open listener you encourage open conversation, though.  And that the best thing that you can do is to be genuinely interested in somebody.  If you are genuinely interested in somebody they reward you by speaking to you genuinely and by addressing subjects on camera with you that they otherwise might not.

I mean, I do not think this is the kind of shoot where people forget they are on camera.  You know these “Mixed Tapes” shoots, they are always three camera shoots.  And it’s usually a big crew in a small space with three cameras.  I don’t think it’s easy to let go of the idea that you actually are on camera, but that’s never been necessary for me.  You know, I’m not after verisimilitude, I’m after honesty and I’d rather have my artist acknowledge the camera but then speak comfortably in front of the camera anyway, as opposed to forget that the camera is there.

JM:  So you’ve done two features both fiction, both narrative.  Are you planning on doing more doc work?

MM:  I would love to.  I’m really a person that likes new challenges.  You know, my first feature and my second feature couldn’t be more different than each other and my documentary series could not be more different than either of my features.  Now, I think there is a certain level of care that goes into all of my work.  If you see all of my work in a row, there is a piece of it that you would understand that the sensibility in all of this work is similar.  But, at the same time, they could not be more different structurally, each of the three pieces – “Mixed Tapes”, “Weakness”, and my new film the “Exhibitionists”.

My goal is to just keep making films.  I love the craft and the art of making films.  I love being behind the camera.  I think getting to tell stories is a privilege.

JM:  Awesome.  Well, “Mixed Tapes” is a good series.  I hope you do more of them.

MM:  Thanks so much.

JM:  Thank you, my friend.

PART 1_____PART 2

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Since Michael and I talked, true to form, he is telling yet another story, this one in the form of a feature length documentary about Korean artist Victor Victori.  One of the things I love about Mike is his passion for storytelling.  I hope that passion comes through in this post.  Now go check out Mixed Tapes and buy or Netflix his first feature Weakness.

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Case Studies In Social Storytelling examines past successes and failures in the world of Social Storytelling brought to you by AboutFace Media.

JM: Well, it is beautifully shot and you get great bands, most of, all of which I had never heard of before I saw your videos.  How do you get the bands? Are they friends of yours?

MM:  You know it is interesting, the first band that I shot was a band called Holy Moly and they where friends of mine.  I have since been fortunate enough that musicians have really responded to the series and so ever since I launched the series I have been approached by bands or I have been approached by people who have seen an episode and say, “God, I know this band and they are amazing and you should shoot them.”  I took a hiatus from the series to go direct my second feature.

MM:  I am hoping to return to it, but I have shot 7 bands but I have probably sat down with about two dozen bands at this point.  I have known going into the session probably a third of them.  I mean, I’ve always been very into music and New York’s music scene, but I also keep my eyes open and my ears open for people’s recommendations.  What I do is I go and I sit down with these bands when they’re recommended to me and I actually do a pre-interview with them and I listen to their music, and I do whatever research I can on them.  And I start to try and get an understanding of what might be the story that I want to tell through that band.  For instance with the Teddy Blanks episode, I knew that it was going to be an episode about grief and mourning and the mourning process and to me it was so wonderful that he was an artist situated in Williamsburg, New York…
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Williamsburg is a community in New York that has kind of been been known to be a home for hipsters and ironists and it is a home to a ton of artists.  And for me it was so important to locate someone with a really caring and sensitive story  within that neighborhood.  To locate a story that existed beneath the traditional trappings of what we knew that neighborhood to be.  And it was even more interesting that he was a synth pop artist, because I love synth pop.  I love the pop of the 80′s.  I actually think it is deeply emotive and when people look back on it and they say it’s cheesy, I don’t always think they are talking about the synth effects – I think that they’re talking about the fact that so much of the time, despite the the fact that it’s so heavily manufactured music, there is a tremendous sincerity to it.

So to find a living, breathing, sincere synth pop artist in Williamsburg, that was a gift.  And it did a lot of great things, because, Teddy has since become a friend and collaborator of mine.  He actually composed the score to my second film.  But, I have constantly sought out bands that I thought were going to contribute to this musical tapestry that I wanted to create.  Whether it was telling a story about love and partnership itself, or exploring the nature of cultural memory with a band like Behavior, who does all of this pastiche pop, it has always been important for me to seek out bands that weren’t just great bands but great bands that had something really interesting to say.  They have a real perspective about the music that they were making and why they were making it.  It’s not just important that you make great music to be in this series, it’s important that you know how to talk about the music that you’re making.

JM: Why did the bands, or why did you, choose to do covers rather than the bands or the artist’s original songs?

MM:  The desire to do covers was, for me, what this series is about it’s about the history of music and the bands and exploring their personal

From the Holy Moly episode.

histories – and then tying those personal histories into a wider cultural memory.  I wanted to say that all of these musicians are part of a larger tapestry, part of a larger community.  And it’s not just a physical community, it’s a community  based in memory, it’s a community based in musical tradition and roots, and it’s music-based in a listener’s experience of watching these bands and understanding their music.  And the way that we all come to understand the work that we do is by is coming to understand who we are influenced by. You know, for me it was important to understand not just how much I love Brian De Palma as a filmmaker but why I love Brian De Palma as a storyteller.  Now Brian De Palma shows up in all of my films and to an extent Hitchcock does,  and they are all part of a tradition and it’s part of a tradition that I’m working in and trying to comment on and to hopefully, if I ever get lucky enough, to elevate.

Teddy Blanks

I thought taking these bands that nobody has heard of really, I mean, that’s not fair to say, you know – these bands have followings within New York but they don’t have massive followings, they have local followings.  They are not bands that are known yet on a national level.  They are not bands that have been picked up by a major label, and it was important to relay the familiarity of their experience and tying viewers to their experience of personal history, you know, personal history and then musical history to connect them to that music.  It’s music that the bands themselves would emulate, like me with De Palma or Hitchcock.  The kind of music that they loved and it’s key to bring out really interesting questions in the bands and it helps the bands refocus themselves within the context of these segments and think about what it is that they are doing and why they are doing it.  I always think it’s so interesting to see to see anybody in their natural element dealing with their influences because the best interpretations are deeply personal, they always are.  The difference between a great cover and a terrible cover is that a great cover, you hear something in the song that you have never heard before.  That can only happen when the the artist making that music has a real personal connection to it on some level.

JM:  Where did the format of the episodes – the introduction to the bands, to them as people, and then the song – where did that come from?

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MM:  In terms of the structure of the episode you mean?

JM:  Yeah, yeah.

MM: There were a few things that I knew that I wanted to focus on, and, obviously one was the personal history of every band and how it connected to the music that they where making.  But the other was that I wanted the series to be representative on some level of living in New York itself, the specific challenges that come with living in New York.  Culturally, I think there has never been a more difficult time to live in New York, the city remains tremendously expensive to live in in-spite of the recession and, you know, the economic collapse of the last 10 years.  Which means that making new work here is harder than ever.  So to find all of these terrific and intelligent young people who are fighting to make their work here in New York, who are choosing to make a life in New York, part of me wanted to focus then on the character of the city itself, and the kind of characters that it might bring out within the city.

Even if all you are seeing is a broken down neighborhood at the start of every episode, to understand the kinds of places where these artists are choosing to live, where they are forced to live as a way of having to make new music and to continue to focus on the kind of work that they want to do…  To understand that there is a little bit of sacrifice that goes into making work for most of these people, for one reason or another.  And the neighborhood, the geography of where they live are as much an influence on the work that they are making as anything that might have happened as as a younger person, or as a person growing up listening to music.  That it is a constant evolution, and that journey and and geography is a big part of it.

You know, it’s why we talk about every city every major city having it’s own music scene, and that the Portland music scene is different than the LA music scene.  LA is different than the Austin music scene.  I would love to eventually take Mixed Tapes all over the country because I imagine that, even if some of the references are the same, that making music in Detroit has to be different than making music in Memphis and it has to be different than making music in Austin, and it’s certainly different than making music in New York.  And that that, like anything else, is a choice, it’s a choice that we make as artists about where we live, why we live, and how we approach the work.  And I don’t want to separate the geography from the work.  So, it sort of delivered this format to me where we where always going to start looking in from the outside by seeing the external world, by seeing the place and the things that surrounded this artist and the space where they created their work.  And then use that as a pretext to move further into them before we came back out and heard their music.

PART 1_____PART 3

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Case Studies In Social Storytelling examines past successes and failures in the world of Social Storytelling brought to you by AboutFace Media.

Michael Melamedoff is a filmmaker living in New York.  He’s made two feature narrative films to date, the first of which, Weakness, premiered at the 2010 Austin Film Festival and stars Bobby Cannavale, Danielle Panabaker, June Diane Raphael, and Josh Charles.  His second, The Exhibitionists, is in post-production and will hit the festival circuit later this year.  Mike and I went to NYU film school together and when I saw his web series, Mixed Tapes, I wanted to know more about it.  The documentary short form series profiles NYC musicians and bands, their personalities, their influences, and music.

JM:  So where did this project come from.  What made you start it or why did you start it?

MM:  I was in the process of making my first feature film “Weakness” ready for international sales and I had been working on the film for about a year and a half and had been watching it go slowly through the festival circuit.  And we had been picked up by a fairly large sales rep and I had been sitting there on my hands kind of waiting for the film to sell.  I was just dealing with all the frustrations that you go through as an independent filmmaker in terms of making these films that are small and you’re really proud of, and then having to kind of bite your tongue and sit on your hands and wait for somebody to come along and acquire your property.

So, I had made this first film and I was deeply proud of it and yet it didn’t find its place in the way that I assumed that it would.  Just on the basis that it was a good film, with some known actors in it.  We finally started to make headway on some sales and we began to do the pan-and-scans to deliver this film for airlines, foreign territories, et cetera.  And my colorist approached me during a session, and I had worked with him on the film, and now he was handling the pan-and-scans.  He said, “I just got one of these 5d cameras and I want to start shooting on it.  I’m a cinematographer.  I have been doing small music videos, and I would like to just be behind a camera and working.  And I like your style and I like you, would you like to go shoot something?”  And I did.

MM:  I very much wanted to make something because I was feeling very bottled up and hemmed in by the process of waiting for my first feature to sell, and I have to admit that I was starting to feel a little bit jaded by the process of filmmaking. I never understood just how much work it was going to be to get a film out into the world.  I thought that when I was making my first feature that that was the destination in and of itself.  I did not realize that there is such a longer road ahead of pushing the film through festivals, of pushing the film through sales, of procuring non-traditional means of distribution.

Michael Melamedoff

I found it really frustrating because I never approached filmmaking from the point of view that it was going to be a thing that I did solely for the purpose of making money.  I always had approached it because I felt like there were stories that I wanted to tell and I wanted to put them in front of people, and if people responded to those stories then the money would follow suit, and if the work was good then the money would follow suit.  But I have always believed that you do what you love and the money follows.  That trying to do it the other way around it is actually much, much harder.

So, I went home and chewed on what I could shoot.  I had never worked in documentary before but I knew that the format was interesting to me.  That it was interesting in terms of unleashing me onto different types of stories,  and that because I also have a background in theatre and non-profit theatre, and I do enjoy working collaboratively and developing the stories of other people.  I have a long background in developing young playwrights and developing new scripts.  So, the idea of finding a different way to cobble together a story was deeply interesting to me. And I started thinking about my own life, what I faced in trying to get films out, and why people continue to make films in a climate where it’s so economically hard for filmmakers to make a profit unless they’re working within a studio system.  You know, the boom of 90′s independent film has really come and gone – and I hope it comes again – but in the meantime it has created a really hard environment for filmmakers like myself to make work.  And I want to explore why people keep doing it.

“Mixed Tapes” for me was born out of a very personal fascination with art and artists and wanting to explore what choices they make and have to make to work and why people continue to make their work even when the financial rewards aren’t immediate.

From the Soft Spot episode.

What’s the purpose that lies behind it.  I’ve always really loved pop music.  I have a really contrarian, sometimes very high brow, high-art kind of taste in film or in art or in dance, but when it comes to music I really really really love pop music.  I really love Top 40 radio. I have always been really fascinated by the idea that really great pop songs are this distillation of something intensely personal… which is then manufactured and made highly commercial.  And yet when the listener interacts with it it becomes deeply personal again.  That cycle, that work flow is really interesting to me on a personal level in terms of somebody making work and making deeply personal work.  And on a larger level, in terms of wanting to, to really create an empathy for artists and what they are doing.

I also think one of the challenges of living in this current era is that there are so many channels for distribution and there is such a saturation of different networks and markets for content.  I wanted to take it back to storytelling that was very basic, very simple, very one-to-one.  And I also wanted to take it back to a story that had a historical pulse and a cultural pulse.

I think sometimes we lose sight of the culture and the cultural precedence of the films that have come before us.  You know there is such there an onus on rebooting ideas, on remaking ideas.  And because viewers are so sophisticated now by growing up in a culture where there is kind of an endless media cycle, people actually are more saturated with the information than ever but maybe have less of a sense of the cultural and historical context for the work that they are seeing or for the work that they are making.  And I do think it is important, as anybody that is creative, that anybody that cares about the arts and the culture, to have an understanding of the work that was made before you and the tradition that you’re a part of because it’s the only way that work stays in conversation. It’s the only way that I think you can guarantee that you are working toward making something new or making something different.

PART 2______PART 3

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Case Studies In Social Storytelling examines past successes and failures in the world of Social Storytelling brought to you by AboutFace Media.

MC Hammer spoke at Stanford University’s Graduate School Of Business Entrepreneur Week back in 2010.  Did that sentence shock you?  Well, the artist best known for the 1990 hit song “U Can’t Touch This” (and possibly also for those oddly cut, oversized pants) is also a self-described serial entrepreneur who has been everything from racehorse stable owner and record label mogul to CEO of an MMA fighter management firm.

I must admit that surprised me.

Hammer’s had a fascinating life with fame, business ventures, bankruptcy, and finding his faith, and now you can watch a fascinating video of him speaking to Stanford grad students – MC Hammer: Role Of Social Media In Marketing.

It may shock you to learn that Hammer has a ton of great ideas for how social media applies to marketing, start-ups, and much more.

He is genuinely passionate about social media and the empowerment that it brings us all.  And he points out the power that brands have to control the narrative of what comes out about them via social channels (at about 8:45 in the video).

“I like working with great companies, I like working with distressed companies.  Distressed companies need social media to tell their story, to regain ground, to communicate their message – there’s a great opportunity in that.”  And a bit later:

“If you’re actually telling the story yourself – the transparency – it extinguishes the initial effect of breaking news.”

That cottons with what we at AboutFace have been saying, and doing, for years.  Check out the video for Hammer’s philosophies on all things social media (and especially his David Letterman example of how to get out front of bad news that’s coming).  He’s an interesting man and you may be shocked at how much we can all take away from his lecture.

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You may remember Google’s famous Super Bowl ad Parisian Love.  It tells the story of a (presumably American) student going to Paris, meeting a French girl, wooing her, them getting married, etc.  The story is told through terms the student is typing into his Google search.  The ad was a big hit and was part of the launch of Google Search Stories back in 2010.  Google also launched a Search Story Creator tool that allows users to type in their own search terms to create their own search stories, and encourages users to share the results through social.

Google is now employing documentary storytelling to show how their search functions benefit users.  It’s the documentary take on the search box Parisian Love version of story.  Check out Google Search Stories for the entirety of documentary shorts they’ve put up, or watch an example below.  It’s very, very similar to what we at AboutFace have been doing for years in terms of documentary style, video length, and using a fascinating story to engage an audience and at the same time soft-sell the brand or product (in this case, Google’s search engine).

Showtime has obviously ramped up its original programming over the last decade with their shows getting better and better.  (I myself am a fan of Shameless and House Of Lies, and everyone everywhere seems to love Dexter – shamefully I haven’t seen the wildly acclaimed Homeland yet.)  Now the premium cable network is ramping up their original web content, too.  They commissioned a series of short films from artists and filmmakers with lots of web-street-cred.  Mike Hale at The New York Times wrote a great article about what Short Stories is all about.  Check out Mike’s article.  It would seem that Showtime has found a unique way to use social media to market content to their intended hard-to-reach audience.  Here’s a short excerpt from Mike’s article that will give you the flavor:

Of course the films wouldn’t be there — on sho.com, on a dedicated YouTube channel and as free Showtime podcasts on iTunes — if they didn’t also serve a business purpose. The seven shorts, six of them at least partly animated, were commissioned by Showtime from filmmakers who had built followings online. By allying itself with them, the cable channel hopes to hitch a ride on their reputations — and benefit from the artists’ own marketing and social networking — to reach an audience for which television is not the primary viewing option.

“All of our content creators have done an amazing job pushing this out to their audience, whether it’s Facebook or on their own Web site,” said Trevor Noren, Showtime’s creative director for digital content. “A couple of them have blogs where they will post the content. There are so many tools out there to organize the audience, and they’ve done that before we ever partnered with them.”

Bank Of America has begun using documentary storytelling to tell customer stories – how BofA helped them achieve their dreams.  Check out this video about a San Francisco chocolatier.  Looks a lot like what we’ve been doing for years now… so welcome to the party, BofA!

The New York Times is rolling out a series of fascinating documentary short films – under the banner of their Opinion section, meaning they’re essentially video versions of traditional print editorials.  It’s a very smart evolution embracing technology as opposed to hiding their heads in the sand and going extinct.  Check out one of the “Op-Docs” documentaries here.

John:  That actually leads to another question – there’s a bizillion videos uploaded to YouTube and everywhere else every minute.  There’s a bizillion people on Twitter.  There’s all this noise, like you said.  You have a show that people actually watch.  Most of these videos nobody ever sees.  Was it instantly successful in getting people to watch it?  Did IKEA help promote it?  How did you get people initially to watch it and has the audience built over time?

Illeana:  Yes, it definitely built over time.  I think it was a combination of my quirky fan base, people who liked me, people who liked Justine Bateman, the quality of the show.  And then also there’s this built in audience for people who like IKEA.  This was another epiphany that I had, and we hadn’t gotten to that point yet, where I’m always saying to them that IKEA needs its own channel.  The IKEA Channel.  Which would be Easy To Assemble, it could also have DIY.

In the future my belief is that – like in TV we have the SyFy Channel and TLC and Lifetime – what we’re going to see is that on the web.  There’s a guy on the web who has a network that is all horror.  They do low budget horror – it’s all about horror.  And you can find a niche audience for that.  So I see that as being the future.  If you like IKEA, and obviously millions of people like IKEA, you will probably like my show.  You see these shows, like Morning Joe on MSNBC, it’s a show that’s entirely sponsored by Starbucks Coffee.  It’s actually a great show, it’s on really early in the morning and when I can’t sleep I watch it.  It’s incredibly free-wheeling and probably the only reason they can keep it on the air is that all they have to do is drink Starbucks Coffee constantly.

Who knows, maybe it’s freeing to have a brand.  What I’m not as crazy about are the shows where they suddenly shove the brand down your throat, where it’s not integrated into the show properly.  I just kind of see that as the future.  You know, Red Bull sponsors sporting events.  So I’ve talked to them about developing a sports show.  I think the sports network is going online.  You could do sports shows.  Say you’re a tennis fan and you have a sitcom you want to do about tennis.  That’s not going to make it on the air.  There’s no way.  The odds are…  But say you want to take half that budget and do that show on the online tennis channel – I think that, as artists, that’s what we’re all balancing.  Do I want to work and get paid less but at least have people see my stuff?  I think that’s the climate we’re in right now.  The alternative is that you could try to write a great script every year and try to pitch it, but the odds of that to me seem so astronomical, that cultivating an online audience seems to be easier – if you’re good.  You’re always going to get the haters, as they say, but I suppose that’s part of it.  And I don’t think IKEA is going to take me off the air because one person out of two hundred doesn’t like the show or doesn’t like something that’s in it.

[Here is Illeana winning a Streamy Award for East To Assemble.]

John:  Writing and directing and acting in your own show seems like a lot of work.  You’re probably not gonna get rich off of a web show at this point.  So are you motivated by just wanting to work, or you need to this story or you need to tell your stories or a combination of all those things?

Illeana:  I think it’s a combination of all those things.  You’ve got this limited amount of time to tell stories.  It’s very hard not to get bogged down in wanting to be successful and be celebrated and have your things be celebrated.  But on the other hand I think it’s important to just work.  I’m just a big believer in that.  It’s important to work.

And people will see your movies.  They’ll find them, they’ll discover them.  I think of all the things I’ve discovered on YouTube.  Long dead performances where I’m like, “This guy’s a genius.”  It would have been better to discover them when they were alive, but I think you have a responsibility to try – to try to maintain your work and your voice as an artist.  If you think you have something valid to say, that is.  If you want to be famous then I think that’s a completely different ball game.  But all of this for me also goes hand in hand with wanting to make movies.  You know, I love movies and I love acting and I love telling stories.  But there does seem to be a somewhat limited opportunity right now to make movies.  So if you don’t do this then what is the alternative?  That’s what I always say.

Plus it gives me the opportunity to write something for Craig Bierko or Ed Begley, some of these characters, or Fred Willard.  Fred

Patricia Heaton on the set

Willard is a childhood idol.  So to be able to call him and then talk to him about a part I want to write for him and then have him be on the show is amazing.  To me that’s what’s so great.  Or Patricia Heaton, Kevin Pollack, all of these great people who have been on the show.  And as we go into season four, I meet people and say would you like to be on the show – it’s getting easier.  Kevin Pollack used to say – and I’m quoting Kevin Pollack too much – but he used to say it’d be like jury duty to try to get someone to be on your web show.  But it’s getting easier and easier now because people definitely see the viability of it.  You could come in and you can actually play a character on the show that’s a well written character – on my show.  There’s certainly other things on the web, there’s stuff that runs the gamut.  But my show is specifically a kind of indie film fest.

When Cheri Oteri was on the show, people really liked that part.  David Henrie and Tim Meadows – people always talk about when they were on the show.  So I get a lot of compliments for people just doing something different.  Patricia Heaton playing a Swedish mom.  Sung Kang, who is an action guy, coming on and doing comedy.  So I try to offer an alternative – something the person’s never really done before.

John:  That’s great.  All great.  I really admire how you’ve taken control of your career and your art.  Keep on rocking and thanks so much again for doing this!

Illeana:  Thank you!

                                             PART 1 ____ PART 2

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Go check out Easy To Assemble if you haven’t already, and thanks again to Illeana for taking the time!

Case Studies In Social Storytelling examines past successes and failures in the world of Social Storytelling.

John:  How did the partnership with IKEA come about?  Were you out pitching brands or…?

Illeana:  Yes, I was.  I did a pilot called Illeanarama, and I did a short film which was called Supermarket.  Then I did a series where I compiled all of my short films for the Sundance Channel and I called it Illeanarama.  I said I want to do something like Supermarket because you could get a brand to sponsor the entire show.  I wanted it to be like a variety show but the difference being that it wasn’t going to be stand-up comedians doing the variety, it was going to be actors doing the comedy.  Actors doing funny stuff.  So I compiled all these shorts and I was going around pitching that, but that didn’t go anywhere.

And eventually I did this pilot called Illeanarama which was based on this premise that I worked at this supermarket called Supermarket Of The Stars.  Ed Begley was in it and Justine Bateman.  I got Jerry Mathers who was the Beaver and Jane Lynch.  And it was the juxtapositioning of celebrities being in the supermarket versus the regular people that work there.  We did the pilot and it didn’t go.  Interestingly, it spawned a bunch of shows that were just like my show.  There were a bunch of shows that then came out that were about supermarkets.  And movies.  There was Employee Of The Month, Ten Items Or Less, there was suddenly this proliferation of supermarket shows.  But they always shied away from the idea of actress or celebrity working in the supermarket – that always bothered them.  So then I went around to actual supermarkets like Whole Foods and Vons and all these people thought I was out of my mind.  They were like, “A show… in a supermarket…?  I don’t think so.”

I was just pitching it and pitching it and pitching it and eventually I got this call…  I was asked to pitch something to Ford, a series of funny commercials to Ford utilizing this car.  I remember going and talking to them, but it didn’t go anywhere.  Then the next thing I knew was I got this call saying do you want to meet the people from IKEA?  They were interested in doing interstitials.  So I met with them.  We were talking about what we wanted to do, and the more we continued to talk, I said, “What about this idea of doing this show where I work for IKEA?”  And I wrote the script and I said I’ll try to reach out to some people I know and see if they’ll do it.  It was such a new idea at the time on the internet that I was able to get Tom Arnold and Jeff Goldblum and Justine who was completely into it and wanted to do the show.  So I wrote it and I just had as many people as I possibly could come do it.

Cheri Oteri at the Easy To Assemble premiere

It was probably wildly ahead of its time.  Of course now it’s, oh, a web series, everybody’s got to have a web series.  But at the time it did seem pretty crazy.  When we got our second year pick-up, it started to get that people were approaching me saying, “I really want to be in it.”  Like Cheri Oteri, she saw it and said I really think it’s funny and I really want to be in it.  So people started coming to me and saying I want to be in it, which was great.  It gave me this opportunity to be a comedy writer without having to go through all the steps of rejection like I’d done before…my three failed pilots that didn’t go anywhere.  It was great.  It was like 1950s television where, basically, the only thing that’s branded about the show is that we all work for IKEA.  And that’s kind of what makes it funny.

I think there’s something humorous about the brand.  So doing a show at IKEA for some reason works.  I don’t know if it would necessarily work for another department store like Macy’s.  We all work at Macy’s!  And it’s hysterical!  Although I wouldn’t turn them down – if they wanted me to write a show for them I certainly wouldn’t turn them down.  But there’s something so kookie about the Swedish-ness of IKEA that it seems like you could believe that I would go there to work.  And a lot of what is put into the script is semi-true.  It’s either based on things that are part of IKEA culture or part of what’s going on in my life.

John:  Is IKEA, as far as the creative side, are they involved creatively a lot, or are they more “here’s the check, now go make the show”?

Illeana:  They’re involved creatively in the sense of the basic things – you can’t disparage the brand.  However, they’ve been kind of

Illeana and Tom Arnold

unbelievable in what they let me do.  They know I’m pushing the envelope as much as possible.  Their thing is as long as it has a twinkle in the eye and it’s family friendly.  I told this story to the LA Times.  I had waited a couple of years to tell it, but it was an absolutely true story.  I had written in Tom Arnold, who is my friend in real life, too, and we’ve done all these movies together and hung out together and been photographed on the red carpet together.

So I said let’s write in this story line together where you’re trying to get me to rev up my career by doing a sex tape video with you.  So what happens is that we do the sex video and it does not turn out well.  I say I’ve got to go to work.  And you pull back to reveal that we’ve done the entire thing in one of the living rooms in IKEA in Burbank.  Now we really did that.

When IKEA read it, their only note was that I couldn’t say “sex video”.  I could just say “video”.  When we shot it, we were scantily clad with shoppers coming by.  The only requirement was that we could not block the aisles.  The fact that Tom and I – I’m in lingerie and Tom’s in boxer shorts – and we’re shooting it in the middle of an IKEA, and kids are watching, seems to be perfectly fine as long as people can still get to the bedding section.  So in that sense, they’ve been amazing.

The main concern is always that we’re not disrupting the shoppers or the shopping process or causing any kind of danger to anyone shopping.  As far as the editorial content goes, I always pitch them the general idea of the script, where I’m gonna go.  I don’t just throw something at them.  I don’t swear – I try not to swear.  So that’s hard.  I have to think of things like, “I wonder if they’re going to let me say ‘ass’” and things like that.  I try to keep it family friendly, but there’s a lot of innuendo in the show.  And I find that that goes along with the brand.  I think it’s a kind of a cheeky brand.  And I think certain brands – Virgin Airlines, Jet Blue, Starbucks – have a more cheeky presence probably more than Wal-Mart or something like that.  I’m just guessing.  I don’t know if you could do a lot of innuendo at Wal-Mart.  That seems more middle America.  There’s something about IKEA where they want to be stylish and hip and all those things so it works.
John:  Yeah – I read something, maybe the LA Times thing, where you said everyone you know is looking to work with a brand.  Why do you think that is?

Illeana:  Currently they are, yeah.  Because at the time I was first starting to talk to brands, even they didn’t know what I was talking about.  Two years later I was meeting with companies that represented brands.  I met with the company that represented Heineken that put together the whole Mad Men – Heineken deal.  Now I think the reason people are looking for a brand is that it’s a way to fund something quickly where there’s a benefit for the brand, certainly, and there’s a benefit for the artist.  I think that if they go hand in hand, you can actually do some great content.  But I know a lot of people come to me now and say, “I have this idea and what brand do you think would be interested in it?”  And those days are almost already over.  Now you’ve got companies or advertising agencies that are so savvy – like there was this little window like there was with indie films where I could get right to the brand.  But that has gone away.  That has been sealed up again by the advertising agencies or the distributors.  They want to go to the brands.  You know, the last thing anybody ever wants is for the artist to have direct control with the money.  The fact is, that’s what I have learned.  Because that’s the most dangerous thing.  Because an artist will be like I’ll do that whole thing for a hundred grand!  The advertising agency wants to tell the brand give us a million dollars and then we’ll go out and get this person and that person.

It’s the same thing with the distributor.  Some of these distribution outlets now online basically stole the idea from the artist, like myself, that is just looking for a way to do content online.  And they were like – oh this is a great idea!  We will go to brands, we’ll say that we produced all this stuff that we’re simply distributing, and you give us x, y, and z and we’ll go out and hire the talent and all that and of course for a quarter of the cost.  That’s kind of what’s going on right now.  That’s why you see a lull in branded entertainment because people are locking up their brands right now – removing that relationship that the artist has with the brand, which I think is too bad.  Unless you can create your own brand.  Unless you can become your own Adam Carolla or your own Tom Green or your own Dane Cook.  And somebody can see what they are and they’re an identifiable thing and then a motor oil company or – brands will start pursuing you.

John:  The Dane Cook thing, another thing I wanted to ask you about.  He’s kind of known in comedy circles as being one of the first people to get really really big primarily through social media – Facebook, at the time MySpace.

Illeana:  Yeah, yeah.

John:  Like on Twitter, now I think somebody like Rob Delaney or Megan Amram, who are incredibly funny, were like the Twitter kids who got big because of Twitter, or by using Twitter.  Whereas Dane was in the old days MySpace-Facebook.  I follow you on Twitter and so I find out what’s up with the show, stuff like that–

Illeana:  So you know that I hung out with Jo Anne Worley, which is just the coolest.  You know how hip I am.

John:  Yes.  I am impressed and jealous.  But my question is, you’ve got content and you’re distributing it over the web – do you like Twitter as a tool for distribution or promotion?

Illeana:  I was sort of doing it for the show, not really for myself, but then as the Easy To Assemble show started to progress I thought – wait a minute, I’m devoting so much time to the Easy To Assemble blogs, I should probably take more time to do my own thing, my own varied interests, etcetera.

So this year, this season, is when I started for the first time doing it more and more.  I do feel like I have a strong point of view.  You can’t compete with the giants, the Steve Martins, but every once in a while it’s exciting, you get in there with a good tweet that somebody retweets.  I think it’s good because I think the future of real estate is in figuring out how to create this little tribe around you.  Because they’re going to support you when other people say oh I don’t know if he’s so sellable.  And again, somebody like Tom Green is the perfect example of that.  It’s as if his career stalled but by going on the road and doing his own thing he maintains probably a more successful career and he doesn’t have to be at the mercy of this production, that production.  He can maintain a living and in a sense rebuild his own credibility as an actor and as an artist.

NOISE!

So that’s where I think the time we’re in right now is.  For somebody like me or somebody like Kevin Pollack, I do think the tweeting is very important.  For me, establishing myself as being a being a writer and producer and also being someone who is funny and can write funny and eventually, rather than trying to force a script you wrote down someone’s throat, you can see the evidence of it online.  So in that sense I find it’s become easier.

I think the overnight sensations are always going to be the overnight sensations.  I don’t know how you compete with an overnight sensation.  I mean the girls with their makeup tips, stuff like that.  You can’t create that.  Then you get into this other issue where you have these people like the Kardashians and Real Housewives and the proliferation of what is real and what is not real is somewhat troubling right now.  We’re inundated with it and there’s so much noise it’s difficult then to find a space.           

                                                                           PART 1 ____ PART 3