Archives: #tpolive

The Lowdown on Communication

This week’s Lowdown focuses on communication tools for filmmakers:

Communication, as we all know, is key to establishing, maintaining and getting the most from our connections and relationships. And it’s important to remember that “getting the most” doesn’t just mean “getting what you want” – all relationships in life should be a two-way street. As soon as we forget that, we’re in trouble.

SKYPE

The biggest and most obvious communication tool for filmmakers is Skype. It’s free, it’s easy-to-use and it offers three main methods of connecting with someone: text-based instant messaging, voice-only internet phone calls and, more famously, video calls.

There is nothing better than meeting with someone face-to-face; relationships will always be stronger and more cemented simply by being or having been in someone’s company. Failing that, however, video calls are by far the best way. You can not only hear the person’s voice, but you get to see their facial expressions, too. When you’re part of a global community of filmmakers, being able to connect with people on the other side of the world and work with them in close-quarters, Skype video calling is simply the best solution.

Voice calls are second best, but Skype still allows you to have a conversation, to hear the other person and to enjoy proper two-way communication. And, of course, it’s still free, which means you’re saving significant amounts on your phone bill.

Lastly comes instant messaging. IM can be a great tool for chatting things through quickly with someone or floating ideas while you’re doing other things, too. It’s a productive communication tool for conversations that don’t require 100% attention the whole way through – you can dip in and out with pauses between responses. The main issue with IM is that it’s far too easy to be lazy and use it when you should really pick up the phone and talk to someone.

WHATSAPP

Alongside Skype, which is often seen as the catch-all free communication tool, is the fantastic WhatsApp Messenger. WhatsApp is both brilliant and significant because it’s one of the first cross-platforms communications apps that lets you connect with friends and contacts using instant messaging from your mobile device.

It works on iPhone, Blackberry and Android smartphones and uses the same internet connections and technology that gives you your email to keep you in touch without any charge beyond your usual monthly phone service.

The biggest barrier to this right now is the fact that both sides have to have the app installed on their device, so the more we can encourage each other and our friends and connections to download the app and sign up, the more free communication we’re going to get from it.

WRAP UP

Communication tools are like all the other tools I talk about on here: they’re great if you use them correctly and for the right purpose. While all manner of free communication tools are a huge boon to us as filmmakers and content producers, they can only be as good – and as productive – as we allow them to be.

So next time you find yourself typing out an email, stop and think if you’d be better connect with the recipient in a chat. Next time you try to connect with someone in a chat, think about whether you’d be better off calling them on Skype. And the next time you connect on Skype, think about whether what you have to say would be better done using video so they can see you’re not angry, pissed off or disappointed.

Good communication is the cornerstone of good business and at the end of the day, good business is what we’re all trying to achieve.

The Lowdown on Email Marketing

This week’s Lowdown – part of The Production Office Live – is focused on email marketing:

TOOLS

If you’re going to be marketing your content and products to your email list you first of all need a tool to help you do it. By far the most popular are MailChimp, which starts from free and scales up, and Aweber, which is a paid service, but offers much more in terms of functionality and interaction with other programmes.

Both are good choices, but like most programmes of this ilk – and there are many – it mostly boils down to your budget and what you want to do with your emails. Take a look at them both (and others) and see what you think.

BUILDING YOUR LIST

We all have an email list, we just call it our address book. Most of us don’t like to think of sending marketing messages to our friends, and that’s why there are all sorts of protections in place (in the UK at least) for holding people’s data.  Everyone you send a marketing email to MUST have consented to receiving them, either by giving you their address on a sign-up form or expressly agreeing in another manner.

There are many ways to capture email addresses and many examples of good practice. The two most common ways are through your project website – check out dontlethimin.com for a good example of Opt-In email forms – or by offering something in exchange – see Seth Godin’s offer of the first four chapters of Permission Marketing.

As we talked about previously with Crowdfunding, you have to be able to offer value to your list through your email. Which brings us to…

TIPS

54% of people who unsubscribe from email lists do so because they either receive the emails too frequently or because the content is too boring or repetitive. You need to make any marketing emails you send out interesting, informative and relevant. As soon as you lose those three things from your emails, you will start to lose subscribers quicker than you gained them.

Another great tip is the use of social media connections. Adding “Share” buttons from the major social media sites on the ‘net increases click-through by 55% – a huge advantage over all those emailers out there who aren’t leveraging social media in this way.

More than likely, you subscribe to several email marketing lists and the best way to learn what works and what doesn’t is simply to look through your inbox. Some of your emails will be out-and-out marketing, some will be sharing and some will seem to be neither. Look carefully at all of them and work out for yourself what you like, don’t like and how you could do it differently to promote yourself, your film or your products.

I hope this is all useful to your quest to gain more from your online marketing. Have any other tips about email marketing, or your own success story? Post them in the comments section below.

The Lowdown on Productivity Tools

Welcome to another new LOWDOWN, that part of the Production Office that brings you tips and tricks on all the tools you need to enhance your career as a filmmaker and creative.

Today, it’s Productivity.

Anyone who follows my blog will know I’m pretty hot on productivity. For far too long I spent my days being busy, but rarely productive. Since harnessing some of the tools I’m talking about today and putting some best practices of getting things done into place, I’ve become much more focused, much more productive and much more successful.

Let’s have a look, then, at some of the tools you can use to make your life easier.

EVERNOTE

Evernote comes at the top of the list today for two reasons: number one, it’s the tool I was most recently introduced to and two, it’s the tool I now find the most invaluable.

Evernote is a desktop and web-based app that you can also get for almost all smart phones.  It’s free to get started, but if you go over a certain storage limit you have to start paying.  That said, I’ve used it quite a lot and still not exceeded my free allowance.

What Evernote does is to collect together all those bits and pieces of things on the web that you want to take note of, as well as allowing you to compile your own To Do lists, projects and other notes.  It’s the simplest, cheapest and easiest way of keeping track of just about everything you need to remember. The Evernote logo isn’t an elephant for nothing.

THINGS

The second tool that works hard to keep you on time and on-topic is Things. The biggest down side? It’s Mac-only. So all you Windows dinosaurs can’t take advantage of it. You also have to pay around £30 for it, which puts it a step below Evernote to begin with.

Once you get past those elements, though, Things is brilliant for tracking To Do’s, project files, notes and reminders. Most usefully, though – and what helps to elevate Things to a point worth paying for – is it’s interaction and syncability1 with iCal and iPhone. If you use Apple’s MobileMe syncing solution to share your calendar across all your home computers, like I do, Things swaps and shares data seamlessly with not only all of your computers, but your phone as well. An invaluable way of keeping track of everything you need to know when you need to know it.

BASECAMP

There are numerous online project management tools that help you and all your collaborators to keep track of all the strands that make up your project, but the best one I’ve found (and used) is Basecamp.

Unlike other, equally useful online tools like Huddle, it’s Basecamp’s pricing structure that really makes it stand out. You pay a flat monthly fee from $24 (£15) and upwards that allows unlimited numbers of people to join your project and work on things with you. Huddle, by contrast, charges you per user per month, meaning a major film or creative project would quickly rack up sizable fees.

Basecamp2 is best used for sharing documents and keeping track of project timelines and goals in a way that everyone involved can see. Not only is that a great motivational tool – if everyone know what you should be doing, you’d better be doing it – but also a great way of making sure key things don’t get missed and that everyone knows the timeline their working to and the goals their aiming for.

There are hundreds of different tools of productivity for you to explore, but I’d suggest you limit yourself to trying one or two at a time, otherwise you risk undoing all their good work by spending all day getting to know them and setting them up as opposed to using them to help get your work done.

For more o productivity, keep an eye on my blog here, as well as checking out the99percent and lifehacker, my two online bibles of productivity tips and tools.

  1. new word alert! []
  2. and, in fact, all online project management tools []

Should We Aspire To “Event TV”?

It doesn’t take a genius to work out the value of “Event TV”. Take last night’s Superbowl: people all over the world tuned in and felt compelled to take part in the chatter, bantering back-and-forth with friends, followers and random strangers.

In the age of the DVR1, VOD and online catch-up services2 more and more of us are watching our TV content time-shifted to suit ourselves. But if you want to be part of a conversation – if you want to experience the feedback as it happens – you need to be watching live.

The LOST finale is the obvious fictional TV reference3. Although it’s easily dismissed as a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence for fans of one particular show and thus something of an exception, it’s still worth noting that the LOST team had spent 6 years working up to this moment, carefully building their following and fanaticism to the point when it became not only “must-see TV” but “must-see-at-the-same-time-as-everyone-else TV”, the very definition of “event TV”.

Can we, as independent filmmakers and creators, produce the kind of content that is best experienced live and as it happens? Can we create “event” content?

The closest we have to it right now is probably The Production Office Live and Film Snobbery, shows that are available almost immediately after airing on the ‘net for anyone to view it at their leisure, but which the vast majority of the audience wants to see live so they can engage in the chat and discussion, whether on the website chat or via Twitter.  Even this, though, is factual content rather than fictional.

If they key to it is interaction and immediacy, is it possible – or even realistic – for us to create “event TV” in a fictional format? Or are we foolish to even aspire to such heights? Do the indie forms of distribution (VOD, digital download etc) inevitably mean it’s beyond our reach, or can we create content that will get people buzzing across platforms as they all watch our product together?

What do you think?

  1. be it TiVo, Sky+ or whatever the dominant service in your area is []
  2. like the BBC’s iPlayer []
  3. just check out the spike in Twitter traffic as recorded here by the NY Post []