Tanya Kersey | Hollywood Career Strategist | Hollywood Career Coach | Entertainment Industry Consultant | Hollywood Career Resources

Ask any indus­try pro­fes­sional, and they’ll tell you the same. Since the dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion lead to cheaper equip­ment costs, the film mar­ket has never been this flooded. This leaves the imper­a­tive ques­tion, how does one stand-out from the crowd.

Scott Kirsner pon­dered this very issue when he attended the South-by-Southwest Film Fes­ti­val a few years back. He wit­nessed film­mak­ers in frenzy, post­ing fly­ers on top of fly­ers, and wast­ing expen­sive press mate­r­ial by trad­ing with other film­mak­ers in des­per­ate attempts to get noticed. Kirsner thought to him­self there had to be a bet­ter way.

See, Kirsner, a social media guru, was wit­ness­ing the same prob­lems online between other cre­ative artists fight­ing for atten­tion on the even more over­pop­u­lated World Wide Web. Deter­mined to find answers, he inter­viewed over thirty cre­ative artists who had suc­cess­fully unlocked the secrets to gain­ing atten­tion online, and pub­lished his find­ings in the book, “Fans, Friends, and Fol­low­ers: Build­ing An Audi­ence and Cre­ative Career In The Dig­i­tal Age.”

On Mon­day, May 17^th, Scott stopped by “Inside Urban Hol­ly­wood” to share his dis­cov­er­ies with Tanya and Tiffini. What he had to say is valu­able advice to any­one look­ing to sus­tain a cre­ative career in the new world we live in where Face­book mes­sages are sent just as often as reg­u­lar mail.

The first step to build­ing an online fol­low­ing is find­ing fans. Scott advised to go where the audi­ence already is.  If your film dis­cusses a sub­ject mat­ter, find places online where users inter­ested in that sub­ject mat­ter hang out. Blogs, dis­cus­sion boards, and Face­book groups are great places to start a dia­logue. Once a rap­port is estab­lished, feel free to share your mate­r­ial, since at that point it won’t come off as spamming.

This is when you’ll want to direct them to your web­site or social media page. When asked about the plethora of social media sites (Facebook/Twitter/Linkden/Blooger, etc.), Scott sug­gested not to feel pres­sured to use every sin­gle trend that comes along.

Pick one thing you feel com­fort­able with and can keep up with. Stick with that. Don’t feel like you have to do everything.

Scott said the most impor­tant thing was not to be on as many sites as pos­si­ble, but to reg­u­larly keep your site cur­rent. The worst sin is not updat­ing. Users auto­mat­i­cally think there’s noth­ing going on, even when that can’t be fur­ther from the truth.

Now that you have fans, you want to turn them into fol­low­ers. Kirsner expressed some of his ideas on how film­mak­ers specif­i­cally could use social media to build their fan­base. For exam­ple, when using Face­book and/or Twit­ter, Kirsner advised film­mak­ers not to use the site as a con­stant stream of self-promotion. Artists instead should seek to engage fol­low­ers by fos­ter­ing dia­logue, and ask­ing for their input and feed­back on new ideas. As an exam­ple, he men­tioned Jonathan Cole­ton, a musi­cian who gave his inter­net fans per­mis­sion to make music videos out of his songs. By using the dig­i­tal com­mu­nity as a part­ner, Jonathan’s music became more viral, and his fan­base grew expo­nen­tially to the point where he was able to make a liv­ing solely off his art.

Scott had many more tips to share on build­ing on online fol­low­ing. To here Scott dis­cuss the rel­e­vancy of Myspace, the impor­tance of gath­er­ing geo­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion on your email list, and when it’s okay to get help, lis­ten to the show Here on Blogtalk Radio.