​ Bambuser
Bambuser is an app that was released in 2011, so it isn’t extremely new however this means that the amount of users has grown and became a suitable audience. This apps allows you to record things in real time for your ‘followers’ to watch. As it is happening in real time it is hard to question the reality that it is showing. It has become a tool for citizen journalism and has even been used by broadcasters in Sweden to show events that haven’t they have not been able to record.
This app is a simple way to advertise our documentary and us. We could use it to show our audience the filming and making of the documentary as well as showing them real time footage that will be in the documentary.
New Media Application
Social Networking
To help promote our company name and our documentary we wanted to use the force of the Internet and social networking. There are 218 million users on Twitter and 1.15 billion Facebook users that are active monthly. This is a huge audience that is easy for us to reach without having to go out and meet hundreds of people just to see if they are interested. These social networking site have search bars so that you only have to communicate with people that you know will be interested.
The first networking site we made was Facebook. For promotion this site will be one of the best as it allows you to post whatever you like and it will appear for all to see. The only issue with Facebook is that it is a lot more private than Twitter. This means that people are less likely to ‘like’ your page unless you truly give them reason to.
Due to this reason we then made a Twitter account. With twitter you get a certain amount of characters to write a post. This can sometimes be a problem as not everything you want to say can be fit into one single post. However it is a lot easier to collect followers with the use of hash tags. At the end of posts (or even during) if you hash tag a word it becomes a link, which if clicked on will send you to a page full of all things to do with that hash tag. This has made it very easier to make sure that Bronies see what we are posting.
To get the ball rolling with our Twitter followers contacted someone who would be able to assign us thousands of followers for free. Within a few hours we had 5,000 followers. Some people may call this cheating however the followers slowly leave over time. The idea of this is to create the perception that we are a company with interesting things to say as well as that what we are ‘selling’ is what people want to hear. This then would create more followers.
Both of these sites have a limit when it comes to videos. Due to us being a media production company we will be having a lot of video to put up to show to our audience. For this reason we created a YouTube site. There are 1 billion unique users on YouTube with 100 hours worth of video uploaded every minute, there are over 6 million hours of video watched every month. We will be using YouTube to post all of the work we have been doing during these semesters so that our audience know who we are, our style and technic, as well as the fact we are hard working students.
When creating a YouTube account it automatically links you to Google+. While creating your YouTube it is all linked together, therefore subscribers can also see this profile and all your videos are automatically uploaded there as well. This is still a fairly new social networking site which is growing in popularity therefore this could be helpful for the people who have moves past Facebook and Twitter.
Crowdfunding
Crowd funding has taken the Internet by storm. It appeals to people wanting to create something new and people wanting to help by giving them money. Crowd funding is when a group of people come together, individually or as a group, and put their money together to support people’s effort to make something. It could be a film, TV show, book, company, piece of art, games, even just a act of humanity. The main websites that are doing this are Kickstarter, Crowdfunder and IndieGoGo.
Kickstarter started in 2009 with 5.2 million people pledging $882million for 52,000 creative projects. So far they have a 44% success rate for funding. On Kickstarter the person wanting to raise money sets up a viral campaign to post on their website. Normal it is a video or a photo with all the information about the project below. For the people pledging their money they are offered certain rewards for doing so. This tends to be a copy of the finished project however the more you pledge the more you get in return, this could be a private viewing or a meet a greet with a the star. One disadvantage of Kickstarter is that if you do not reach your target money then you don’t get to keep any of the money you raised.
Crowdfunder is the Uk’s largest crowd funding network and has launched 3000 projects having raised over £1,000,000. They have over 70,000,000 followers waiting to support the next big thing. This site has the same principles as Kickstarter however here you keep want you earn, even if you don’t make your target.
IndieGoGo was created in 2008 and is an international platform for crowd funding. On this site you have the option of setting your campaign as a ‘Flexible Funding’, which allows you to keep what you raise even if you do not reach your target, or a ‘Fixed Funding’ where, if you do not meet your target, the money is refunded to the pledgers. It is free to create a campaign however if you reach your target you are charged 4% of your goal and if you do not then you are charged 9% of what you received.
