The Socializers | intelligence gathering

Funding your Creative Today!

admin February 9, 2011 No Comments

How To Run a Successful Self-Funded Creative Project

The age of the Creative has fully arrived. We are in times when Creatives have the real possibility of identifying an audience for their work and getting funding from that audience.

Using a combination of creative software, free intelligence solutions and free crowd-funding solutions (here and here), Creatives globally can be up an running within 1-2 months on the creative project of their dreams.

THE VALUE OF COMBINING A TARGETED INTEREST GRAPH WITH A CROWD-FUNDING TOOL: When you identify Key Influencers who are passionate about YOUR niche AND their followers, you will have discovered a fertile field in which to plant your crowdfunding campaign. Why? Because these are YOUR people, the ones who LOVE what you love! When you place a Kickstarter or Indegogo project WITHIN a targeted social footprint chock-full of Passionates, funding and momentum occur that much faster. Your Facebook page is GREAT for family and friends to participate BUT you also need to get this project in front of its tribe!

Following is a simple process for getting going:

1. LEARN: Visit KickStarter and Indegogo. Study the projects that have been funded successfully, read the FAQs and blogs and learn how these easy-to-use crowd-funding solutions work.

2. GATHER: your materials: video, photo, music, text.

3. CREATE a promotional video (this one of the MOST important aspects of successfully funding a crowd-funded project).

4. IDENTIFY YOUR AUDIENCE/FUNDING SOURCE: Once all of your materials are together and are tightly written, edited and scored, it is time to create the interest graph around your offering. An Interest Graph is a term used to describe the tribe of people who are passionate about the content in YOUR creative offering. While the initial funds for any creative project often come from family and friends, it is a great idea to do a little “intelligence gathering” on your potential audience and funders.

How to do intelligence gathering and assemble a tribe:

a. THE AUDIENCE WITH AN AUDIENCE: Go to wefollow.com , Research.ly and listorious.com. Type in keywords related to your niche. In both of these free solutions, lists of key influencers will emerge. Those influencers and their followers are YOUR tribe. They are the ones who will be interested in what you have to offer.

b. STUDY SUCCESS: Go to Amazon.com and Last.fm and study “similar products” or “tracks you might like” to get an idea of how Creatives of your stripe are marketing themselves. Study the successes AND the failures.

c. AGGREGATE THE INFLUENCERS: Create a Twitter account and brand it. This Twitter account should be around YOUR niche interest. Do NOT title it the name of your movie or album. Title it more generically and then follow ALL of the key influencers you discovered in wefollow.com and listorious.com. Their content and their audiences will be a very valuable resource for you in the following ways:

i. – As an idea of what is trending

ii.- As a virtual tribe to “drop” your Kickstarter or Indegogo project into. Once you create your project in one of these two funding solutions, you can announce it into the fabric of this niche social footprint. The way to do this is simply to tweet the video you created with a link to the Kickstarter project.

iii.- Feedback on your offering. You can direct members of this niche tribe to your video and get valuable feedback. Remember, the best part about critics is how they refine a creative offering. The best Critics are actually lovers of Creativity and offer constructive feedback. Even blistering Critics are valuable since these individuals shave away the fluff and help one identify potency. Never fear a Critic. Seek out a Critic and seduce him or her through your offering.

5. CREATE THE CAMPAIGN: After creating the Interest Graph (the GENERIC “social footprint” around a microsite based on that genre), it is time to create the Kickstarter or Indegogo project. Both sites have EXCELLENT instructions and are very easy to use.

6. MARKET THE PROJECT through your interest graph, to family and friends, and on all of your social networks. Let people know about your project with short punchy tweet-length messaging that contains bit.ly or ow.ly links leading back to the video on YouTube and to the crowd-funding solution.

The World Behind the World

admin October 20, 2010 No Comments

Behind all appearances, I divine a struggling essence. I want to merge with it. ~Nikos Kazantzakis

There is a world behind the world. The best social monitoring tools help one to peer into the vast realm of the unconscious, a place populated by archetypal entities created by sub-cultures. The voices of the unconscious realm become starkly visible in the patterns moving across and through social networks. Within these complex and varied fabrics there ripple millions of vibrations, which ultimately collate to form the deities worshipped by the various tribes roving cyberspace. It has been said that all words find their root in a god somewhere in some mythology. The collective is forming a series of complex, subtly balanced life support systems in the form of social networks populated by living cells!

Carl Jung writes, “…psychic contents, the so-called complexes, take over the control of the total personality in place of the ego, at least temporarily, to such a degree that the free will of the ego is suspended.” It could be said that humanity is poised on the brink of such phenomenon becoming widespread in social networks. It would not be too outlandish for a single voice to catalyze OR motivate the whole. Jung writes, “When someone is able to perform the art of touching on the archetypal, he can play on the souls of people like on the strings of a piano.” With multiple crowdsourcing sites and campaigns emerging, the mechanism is in place to reach those with an affinity to particular messagings AND swiftly guide these groups toward attractive events, products, services and causes. The collective acts like an individual and influences ALL within its own body! Jung says, “The world powers that rule over all mankind, for good or ill, are unconscious psychic factors…We are steeped in a world that was created by our own psyche.”

Currently The Firestarters in organizations are inspiring LISTENING programs AND finding ways to involve the WHOLE organization. These are the ones who understand the value of listening to the WHOLE, divining the “world behind the world” and gleaning emerging trends. Out of this, a Creative has the data to craft more finely-honed FUTURE RAGES. Jung writes, “…any autonomous complex not subject to the conscious will exerts a possessive effect on consciousness proportional to its strength and limits the latter’s freedom.” He goes on to say, “It gets you below the belt and not in your mind, your brain just counts for nothing, your sympathetic system is gripped. It is a power that fascinates people from within, it is the collective unconscious which is activated, it is an archetype which is common to them all that has come to life.” This phenomenon is occurring countless times a day in the social networks as viral elements feed on Likes and Tweets, rolling millions into seemingly irresistible currents.

Nikos Kazantzakis writes, “I feel that behind appearances this struggling essence is also striving to merge with my heart. But the body stands between us and separates us. The mind stands between us and separates us.” In the coming 12 months, I predict this sense of separation will diminish as Transparency becomes the fashionable “way to be” and world behind the world injects itself directly into daily experience through a kind of spiritual tech, fusing humanity’s hunger for piercing mystery WITH financial return. The real VALUE of transparency IS that we are introduced to MORE MYSTERY, having transcended the secrets that acted as blockades to progress. Jung writes, “The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.” To be conscious of ANYTHING is to be free of its influence FOR THEN we have power of choice related to its activities. Humanity yearns to open itself to possibility. Exploring the unknown through social monitoring is a FANTASTIC action for facilitating such an evolutionary process.

ROOT INFLUENCE: At the root of every word, there is a god or deity, a revolution waiting to happen!

admin September 14, 2010 No Comments

To listen well, is as powerful a means of influence as to talk well, and is as essential to all true conversation. ~ Chinese Proverb

Keywords are the words that are used to reveal the internal structure of an author’s reasoning. Keywords can be identified as words which appear with statistically unusual frequency in a text or a corpus of texts. An adventure into the significance of a single keyword includes etymological, mythological, cultural and personal discovery of meaning. Understanding the eco-system of key influencers, major conversations, largest web communities and highest examples of ROI around any given keyword signifies a successful foray into the heart of that keyword.

We now have truly fantastic ways to discover all of these deeper meanings of keywords using the following tools.

ETYMOLOGICAL SEARCH: Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time. As marketers, we want to know about this history because it informs our intelligence gathering about the communities that have surrounded, do surround and will surround any given word.

Example of the power of etymological search: When doing recent research for a film that targets the Cultural Creative community and specifically the Karma Queen consumer within that community, I found that “family” is THE single most popular keyword by global search volume for that tribe. Knowing more about the etymology of the word family gives me further insight and inspiration on which key influencers, largest groups in social networks and web communities. What insight does the word etymology of the word family give me into the Karma Queens?

c.1400, “servants of a household,” from L. familia “household,” including relatives and servants, from famulus “servant,” of unknown origin. The classical Latin sense recorded in English from 1540s; the main modern sense of “those connected by blood” (whether living together or not) is first attested 1660s. Replaced O.E. hiwscipe. Buzzword family values first recorded 1966. Phrase in a family way “pregnant” is from 1796. Family circle is 1809; family man, one devoted to wife and children, is 1856 (earlier it meant “thief,” 1788, from family in slang sense of “the fraternity of thieves”).

From this etymology, we can derive some of the deepest HEART SIGNIFICANCE of this word. A FAMILY (ideally) is a group of people who would do anything for each other, including lying, cheating and stealing to help each other survive. They are pregnant, not only with children, but also with the ideas, the hopes and the dreams of the individuals carrying the same blood. And out of these ideals, they develop values that signify devotion to the children, giving them as much hope and thrust INTO the future as they possibly can.

To perform an etymological search, go here: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=tool

MYTHOLOGICAL SEARCH: Mythology is defined by Joseph Campbell, the world’s foremost mythologist, as “a field that teaches humans what is behind the literature and the arts.” He goes on to say that “metaphor is the native tongue of myth… myths are public dreams and dreams are private myths.” It has been said that at the root of EVERY word there lives a deity. A mythological search reveals the deity, the sacred and the divinity at the root of a word — its magic.

One location to perform a mythological search related to a keyword is here: http://www.godchecker.com/pantheon/index.php?_search

CULTURAL SEARCH: When one works with keywords and SEO, it is wise to take into consideration ALL of the factors present for OTHER cultures related to keywords. For an excellent article on this go here.

KEY INFLUENCER SEARCH: Knowing who is recognized by the world as a TRUE expert in any given field is pretty valuable information for a researcher. There are many tools for discovering key influencers. Radian6 will reveal key influencers in real time and PeerIndex has produced an elegant and effective measurement tool for the Key Influencers in many areas.

NEWS SEARCH: Searching news is a powerful way to discover what is happening. Recorded Future has created a truly incredible tool for discovering news from the future. With its major investment coming from In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and Google, one can be sure there is some excellent information coming through this window into global activity.

One of the world’s foremost social community and strategy architects, Brian Solis, writes, “Gathering intelligence to inspire meaningful and actionable social programs is priceless.” Every KEYWORD contains etymological, mythological, cultural and personal significance AND understanding this truth gives significant power to anyone wishing to influence anyone on anything.

To create “meaningful and actionable social programs” a social marketer should consider delving into each of these disciplines AS A MEANS OF UNPACKING THE SECRET OF EACH KEYWORD AND KEYPHRASE. For a social strategy to find its seed in a set of potent keywords is the equivalent of walking down the rainbow into the pot of gold. Use keyphrases, their meanings and their histories to inform your understanding of the living quality of the WORD, the COMMUNITY, and the OVER-ARCHING CAMPAIGN PHILOSOPHY.

At the root of every word, there is a god or deity, a revolution waiting to happen, a cure for an ill, a ticket to a desired destination…a living and breathing presence and experience. Understanding words AS living and breathing presences transforms keywords from plain data into VIBRANT DATA, DATA WITH VITALITY!