Digital Marketing Part 1 (Independent Cinema)

Background:

Sliver Screen is a latest independent cinema in Newcastle, in which concentrates on offering widest choice of films to go and see and organising special film events for the customers. The profits come from the box office, film peripheral products, cafe shop, and film events.

Customers:

Ideal customers:

18-30 years old white middle classes audiences.

Demographics:

Age: 18-30

Education: University or higher

Occupation: Students

Age distribution of cinema-goers,1997-2009

Market:

Cinema Industry

ž  “The number of screens in the UK continues to rise, although the availability of screens and admissions per person vary considerably across the country. The number of digital screens doubled during 2009, while the number of 3D digital screens increased by over six times.”

ž  “Only 7% of screens were dedicated to ‘specialised’ (that is non-mainstream) programming, with 0.3% dedicated mainly to South Asian films.” 

                                                                                                                        ------ UK Film Council

Specialised films

Current trends

ž  Current trends for independent cinema

ž  ‘Choice’ -> programme

        ‘Quality’ -> physical environment.

Competitors:

Tyneside Cinema

25 Characteristics of Highly Effective Social Media Campaigns (Note)

(http://socialmediatoday.com/index.php?q=SMC/203359)
1) They spread like wildfire. Effective social media campaigns spread very fast. If your campaign is not spreading, it is not effective. Test the waters with micro campaigns. Learn to swim before attempting to ride the big waves.

2) They are not spammy. Don't just promote your site links; share something insightful about your company or product. Don't send out the same message to your community. It is spam…and it is very annoying to them. Even to you. Admit it.

3) They provide value. Value can come in the both physical and mental forms. Effective campaigns provide value in any or both of these regards.

4) They are well branded. Clothe your campaign from head to toe with your company's identity. Use your logo, your USP or slogans, your colors, and any other thing that defines your business's identity. Add your brand to every video you produce; don't add just your website address.

5) They are measured. You need to track your social media marketing efforts. Whether you install Google Analytics on your Facebook fan page or you use Post rank to measure your effectiveness, make sure you work with the data.

6) They have excellent copy. Leave a positive impression in just a few words. Using big vocabulary is not the way to go; making sense is what matters.

7) They don't ‘sell'. Instead of selling, you should work at generating leads with your social media campaign. Sell to those leads later on.

8 ) They build relationships. Don't just broadcast. Interact. Building relationships  helps build even more relationships. It also increases the perception of value and builds loyalty.

9) They build trust. Be as honest in your campaign as possible. Trust is very hard to earn back once lost. Your campaign should build and maintain trust in your build.

10) They are innovative. Regular campaigns mostly go unnoticed. Innovation adds ‘flavor' to your campaign. It is the aroma of your campaign and the one thing that will convince most people to take action.

11) They have ears. Your campaign will not be successful unless you listen for feedback. People may have something to say so listen and show appreciation or let them know you are working on it. Never delete a negative feedback.

12) They are well organized. Your campaign needs to be well planned. It should have a first step and an nth step (where n is the number of the last step). Follow through from step 1 through to step n. Don't go from step one to step 3 to step 2. Plan your steps well so it is easy to follow through step 1 to the last step.

13) They are maintained by humans. Don't rely on automation when it comes to marketing on the social web. It just won't work. Besides, it destroys trust. Put a human being in front of, in-between and behind all your social media campaigns. I want to talk to a human being not a robot.

14) They are consistent. You need to be consistent with your update (or broadcast) schedules and interact with people who leave replies and comments. If you broadcast once a week and change to 5 times a day, people will begin to question your actions. Unless you give them good reason why you have changed your schedule.

15) They have bait. You need to have some sort of bait to convert visitors into leads. Try eBooks, free products, white papers, discount codes, samples, free vouchers, et cetera.

16) They use leverage. They leverage the subscriber bases of their communities and other people's communities. They also leverage their company strengths.

17) They include a blog. I suggest you have a business blog before you start your campaign. Your blog should be the hub of your social media campaign efforts. Make you install social media sharing buttons to make it easier for others to share your blog's content.

18) They engage other blogs. You can do this too. Apply as a guest writer for blogs in your target market. Read blogs in your niche and leave thoughtful comments (not just a “thank you”).

19) They are not everywhere. If you want your campaigns to be successful, don't register for an account on every social media site. That will only burn you out and your campaigns will be fruitless.

20) They have humor. Adding humor to marketing is a cool way of saying “we are a friendly business”. It makes your marketing memorable. A priceless result.

21) They share company events. If your company is being bad mouthed, tell your customers about it. Tell them the truth in it and the lies. Don't give them the chance to second guess your company. If your company is nominated for an award, tell your community about it. If your company wins the award, tell them. If you lose the award, tell them.

22) They integrate offline marketing. Print some T-Shirts, with your logo, Twitter handle, Facebook fan page URL and your slogan on it and give them out to your customers. Send out paper printed catalogs to your online leads. Add your Twitter and Facebook URLs to your contact address. Integrate offline with online.

23) They use the right networks. Even though Facebook supports videos, video campaigns will do better on Youtube than on Facebook.

24) They use photos and videos. Photos and videos leave a lasting impression on peoples' minds. The best photo you can use is your logo. When you make a video, put your logo on it.

25) They have a call to action. What is the essence of a marketing campaign without having a call to action of some sort? I suggest you use your social marketing campaigns to generate leads before trying to sell anything. By the way, “signup below” and “call us now” are not the only call to action examples. “Click to view our portfolio” is an example of call to action. Your call to actions must follow a sequence; from your homepage to the last page.

10 Rules of Social Media (Note)

(http://socialmediatoday.com/index.php?q=richardmeyer/244571/10-rules-social-media)

1. Don’t recreate your home page in social media: don’t rehash the same information people can get elsewhere.

2. Listen first, then talk: create a dialogue 3. Build trust by being open and honest: transparency is key.

4. Give your brand a face: give consumers someone or something accountable for the brand.

5. Offer something of value: give without wanting something in return.

6. Be relevant: don’t be invasive without purpose.

7. Talk like a friend, not a corporate entity: speak in simple, casual language.

8. Give consumers some control: be comfortable with the fact that you can’t dictate the message any more.

9. Let consumers find you/come to you: brands that seek consumers too fervently will be seen as intrusive and interruptive.

10. Let consumers talk for you: people will advocate for brands they care about.

Now here are my 10 rules before you embark on a social media marketing program:

1. Ensure you have a strategy in place and that it ties back to brand objectives.

2. Ensure you have buy-in from senior managers on what constitutes success.

3. Use metrics that matter like cost per lead or cost per transaction not engagement or number of followers.

4. Train your people on how to use a human voice in social media not corporate spin.

5. Answer questions, comments and complaints in Internet time not on your time schedule.  If you wait too long you risk getting consumers upset and having them hijack your brand.

6. Expect to fail but learn as you move forward.

7. Don’t try to be all things to everyone.  There are some people that you’re not going to be able to make happy no matter what you do.

8. Make sure that content is relevant to your audience and is not a sales brochure.

9. Do not have an agency speak for you on your social media page.

10. Marketing should be in charge of your social media if you’re targeting consumers & customers. PR if you’re targeting investors and members of the press.

9 Essential Principles for Good Web Design (NOTE)

(http://psd.tutsplus.com/tutorials/designing-tutorials/9-essential-principles-for-good-web-design/)

1. Precedence  (Guiding the Eye)

Good Web design, perhaps even more than  other type of design, is about information. One of the biggest tools in your arsenal to do this is precedence. When navigating a good design, the user should be led around the screen by the designer. I call this precedence, and it’s about how much visual weight different parts of your design have.
A simple example of precedence is that in most sites, the first thing you see is the logo. This is often because it’s large and set at what has been shown in studies to be the first place people look (the top left). his is a good thing since you probably want a user to immediately know what site they are viewing.
But precedence should go much further. You should direct the user’s eyes through a  sequence of steps. For example, you might want your user to go from logo/brand to a primary positioning statement, next to a punchy image (to give the site personality), then to the main body text, with navigation and a sidebar taking a secondary position in the sequence. 
What your user should be looking at is up to you, the Web designer, to figure out. 
To achieve precedence you have many tools at your disposal:

• Position — Where something is on a page clearly influences in what order the user sees it.
• Color — Using bold and subtle colors is a simple way to tell your user where to look.
• Contrast — Being different makes things stand out, while being the same makes them secondary.
• Size — Big takes precedence over little (unless everything is big, in which case little might stand out thanks to Contrast)
• Design Elements — if there is a gigantic arrow pointing at something, guess where the user will look?

2. Spacing

When I first started designing I wanted to fill every available space up with stuff. Empty space seemed wasteful. In fact the opposite is true.
Spacing makes things clearer. In Web design there are three aspects of space that you should be considering:

• Line SpacingWhen you lay text out, the space between the lines directly affects how readable it appears. Too little space makes it easy for your eye to spill over from one line to the next, too much space means that when you finish one line of text and go to the next your eye can get lost. So you need to find a happy medium. You can control line spacing in CSS with the ‘line-height’ selector. Generally I find the default value is usually too little spacing. Line Spacing is technically called leading (pronounced ledding), which derives from the process that printers used to use to separate lines of text in ye olde days — by placing bars of lead between the lines. 
• Padding
        Generally speaking text should never touch other elements. Images, for example, should not be touching text, neither should borders or tables.
    Padding is the space between elements and text. The simple rule here is that you should always have space there. There are exceptions of course, in particular if the text is some sort of heading/graphic or your name is David Carson   But as a general rule, putting space between text and the rest of the world makes it infinitely more readable and pleasant.
• White Space
      First of all, white space doesn’t need to be white. The term simply refers to empty space on a page (or negative space as it’s sometimes called). White space is used to give balance, proportion and contrast to a page. A lot of white space tends to make things seem more elegant and upmarket, so for example if you go to an expensive architect site, you’ll almost always see a lot of space. If you want to learn to use whitespace effectively, go through a magazine and look at how adverts are laid out. Ads for big brands of watches and cars and the like tend to have a lot of empty space used as an element of design.

3. Navigation

One of the most frustrating experiences you can have on a Web site is being unable to figure out where to go or where you are. I’d like to think that for most Web designers, navigation is a concept we’ve managed to master, but I still find some pretty bad examples out there. There are two aspects of navigation to keep in mind:
Navigation — Where can you go?
There are a few commonsense rules to remember here. Buttons to travel around a site should be easy to find – towards the top of the page and easy to identify. They should look like navigation buttons and be well described. The text of a button should be pretty clear as to where it’s taking you. Aside from the common sense, it’s also important to make navigation usable. For example, if you have a rollover sub-menu, ensuring a person can get to the sub-menu items without losing the rollover is important. Similarly changing the color or image on rollover is excellent feedback for a user.
Orientation — Where are you now?
There are lots of ways you can orient a user so there is no excuse not to. In small sites, it might be just a matter of a big heading or a ‘down’ version of the appropriate button in your menu. In a larger site, you might make use of bread crumb trails, sub-headings and a site map for the truly lost.

4. Design to Build

Life has gotten a lot easier since Web designers transitioned to CSS layouts, but even now it’s still important to think about how you are going to build a site when you’re still in Photoshop. Consider things like:

• Can it actually be done?
      You might have picked an amazing font for your body copy, but is it actually a standard HTML font? You might have a design that looks beautiful but is 1100px wide and will result in a horizontal scroller for the majority of users. It’s important to know what can and can’t be done, which is why I believe all Web designers should also build sites, at least sometimes.
• What happens when a screen is resizes?
      Do you need repeating backgrounds? How will they work? Is the design centered or left-aligned? 
• Are you doing anything that is technically difficult?
    Even with CSS positioning, some things like vertical alignment are still a bit painful and sometimes best avoided.
• Could small changes in your design greatly simplify how you build it?
    Sometimes moving an object around in a design can make a big difference in how you have to code your CSS later. In particular, when elements of a design cross over each other, it adds a little complexity to the build. So if your design has, say three elements and each element is completely separate from each other, it would be really easy to build. On the other hand if all three overlap each other, it might still be easy, but will probably be a bit more complicated. You should find a balance between what looks good and small changes that can simplify your build.
• For large sites, particularly, can you simplify things?There was a time when I used to make image buttons for my sites. So if there was a download button, for example, I would make a little download image. In the last year or so, I’ve switched to using CSS to make my buttons and have never looked back. Sure, it means my buttons don’t always have the flexibility I might wish for, but the savings in build time from not having to make dozens of little button images are huge.

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If anyone knows good type it’s iLoveTypography!

5. Typography

Text is the most common element of design, so it’s not surprising that a lot of thought has gone into it. It’s important to consider things like:

Font Choices — Different types of fonts say different things about a design. Some look modern, some look retro. Make sure you are using the right tool for the job.

Font sizes —Years ago it was trendy to have really small text. Happily, these days people have started to realize that text is meant to be read, not just looked at. Make sure your text sizes are consistent, large enough to be read, and proportioned so that headings and sub-headings stand out appropriately.

Spacing — As discussed above, spacing between lines and away from other objects is important to consider. You should also be thinking about spacing between letters, though on the Web this is of less importance, as you don’t have that much control.

Line Length — There is no hard and fast rule, but generally your lines of text shouldn’t be too long. The longer they are, the harder they are to read. Small columns of text work much better (think about how a newspaper lays out text).

Color — One of my worst habits is making low-contrast text. It looks good but doesn’t read so well, unfortunately. Still, I seem to do it with every Web site design I’ve ever made, tsk tsk tsk.

Paragraphing — Before I started designing, I loved to justify the text in everything. It made for nice edges on either side of my paragraphs. Unfortunately, justified text tends to create weird gaps between words where they have been auto-spaced. This isn’t nice for your eye when reading, so stick to left-aligned unless you happen to have a magic body of text that happens to space out perfectly.

6. Usability

Web design ain’t just about pretty pictures. With so much information and interaction to be effected on a Web site, it’s important that you, the designer, provide for it all. That means making your Web site design usable.
We’ve already discussed some aspects of usability – navigation, precedence, and text. Here are three more important ones:

• Adhering to Standards
      There are certain things people expect, and not giving them causes confusion. For example, if text has an underline, you expect it to be a link. Doing otherwise is not good usability practice. Sure, you can break some conventions, but most of your Web site should do exactly what people expect it to do!
• Think about what users will actually doPrototyping is a common tool used in design to actually ‘try’ out a design. This is done because often when you actually use a design, you notice little things that make a big difference. ALA had an article a while back called Never Use a Warning When You Mean Undo, which is an excellent example of a small interface design decision that can make life suck for a user.
• Think about user tasks
      When a user comes to your site what are they actually trying to do? List out the different types of tasks people might do on a site, how they will achieve them, and how easy you want to make it for them. This might mean having really common tasks on your homepage (e.g. ‘start shopping’, ‘learn about what we do,’ etc.) or it might mean ensuring something like having a search box always easily accessible. At the end of the day, your Web design is a tool for people to use, and people don’t like using annoying tools!

7.  Alignment

Keeping things lined up is as important in Web design as it is in print design. That’s not to say that everything should be in a straight line, but rather that you should go through and try to keep things consistently placed on a page. Aligning makes your design more ordered and digestible, as well as making it seem more polished.
You may also wish to base your designs on a specific grid. I must admit I don’t do this consciously – though obviously a site like Psdtuts+ does in fact have a very firm grid structure. This year I’ve seen a few really good articles on grid design including SmashingMagazine’s Designing with Grid-Based Approach &  A List Apart’s Thinking Outside The Grid. In fact, if you’re interested in grid design, you should definitely pay a visit to the aptly named DesignByGrid.com home to all things griddy.

8. Clarity (Sharpness)

Keeping your design crisp and sharp is super important in Web design. And when it comes to clarity, it’s all about the pixels.
In your CSS, everything will be pixel perfect so there’s nothing to worry about, but in Photoshop it is not so. To achieve a sharp design you have to:

• Keep shape edges snapped to pixels. This might involve manually cleaning up shapes, lines, and boxes if you’re creating them in Photoshop.
• Make sure any text is created using the appropriate anti-aliasing setting. I use ‘Sharp’ a lot.
• Ensuring that contrast is high so that borders are clearly defined. 
• Over-emphasizing borders just slightly to exaggerate the contrast.

 

9. Consistency

Consistency means making everything match. Heading sizes, font choices, coloring, button styles, spacing, design elements, illustration styles, photo choices, etc. Everything should be themed to make your design coherent between pages and on the same page.
Keeping your design consistent is about being professional. Inconsistencies in a design are like spelling mistakes in an essay. They just lower the perception of quality. Whatever your design looks like, keeping it consistent will always bring it up a notch. Even if it’s a bad design, at least make it a consistent, bad design.
The simplest way to maintain consistency is to make early decisions and stick to them. With a really large site, however, things can change in the design process. When I designed FlashDen, for example, the process took months, and by the end some of my ideas for buttons and images had changed, so I had to go back and revise earlier pages to match later ones exactly.
Having a good set of CSS stylesheets can also go a long way to making a consistent design. Try to define core tags like <h1> and <p> in such a way as to make your defaults match properly and avoid having to remember specific class names all the time.

Research of ideal customers and specialised films

Statistical Yearbook 2010 (UK Film Council)

Audiences

Watching films is one of the UK’s favourite pastimes. On average almost seven films are seen per person per month, either in the cinema, on video or television, or increasingly online and via portable devices. Age, gender, ethnicity and socio-economic status influence film preferences and the tendency to watch films at home or on the big screen – and to download films illicitly.

Facts in focus

• In 2009, 60% of the UK population said they went to the cinema at least once a year, the same percentage as 2008.
• 18% went to the cinema once a month or more.
• The cinema audience for the top 20 films in 2009 was predominantly young, with the 7–34 age group (40% of the population) making up 64% of the audience.
• Minority ethnic groups were equally or over-represented in the film audience, except for viewing pay-per-view films where they were under-represented.
• Disabled people were under-represented in the film audience.
• Total ‘film viewing occasions’ numbered over 4.5 billion, which means an average of 81 film viewings per person in 2009.

Specialised films

Specialised films offer audiences an experience of cinema that is very different from mainstream commercial fare. Such films may offer an innovative cinematic style, engage with challenging subject matter, be in foreign languages or portray experiences from different cultures. Evidence shows that specialised films are a growing aspect of our film culture.

Facts in focus

• 347 specialised films were released in the UK in 2009 (69% of the total) earning £173 million (15% of the total gross box office).
• Films in 28 different languages (including English) were released in the UK in 2009.
• 161 foreign language films made up 32% of total releases, but shared just 2% of the UK box office.
• Hindi was the most frequent foreign language in terms of the number of releases, with 3 Idiots and Love Aaj Kal being the two most popular Hindi films.
• 56 documentary films were released, accounting for 11% of releases but only 1% of the gross box office.
• 26 classic and archive films were re-released (5% of the total), accounting for 0.2% of the box office.

Research of Independent Cinema

Independent Cinema Office

http://www.independentcinemaoffice.org.uk/index.html

UK Film Council

http://www.ukfilmcouncil.org.uk/

Film Funding ( UK Film Council)

The Film Fund is our new unified production and development fund dedicated to British filmmaking.

We have £15 million a year to invest across the development, production and completion of feature films. Being supported by the UK Film Council means more than just being given funding. It means that your project can be assisted at every step of the journey by our team, who can offer advice and practical help with many aspects of developing and producing your film.

Cinemas (UK Film Council)

Creation of a digital screen network; support for independent cinemas; and improving access to cinema for people with disabilities.

Fifteen million pounds of capital funding has been delegated to the UK Film Council by the Arts Council of England, which is allocated as follows:

Digital Screen Network The largest proportion has been used to create a network of screens dedicated to the exhibition of specialised films in locations across the UK where there is no such provision currently.

Capital funding for cinemas This fund assists cinema operators to undertake and/or complete capital projects, particularly where the works are considered essential to the cinema's continued existence or of benefit to audiences that may currently be excluded (for example, by improving access for disabled cinemagoers).

Please note: no funding is currently available for cinemas.

Year Book 2010 (http://SY10.ukfilmcouncil.ry.com/)

The UK Film Council's 2010 Statistical Yearbook is published as a fully digital and searchable website for the first time. It offers the most comprehensive and accessible picture of film anywhere in the UK, and it can be found at http://SY10.ukfilmcouncil.ry.com/.

The new-look Statistical Yearbook is an even more accessible, open and valuable resource – one which can be shared with the widest possible audience and which, depending on your needs, can be explored online, downloaded or printed either in whole or in part. The search facility and the More Info section allow you to navigate the Yearbook with real ease, while the Links section takes you to related content and further helpful information. Each chapter has its own headline page, comprising all the relevant key facts and data – you can then explore each chapter, section by section.

In addition to these developments, regular readers of the Yearbook will notice some extra features this year, all of them in response to user feedback:

Details of the production and performance of UK independent films;

A 10-year time series of the performance of specialised films at the UK box office (Chapter 5);

The box office performance of UK films in Japan and Korea (Chapter 6);

A chart of UK admissions going back 75 years (1935–2009 inclusive) for historical comparative purposes (Chapter 1)

A new chapter on film education, gathering for the first time the available statistics on film education at school, university and in the community. It is intended that this will serve as the basis for wider coverage of the cultural aspects of film in the future.

Reading List

Reading List:

Wertime, Kent. Fenwick, Ian. (2008) DigiMarketing, The Essential Guide to New Media & Digital Marketing (John Wiley)

Spurgeon, Christina. (2008) Advertising and New Media (Routledge)

Lister, Martin. Dovey, Jon. Giddings, Seth. Grant, Iain. Kelly, Kieran. (2009, 2^nd Ed.) New Media, A Critical Introduction (Routledge)

Heller, Steven. (2007) Becoming a Digital Designer: a guide to careers in web, video, broadcast, game and animation design (John Wiley)

Chapman, Nigel. Chapman, Jenny. (2007, 3^rd Ed.) Digital media tools (John Wiley)

Galer, Mark . (2009)  Photoshop CS4 essential skills : a guide to creative image editing, Oxford : Focal

Binder, Kate  (2009) Sams teach yourself Adobe Photoshop CS4 in 24 hours

Indianapolis, Ind. : Sams Pub 2009

Digital Marketing Introduction

Introduction:
Our group will analysis and strategy for the company SilverScreen (Independent Cinema)  in this module. Moreover, my digital agency role is Social Media Manager, thus I will demonstrate my research and findings about it in this blog. Whilst this blog will record how my website has developed.

This is a brief introduction for the SilverScreen:
Company: - SilverScreen
Industry: - Independent Cinema

SilverScreen
SliverScreen is a new, independent cinema in Newcastle.

Showcasing the latest speiclisfilms from independent and world cinema.

Featuring regular film events and activities the small but ambitious cinema hopes to become one of the top 5 leisure venues in Newcastle.