You know.. I never really appreciated myspace before. I thought it was a good idea, but poor implimentation. However... the more I use it the more it seems to grow on me. Well, I guess being on Robert Rodriguez's friend list helps a bit too :D

And I'm not the only one.. Knightly is, the Broken guys are.. isn't technology grand? :)

Robert Rodriguez is on Myspace? Sign me up.

I'd love to party with that guy. And Tarantino. And Kevin Smith.

i created several myspace film profile for each of my film, and since they now can host film, it was much fun to post it up there, less bandwidth for myself ;)

Has anyone figured out how to bypass the squeezing of the mySpace "processing" for film? I'd like to post my stuff without it being squished into a tiny 320x240 window. I experimented with putting it in a .flv file to no effect.

How much space does MySpace give you to hose your film?

it said you can't go mre than 200meg (last I remembered), as a filmmaker profile, you can showcase 4 films on your profile, then when you delete them from it, it seems to stay in their system and they can still access it (when they click on the video link).

Or you can just post by categories (I think they partnered with yourtube) it's very similar to yourtube.

J

...I'm on myspace so much I think I need an intervention :rolleyes: The film forum is only okay, though. There is ALOT of silly sniping from people. There are arguments and posts that would never fly here, thank God. Myspace in NO WAY can replace THIS BOARD. If I want real information, I come HERE.

On myspace you have to look through the garbage to find the good stuff, but there are some people who I can tell would benefit from this board. I have sent one or two people here because I thought that they would benefit and they seemed as though they would have something to contribute. Don't know if they did though.

I wouldn't mind adding you guys to my friends list if you are on there, however. I am trying to figure out how to use myspace as a way of getting the word out about our projects. If nothing else, there has got to be a way to advertise without 'spamming' on myspace....

-- spinner:cool:

I think I am going to use mySpace to experiment with raising completion funding for a DVD pre-sales campaign. See the post here:

http://www.indietalk.com/showthread.php?t=9812

MySpace annoys me a bit. Everyone has to stick a stupid song or video that drains your memory.

How did it become so popular? I mean, didnt MS and Yahoo have the same concept with their webpages? How did MySpace take off? Perhaps its nothing more then the Hip thing of the day.

besides song, I get annoyed when people post over 5 bulletins within 24 hours, it's just like attention seekers... but overal, I am addicted to myspace.

I am on myspace and Like some of the interaction of the people. I want to set my filmmaker profile up eventually.

I agree that it may be a fad. But it does have some networking things that others do not have. Like bulletin boards and groups that show up on your page.

my .02 cents

I also agree that in no way could it ever replace this place.

I think I am going to use mySpace to experiment with raising completion funding for a DVD pre-sales campaign.


...the folks there have less money than the folks here. Everyone there is 15 years old!

....well, not everyone, but you get what I mean....:D

--spinner :cool:

The idea is to get several thousands of pre-orders for the DVD, and then use those pre-orders to obtain funding.

The idea is to get several thousands of pre-orders for the DVD, and then use those pre-orders to obtain funding.


....hmmm, interesting....:hmm: :)

--spinner :cool:

It would be an enormous amount of work.

I always thought of myspace as a teenage thing too... but I did join two weeks ago at the urging of a friend . Sadly, I don't have many friends on there, and I haven't really spent too much time on it.

I agree that good networking is possible on there, so if anyone here at indietalk has a myspace, email me and I'll add you to my friends list! :D

Find me at http://myspace.com/tallrobert

Just sent you a friend request.

As did I.. you might want to set yourself up for 'networking' with a few film related sections.. helps people find you and such.

spinner: Don't get me wrong, I was in no way suggesting that myspace is good for anything other than a networking tool... the real help/advice/etc is obviously here. :)

I should give you guys mine

www.myspace.com/mdifilms

I just made an add request as well.

IndieTalk is now accepting friends, send your invites ;)
http://www.myspace.com/indietalk

...I have two, one for me and one for the doc:

For Me:
www.myspace.com/kruffin25


For The Doc:
www.myspace.com/voodoochildrenfilm

...sending my requests as well...

-- spinner :cool:

spinner: Don't get me wrong, I was in no way suggesting that myspace is good for anything other than a networking tool... the real help/advice/etc is obviously here. :)


...I didn't, its fun, but we all know where the real info is :yes:

send me a request, I don't have your url

-- spinner :cool:

I've added everyone. Yay, now my friend list is growing :D

Here's what I'm thinking, add this one to your friend's list. I'm still horsing around with the campaign concept, but the idea is to make a profile for each character in the movie:

http://profile.myspace.com/FlatlandTheMovie

Add the movie as your friend!

OK people, here's mine: http://myspace.com/cootdogproductions

I'm mostly up there at the prodding of my sister. But I have a few ideas on how to use it for marketing.

so, do you think the myspace for robert rodriguez and such are real? I always have a hard time trying to believe they would be 'in' there, wouldn't they get a lot of script request?

I'm sure they do, mostly lots of fan mail though...it's about the same as having an agency to handle and process your fan mail, but you can sit down and dedicate time per week to dealing with the messages, it's basic high end PR stuff.

Actually I was just thinking about this and I believe it mjore from tarantino and rodriguez who have some indie cred to them and are still in the mindset of taking risk and exploring technology. I wouldn't believe someone claiming to be speilberg as I think myspace would be out of his public character. I've been looking for Stephen Sommers though, he started making movies in my home town...his home town also. I'm actually in one of them somewhere.

Here's mine:

Okay, here's the beginning of my campaign.

http://www.myspace.com/FlatlandTheMovie

Everybody add the characters in the film to your friends!

Okay, since everyone else is jumping off the bridge, I will too. :D

http://myspace.com/LoudOrangeCat

www.myspace.com/squad77movie

www.myspace.com/reecetedford

Jack Ryan (ME) is on Myspace. What that means. Nothing. Beat the Jack Bauer.

Jack Ryan (ME) is on Myspace. What that means. Nothing. Beat that* Jack Bauer.

I had a correction. Please note the really nice star above. ...............^...............

you could have used the nifty edit feature instead of reposting.. ;) hehe

http://www.myspace.com/dlogan007

I'm just starting to use it. My hotmail is getting cluttered with myspace notices, so I figured I might as well pay attention to it if I'm on the web. Wait... what the hell am I talking about? Oh boy...

Was there always this much interest in Myspace until this thread went up? :D

I was on there. I have a friend who is marketing his band through myspace:

http://www.myspace.com/ubercoolkungfu

I'm actually surprised this thread is lasting this long... most that I've started die after a day or so.. :)

sorry will, didn't realize you had started the thread, I'll close it now...DOH! wasn't supposed to let on. ;)

I don't know, I'm having an interesting go of it. While it may be a waste of time, the jury's still out.

So far, I've gotten about 500 friends for my movie page (Flatland). I've also developed profile pages for its characters. I've found that President Circle has been the most popular so far, with over 300 friends. I may be on to something here if enough friends are gathered by all of the different characters. I'll keep everyone informed.

I was just contacted by a girl I knew back in highschool.. and now I guess we're gonna go meet for drinks and catch up, so I guess it's not a TOTAL waste of time.. :) heh

Knightly: you're evil.. remember who has your footage though.. :D mou-haha

LOL! good Will...

Ladd, I think your idea is great..

AND all of those friends are your marketing partners because their friends look at their profile and so on and so forth... PLUS they are all potential customers!

I've been on myspace for about 5 months. I found the song that is played in the end credit roll on "Rubble" there by befriending a UK artist. It's been a boon to me, especially in keeping up with my film contacts locally (Ohio).

www.myspace.com/mdmelilith ( I think). I will be changing over to a film profile soon.

Hey indiepeeps, mymyspace is http://www.myspace.com/contempovision_films

Also, some of you were thinking whether the stars on myspace are real, which probably most are fake, but i know for certain Kevin Smith IS on there, his real myspace is: http://www.myspace.com/therealkevinsmith

Yeah so add me and my friend Kevin at the same time :)

so...is it a coincidence that I get an add from Mr. Rodriguez and my website gets surfed out completely by someone from an airport in austin texas? I think so!

so...is it a coincidence that I get an add from Mr. Rodriguez and my website gets surfed out completely by someone from an airport in austin texas? I think so!


Hmmm, very cool indeed!

how do we change background colors and fonts etc?

whats Mr. Rodriguez myspace address?

he's on my top 8 friends:

http://www.myspace.com/yafi_underground

robbierod or something like that

how do we change background colors and fonts etc?


...okay, guys! This is the little bit I have. It's not much, but it will get you started. By the way, everything is html codes or CSS, I think....:huh:

To Change Your Background, go to:
www.mytheme.com
That's where I went, pretty easy to understand and that is what I need: Easy


To Make Bold, here's the code:
<b>your text here</b>


For A Line Break, put this at the end of your paragraph or picture so there is a line space:
<br>

...also, if you have pictures you want to put on your profile, the site I use is:
www.photobucket.com
I know there are more but I know about this one. Plus it is free.

...I don't know how to change the color of text yet. If someone else does, I would love to know. I also could use a code to make text bigger or smaller. I lost the code for that one...

...hope this helps at least a little...:)

-- spinner :cool:

There's a lot of sites that have forms and such you can fill out to customize your myspace page..

This is one of the better ones I've found:

http://www.modmyspace.com/customize.php

seems as if it's just straight HTML, I'm just not sure where to do that...I'll try those sites...and here's one for you:

http://www.html-reference.com/

The tag you're looking for is probably <font color=aabbcc>Text you want to change the color for</font> where aa is a value from 00 to ff (0-255) for red, bb for green, cc for blue.

You don't need any special sites, just enter style tags and html in the profile.

seems as if it's just straight HTML, I'm just not sure where to do that....

to make bold: put <b> at the beginning of your paragraph and </b> at the end of your paragraph in the boxes where you tell info about you, or music, or general or whatever....

Is that what you mean?

-- spinner :cool:

it all depends on what you're after..

there is a way to completely change the way the page is laid out and such..

OK, you can put inline css style defs in the "about me" box...I have searched through the default file and pulled out all the ids and classes...I'll make a textfile and attach it to this post, but I'm not sure what most of them do yet.

also, be careful, myspace is the most easiest one to get hack in, I was hacked once and a few others, so just watch for bad guys who likes to steal your password.

I'm now on the friends list of Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez and Kevin Smith.

Damn. Why haven't I heard of this site earlier?

Now if only Darren Aronofsky was on Myspace, my life would be complete. :D

OK, I've e-mailed the support folks there requesting that they make style definitions for each of the subtables for individual access. They currently have one for the contactTable, but no other sections. They do have id's for them, but accessing them is not possible as the # gets turned into a .. when you save it. Hopefully, they'll get back to me on this one as I feel it would benefit their community to implement this.

ID declarations in css start with a # (i.e. #ctl00_Main_ctl00_UserFriends1_pnlFriends{ background-color: ffffff;})
CLASS declarations start with a . (i.e. .contactTable{ background-color: ffffff;})
ELEMENT declarations are just stated plainly (i.e. body{ background-color: ffffff;})

Okay, here is my analysis so far in regards to the mySpace "Flatland" campaign. I'm thinking outloud as I write all this out.

This may be something worth pursuing, but it has its drawbacks. It takes an incredible amount of effort to reach enough people on mySpace to reach "critical mass" and generate enough audience for a movie to really get attention.

Here are some of the issues:
a) Friend requests are limited to 999 per day.
b) Friend requests count towards an unspecified "daily allotment" of emails, meaning that if someone sends you a message about something, you can not respond until the next day. Making management of contacts and people difficult.
c) Friend requests are slowed down by a "code" process used to prevent "bots" from spamming. I'm sure everyone knows what I'm talking about - a picture of several numbers and letters are presented, and you must type them in.
d) oftimes, Friend requests are "blanket accepted" by narccist users - that is, you send a friend request, and they accept without even looking at the profile of the person that sent the request.
e) The entire mySpace system is incredibly buggy. Unspecified errors occur on a constant basis. This slows down the accumulation of friends.
f) many people can be lurking on multiple profiles, or have logged on once or twice and have let their profiles lapse due to disinterest, etc. From what I can tell, the huge mySpace number of users is most likely inflated by a factor of at least 10. The only way to really tell the difference between a real person, and someone who will never return to mySpace, is to get them to sign up as a friend.

I have found that the only way to bust through the fog of mySpace is to go back and post a "comment" on a person's profile page in order to get them to actually pay attention to whatever it is you're promoting. And it has to be targeted - you can't just copy and paste a comment, this ticks people off.

In the case of "Flatland," I am lucky in that the film is tailor-made for mySpace. I've decided to add a profile and account for each character in the film. The film is animated, and each character is colorful and has a distinctive personality. Each character is listed on every other character's page, and each character cajoles the user to "add ALL of the characters from Flatland!"

When a mySpace user adds all of the characters from Flatland, including the movie, I consider this a marketing success. So far, I have reached approximately 50 people who have done so. This was after roughly three-four days of off-and-on attempts, hardly full-time. Whenever I had some time.

So let's extrapolate some numbers here:
1. 1 marketer = 5,000 user requests per day = appx 50 intensely interested potential customers.

If we are attempting to achieve 10,000 real, qualified customers one would have to spend approximately 200 intense man days to achieve this number. 10,000 is a small number, of course. One would prefer 100,000. This would be 2000 man days.

So, any campaign to drive up the name recognition of a movie, band, or person must be considered a very, very slow burn, unless one has a couple of employees to click and make add requests, and type in the stupid code boxes.

Thoughts anyone?

I am on there as well http://www.myspace.com/all_things

Thoughts anyone?

I've been looking at how the dynamic works on there. It's a much less passive process than I imagined. You get more exposure when you post a bulletin that goes to all your friends bulletins. Groups are a good way to get more exposure and the forums. In order to get your profile viewed mroe, you need to do more than just link to friends...you usually end up buried in folks list of friends, so the networking portion down't do much there, but bulletins will get you on their profile page for a time until the bulletin rolls off their page. Making informative/interesting/inflamatory posts will get you eyes as well -- I don't recommend the latter for marketing. Blogging only goes to people who subscribe to your blog, but bulletins go to anyone looking at a profile of a friend. Forum posts go to a potentially wider audience depending on which topic you post to...I would imagine that using the flatland profile page in other media advertising as well would help too...get more eyes and therefore more friends to post bulletins to.

Good points. I've noticed however that when one posts a bulletin, it can quickly dissapear in the fog as well. It's really something that requires an enormous amount of aggressive effort, as you say.

I can imagine someone could make some money setting up a little business with a couple of college kids and computers, high-speed connection, employed to do nothing but promote a band, film, comedian or website on mySpace. Hmmm....

As for the bugginess and all to often occurring errors, I'd bet thats got something to do with the volume of users overwhelming the server(s).. which was my initial major problem with the site... too many people, not enough power to handle it. Along with, of course, the large number of childishness that is there.. for both the kids and others. ;)

Good thing my movie is a G-rated type movie!

...Ladd,

I got a chance to look at what you were attempting to do to promote you animation. Clever, although I don't know if I want to have 6 friend requests from the same source...:huh:

nice animation, very cool....still looking around :)

-- spinner :cool:

Hey spinner -

It's actually supposed to be the other way around (except in special cases of people I know from other areas, such as you...), where the target audience is supposed to send friend requests to the characters in the film, not vice versa. I've been very careful to make sure that only one friend request is sent from one character, and then that character will post a comment asking the person to befriend everyone else in Flatland.

I've got 4 pages going on MySpace...great free publicity (though their counters are screwy...at one point my trailer had over 10,000 views...then they were lost).

http://www.myspace.com/youarealone

http://myspace.com/youarealonemusic

http://www.myspace.com/gormanbechard


and for our NEXT film:

http://www.myspace.com/friendswithbenefitsmovie


Send me an ADD.

When a mySpace user adds all of the characters from Flatland, including the movie, I consider this a marketing success. So far, I have reached approximately 50 people who have done so. This was after roughly three-four days of off-and-on attempts, hardly full-time. Whenever I had some time.

I think you've got it wrong.

How many times have you watched something because you like the character?
Luke Skywalker or Yoda or Darth Vader from Star Wars. If Lucas was using myspace as you are, Ladd, and I saw one of those characters for the first time here in someone's profile, I'd check out that characters' profile. In the characters' profile, I'd discover he was a character in a movie. So I follow that characters' friends and go to the movie. This is where I find more characters. Then I watch a teaser, a webisode, or something and decide which character or characters I like, and I ask them to be friends.

If it was Bay Watch, Pamela Anderson would max out her friend requests each day. Is that failure? No, because everyone else that sees the friend link will want to know where they can see her. So they go to the Bay Watch page and see that it's on BayWatch.com and new webisodes air every Tuesday at 9pm Pacific Time.


So, Who cares if someone watches the film for one character? You want viewers you get viewers because they are interested in the character and what becomes of them.

Perhaps you should break your film out into webisodes?

Or create webisodes that happen before the film. So you get interest with the webisodes, then you'll get a following, then when it's time to launch the feature film, you'll have a steady following.
And it's all trackable.

Just because I like Yoda, do I HAVE to like Darth Vader, AND the 20 other characters AND the entire movie for the marketing campaign to be a success? NO! Because I'd watch it to see my "friend", Yoda.

Here's an interesting story from today's newspaper here in town about myspace...

http://www.cleveland.com/ohio/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/news/1145522450217630.xml&coll=2

So, beware guys, no bad talking.. :)

Perhaps you should break your film out into webisodes?

Or create webisodes that happen before the film. So you get interest with the webisodes, then you'll get a following, then when it's time to launch the feature film, you'll have a steady following.
And it's all trackable.

Just because I like Yoda, do I HAVE to like Darth Vader, AND the 20 other characters AND the entire movie for the marketing campaign to be a success? NO! Because I'd watch it to see my "friend", Yoda.

Hmmm! Yes, I may be thinking abut this too much as a marketer. In this case, my thinking in regards to "success" is whether or not the potential customer is interested enough to add everyone from the film. My thought process was, if they'll click 6-12 times on the characters, they'll buy the film.

You make a good point, however... I like the idea of doing little short trailers for each character...

Since everyone is posting, here is mine: http://www.myspace.com/rpmfilms

With everyone signing up to Myspace, I'm wondering how long it will take for Indie to add a [MYSPACE] button next to the IM and Skype buttons. :lol:

Don't get me wrong, it's a wonderful networking site, but nothing beats Indietalk.com!

myspace really doesn't seem all that interactive. Friends are trophies there I think. I'm trying to add targeted friend links to make it easier for folks to find all of you through me, and a couple of higher profile friends to get that traffic to mine and on to you...but here, it's interactive question answer opinion...not just passive like myspace...I spend much more time here, I can check myspace once every other day and I'm all caught up...but here, they should offer a 12 step program, I'm on here waaaay too much ;)

They do have forums on myspace, but as has been said.. it's juvenile, and not even close to the quality of posting done here.

Maybe instead of looking at the forums on myspace, we just invite the more mature filmmakers from there here, i think it sounds a little better.

that sounds like a plan, I've already pointed some folks this way from other forums. :)

Does anyone know how to make more than eight friend pictures appear on the front page? I've visited some pages that had 16 or more.

Lots of other stuff thats usefully to customise is http://www.myspacescripts.com There is a friends top 8 thing there, but the link is broken right now, so...