520 CHAPTER 15 E-COMMUNICATIONDutch film director Eddy Terstall needed funding (€18 000) for his new short film. With budgets being cut, the usual
channels of fundraising had to be replaced with a more creative approach. He came up with an idea that would engage
film fans and involve them in the process. The PR campaign was built around a single premise – personalised content in
return for donations. Eddy’s Twitter followers were invited to tweet a message and make a donation. Every €10 donated
resulted in 10 seconds of film directed by Eddy, based upon the donor’s own idea and posted on their Facebook wall. For
€60 or more, donors received a film of one minute to share with friends and family. The single message was a tweet by
Eddy to his followers. The single medium was the micro-site of the campaign.
The main objective was obviously to generate publicity to reach serious investors. The tweets were attention-seeking
tools to get to the real investors. The results were as follows:
z Earned media: 47 tweets leading to films, 37 articles in Dutch media, 1 print, 32 online magazines, 4 blogs, worth
€11 806.
z Commercial result: €20 000 was raised before the deadline, another €120 000 was raised in the six weeks following the
deadline. Because of this, Eddy decided to turn his short movie into a full length feature film.^149BUSINESS INSIGHT
Fundraising using Twitter to make a Dutch movieA podcast is a sound fi le with an RSS feed that can be listened to by any MP3 or audio player
(not only iPods as the name would suggest). Th is technology makes it easy for people to create
their own audio recordings and post them on the Web. Th e new Edison Media Research done in
2012 revealed that 29% of Americans listened to an audio podcast and 26% of Americans even
viewed a video podcast. Furthermore, 17% of Americans had downloaded and listened to an
audio podcast during the last month. People consuming audio podcasts are spending 70 minutes
more online than the average American is doing. For people consuming video podcasts this
extra time is 93 minutes. Podcast consumers are extremely attractive advertising targets as they
are well educated and earn good money. Podcast consumers are watching TV in non-traditional
ways: 41% do it via their computer and about 20% smart-phone users are podcast consumers.
Th ey are also Internet social, as 74% of them are using Facebook, 28% use LinkedIn and 21%
are using Twitter. Podcast consumers are heavy YouTube users.^150Content communities
Th e main objective of content communities is sharing content between users. Content
communities share diff erent media types, such as text (e.g. BookCrossing, via which more
than 1 million people from over 132 countries share 9 122 677 books),^151 photos, videos
and pre sentations (e.g. SlideShare, which has 60 million monthly visitors and 130 million
page views, and is among the most visited 200 websites in the world. Besides presentations,
SlideShare also supports documents, PDFs, videos and webinars).^152
Th e most important photos communities are Flickr (owned by Yahoo!) with about 51 million
registered users uploading 4.5 million pictures per day^153 and Instagram, launched in 2010 and
bought in April 2012 by Facebook. Instagram is a free photosharing program that allow users to
take a photo (with their mobile phone), apply diff erent digital fi lters to it, and then share it on
a variety of social networking sites, including Instagram’s own. Initially, Instagram was only sup-
ported on iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. In April 2012, Instagram for Android camera phones was
launched via the Apple Store and Google Play Store, where it had more than 1 million downloads
within 12 hours. In April 2012, over 30 million accounts were set up on Instagram.^154 AccordingM15_PELS3221_05_SE_C15.indd 520M15_PELS3221_05_SE_C15.indd 520 6/6/13 8:55 AM6/6/13 8:55 AM