Crowdsourcing Engagement

Before you build your transmedia platforms, it's important to know where your audience lives and how many demographics you will be approaching.

In using +Marvel Movies as an example, an audience can stretch over several generations. There is no one size fits all for demographics. Even though they may all come together for their love of Spiderman and Captain America, the interests and platforms of a 10 year old will differ largely from that of a teenager, from a twenty-something mom, to a 40-year-old professional, to a retired tradesman.

Know where your audience "lives" and what they look for (how they want to be approached). Ask them to participate. I don't mean "like my Facebook page." That means dick squat. What milkshake does your Facebook have to bring all the people to your yard? Once they are there, do you ignore them? Also, when you do ask for their participation, don't waste their time. Be brain-dead clear and concise.

Here are a couple of tips from the Australia website www.8ms.com.

1. Most people want advertising to feel like a story or game (see every Super Bowl).
2. Most want brands to treat the real world like a platform.
3. Most feel more compelled to jump in if the activity is in real time.
4. Most of all the media people consume is screen-based.

Managing audience engagement is crucial. Silence begets silence, and it is also important to make your content easy to share. Replies to comments and queries should be timely. If email, sometimes a few days is okay to wait, but in Twitter or Facebook, if you don't respond within a day, people have moved on and it seems like you have disregarded them.

If you make it hard for people to share your content, they won't. Digital currency is based on likes, comments, and shares. There are some traditional media sites that still throw up roadblocks to sharing online content. If your blog or post doesn't have a relevant photograph (we also see some media posts that don't), you won't be able to pin the story to Pinterest and if it just shows up as text in a feed, it may get glossed over.

There are a whole host of platforms one can use to extend their storyline: blogs, videos, podcasts, special Twitter hashtags, email, social media, web series, website, book, music, SMS, location-based games, novellas, comics, memes, the list is endless.

The following Blab offers up a few examples of getting audiences to engage in multiple platforms. You don't have to go very far to find ideas to inspire your own projects. These two creative websites are the ones mentioned in the video: www.conducttr.com and hitrecord.org.