While Malcolm Gladwell made the “tipping point” a part of our shared lexicon over a decade ago, the desire to put a finer point on why one thing succeeds (and others fail) has been in our genes from the beginning. It’s only natural to want to pick apart the success of others with the hope of learning something that will help you with whatever it is you’re doing or want to be doing. Just as chimpanzees learn the fine art of ant fishing from one another, humans turn to their fellow man to learn what’s worked and what hasn’t.

In the business world, more often than not, this desire to learn from success takes the form of stilted case studies. Sometimes it takes the form of an informative conversation. I hope this post more closely resembles that second option.

Following that line of thinking, I decided to interview someone who has seen a huge amount of success in the highly competitive field of Web-based entertainment to hear some tips on DIY marketing, creating quality content and the importance of an integrated communications approach first-hand.

Rob Michael Hugel is Brooklyn-based actor, writer, director (and longtime friend) who’s seen a great deal of attention for his hilarious web series, I Hate Being Single. I was lucky enough to catch up with Rob in advance of the web series finale, which airs tonight at a public finale screening party at indieScreen in Williamsburg and goes live tomorrow on the web at ihatebeingsingleseries.com. You can catch episodes 1-5 on the series’ YouTube channel in the meantime.

Before we get into your take on marketing and promoting the series, how would you describe the premise of the I Hate Being Single for an audience who is used to elevator pitches and discussions of ROI?

The premise I would describe is probably that it’s a sitcom web series. Picture a Curb Your Enthusiasm for the Portlandia generation but in bite-sized 5 minute episodes. It’s a little bit Wes Anderson, a little bit Cosby Show. Each episode is a standalone story so you don’t necessarily need to know the backstory to get it. The tone of the show is dry like the British Office or Larry Sanders Show, with observations of Brooklyn and the “indie” lifestyle from the perspective of a lonely outsider. Anything can happen to him in the show but the eventual outcome is true to the phrase “I Hate Being Single.”

What’s been your overall strategy when it comes to promotion?

My strategy with promotion (and production) has been to do as much as I can without money. I made the series with the help of favors and eventually a Kickstarter. I work freelance and sacrificed a lot of the paid work time to do the show, so it’s a complete DIY strategy.

The promotion has been entirely online with the exception of a couple hundred flyers for the release day. Social media is the first and daily, and press outreach is done strategically to what the episode is about. I had a release schedule of about 14 weeks with a new episode each week so that was important to use as tool to keep people coming back each week knowing there would be a new episode.

As a rule, I try to make everything dealing with the show look true to the series style as far as graphic design, posters, flyers, images. I basically operate like a one man TV studio in the same way they have a graphics department making trailers, promos, magazine ads; I’m doing the same thing on a small scale. I watch HBO, FX and IFC and think about how they promote their shows. I’ll follow that guide. Anything to make the audience believe that the show is legit, substantial, and worth looking at. Consistency is very important.

Did you have a particular audience in mind when you made the series?

I wouldn’t say I had an audience in mind as a goal, but I thought there would be a good possibility that people like me would like it. Independent spirits, artists, musicians, comedians, actors, fans of indie films, fans of independent comedy, and Williamsburg itself. There’s been a lot of film or TV that parodies and satires the world of hipsterdom that is about us but not necessarily for us. So this was my attempt to recreate that world but in a more earnest and genuine way than it’s been seen.

It wasn’t untill the series premiered at the New York Television Festival that I got the response from people of all backgrounds who connected with the story. It was a great realization. (Image note: That’s Rob accepting the Bing Audience Award at the NYTVF in the thumbnail above.)

You ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund the upcoming finale. What did you learn from that experience?

The Kickstarter was a great relief. I really just had a lot of reservations about whether or not we’d meet the goal ($5,000) and I was nervous about asking for money, and would people judge me, and stuff like that. It’s a strange situation to create a show that has the potential for a whole TV series, but be the ONLY individual representing. No co-creator, no co-writer, so it was all on me to pitch the Kickstarter and represent the show, and not sound too desperate, cocky, entitled, amateur, and any other criticism.

The support from the Kickstarter was amazing. People donated who I never could’ve expected, and it was truly a huge sign of support from the “community.” A lot of the money was from people I know through doing comedy in NYC over the years, and friends from throughout my life. The largest donation from one person was $500 and the rest were a collection of $10, $25, $50, $150, and $300 donations. I think people assume there’s always a big backer (family member, or wealthy stranger) that takes care of a large chunk and the campaign is almost a front for that. I am very proud to say that was not my experience at all. All the donations add up and make a huge difference. We met our goal the day before production, so I was promoting hard for the entire process, and very, very nervous about if we’d make it.

You’ve been promoting the series through social media quite a bit. What does your presence look like online and have you found any one platform or tactic to stand out in particular?

I’ve been using Facebook (personal and fan page), Twitter, Tumblr, Buzzfeed, YouTube, and Blip.  I wish I could say there was one successful platform alone. It hasn’t been my experience.

I really love Tumblr as a tool for this show. Our official website is a Tumblr and I’ve been using a personal blog for a while. Over the past year I think there’s been a great boom of Tumblr users. It’s the best place for people to spread work and not feel like its “clogging a feed” or something like that. It’s my goal to keep working on getting tumbld and find more followers that way. I search tags of things that I like or I’m influenced by and find thousands of people who like the same thing and want to share it. It gives me confidence that we’ll reach the right people eventually if we keep working at this.

As for Facebook it’s been really great for gaining a grassroots following. I have a great network of friends in NYC and across the country who, when they repost from Facebook tend to get a positive response, which leads to a new follower on the fan page, or YouTube. It’s very typical that I’ll post something on Facebook, a friend reposts it, and a minute later my I Hate Being Single page has a new follower that I don’t know who is connected to the friend that reposted. It really is social networking!

There’s a small number of international fans on Facebook. I have no idea how they found us originally, but there’s some random people from South America, Europe, Africa, and Australia. Even though it’s small number of people, it’s one of the coolest things I can think of; thanks to social media I know they’re out there at least, and can communicate with them easily.

That being said, I wish it was easier to get Facebook fans. I Hate Being Single has 550 fans and I have over 1,000 friends on my personal account. About a quarter of my Facebook friends have “liked” the fan page. It’d be nice to get that higher, but it’s out of my control aside from a friendly reminder once in a long while.

What just wasn’t worth the effort?
I can’t really tell what wasn’t worth the effort at this point. I’m still feeling like everything has paid off in one way or another, and since we aren’t yet done releasing the season, I think there’s a lot of promotion on the horizon. I know the finale episodes will exceed people’s expectations for a comedy web series. I’m getting ready to work on that promotion as soon as it’s up.

I think we all have found our friends can get quite tired of promotions, whether its related to fundraising for an upcoming charity race, getting people to check out your new blog or anything else that doesn’t directly involve them. I’ve found this is especially true on Facebook. People want to see pictures of you and significant others, read funny life experiences, but beyond that, you’re often pushing your luck. Did you run into any of this in your personal promotions?

I haven’t had much backlash from personal promotions. I think different Facebook users have different experiences depending on who they’re friends with. I live in NY with a very bustling and almost overwhelmingly energetic community of comedians, improvisors, and actors. So, in my daily feed there is almost constant promotions of live shows, web series, films, articles about people’s projects or jokes. So, I don’t really think a lot about the people that aren’t in that circle because it’s what I see the most.

I do get a lot of good support from other friends or family from the past who live in other places. They’re always encouraging from afar and keeping tabs on what’s going on. I do think once in a while that people could be judging me for posting too many mentions of something, but I don’t hear from them and they can take me off their feed if it’s too much trouble.

What words of advice for those looking to find an audience for their creative work?

My advice to creative people looking for an audience is to first concentrate on the product and make it as good as you believe you can. Imagine yourself in a public place with like-minded people, like a concert or art gallery, find them online and get the work in front them. I always think about who my inspirations are, and find people who have that same inspiration. They’re more likely to associate with what I do. Get specific.

You’ve gotten quite a bit of great press on the series. How did those pieces come about?

The press has been awesome. It’s a mix of things. Some people contacted me out of the blue from seeing posts on Facebook through friends, a few were through friends of friends who were recommended to check it out. I sent out press releases on the morning of most of the full-length episodes, which came out biweekly. I sent about 200 emails each day with a press release about the series, and that particular episode. I targeted NYC blogs that would cover it for the topical NYC stuff and other sites that I saw had coverage of indie film, web series, comedy, TV, and fashion. I feel like the show has a flavor, and if there’s any outlet that has a similar flavor, then I’d contact them. Some of the press didn’t get back to me until the 3rd or 4th episode/email, which is worth mentioning because I’m the kind of person that feels slightly uncomfortable emailing someone repeatedly with no response. I learned that the persistence is important and not be discouraged to get no response, for it may come a while down the road and be totally positive.

One of the things that quite a few of the  blog posts and reviews mention is the high production quality, which is definitely not standard when it comes to the web. What was your thinking there?

The quality was a very conscious choice. I’ve been doing TV production and making videos (in one form or another) since I was in middle school. I really wanted to make something for the internet that looked better than what the internet expects. The center of that issue is money, of course. I didn’t have money to shoot episodes 1-12 (everything except the finale) so I was working with friends who donated their help to shoot and be the crew. The DP for those episodes was Giga Shane, who is a videographer and experienced with documentary shooting. He can make things look great with just his eye, lens choice, and a light. Even if it was paid for it’d be looking amazing for very little money compared to a professional shoot.

The sound was done by Matt Cook, a close friend and collaborator (Nights In Ultraviolet, CafeBloodbath). He knows how to record good sound and that’s something a lot of people get wrong on small budget productions.

Aside from the shooting quality I really wanted to make the show specific and detailed throughout. The music was original by a friend Jake Zavracky (Zavracky.bandcamp.com). I’d email him ideas for the tone and he’d write a song send it back and forth a couple times. Then I’d recut the song to fit the episode exactly.

The opening title logo was created by my good friend Mike (theblackaxe.com) and animated by Giga, the DP.

Basically everything in the show was done specifically so people watching could get into the story and not be constantly reminded that what they’re watching is a) on the internet, b) not famous and c) not funded.

The finale episode is that same idea, but using the budget we raised to pay a director, DP, steadicam operator, sound mixer/engineer, locations, lighting gear, and more pro camera. It looks like it cost $100k and it only cost $6k. Again, that’s only because so many people are willing to sacrifice getting paid a lot for the project itself. It’s not a model I plan to continue and if I won the lottery today, I’d be giving them a chunk because it means everything to the project and to me.

What’s next for the series?

I’m hoping to continue the series in the best way possible. I’ve been hoarding ideas for a while and will be ready to write it while we spend some time promoting season 1. I’ll be looking for a home for the show somewhere we can be funded for the season, should we find the right fit and of course. I wouldn’t rule out pitching to TV as well. I’ll be in LA in June to start this process.

What’s next for you acting-, writing- and directing-wise?

What’s next for me will be hopefully somewhat determined by the show. My girlfriend and I co-host a stand up show every month at The Gutter, I’m performing at UCB NY with the house team “Onassis,” and I’m acting in an independent pilot at the end of the month. Continuing pursuit of commercial and legit acting work in NY and LA and working on a new live show.

The notice (below) implies that Patrick’s account should not have been activated to begin with. It’s all very legal sounding (a.k.a. doesn’t really say anything) but having looked at both Path’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, I can find no reason why Path did this.

Patrick used his real name and real information. He’s well older than 13. It just doesn’t make any sense.

Facebook and Google are notorious for deleting accounts first and then only responding reluctantly later. I’m sad to see Path take this approach. I wish social networks would take the small steps to notify users first and give them a chance to respond in some way before their accounts are deleted.

You’d think with all the negative response Path already received around collecting user information that they’d proceed with caution around this stuff but maybe that’s too much to expect from people who came from Facebook.

Patrick’s reached out to Path, I hope they respond quickly.

UPDATE: Patrick is back on Path now and it seems the problem occurred because when Path first let users signup they didn’t force users to fill in their birth date. Users who slipped through this gap are apparently being deactivated instead of just being prompted to input this data. I still don’t know why social networks take this heavy handed approach when it seems like a little communication will go a long way.

But I’ll still be posting more frequently over on tac.is and postsocial.us.

You have probably noticed that it’s been exceptionally quite here. Or maybe you didn’t. I’m still posting, just not here. Being one to always experiment, I’m off experimenting.

This isn’t the end of this blog (at least not yet). But after five plus years I’m questioning if this is the right approach for me. So for the time being, the New Comm Biz blog, Twitter and Facebook will be silent.

If you want to follow me there are a few options. I have two new sites where I’ll be splitting my time. My personal site, Tac.is and my industry site, PostSocial.us. Beyond that there will not be any additional Twitter of Facebook accounts, just my personal ones. You can follow me on Twitter if you’re not already and if you’re a friend of mine (defined very loosely) you can friend me on Facebook or even if we don’t really know each other you can subscribe to my Facebook updates as they’re set up as public. Beyond that you can find a list of services I use at http://tac.is/here.

The only way companies and governments were able to find out this information about us was through huge expensive research initiatives where armies of college students were deployed to ask us what we thought and what did. It was our choice to give this information away or not.

But increasingly we’re giving away that information “for free” and far more of it than we’ve ever given away before. Why? In simplest terms we gain social capital from our over-sharing but it goes way beyond that.

Invasion Of Your Privacy With Consent

Every week there seems to be a new story about some app or social networking service that is being accused of violating your privacy. Facebook is almost always somewhere in the mix as they are the service that is most aggressively pushing the boundaries of our privacy. Over the weekend a new app called Girls Around Me sparked off the debate again. The app pulled Foursquare check-ins from public Facebook profiles to locate girls in your area. Creepy? Yes. In violation of any rules? Nope. But it was still pulled down. This app basically confirmed all the worst fears people have about geolocation.

Despite this, and possibly much worse, we will continue to give up our personal data. Not only will we continue to give up our personal data, we will gladly give up even more than we are today.

I’ve argued in the past that our privacy was already an illusion and have even gone as far as to suggest that geolocation could eventually make us feel safer.

Personal Information Is The New Oil

You may remember sometime last year (seems like longer) that everyone was saying that your personal information was the new oil. That collectively our personal data would fuel a whole new economy. The analogy was heavily championed by Reputation.com CEO Michael Fertik. The World Economic Forum even released a study (PDF) which praised the social good which could be done with this data.

I had the opportunity to hear Fertik speak at Gnomedex on the topic. Fertik believes that  our personal information is a currency we can use and that services will spring up that will broker our data for us to those companies which wish to use it. Unfortunately for Fertik, that information broker already exists and it’s called Facebook.

Why We Give Up Our Privacy

We all (those heavily involved in social media) understand intuitively that  there are benefits that outweigh the risks involved in sharing our data. And when you get down to it, the use of information brokers is just too cumbersome and costly to use. Who’s going to pay for the service? Large data gathering companies aren’t going to pay for it because there’s more public data than there ever has been. Your data is a commodity. Sure it’s unique to you, but for the purposes of data gathering, your data isn’t special. So if someone was going to use a data broker, they would have to pay for it themselves. And I think we’ve already demonstrated we’re not going to do that.

We may not like it but we seem perfectly content to let Facebook manage our data for us.

The Future Is Transparent

But don’t despair. We are receiving plenty of benefit in trade for our data and we’re only going to get more. Right now we have unlimited use of World changing services like Facebook. Could you imagine going back to a pre-Facebook world? A World without Facebook would seem like post-apocalyptic fiction. And it’s only the beginning.

Eventually our personal data will take us into the post-social age, where our every experience is layered with social data. We will all rely on, or work from, the crowd and the only way that will be possible is if we have access to each others data. With access to that data we will know who to reach out to, who we want to work with and who we trust. Without ever seeing or even talking to that person.

We will inherently distrust people who don’t share their data, the same way we distrust incoming callers who block caller-ID.

I’m not saying it’s all going to be rosy and shiny. There will be casualties along the way. Some people will be taken advantage of. Some people will be physically harmed. This is no different from it is today and is the sad downside of living in a society. And some people will “drop out.” We’ll see some people become Digital Agoraphobics.

One Final Note

I’m not saying we should throw all privacy out the window and just abandon ourselves to the whim of corporations. We need to be smart about how we move forward because I believe most of the damage will be done not in the final state but on the path there. During the transition there will be an imbalance of data. Some people will use this imbalance to their advantage and that’s what we have to mitigate. Additionally I believe that if companies want to participate in this new transparent world, they themselves have to become more transparent.

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Why did I let @prgeek talk me into karaoke the night before a big client event?

March 29, 2012 4:32 pm via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@tacanderson

Tac Anderson

But as it is Sunday it’s that time to share the best of the weekly links that I shared on New Comm Biz Lite, the Tumblr blog that accompanies this blog. All the links are shared on the @NewCommBiz Twitter account and a subset of those are shared on the New Comm Biz Facebook page. I was sharing all of the links there but I’ve limited the number of links I share on Facebook as is the best practice.

1 - Google Introduces Maps 8-bit For NES 

Brilliant. Let the April Fools goodness begin.

2 - I love that FastCompany is doing this and I love that they’re using Tumblr for it.

3 - What would you do if you were running 

These are bleak options indeed but what would you do if you were running RIM?

4 - How To Grow While Staying Insanely Creative, The Aardman Animation Way

Excellent list of ideas. I’m not going to recap them because you should really go read them for yourself.

5 - ‘Our Velocity is Blowing the Doors Off’–Hootsuite Sells $20 Million Stake

I love Hootsuite. After being let down repeatedly by TweetDeck and Seesmic, I finally made the switch. I love the product and the founders are a great group of guys I’ve had the pleasure of meeting with at various Seattle events.

I especially love to see where their ambitions lie. There’s so much need and these guys have been really smart about only raising money when they really need it. Hootsuite is the company to watch over the next few years.

6 – So True

7 - The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever

We all benefit from a better educated society. The more educated society is the better. EVERYONE. At that kind of scale, on alumni donations alone, Universities will be more profitable than ever.

8 - Turning down Zynga: Why I left after the $210M Omgpop acquisition

I don’t know that I would have done the same thing, especially not knowing that it would even be an issue but I admire his willingness to do what he believes in. I also just bought his game Connectrode. 

9 - President Obama Picks an Anthropologist for World Bank Chief

It could just be confirmation bias but I’m seeing a lot more anthropologists being used in the non-academic world than I have over the last several years. I’ve mentioned before my belief that anthropology has a lot to offer the business world, maybe this is the decade anthropology comes of age.

10 - Smartphones make big gains in prepaid

I’ve actually been a prepaid smartphone user since moving to the UK. The plans are cheap and because I’m usually at work or home where I’m on wifi, it’s a lot cheaper to by the phone outright and then just pay the $15 US a month (10 GBP) for the data I use. If US plans were that cheap I’d probably stick with it when I went back to the States.

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Gamification is a total buzz word that really doesn’t mean anything yet because there aren’t a lot of real word examples of how this will affect our every day lives. There’s a few one-off examples but it’s still hard to picture how it’s going to impact the way we live and work.

The leading champion for gamification is Jane McGonigal. Following is an interview FastCompany just posted, in which she gives some early examples of how gamification is working in our everyday lives. BTW, I totally recommend her best-selling book: Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World

In the video they mention The Email Game. I hadn’t heard of it yet, so I gave it a try. Email is definitely one of those tasks that aren’t intrinsically motivating and could benefit with an injection of a little fun. But will a game really make email fun? Here’s a brief video describing how it works.

I gave it a try, and sadly it doesn’t work with Outlook, only with Gmail but there were a few things I noticed. First, the points and smiley face seem to the obvious gamified part but I don’t think they were actually the most useful part. The timer did help keep me moving and the countdown kept me going. These put a time limit and motivation to finish. Email is never-ending but if I know I only have so many emails to go through it’s easier to attack those emails I put off. I also loved the benchmarking at the end. It was cool to see how I rated to other users.

But the most effective part was the simplified design. All the normal email functions were there but you are only presented one email at a time. You can’t see what’s coming next, you don’t have to look at the endless stream that is your inbox, you are just presented with one already opened email and told to act on it.

This is really important because it’s something I’ve mentioned before: gamification without good design is counterproductive.

Over the next two years we’re going to see a handful of these small applications of gamification. Health and dieting are some early examples as well as crowdsourced examples like fold.it, but we’ll see more work related application like The Email Game.

Watch out for a few early successes and a lot of early failures, but it’s not going away and I suggest you start to wrap your head around it now.

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If you’re a non-iPad owner like myself, but would like to read some of the fine Conde Nast publications, you’re out of luck. So now I’ve had to let my Wired magazine subscription lapse and instead I read what I can from their website.  I was never a subscriber to The New Yorker but I frequently picked up an issue at the newsstand. Since I don’t hit the newsstand that often, I haven’t picked up an issue in a while. I skim the sites once a week or so and then save any interesting articles to Evernote. Evernote is my magazine stop-gap.

It’s surprising how quickly the digital switch happens once you start. Having never subscribed to a newspaper I still don’t digitally but I wonder if some of the major papers couldn’t come out with a monthly version of their paper. Something that just included the top stories over the last month, the cool features and longer form, evergreen content. I’d subscribe to that. Or maybe I should just give the digital paper a try.

For me blogs and RSS have replaced the news. I still subscribe to a few newspapers RSS feeds but they’re competing for my attention with blogs and other online noise. Magazines and books get my undivided attention while I’m on the train or reading at home. I’d love to see more papers and even blogs start to take the approach of magazines. Maybe that’s something blog authors could do. If you write a lot maybe a self published book isn’t the way to go but maybe a monthly magazine. Interesting. I may need to think about that.

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As leaders (because I believe we are all leaders despite our roles) I think this can serve as a powerful leading indicator of how well our teams are doing. Are they talking frequently outside of meetings? Do they talk about stuff besides work? Do they actively seek out and connect with other groups? If not then this is probably a warning sign that the group dynamics might be failing.

From Alex “Sandy” Pentland’s HBR article:

My feature article in HBR’s April Spotlight on teams describes in detail the new science of building great teams. We can summarize those points here. Our data show that great teams:

• Communicate frequently. In a typical project team a dozen or so communication exchanges per working hour may turn out to be optimum; but more or less than that and team performance can decline.
• Talk and listen in equal measure, equally among members. Lower performing teams have dominant members, teams within teams, and members who talk or listen but don’t do both.
• Engage in frequent informal communication. The best teams spend about half their time communicating outside of formal meetings or as “asides” during team meetings, and increasing opportunities for informal communication tends to increase team performance.
• Explore for ideas and information outside the group. The best teams periodically connect with many different outside sources and bring what they learn back to the team.

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