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Honestly, I was shocked by the disrespect, considering the well-crafted, high quality joke packet we sent it. As comedians and joke writers, we felt it was crucial to touch on several of the hottest / most talked about entertainment news events from 2012, but Seth Macfarlane and his group of ‘writers’ thought it would be ‘funnier’ to be crass and rude and tasteless. (PS I’m not shocked that this Academy Awards was the first time in several years the host received a negative response from viewers.)

We decided to get our jokes to the masses because (unlike Seth Macfarlane and his ‘writing staff’) we actually care about providing quality content. We’re also thinking of making these a viral video on youtube.

Thank you and enjoy!

—————————

2/23/2013

From: Joe Avella and Greg Ott

To: 85th Academy Awards Main Office

c/o: Seth Macfarlane, host of event

Jokes

Joaquin Phoenix was nominated for Best Actor for his performance in “The Master.” In the film, he depicts an out-of-control alcoholic who’s tormented by the demons of drinking. When asked how he prepared for the character, Phoenix said, “I hung out with Amanda Bynes.”

Denzel Washington was nominated for Best Actor for his performance in “Flight.” In the film, he depicts an out-of-control alcoholic who’s tormented by the demons of drinking. When asked how he prepared for the character, Washington said, “I hung out with Amanda Bynes.”

Stephen Spielberg’s Lincoln is nominated for Best Picture. In Lincoln, we see Daniel Day Lewis portray our nation’s greatest presidents put an end to the Civil War and then take a shot to the head. If the role was played by Amanda Bynes, we’d see her end the Civil War, then take a shot… of jack!

Chris Brown and Rihanna have had an on-again, off-again relationship all year, despite Chris Brown’s well-known record of physically assaulting Rihanna. Doctors say the damage done to Rihanna’s face was almost as bad as the damage Amanda Bynes has done to her liver.

Silver Linings Playbook took home many awards this season, including Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor. In a related story, the Amanda Bynes Playbook took home the award for Best Drunk Driver.

Jack Nicholson is here! Although he didn’t release a movie this year, he’s front and center wearing his iconic sunglasses. This year they have a purpose: to help the hang over he got after a night with Amanda Bynes!

Ang Lee is nominated for best director for Life of Pi. In the film, he directs an out-of-control alcoholic who’s tormented by the demons of drinking. When asked how he prepared for the character, Ang said, “I hung out with Amanda Bynes.”

Let’s not forget about the biggest star of tonight, Oscar himself. This is his 85th year in the movies, or as Amanda Bynes calls it, how long she drinks before she drives… a car!

Princes Di was tragically killed several yeas ago. When police did their investigation they found the chauffeur took driving lessons from Amanda Bynes.

Zero Dark Thirty was nominated for many awards this season, including Best Picture and Best Director. Director Kathryn Bigelow says she was glad to help tell the story of “the greatest manhunt in history,” tracking down terrorist Osama bin Laden to his ultimate demise, and looks forward to her next project, tracking down another well-known criminal monster: Amanda Bynes.

It seems that the Titanic has sunk! The ship’s captain, apparently, rammed the vessel into an iceberg so that Amanda Bynes could “freshen her glass.”

Storage Wars has become a hit TV show. Recently, while one of the show’s stars, Dave Hester, was getting an antique football appraised, the appraiser did a double take and said ‘Is this Amanda Bynes’s liver???”

Life of Pi, of course, was a masterpiece. For those who don’t know, the number Pi is a mathematical constant beginning with the numbers 3.14, also known as Amanda Bynes’ blood alcohol level.

The Hobbit was snubbed for a best picture nomination. Many of the film’s biggest champions took to twitter to express their outrage. Peter Jackson tweeted: Bloody Hell! Sir Ian McKellen tweeted: what the blood hell? And Amanda Bynes tweeted: after this bloody mary, I’m driving home, drunk!

Lots of buzz this year in the Best Documentary category. The most buzz belongs to Simon Chinn’s “Searching for Sugar Man,” followed by Amanda Bynes’ “Searching for an Open Liquor Store.”

For the best foreign language category, we have films with dozens of languages from all around the world, like Austrian, Norwegian, Dutch, and Amanda Bynes when after a couple of drinks. Can’t understand a word!

Coming up later this evening: The Amanda Bynes Dancers! They’re just like regular dancers, with one important difference: they’ve all passed out because they’ve had far too much to drink.

Naomi Watts was nominated for Best Actress for her performance in “The Impossible.” What exactly is “The Impossible?” Forty-five minutes of sobriety for Amanda Bynes.

For the first time in over 2 decades, a James Bond film has been nominated for an Oscar! James Bond is known for his amazing secret spy adventures, as well as his signature drink, a martini: shaken not stirred. Or as Amanda Bynes takes it: shaken, not stirred, in a giant bucket, in her car as she’s driving into a tree.

In this year’s tension-filled thriller “Argo”, a group of Americans face death trying to escape extremists in revolutionary-era Iran. When asked if their near-death experiences were scary, a captive noted that could have been far worse. “For instance,” the captive claimed, “we could have gotten into a car with Amanda Bynes.”

Steve appeared on NBC’s Shark Tank and got Mark Cuban to invest money in his biz. since then the company has exploded and left Steve tirelessly drawing custom cats, currently 11,000 in 2 years.

Learn about his success and how he balances the demands of his popular web business with a family and a full time job.

This episode stars Drennen Quinn and Tim Heurlin:

SPECIAL BONUS PROMO!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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The show is super awesome, and every episode has made an average of $800 without the use of crowd funding, youtube ads, or any of that annoying junk. what do they do and how do they do it, you ask?! Listen below and find out.

Watch episode one now!

Learn more about the show and see all episdoes at : www.hankfrisco.com

——————————————————————————–

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Overview

All page updates now go into a specific pages feed, different than your regular feed, and if you want posts to go into your regular feed you need to manually put them back in by selecting ‘Show in News Feed’.



Along with this, Facebook introduced promoted posts. Just how it sounds, you can pay for a post to be shown in a fan’s feed the next time they log on, as opposed to before, where they had to be online when it was posted or it would get lost in the feed / noise.

This article makes an argument that promoted posts can be more effective than page ads.

The thing everyone is speculating on is now regular page posts are not shared being as much and Facebook is trying to grab all your money. I find this article a little over dramatic but informative. 

Also, here’s an article about promotion post myths you should read before you blow a gasket.

John Loomer wrote a post I agree with 100%. The gist is this: your content is only going to people who engage with your page regularly or semi regularly and mutual friends who share similar interest/likes. Facebook has stopped bugging the people who were ignoring your content, or at least they bug them a lot less.

If you Google search this topic you will find roughly one million search results about how unfair, awful, unjust, and company destroying this change is. Whenever this many people are upset about something, it usually means they’re wrong or at least misinformed, so I wanted to check it out for myself.

It has always been said the more engaging your content is (likes, shares, comments, etc.) the more these posts, and your pages, will be shared. Bottom line: I know it’s not easy, but if you want your nonpaid content to go places, you must make it engaging and worth sharing.

Or a quick short cut would be to pay for it to be shown to lots of people, aka advertising.

My Very First Promoted Post

Keep in mind I didn’t have much of a goal other than to try them out, and I’ll experiment in the future, but for now I just ran one.

The Post: I released a music video for Ruby Weapon back in October. For $10 my post was promoted for 3 days. Here’s the post after the promotion was over:

Here are the stats:



Like I said, I had no agenda for this campaign other than to see what would happen. At first, I realize these numbers are not very impressive. You pay for reach (aka impressions), which means Facebook just puts it in front of your fans and their friends. After that it’s up to you to be engaging. Ads have more specific targeting but go more ignored. Also you can pay per click or likes with ads but not promoted posts.

First Impression Conclusion

As a filmmaker, I’m looking to get views (of course) but also connect with fans to share my work. I’ve always rallied that you’re number one goal with social media is to expand your email list. The impressions count doesn’t do much for me. In the future, I will use promoted posts to get traffic to a page that catches email addresses.

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Soon after its release it experienced a bit of viral success winning a contest connected to Dane Cook’s Employee of the Month. (In that video link, notice how Dane clearly never watched any videos for this, but our link is in the description!)

Our prize? Front page of YouTube for a day, which back then got us around 200,000 views.

Unfortunately the video is not on my youtube account, and since the business went under, I was never able to keep track of it and any potential spoils of having a viral video in 2006. I recently stumbled upon it, and WOOF it’s bad. Real hacky stuff. What amused me are the mean comments on the video I never got a chance to respond to.

Until now. Here’s screen shots of my recent responses to old comments on a video I too think is bad. Enjoy!

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Unfortunately, dealing with Jobvite has made the application process a little too impersonal. So I’m posting my cover letter and resume here for everyone to see, and will pursue GrubHub to the best of my ‘social media-ing’ abilities, in hopes I reach some one at GrubHub that can get me in touch with the right person/people.

Here’s how you can help: Tweet this to @GrubHub
or
Pass this on to anyone you think could help.

Note: Out of respect for my current employer all identifying info has been removed. 

Thanks!

Joe

———————

Cover Letter

Dear GrubHub,

Your service has been a revelation for me as my go to for finding new and awesome cuisine options, and I want to bring the social media skills I’ve developed promoting my own films to the Social Media Associate position at GrubHub.

Passionate about marketing, mostly for the purposes of expanding the reach of my own films, I developed a marketing blog to chronicle some of my triumphs and tribulations using Facebook, Twitter, blogging, and a variety of other media experiments. One success, covered in my blog post on the herd mentality, showed positive results from a Facebook campaign targeted at just my fan’s friends, which I measured by gaining one hundred new fans in a few days, thousands of views on my videos, and a dozen additions to my email list by leading that traffic to a specific landing page. Of course, not all of my experiments yielded immediate results. Early experiments on Facebook proved fruitless as I sent traffic to a page or post without a clear point of action. I made minor adjustments giving my audience a specific direction, such as liking a post or entering their email address, and my success rates soared. Through this marketing blog I’ve grown to learn what works and what doesn’t, keeping a spirit of adventure and a thirst for trying new ways to engage an audience using social media platforms.

Constantly sharing scenes, out takes, and other video excerpts from my film, Master of Inventions, via Facebook, Twitter, and MailChimp, I encouraged chatter among my audience about the film’s development, creating an increase in sharing and a small frenzy before the film’s release. I used HootSuite to schedule tweets and posts to my pages to generate this constant contact, while focusing on other tasks and still maintaining a valuable presence online. In the spirit of keeping a constant engagement with my audience, if I received negative feedback from comments on the sharing sites Reddit or Hacker News, I quickly engaged negative feedback in a positive light, recognizing negative comments as an opportunity to make a connection with my audience, and eventually as a means to satisfy disgruntled viewers.

I’ve successfully managed a multitude of projects: making films, performing improv and sketch comedy all around Chicago, and promoting them all online, all while holding down a full time job at CURRENT EMPLOYER. As a member of their EMPLOYMENT, I’m responsible for hundreds of SERVICES WE PROVIDE and maintaining their very specific voice through my image work. While at the very fast paced environment of advertising employed at Schawk, I worked on a large marketing team creating a weekly national insert for Sears, managing the brand’s voice as well as the brands of several products sold in the catalog.

I would like the opportunity to meet with you in person and discuss the Social Media Associate position further. In the meantime, feel free to check out my marketing blog at www.joeavella.com or visit me on the major social media platforms:
Twitter: @joeavella
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/joeavella
My film’s Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/masterofinventions

Thank you and I look forward to your reply.

Sincerely,

Joe Avella
www.joeavella.com

Resume

Joe Avella
joeavella@gmail.com  //  @joeavella  //  www.joeavella.com

Social Media / Marketing

• Extensive experience using social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to build and connect with an audience for my films.
• Blogs extensively about my experiences marketing my film, teaching myself all elements of marketing online. Using those experiences to grow fan base and increase my viewership.
• Provides consistent written and video content for my followers. Uses new content and blog exposure to reach a wider audience online. Schedules regular tweets for dispensing content using HootSuite.
• Connects with online communities with similar interests to share my work and broaden my reach.
• Developed online marketing strategies to leverage the reach of Facebook ads to drive traffic to my work and ultimate grow my subscriber list.
• Manages email list of 200 subscribers through Mail Chimp and sends campaigns with a consistently high open and click through rate.

Design and Production

• Image Designer in DEPARTMENT of CURRENT EMPLOYER, working within a large team of writers, salesman and many others to develop hundreds of ITEMS every week.
• Kept consistently high quality image production in a very fast paced environment as CURRENT EMPLOYER has grown rapidly over the past 2 years.
• Worked as a Production Artist and Designer for Schawk, working primarily on the Sears account, collaborated within a large marketing team to produce weekly national booklets.
• Managed the brand of Sears as well as the hundreds of consumer brands within the Sears catalog.
• Extensive graphic design experience in both print and web, working as a freelancer.
• Built my blog and other websites using HTML.

Social Media Tools
Proficient with Facebook and managing Facebook pages, Twitter, Hootsuite, TweetDeck, MailChimp, Google+, YouTube, Vimeo, WordPress, Tumblr, Instagram, Foursquare.

Software
Eleven years of experience on Mac and Windows platforms. Highly proficient with Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign; Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel; SalesForce

Professional Experience
Image Designer – CURRENT EMPLOYER, Feb. 2011-Present
Freelance Graphic Designer – April 2010-Feb. 2011
Production Artist – Schawk! Retail Marketing, Chicago, IL Jan. 2007 – April 2010
Graphic Designer – Sears Roebuck and Co., Hoffman Estates, IL Nov. 2005 – Dec. 2006
Laser Form Designer – ADP, Hoffman Estates, IL Feb. 2004 – Aug. 2005

Education
Bachelors of Graphic Design – Iowa State University Ames, IA – Aug. 2002
Certification in Web Site Development – Illinois Institute of Art Schaumburg, IL – Jan. 2004

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