Cinematic Happenings Under Development reports on and participates in a fun contest taking advantage of fan creativity in promoting a re-release of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas:

Calling all artists, designers, creative geniuses, film lovers and NIGHTMARE fans! This is your chance to create an original character for Walt Disney Pictures’ holiday classic, TIM BURTON’S THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, making its return to the big screen this month in stunning Disney Digital 3-D. You are free to create the scariest, creepiest, most inspired character you can think of that fits into the world of Tim Burton’s beloved film. Your submission will be judged based on creativity, originality, and the unique features of the character.
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We will select one winner from the submissions. Along with the winners from 4 other sites, these five finalists will be judged by the filmmakers of THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS. One grand prize winner and 4 second-prize winners will be announced on the site during the week of Halloween.

Of course, the winner’s character doesn’t get to appear in the film and the legal boilerplate about you-don’t-own-anything-at-all-about-what-you-submit is long enough to make the head spin, but still, it’s yet another way in which film-makers are reaching out to fans and taking advantage of their talents in ways that can benefit both producers and fans. Better still would be to create a system where people could view one another’s entries instead of the expert judges model — then you could get the whole community thing happening.

Pitchfork, ever eager to poke Ryan Adams in the eye with a fork, sets their animosity aside to report on the shutting down of his unaffiliated fan board. Apparently rumour had it that Adams couldn’t handle the negative criticism on the site, but:

Pitchfork contacted David Smith, proprietor of RyanAdams.org, who set the record straight. “Ryan’s management contacted me Tuesday, asking that the board be temporarily shut down,” he disclosed. “Initially there were reports of censorship or an inability to deal with criticism and negative show reviews. But I’ve since had the opportunity to discuss the issue directly with Ryan…and apparently sensitive information of a personal nature had been exposed on the board which was a threat to the band.

Information is said to have included his hotel room number (shades of gawker.com anyone?). Meanwhile his fans have relocated elsewhere en masse while Smith figures out how to make it harder to register for the board.

Another fine line.

One of the themes I’ve occassionally hit on in this blog is that fandom is not just about celebrities and athletes, it can also happen around brands (Trader Joe’s being one exemplar), and smart brands will figure out more and more ways to make this happen around them. The always-informative blog Micro Persuasion has an excellent post up critiquing the concept of “brand engagement” in which Steve Rubel argues:

The engagement myth is built on an insatiable desire to get consumers obsessed with our brands. That’s because TV advertising ain’t what it used to be. Often “engagement” is achieved through digital technology. Problem is, consumers don’t want to be “digitally engaged” with us. They’re only into each other.

As marketers, we shouldn’t care about brand engagement. Instead we should focus on how we get people connected with each other and measure the number of times we helped them do so. That’s why venues such as Second Life, YouTube, Facebook and other social networks are so hot: They allow people to connect with each other.

If you want to see engagement, find the right communities, build programs that empower people to connect, then get out of the way. Your brand will get a lift purely through association.

This is so right on, whether you’re talking brands or famous people. When you get people connected to one another and invested in their social relationships, they want to stay connected to each other. If your brand is the vehicle that allows them to do that, then they’re going to stay connected to your brand. Soap fans have been watching lame soaps for years in order to stay involved in their soap fan communities, music fans have been buying new records by artists they haven’t really liked since their first two albums just so they can trash them with the fans they’ve been talking to for years.

More and more, marketing = community management. But community management is an entirely different beast from advertising, in fact I’d argue that the more the former looks like the latter, the more doomed it is to fail. How do you “find the right communities”? How do you “get people connected” and measure how often it happened? How do you “build programs that empower people to connect”? Unless you’re a super lucky or genius marketer, they don’t happen just because you’ve realized it’s the way to go. Having been so deeply enmeshed with the Association of Internet Researchers and followed internet research so closely for so many years now, I know these things can be done, even if they don’t always work out the way the planners anticipated (or — more accurately — even if they never work out the way the planners anticipated), but I’m also astutely aware of how much complexity there is to these problems.

As an aside, I can’t help but note that one reason Facebook, YouTube, and Second Life are so hot is that they are getting press coverage as though they were a brand new phenomenon. Fact is, USENET had way more users than these platforms do now more than a decade ago. Connecting online is still hot, but it’s not new, no matter what Web 2 hype overcomes us. But I’ll save the rest of that commentary for another post.

Hi there everyone,

Well, this blog is about to hit its three month anniversary. I always thought 3 months was about the right length to know if a relationship has promise or not, and I have to say, this one is looking pretty good. Online Fandom has brought me in touch with many interesting people and ideas I wouldn’t otherwise have met and has generally just been lots of fun. Thing is, it’s all kind of mysterious — who are the people behind those unique hits? what are they here for? what do they get? what do they want more of? less of?

The first principle we teach in Communication is that the best communication is audience-centered. That’s a trick when you don’t really know who’s there. So if you’re paying attention to this site, I would love to hear from you. Tell me who you are, tell me what you’d like me to write more about, tell me what brings you here, share your ideas about phenomena worth covering. Just say hi. You can email me at nancy at onlinefandom dot com, or leave a comment on this post.

Thanks for reading, it’s great to know you’re there, even if I don’t know who you are.

Nancy

Christy Dena has done a nice write up of fan-related presentations at the recent Association of Internet Researchers conference in Australia that I just attended. After organizing the first AoIR conference in 2000 and spending many years being an exemplary AoIR citizen, I confess that I spent much of my time there meeting new people and exploring Australia rather than listening to presentations at the Hilton, but I did see Christy’s very interesting paper about fandom distributed across media and quite enjoyed meeting her. You can see Kevin Lim interview her about her topic here.

Two other people’s work I found particularly interesting are Daniel Skog (blog here) and Sal Humphries. They are both looking at what I consider an increasingly important new concern I’ve mentioned here before — the consequences of conducting social life in proprietary spaces, Skog in the context of Sweden’s LunarStorm, and Humphries in the case of online games.

There’s a lot of interesting media-related work going on in Australia, and it was great to be exposed to it. My own paper was about the representation of the internet as a relational medium as seen in Ann Landers and Dear Abby between 1993-2004. It’s part of a larger project taking an historical look at how the role(s) of the net in personal life were understood as the net went from new to normal. It’s got nothing to do with fandom, so I won’t go on about it here, but it’s fun stuff and I had a blast presenting it.

If you are looking for a quick virtual vacation, join me on a walk from Coogee Beach to Bondi Beach along Sydney’s Coastal Walkway. Wow.