Welcome to the FanTrust guide to digital success – Setting Your Digital Resolutions for 2009. December is traditionally a time for reflection and goal-setting, both personal and professional. Though you know what it takes to reach your goals for, say, losing weight (less eggnog, more yoga) or having fun (more eggnog, less yoga) –what if you’re venturing into uncharted business terrain?

Over the last two weeks, we’ve walked you through short, simple exercises – complete with case studies and success stories – intended to spark transformation in your company or division with overall corporate and business goals; digital capacity; market niche and fan engagement strategies.

With more than two decades of experience in digital media, FanTrust can help you grow your digital lines of business. Our hope is to leave you inspired and invigorated for a happy, healthy digital business in 2009.

All the best!

Week 4: Put Your Ideas into Action

Like any resolution, intention without action is useless. In this December blog series, FanTrust has helped your company to articulate digital goals for 2009; identify the niche value offered to your fans; and better understand your fan base. In this final blog, we discuss the need for a digital action plan.

No doubt you’ve identified many digital aspirations for the New Year. A long term vision prioritizes these goals, and assesses the time, financing, man power and strategic partnerships needed to achieve them.

To get started, ask the following questions for each digital goal or project you’ve identified:

• How will I define digital success? New audiences? Direct revenues? New or strengthened business partnerships? Is the project monetizable?
• What are the financial costs associated with this digital venture? Be sure to factor in time for planning, business meetings, securing necessary funding, etc.; employee/ executive time vs. third-party outsourcing.
• What funding/ financing options are available for this project? Canadian content producers can tap into several funding sources; entertainment companies can also underwrite projects through sponsorships, strategic partnerships or smart money. FanTrust can help you select and pursue the best options.
• What is the ROI for this digital project? Is the cost of implementing an idea justified by the payback: market exposure, revenue generation or social impact?

Answering these questions will help you set priorities and benchmarks for success. You’ll know you’ve achieved your goals when you track your results against pre-set, concrete, measureable targets. Good luck for a prosperous 2009!

FanTrust is a full service management consultancy laser-focused on digital entertainment.  We deliver a comprehensive range of services in all areas of new media and multiplatform development, production and distribution – as well as corporate strategy and business development to position your entertainment company in our digital age. For a full list of FanTrust services, visit the Impact + Clients section of our website.

Welcome to the FanTrust guide to digital success – Setting Your Digital Resolutions for 2009. December is traditionally a time for reflection and goal-setting, both personal and professional. Though you know what it takes to reach your goals for, say, losing weight (less eggnog, more yoga) or having fun (more eggnog, less yoga) –what if you’re venturing into uncharted business terrain?

This month, we’ll walk you through short, simple exercises – complete with case studies and success stories – intended to spark transformation in your company. Set your sights on overall digital business goals, digital capacity, market niche and fan engagement strategies.

With more than two decades of experience in digital media, FanTrust can help you grow your digital lines of business. Our hope is to leave you inspired and invigorated for a happy, healthy digital business in 2009.

All the best!

Week Three: Define Your Niche

So far in FanTrust’s Setting Your Digital Resolutions series, you’ve identified digital business goals and investigated your fans’ online behaviour.

The next step – defining your company’s niche – requires the right blend of aspirational thinking and capacity assessment. It’s also a highly custom exercise. Over the years, FanTrust has led many entertainment companies through its Digital Brand Snapshot. Companies that to the outside world may appear very similar – television producers with similar broadcast partners, format genres and slate sizes, for example – have defined their niche in remarkably different ways.

Many content producers define themselves as storytellers. Some see themselves as media-specific storytellers– television, games, movies, etc. In this case, digital growth will generally stem from strategic partnerships on new distribution platforms, or creative IP licensing deals.

Other producers see their team as media-agnostic storytellers. FanTrust client marblemedia is a great example. marblemedia recently won both Company of the Year and Producer of the Year at the Canadian New Media Awards, and has built its award-winning reputation as a content creation company devoted to telling stories that entertain and engage audiences across all platforms, including This is Daniel Cook and The Dating Guy. Another inspirational client is the National Film Board of Canada, an organization that is producing and distributing virtual online communities and platforms for social engagement and documentary media creation, including Homeless Nation and its Filmmaker-in-Residence program.

Entertainment and media executives overseeing blockbuster digital success share a common attribute – they are able to pinpoint and extend the fan experience.

Oprah’s media tagline is “Live Your Best Life”. The Oprah media empire inspires its female viewer to challenge her thinking, expand her physical and spiritual knowledge, change her behavior and improve her life in the process. The Oprah Bookclub is one of the most recognized brand endorsements in North America. Therefore, the Skype-powered New Earth Web events and podcasts were a natural digital extension of the Oprah media niche.

The online cult phenom ICanHasCheezeburger.com boosts more than 4 million page views a day – that’s 4 million views of animal (mostly cat) photos set to funny captions of what they might say.  Ben Huh, CEO of Pet Holding Inc., which runs a network of humour sites including ICanHasCheezeburger, summed up his company’s niche succinctly when he said “We just want to make people happy for five minutes.” His is not the only entertainment and media company to find a market in “web escapism”.

How you define your company affects where and how it will grow in the multiplatform space. Often, how a company defines its digital position is the result of management’s digital comfort-level, rather than company-wide business capacity. This can lead to lost opportunities. FanTrust serves as a valuable executive coach, educating teams on market and revenue opportunities and realities – including budgets; technical and operational requirements for projects; case studies; and audience engagement.

Welcome to the FanTrust guide to digital success – Setting Your Digital Resolutions for 2009. December is traditionally a time for reflection and goal-setting, both personal and professional. Though you know what it takes to reach your goals for, say, losing weight (less eggnog, more yoga) or having fun (more eggnog, less yoga) –what if you’re venturing into uncharted business terrain?

For the next two weeks, we’ll walk you through short, simple exercises – complete with case studies and success stories – intended to spark transformation in your company. Set your sights on overall digital business goals, digital capacity, market niche and fan engagement strategies.

With more than two decades of experience in digital media, FanTrust can help you grow your digital lines of business. Our hope is to leave you inspired and invigorated for a happy, healthy digital business in 2009.

All the best!

Week 2: Know Your Audience

Last week’s Digital Resolutions post set you on the path to outlining your digital goals with motivating examples from Monty Python, Nexon and others. We asked, “What are your motivations for getting into the digital space? What do you hope to achieve?”

It’s also important to look outward – to get to know your fans. More specifically, to understand your fans’ online lives. This doesn’t require anything nefarious – such as creating a Second Life avatar and spying behind virtual bushes. As with any relationship, getting to know your fans simply requires that you ask the right questions, listen, observe, and draw the correct conclusions.

We recently blogged about trends in women’s and men’s online behavior. Tracking trends is important and can be incredibly valuable. But to be a real online success, you must drill down and understand your own fan base. What experiences and value are your fans seeking online?

The TV series Reality Obsessed follows the adventures of Murtz Jaffer, the most dedicated and obsessed fan of reality television. In each episode, Murtz enlists the help of reality TV stars-cum-friends to answer a burning question about the genre: Do participants really experience connections or sexual chemistry with the reality cameras rolling? How do you produce a fail-proof audition tape? What’s it like to “work” at the business featured in a hot reality TV show?

Producers Peace Point Entertainment enlisted FanTrust’s community-building expertise for Reality Obsessed. Peace Point had clearly defined goals – they wanted the Reality Obsessed blog, penned by the host, to serve as marketing for the show – attracting international fans and sparking interest in the series.

FanTrust created a two-pronged strategy: develop a blog that would fill an untapped need for reality fans online; and roll out targeted weekly promotions.

The blog, like the show, was designed to expose the reality behind reality TV – an insider perspective, but free of the snark found on many popular TV gossip blogs. Polls and questions at the end of each blog post facilitated fan participation and discussion.

To promote the show online, we reached out to fans in their natural habitat – on fan/ gossip sites, forums, and popular social networks. We sought out fans of reality TV franchises that were airing concurrent to the show’s rollout (e.g. Big Brother, Survivor) – reasoning that these show fans would be online in droves – buzzing, chatting and searching about the latest scandals and vote offs. And of course reality stars, and the fans who love them, were promoting themselves and connecting on MySpace, so Reality Obsessed joined the fray.

The host, Murtz, parlayed his reputation to serve as reality TV expert on the Survivor Panel of National Post’s arts & culture blog, The Ampersand (owned by CanWest, the parent company of Reality Obsessed’s broadcaster, TVTropolis).

What if your property is still in development phases, with no existing fan base? Study the digital offerings of your stakeholders and competitors. What are the best offerings already on the market, and why?

FanTrust provides digital strategies, deal-making, competitive intelligence, fan tracking, online community building and social networking campaigns – establishing the best strategic partnerships, digital properties and platforms for our clients.

Every Thursday and Monday for the next two weeks,  we’ll walk you through short, simple exercises – complete with case studies and success stories – intended to spark transformation in your company or division with overall corporate and business goals; digital capacity; market niche and fan engagement strategies.

With more than two decades of experience in digital media, FanTrust can help you grow your digital lines of business. Our hope is to leave you inspired and invigorated for a happy, healthy digital business in 2009.

All the best!

Session One: Define Your Aspirations

What are your motivations for getting into the digital space? What do you hope to achieve?

Perhaps, as a television producer, you simply want to maintain a competitive edge when pitching or developing TV treatments for broadcasters. Others may have more ambitious goals – eyeing additional revenue streams (e.g. sales of video online) or new partnership models (e.g. production underwriting from online video destinations and/or brand sponsorships).

The men of Monty Python are blatantly, unabashedly aspiring to additional revenues with their just-launched YouTube channel. In their comic, absurdist style, the group admits the channel is a direct ploy to sell Monty Python DVDs and merchandise through YouTube’s new partnership with Amazon. And it appears to be working – the three-year-old best-of Monty Python DVD set went from being the ten thousandth most purchased item on Amazon.com to No. 5 one week after the comedy group started posting videos on YouTube with referral links to Amazon.

Web studio NextNewNetworks signed a deal in July 2008 with Starburst. The characters of NNN’s animated series Nite Fite talk up its candy company sponsor – alongside “sell-out” quips – in return for sponsorship revenues. Though terms were undisclosed, this type of deal is helping studios create and seed their series to online audiences.

Many game companies are stepping into the digital space in pursuit of audiences, financing and new revenue streams. We’ve previously blogged about Nexon generating $1.2 million in sales of virtual MiniCooper cars within Maple Story. Talk about printing (or in this case, digitally rendering) your own money!

Former Capcom VP of Marketing Nique Fajors is now working with a new online games company. He explained in a recent GameDaily article that he believes online games will continue to lure funding from the traditional console space – why would investors put up big dollars to see two console game produced, when they can spread their dollars (and risk) across one hundred casual games, he asks?

While there will continue to be a market for console games, companies and producers including EA and Take-Two see microtransactions and downloadable content as untapped opportunities, and a necessary investment, even in tight economic times.

In short, you need to know where you want to go if you ever hope to get there – begin mapping your digital future today.

FanTrust runs strategy sessions that help you and your team ask the right questions and drill down on the right answers and decisions for your company’s digital business, with our Digital Brand Snapshot brainstorm process.