Long sigh. It’s come to this. Tweeting and twittering and
twatting about and I assume this is just the beginning. Yes, I have discovered
the power of the Tweet. Though I am not quite sure what that power actually is.
One suspects that zombies come into the equation in some way. And as everyone
knows, Zombies are the Indie Film Makers favourite obsession.
It is no surprise to me that massive amounts of publicity generate interest regardless of the thing that it is advertising. And now it is within my power to generate it for next to no cost! So as an experiment I spent a weekend Tweeting away and yep, it brought me thousands of hits rather than the usual few hundred. Whether these hits will bring new fans in, or at least people who will click on an advertisement and generate a smidgeon of income is another matter. I think I have to find a way of forcing all newcomers to at least pay a dollar to view. But hits I can generate on the back of 140 characters of text. Which should indicate that content has nothing to do with it.
Most blockbuster movies thrive on this sort of drag ‘em to the box office action. How else would Transformers or even Matrix 3, make money? They were rubbish films. But publicity got people into the cinemas before the word spread. In the case of Matrix 3, I saw a review saying it was possibly the worst film ever made. But that did not stop it becoming one of the biggest grossing. The audience was bought! The commercial filmmaker has long trotted out the line that the opinion of the critics means nothing, whereas a catchy log line and a good poster, and of course a celebrity star, drag people in to see the movie. Once there, the customer has already paid.
I used to think that buying your audience does not always work. I thought that some times you would spend so much money doing it that you could not make a profit and worse, all it did was spread the word quicker of how bad it was! It was thus better to keep quiet about the weak projects in case they undermined any better projects coming along. But here in the little microcosm of the literary universe we call Hong Kong, I have noticed that although publicity might initially bring attention to the failings of a book, people soon forget that. Especially if you have managed to shift a large number of units.
I have also long suspected that those Youtube videos with huge numbers of hits were more to do with publicity than any passers by just dropping in and spreading the word. Similarly I suspect winners of on-line film or literary competitions, and even American Idol for that matter, win thru organizing voting campaigns rather than because their natural talent shines through. The more money and effort you pile into generating a “buzz”, the more sales! Customer satisfaction might be zero, as it is with most Politicians who have long known the power of the campaign, but there are even ways of suppressing that.
At one end of the scale, we have the Chinese Government suppressing all dissatisfaction with its activities by arresting you and threatening you if you so much as e-mail an off hand comment about graft and corruption. At the more benign end of the scale we have people employed by corporations and publicity agencies roaming the Internet making positive comments about their products and dissing negative ones. If you make a negative comment about some actor or actress who has an agency operating this policy, eventually the search engines find it and miraculously contrary opinion taking issue with anything negative appears. For that matter I have come across that with even minor actors, which suggests that this form of reputation control is relatively cheap.
If you suggest that something is hyped somewhat and promising more than it can deliver, most Apple products for instance, it is amazing how irate some people can get. Go to any popular forum on anything and within them you will find people promoting various supposedly related services and goods, disguised as mere ordinary comment. And of course, moderators, er, moderating!
In fact I censor the forums of the Hong Kong Writer’s Circle! I often have to delete all the comments from Nike Shoes, Luis Vuiton hand bags, various Chinese computer sales people, and people selling fur coats and all manner of things not particularly related to writing. I have an immense black-list of such contributors, plus I have actually blocked whole swathes of trade names from any post. Subtler approaches have managed to escape my filters though. They usually say something like, “Hi Guys, really love this site. Didn’t know Hong Kong had so much talent. Thought the above article was really useful and thought provoking. I thought Hong Kong was only about shopping. Though I did see a really great gold watch the other day at …….”
Spamming software is generating some of this but also Interns working for peanuts are put to work doing what they do best, checking their Facebook account.
What does all this actually do though? Tweeting generates lots of hits but mostly from other people trying to get you to go to their web site! Most of these are not going to be “customers”, or “fans”. They are just people operating similar software generating as many connections as possible. You vote for me, and I will vote for you!
I think something similar happened with the financial system. People were buying debt and selling it at a profit. They were buying from each other to generate volumes. They were inflating prices to grab bonuses. And they were lending other people’s money to people who could not pay it back, and taking a commission on the deal. In some sense, somebody made a lot of money, largely by shuffling it from lots of different pockets. It was “crowd sourced funding” on a massive scale.
And now, to fix things, supposedly, governments are printing money to inflate prices and kill off massive debt values, which seems to entail bankers claiming huge bonuses still. Thus the world economy has recovered from its crisis, while jobs are not being produced and governments and people are going bankrupt. Recovery is not quite the word I would use for this. It is a Zombie Recovery.
Zombies walk, but they are dead. Which does make me wonder if the whole celebrity, hype, vote for me if I vote for you, fake it till you make it, ghost writing, buy in the talent, deliver the audience, keyword, search engine driven creative industry that we are now in, is just a Zombie Industry.
It would certainly explain the number of people making Zombie Movies and the bizarre mantra that you can alway find distribution for a Zombie Movie, despite not seeing any in the cinemas. Unless of course, they are all Zombie Films at heart? They look like movies, but nobody watches them because they have no life? Or they watch them because they too have become zombies? Come to think about it, was Avatar really just a hyped up Zombie Movie? Animated corpses seemed to play a large part in the story. They might have been a nicer shade of blue, for a zombie, but animated corpses they were.
Zombie movies, zombie industries, zombie writers, Jane Austen and Zombies, and certainly zombie politicians, seem everywhere! I wonder if Hong Kong is a Zombie Town? Lots of activity, but very little action! Lots of busy people, producing nothing much! And of course writers with no readers, but lots of fans…
Hmm, you can go crazy thinking about all this stuff. It’s enough to make your head explode!