Digital Media Distribution

Alright so I made this sweet powerful video, well now what? How do I get it to my intended audience? Well lets go back to Bitzer and talk about exigency, this video was created to help college kids at my campus coop with stress and the effects of living in Houghton with little control over family life. How do I get it to them? 

The best way I can think of (and also the quickest) would be to post to YouTube or Vimeo, any quick video uploading sites, then, post the shit out of it all over facebook/twitter/myspace(to the few lost souls still there) and sit back and collect. Facebook has a Michigan tech page, makes it soooo easy posting to it to help connect to students right away. Michigan Tech's facebook group has almost 2,500 members, before the internet, how would I get to all of these students without walking around, posting flyers, trying to get people to sit and watch my movie. Thank you, digital information age. 

Videos just posted to youtube will get lost in the sea of incoming videos. There has to be an intermediate site to connect with the audience. Youtube, Vimeo, Facebook, Twitter, all of these are web 2.0 sites. Youtube alone boosts. They all are dependent on user participation to survive. So the more effort I put into this participation, the more audience I can reach. 

I never explicitly say Michigan Tech in my video, so this allows me to create the secondary audience to be any college student anywhere. How powerful can that be? This video applies hardest to students who are stuck and stressed with their work, school, and its very difficult for many young people to talk about it. I've had to have many conversations with friends who are struggling with campus/home life. 'How can I watch after my family if I'm stuck here?' How can you watch after anyone if you don’t get a degree? You can only have so much control, in so many parts of your life, you’re only human. 

Its difficult to portray that message. People don’t want to be told that they're not all powerful, vulnerable. I feel that the way I produced this video will help explain this in a suitable, non-invasive way, not to long to belabor the issue (or engage fight or flight), and not to short that it's left open ended. People are much more likely (judging from personal experience) to give a video a chance if its short, ~3 minutes or less.  

These social media sites allow us to have great influence and power over advertisement. I don't have to spend a dime, or even an hour, to get my link out to thousands of people. Strategy is key, most people heard, most primary audience reached, with the least amount of effort. 

Good thing I'm not a marketing major. 

-Comrade Chris