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Please welcome Frujen Bridgewater (@Frujen) as our guest Media Words writer. He too is a student embracing social media, your comments are welcomed.
DreamWorks Animation is a film production studio that specializes in computer animated films. DreamWorks has developed an international presence operating out of the US, London, England, and Toronto, Canada. They have dominated the box office with films such as Shrek, Madagascar, and Kung Fu Panda.
So I wondered if they have implemented social media into their marketing strategy? They have a large outreach program working through schools to inspire and discover the next generation of animation superstars which dates back to 2005. I got in touch with the folks at DreamWorks to ask them more about their Social Media strategy but no one knew who was responsible for it. In many ways that’s ok, proof that the many DreamWorks groups out here have grown organically.
DreamWorks is currently promoting on their homepage that they are on Twitter. They can also be found on networks such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and YouTube, and it seems they are creating a stronger presence all over the web. I’ve been able to see that they use these social networking tools for recruiting employees, promoting the business, and most obviously for promoting their products. The are using Twitter and most recently tweeted about Shrek the Musical. Twitter is also where they dropped the news, they’ll increase their film quota to producing a total of 5 new movies every other year and included a link to see what’s on deck.
By using social networks such as Facebook to spread the news, DreamWorks is able to push its newest productions into the minds of their fan base. Perhaps even more importantly, they enable their fans to stay connected and continue to enjoy their favorite characters and films. In Facebook alone they have fan bases that break 600,000 members just in Shrek fan clubs alone. With this kind of representation it is no wonder that films such as Kung Fu Panda are grossing approximately 632,000,000 dollars worldwide. Also while promoting the sequels of their box hits to the public, they are introducing three new movies: How to Train Your Dragon, Oobermind, and The Guardians (the title isn’t set in stone).
I can’t help but imagine the connection and additional loyalty that could be harnessed if DreamWorks were listening to the voices in these social streams with more focus. The additional value they could bring into the business and to their customers has tremendous potential.
By: Frujen Bridgewater
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Please welcome Jenn Staretorp as a guest blogger on Media Words. Jenn is one of my Social Media students at Daniel Webster College this term and this is her first blog post (ever).
We welcome your comments and continued support of her social media experience.
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I’m teaching Social Media this summer and today in class we talked about Twitter. The students were not Twitter users, until today. I’ve found that many people have the same questions about tool.
To help them understand, I’ve developed another KSL’ism. (KSL’isms are what happens when I over simplify a situation and use an unlikely metaphor. Those of you who’ve worked with me are all too familiar. 
)
I explained that Twitter is like a hammer. One tool, with two very distinct purposes.
When you think of a hammer you probably think, like most people, that it’s for driving nails. But a hammer has another job, the claw end of the hammer does significant work and shouldn’t be overlooked. It can extract a nail driven deeply, with ease, exerting great leverage to pull it out of a tight binding.
Twitter is a tool much like that. Twitter is one way to drive your brand or push information. Every tweet, every link shared, every Re-Tweet, reflects and further defines your brand. But Twitter can be used to extract hyper-relevant pieces of information too. Information that might otherwise not have had the leverage, in the great online content world, to bubble up to a level of visibility that could be helpful. Without Twitter it would be very difficult to extract these pieces of information.
To demonstrate to class I typed into a Twitter search “Social Media” and “Business” or “Enterprise”, selected only posts from within the past 24 hours, and only from people within 100 miles of Boston, people we could meet. Then we used google advance search to execute the query, without the location constraint b/c we can’t do that easily there. Here’s the results.
Which do you think did a better job of extracting actionable content?
Keep the faith. -KSL
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