The importance of having a blog (part 2) - guest post

Good reasons to have a blog

To have a blog is very useful for a number of reasons. Especially for low budget productions it is essential to reach a large community / audience without the usual high costs involved in PR. The easiest and cheapest way is to use the potential of Social Media. You can use and combine a variety of tools. Your own blog is very helpful to introduce your project to many people at a time. For example, some “widgets” are permanently included to give the reader basic information. For further and recent information it is easiest to blog, but the most important thing is to keep your blog alive!

Other important tools to gather a Web 2.0 community are Facebook and Twitter. To keep in touch with your followers or fans permanently it is recommended to use these tools regularly. Imagine you are working on a film project and today you are meeting your editor to explain your thoughts about the movie: you fetch your smart phone and twitter “great! met with the editor - everything’s fine” and afterwards you post some pics and a blog entry with more details to your blog. To promote the news you write a short teaser note on Facebook and voilà - you're perfectly networked!

Meanwhile it is very easy to integrate other sites and networks directly on your blog frontpage!

To sum it up, Social Networks never exist alone but always work hand in hand with other Web 2.0 platforms. A blog is one of the main and crucial tools for a smooth and effective network! As an example how good the blog system works, take a look at our own blog at www.budspencermovie.com: within a very short time we reached 60 000 clicks and became number 58 of the fastest growing blogs on Wordpress (June 2009). The popularity we reached is enormous: enter “Bud Spencer” on google.at and you’ll find our blog (about the documentary we are doing concerning Bud Spencer’s life) on the first page (with varying positions)! Even more impressive is the fact that with entering the key words - defining our project - “Bud Spencer” and “Dokumentarfilm” - on google.com the first 19 entries all refer back to our blog!* In addition, we also use Youtube to promote our movie with our own channel, which is successful as well (position 58 in category “Reporter” throughout Germany), check it out on: http://www.youtube.com/budspencermovie

(by Karl Martin Pold and Sarah Nörenberg)

* as at March 2010