Teaser Launch
I had really wanted to release the teaser before we got into production. Then I wanted to release it on Day 1 of production. Karen Walton kept encouraging me to cool my jets. She didn’t see the point in rushing it out and she was right.
We probably could have taken even more time to lay the social media groundwork before releasing the trailer, which is not to say it wasn’t a great launch. It really was.
By the time we were ready to roll out the teaser, we had one week of production under our belt and people were beginning to follow the production blog. Dorice Tepley was tweeting regularly from @rubyskyepi as was I, albeit infrequently. Karen and Kerry were also working Twitter from their own accounts and several members of the cast and crew were supplementing the script with their own ad hoc tweets.
We were close to launching a Facebook page as well. The only thing stopping us was the lack of an image to represent the project. We hadn’t settled on a logo and we didn’t have exactly the right photo to represent the production. But nonetheless, our online presence was growing.
Karen’s plan was a clever one. Raise awareness and excitement about the teaser by talking about it online and offering a small number of previews by invitation only. That meant that in addition to the team, there would be about 20 people who had had an advance look at the trailer and could talk/blog/tweet about it along with us at the moment of release.
And release was scheduled to the minute: 12 noon Eastern on Friday August 27,2010.
The day before we released the trailer, we had a screening for the crew. That’s when we took our crew picture. We immediately put the picture up on the web and used it as the profile picture when we launched our Facebook page that day. The crew got in the fun, joining the fan page, spreading it and tagging themselves in the picture. That was a great boost for us on Facebook, because each crew member was helping by promoting the page to their communities.
That carried through into the launch of the teaser. Many crew members mentioned it or liked it on Facebook helping spread the word as did the 20 or so people who had had a sneak preview. Karen, Dorice, Kerry, production manager Peter Harvey and I were all active through out launch day on Facebook, Twitter and the show blog, talking about the teaser and the upcoming launch.
At precisely noon, we saw a very significant spike in our traffic. We had our best numbers so far on that day. And our traffic has not yet fallen back to pre-launch numbers.
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