This from the ShareThis blog:

• Sharing can make up 5-10% of your overall traffic.
• Sharing can make up 15-30% of your search traffic.
• Sharing drives 25-50% more engagement (page views/unique) than search.

Not enough to convince you how important it is to give your audiences opportunities to share your content? Then consider this:

ShareThis network saw a 200% increase in “shares per page view” in 2009

ShareThis, which provides handy sharing widgets to integrate into your sites and blogs like the ones on this page, is currently beta testing an analytics feature which I imagine will open up to the public soon.

The audience may not be your number one distributer YET, but their importance in spreading your content is on the rise. As the new year dawns, we should all be thinking about that relationship a little more deeply. As with any distributor, providing great content won't be enough to maintain the relationship. Old school distributors take a cut, as we know. Making sharing easy by providing buttons, widgets and shareable assets is only the first step. As this distribution mode grows and matures we will have to think of other ways to encourage users to share and share often.

Yesterday, Facebook was at it again. Talking about privacy settings.

There was a lot of buzz and I wanted to catch some of it promote Hailey Hacks Privacy Settings. I wanted to find a way to use the buzz to drive some more hits to the video.

My majorest stumbling block was that I am here in Niagara-on-the-Lake helping to run a crossplatform training lab. We were just hitting the most intense part of the program as the Facebook privacy news hit so it was hard to find time to work the social media.

I came up with an alternate plan: email my community and ask them to help by using status updates, tweets and comments to the Facebook blog video which was in the newsfeed to draw people’s attention to the video.

I sent out an email asking people to come up with funny status updates etc that said why they were sticking with Hailey’s suggested privacy settings instead of following the ones that Facebook is now suggesting.

I have many good and supportive friends. Here are some of the resulting tweets and updates.

I love that my community came through for me, but when I looked at the initiative I’d started, I realized it felt way too much like advertising.

Meanwhile, Illia responded to my call for support by sending me a bunch of images of funny and embarrassing things people have said on Facebook. If you set up your account the way Facebook is now suggesting all these kinds of gaffs won’t be visible just within Facebook’s walled community (where at least they disappear fairly quickly off the front page) but will be findable through Google. Not that’s entertainment!

So I quickly (well not so quickly, it took me till about midnight last night to do it), I crafted a blog post that included those images. It ended with

Do yourself a favour, keep your life off Google. Set your privacy settings the way Hailey suggests in the video below and when the transition tool comes out? Stick to your old settings!

Followed by an embed of Hailey Hacks Facebook Settings:

The results? A spike in views. But not thousands of people by any means and complete failure to achieve viral.

Conclusion: more work -- a lot more work -- is required to get the view count up. It’s important from here on in to get the word out beyond my own community. I need advocates with big communities of their own, communities who include parents of tweens and people who teach them.

I’ve got my work cut out for me.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

December 7, 2009

HAILEY HACKS WEB SERIES MAKES TECH COOL & FUN FOR TWEEN GIRLS

TORONTO – For girls who are tired of tube socks for Christmas or Chanukah when all they want is the new Robert Pattinson poster, special holiday season episodes from web series Hailey Hacks makes creating, sending and shopping with wishlists easy and fun.

Check out:

• Hailey Hacks Creating Wishlists
• Hailey Hacks Shopping with Wishlists
• Hailey Hacks Sharing Wishlists

Using step-by-step educational videos, the series makes technology entertaining for girls at an age when they’re starting to see math and science as frustrating or irrelevant.

Studies show girls are falling behind in tech and it only gets worse as they get older: Only eleven per cent of students enrolled in computer science and engineering at the post-secondary level are female. Many girls are opting out of science and math at Ninth Grade and Hailey Hacks is aimed at tweens, getting them into technology before they bail out.

Cheerful, bubbly Hailey offers them a different perspective by making tech useful.

Other videos in the Hailey Hacks series show girls how to navigate the online world to get schoolwork done in exciting, new ways, to enhance their social lives and to have fun.

BACKGROUND

Hailey Hacks, created by Jill Golick, produced by Story2.OH and starring Marlee Maslove, is a series of YouTube-style videos aimed at making kids of all ages more technologically literate.

A hack is a clever or elegant solution and Hailey has plenty of them -- for getting school work done, socializing with friends and just having fun.

Join her fan page on Facebook to keep up on the all the links to cool websites she shares. Follow her on Twitter, FriendFeed, YouTube, 12 Seconds.

Hailey Hacks is available wherever fine video is shared.

For more information visit Hailey Hacks, Story2.OH, Running With My Eyes Closed or contact Jill Golick.

I found a very cool blog yesterday called The Google Geek and reading the posts I thought Ron Hall -- the Google Geek -- might be interested in Hailey Hacks, especially the coming-in-the-new-year-episode, Hailey Hacks Google Maps.

I dropped Ron an email and attached a press release. We exchanged a few emails back and forth and lookie here, not only has Ron blogged about Hailey Hacks, he's shared it. Excellent!

Got an interesting email yesterday. From a young woman named Jill Golick about a sneaky way she is using to get young girls, like my daughter, interested in web technology - Hailey Hacks. It is an area of interest of mine because I have a great Mom (dove into the computer/web at 78), I am married to a great lady (still has trouble getting her messages from a cell phone - but has a degree in educational systems), a daughter that is a budding tech wiz, and a sister that is an expert in the field of women's education.

I checked out a couple of the videos and some of Jill's background bio (my daughter - who is also my I Phone mentor - loves creative writing). I sent her a link to GirlEffect.org - something my sister brought to my attention.

One of the beauties of the web environment is how generous people can be. Ron has gone well beyond what any old media journalist would ever do for me. He hasn't just mentioned the project to the readers of his blog, he's helped me distribute it.

I have not yet done much in the way of promoting any of the newly released Hailey Hacks videos. And the view counts show it.

When I released each of the videos, I tweeted the links both through my personal Twitter account and through the Hailey Hacks twitter feed.

I also used Facebook, putting the videos on Facebook and encouraging people to look at the videos through my status updates and the status updates of the Hailey Hacks fan page. I’ve sent out some Facebook emails asking friends to join the fan page and then tried to keep the Hailey fan page in the newsfeed, by posting lots of links.

And I’ve done a little blogging on this site and my other one.

The first video I posted was Hailey Hacks Creating Wishlists. And these methods drove 150-200 views to it. There were diminishing returns for each of the two Wishlist videos that I released over the next couple of days. Two weeks in there aren’t many views coming into these videos.

Then I released Hailey Hacks Facebook Privacy Settings. I did all the same things on Twitter, Facebook and my blogs, maybe with a little less enthusiasm because I was busy with other stuff. But for this video, I also visited some blogs and web sites that cover the web safety terrain and commented leaving the link to the video.

There have been a few more views to this video. Some of these are directly off the links I left, but some of the people who have seen the link have spread it. They’ve sent it to friends, Twittered about it or embedded it in blog posts.

Still, we’re not talking astronomical numbers. I hope to see it keep growing.

My strategy this week will be to leave links to the other videos on some potentially interested blogs and send out some press releases that Karen Hill kindly crafted for me.

This is a very interesting graphic filled with a ton of information. I found it Gary Hayes photostream on Flickr.

Is it user gen or pros working on spec?

A number of prominent film festivals are running "make-an-ad-for-a global-brand" competitions. The project is an initiative of MOFILM who describe themselves as follows:

MOFILM is a privately funded company with offices in Manchester, London and San Francisco. Started as an artistic project in early 2007 with the Sundance Institute and GSM Association, MOFILM has grown into a global community of filmmakers working with world-leading brands and distributing content to much of the globe. MOFILM has pioneered 'made-for-mobile' content working with leading filmmakers such as Kevin Spacey, Robert Redford, Isabella Rossellini and Spike Lee to highlight and champion talented MOFILMers from around the world. MOFILM also run the world's largest mobile film festival in Barcelona, Spain once a year in conjunction with the GSM Association, as well as working with leading film festivals, including Shanghai, Cannes, Sundance, Locarno and London.

MOFILM's mission is to allow creative people from anywhere in the world and with any background to 'Get Creative - Get Noticed and Get Famous!' using the MOFILM platform as a base to run 'Make and Ad' and film competitions to showcase talent. Currently MOFILM works with mobile operators in over 50 countries around the world to distribute content to mobile from within the MOFILM community, sharing any revenue 50/50 with filmmakers.

The Barcelona and Tribeca Film Festivals have upcoming competitions. London had one in 2009 and you can see the winners work on the site -- they definitely feel like ads, but they are pretty good. There's also a Pepsi Short Film Competition (download the brief if you're interested) and an American Idol/Warmart video competition (among the prizes, a $5000 Walmart gift card and the chance to "Attend Walmart Saturday morning meeting").

What do you think? Are you grabbing your camera and shooting for fame and fortune? Or do you need a contract before you start work?

Skype has a cool interactive ad running at the moment to promote their cheap long distance charges to landlines. They've sent trilingual actor Rob Cavazos to god knows where (Cavazos claims he doesn't know where he is except that he landed in Spain) and now, he's answering your phone calls.

The campaign is called the Phone Box Experiment and is a great example of how far advertising has strayed from its roots lately. It's also interesting because Skype really can't control the message. Here's an actor camping in the middle of nowhere -- entirely alone with no handlers -- who has been given license by the company to speak on their behalf. He doesn't need approvals up the line to three vice-presidents before he speaks. That's amazing and entirely necessary for a project like this to work. It's also part of what make the project so much fun; ht's a real person and therefore unpredictable.

There's something compelling about watching and listening to Rob as he answers calls and chats with people. He is genuinely surprised by how many people are calling him and thrilled and interested in talking to people. Unfortunately the sound is not entirely brilliant, but that is one of the truths about Skype. Which is not to say I don't love Skype because I do and I admire some of the chances that the company is taking with their marketing.

Let me know if you call him and what he says. From the sounds of things you may have trouble getting through because on the live web cam below the phone seems to be ringing off the hook! (btw don't phone for a while, he's about to take a nap!)

Read about the original phone box in the middle of nowhere on Wikipedia.

With a bunch of new and semi-new episodes of Hailey Hacks episodes in hand I have to turn my attention to the second most thorny issue in the digital realm. First, is how to make money and that's a real tough one. But common wisdom (ok maybe it's not wise -- time will tell -- so while the jury is out maybe we should call it advice) says "build an audience first and then it will be easy to monetize." In any case, since monetizing is really really really hard, I'm going for just really really hard first/

Which means that my big focus now is getting people to watch (and rate and share and comment on) the Hailey Hacks episodes that are now online.

At NextMEDIA this week, I talked to a lot of people about how to that. You always hear a lot of stuff about viral video but if you’ve ever put any video up on YouTube you know that getting it to spread is a lot of work. And not just any work, it has to be smart targeted sustained work. And one guy, who's card I can't seem to find but I wish I could, told me don't start without a digital distribution strategy.

Oops.

I've always done things on a schedule all my own and this is no different.

I kind of rushed the recently released Hailey Hacks videos onto the web. For a variety of reasons. I thought the Wishlist trilogy might spread pre-Christmas so I wanted to get them out in time for Black Friday and I did.

Then Mark Zuckerberg announced he was making changes to how privacy works on Facebook.

I wanted the Hailey Hacks Facebook Privacy Settings video to be part of the discussion. So I quickly uploaded that to Blip and YouTube.

So as of now there are four new Hailey videos on Facebook, YouTube and Blip and quite a few other sites.

Now I have to put a distribution strategy into place. Do I know how? No. I've never developed a digital distribution strategy before. I'm not sure what it should look like or how to lay it out. As far as I know there's no Movie Magic template for it. But this little hurdle will not stop me. I will persevere. What I can't figure out or get help with, I'll do what any writer would do, I'll make it up.

And since there's going to be a fair amount of fiction involved, I thought I’d invite you along on this little journey. My hope is that I will be able to build a following for Hailey Hacks. But at the very least, I'll learn a whole lot from the numerous mistakes I know I will make. And why shouldn't you learn from my mistakes too and possibly get to have a few laughs at my expense.

So let's get started on Digital Distribution Strategy Part 1.

Above, I'm enumerated all the things I don't know about, but there are a few things I've gleaned about how to get your content to spread and how to build a community.

Keys to Audience Building:

• content – a continuous stream of good quality content
• community – getting to know people, listening to them, engaging with their content
• personality – this from @MissRogue’s talk at NextMEDIA where she emphasized the need to be a human online
• engagement – people want opportunities to participate and interact
• persistence – keep working at it
• time – not just months, but years are needed of consistent content and community work to build a sizeable audience

There may be more keys. I’ll add to the list as I discover them.

With those keys in mind, I need to think a little bit about my target audiences and how to reach them on the web.

Target Audiences and How They Use the Web

Kids 8-14

Hard to reach through the social media. In order to join many social media sites – including Facebook and YouTube – you have to be 13 or older. Now, many of the kids in my target demographic spend a lot of time on YouTube and Facebook, but in order to have accounts, they have to lie about their age. In other words, the defining characteristic of the demographic is hidden.

There are social networking sites that permit tweens to sign up and these are “safe” monitored environments. Going into them for strictly marketing purposes – setting up accounts and doing community management – seems a little underhanded.

Kids also spend a lot of time online on gaming sites and childrens broadcaster sites. These are places with a lot of traffic.

Preteens also love to forward chain email to each other.

Parents of kids 8-14

Like their kids, parents on Facebook. They also read blogs and hang out on Twitter. It should be possible to reach them through conventional community management tools.

The parents who might like Hailey Hacks may be ones who are interested particularly in their kids’ education and in making sure their daughters aren’t left behind in the digital era. It will be important to find and connect with those communities.

Educators

Teachers of school age kids – grade 3 to 8 – may like Hailey Hacks as well, particularly the teachers who are into computers. There are some new Hailey Hacks videos which I hope will have more appeal to teachers than the original videos.

Like parents, there are a lot of teachers on Facebook and Twitter. Teachers read and write blogs. It will be important to find these online communities and engage them.

People Concerned With Issues Surrounding Women in Technology

One of the underpinnings of Hailey Hacks is the fact that there is a severe shortage of girl geeks – Amber Mac and Felicia Day notwithstanding. Over the last 30 years, the percentage of women enrolled in Engineering and Computer Science at the post secondary lever has remained stagnant at about 20% or less. I need to reach people who care about this and want to see it change.

Again, I should be able to find these niche communities on Twitter, in the blogosphere and in other social networks.

Next Steps

The next part of my digital distribution strategy will involve looking for blogs and thought leaders in these communities.

If you know how to help me with any of this, I definitely want to hear about it. Please comment or drop me a line. Otherwise go watch the Hailey videos to completion a few times, rate, comment and then share with all your friends.