I scare myself sometimes. I come up with crazy impossible ideas like a Social Networking Week Story Project with a different writer bringing each character to life and live scenes on Twitter.

Actually, if all I did was come up with the idea, it would be fine. This idea itself isn’t crazy. It’s kind of cool. It calls for performance writing and writing is a performance art done in private.

But I wasn’t content to come up with the idea. I had to try to make it happen.

That’s the crazy part.

That’s how I scare myself.

I’m trying to do it.

I started with the open call for collaborators. I had some people in mind and was hoping they’d volunteer, but I wasn’t above making a call or two. Some great people volunteered including a few unexpected people, some I know and some from beyond my immediate circle who saw something in a blog post or on someone’s Facebook wall.

Writers aren’t enough. You need characters and story for them to inhabit.

Over lunch last week, with Scott, Karen and I talked about the kind of stories that might play out over a week. We thought there should be some kind of a ticking clock in our story to give it momentum. We told each other stories. Stories about Twitter or Facebook and people’s lives. Themes come up. Reconnecting with old friends and old flames. Forgetting that it’s a public space and showing your underwear (metaphorically and figuratively). Connecting with total strangers regularly – casually and but also forming close relationships. Becoming part of a virtual community. After the meal, Karen spilled her coffee on Scott’s smart phone (a Nokia E71 if you must know, which he happens to love). And all over Scott, so he was soaked in coffee and his beloved phone was wet. Karen was horrified and kept apologizing. I recognized an inciting incident when I saw one. (Sorry Karen, your life continues to generate all the best stories.)

I took some of the stories Karen, Scott and I discussed – along with the spilled coffee incident -- and wrote a bible with half a dozen characters and some simple stories for each laid out over 5 days.

I sent that to the people who’d expressed interest in the project and offered them a choice: adopt a character from the bible or come up with your own that plugs into the ones already there in some ways.

Last night, I spent a couple of hours with Adam Higgs, Brent Delaney, Illia Svirsky, Jennifer Laio and Scott Albert. By the time we were done, there was a character for each writer and some broad strokes story for each character.

This is a strange way to write. In television, film, novels, one person writes all the characters. This is more like improv. Actually a combination between puppetry and improv. We’ll all be working from a blueprint which will tell what is going to happen, but it will be up to each writer to manipulate his or her character in the moment. Exciting and scary.

And there’s another thing to remember. All of us at the table last night are screenwriters which means that our stories are built for film. We think visually in scenes. But we’re not going to have the luxury of video (or at least much video) in this telling. The story will be told almost entirely in the first person (although there will be a half dozen or more first persons) and the characters will be telling their stories in the public space that is the web. No objective camera catching secret moments or listening in on private conversations.

But we had a lot of fun and many laughs in the couple of hours we spent together. They had great ideas and I felt like, maybe together, we’re going to pull it off.

Then they left.

And I started thinking about what’s left to do. Everything has to get written up. There are several other writers with other characters who have to be integrated in and brought up to speed. There needs to be branding and more story meetings and schedules. And a website!

The website’s a big one; a central hub to find everything about the story. This is what I wrote about the website in the Crushing It bible:

We’ll put up a site at Crushingitstory.com. It will aggregate the story itself and any mentions of it on blogs, tweets etc. It will also host the schedule of live Twitter scenes.

Website features:

For each character:

• Links to all social networks with profiles, twitter, blogs etc

• A FriendFeed widget that aggregates all that activity

• A writing credit and link to the bio of the writer

• An acting credit (who the profile picture really is)

For each scene on Twitter:

The scene laid out as a conversation including tweets from all the members of the cast and any other people who chimed in, in chronological order so that it can be read like a script or conversation.

A blog:

In which I do a daily recap of the story events of the day with links to everything for those who want to follow the narrative that way.

A credit page:

With info on everyone involved and links to their presence’s on the web

An About page:

With info on the project

A press page:

With links to any blog or conventional press about the project

A Twitter feed:

Capturing any mentions of the project on Twitter

Now I just have to find someone to help me build it. Hello? Anyone out there want to help with that?

The Social Media Week Story Project has a title: Crushing It!

Crushing It! is the comic tale of a group of people whose lives and social networks become intertwined over the course of a week. The story will be collectively told by a group of professional screenwriters and others through social networking tools.

The title, Crushing It! is an homage to Gary Vaynerchuk and his book Crush It! which motivates entrepreneurs to use the social web.

An incredible team of writers are assembling to make this thing a reality along with a group of non-writers who are also contributing. Sophie Sampson, in the UK who penned Mrs Hudson’s twitter feed for 221B, is on board along with Scott Albert of Tights and Fights fame and the soon-to-be-released Job Review With a Vampire. Also Lorin Wertheimer of Speedie Date, Illia Svirsky, Brent Delaney and more. I should have a fuller list of names up soon.

After a lunch with Karen Hill and Scott Albert, I put together a quick bible which outlined a few characters and story lines. That went to everyone who’d volunteered to participate and a few people who hadn’t quite volunteered yet.

Some of them have come back with their own characters and storylines, others have laid claim to characters in the bible and still others will have characters thrust upon them. Tonight a bunch of writers are getting together to do our first Crushing It story meeting.

One of the things I’m grappling with is how much to open source this. Should I make the writers bible available? That’s a spoiler if ever there was one. On the other hand, open source creative is a cool idea. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

The Social Media Week Story Project is starting to take shape. A team is forming. Stories and characters are developing. And a plan for pulling the whole thing off is starting to fall into place.

Yesterday, Karen Hill and Scott Albert sat down with me and we had a first go at wrestling this sucker to the ground. I’ve worked with both Karen and Scott before and they are both funny, experienced, reliable writers. The kind of writers I want at my side when I’m biting off more than I can chew. The kind of writers who can save my ass.

We tossed around idea for story and character and talked about our own and our friends’ relationship-in-the-social-web-stories. We also figured out some process.

The plan is for me to begin writing a bible that sketches out the beginning of story and character. We’ll meet again next week with a broader collection of writer and contributors and keep figuring it out step by step.

We’re still looking for people to join the team especially in the following categories:

• Web savvy people to help with technical elements like setting up web sites, RSS feeds and all the aggregation we’ll need to make this easy on the audience
• Designers to create a logo and design the web site
• Community manager/public relations/cheerleaders to help us get the word out
• Actors to lend their faces to characters

There are probably lots of things I haven’t anticipated yet, so if you want to participate, let me know. (email to story2oh (at) gmail etc)

P.S. If you come across anything on the web that looks like it could have relevance to what we're doing -- in terms of story, character, strategy, etc -- please add a link to the Social Media Week Story Project FriendFeed.

Social Media Week is February 1-5, 2010. It’s an international five day event being held simultaneously in New York City, Berlin, London, San Francisco, Toronto and São Paulo to “explore the profound impact that social media has on culture, business communications and society at large.”

I think it’s a great opportunity to use the social media to tell some stories about how social media are affecting relationships. Do you want to help me do it?

The Idea

The Social Media Week Story Project

an original comedy about relationships and social media

told entirely in the social media

and presented live February 1-5 2010.

If the girl you’ve been crushing on changes her relationship status to single, do you have to wait more than an hour before asking her out?

Is it okay to check your JDate profile for new matches during a first date?

Is it wrong to set up a Twitter account under a fake name to stalk your own child?

After your first love reconnects on Facebook, do you have to tell your husband?

Is it wrong for a married woman to flirt with total strangers on Twitter? What if they live on another continent?

Social networks are changing the nature of human relationships. The aim of the SMW Story Project is to tell some these of stories.

Empathy is the theme of the story project. Empathy is the fuel that drives social media and the building block of community. It’s our hope that our funny little story will allow us to understand our fellow human beings a little better.

The Process

1. Blog the experiment from beginning to end, starting with a call for writers, actors, designers and anyone else who might want to collaborate in the project and continuing through every stage.

2. Mine the web to find out how social media is affecting human relationships. Using a variety of tags, we’ll check out what people are talking about when it comes to dating, friendships, family and social web. Mothers stalking their kids on Twitter, boyfriends who won’t update the Facebook relationship status, long lost friends who find you through your blog.

(Make all this data publicly available in a FriendFeed group so that anyone interested in the project can add, comment on or favourite the material or use it to create their own characters to interact with the characters and storylines we create.)

3. Put together a story room of five or six smart, funny writers to turn the data into story arcs.

4. Have each writer create a character on the web using social media tools like blogs, social bookmarking, FriendFeed and Twitter.

They can cast actors to “play” their character in profile pictures, photo albums and other media they may develop

5. Set up a central website with links to each character’s social media footprint, RSS feeds, widgets and the schedule of performances.

6. During Social Media Week play out the stories of our characters through their social networking activities. In addition to blogs, podcasts, photo albums and social bookmarks, our characters will meet on Twitter at specified performance times to enact scenes in the dramatic narrative. These will be improvised by the writers based on scene outlines (think Curb Your Enthusiasm). Audience members may tune into “watch”. They can chat with the characters. Or they may even create their own characters and participate in the drama.

7. In the final days of Social Media Week, host a free panel discussion to talk about the project and tell stories from the trenches.

The Call to Action

If you want to be part of the writing team, drop me an email to let me know. If we haven’t worked together before attach a short writing sample please.

There are lots of other ways to participate besides writing. We’ll need someone to help set up websites and manage RSS feeds. We could definitely use some design elements. There are probably tons of things I haven’t anticipated yet. If you want to participate in other ways, let me know how you can help.

Send email to Story2oh (at) gmail (etcetera).

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.

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.

I get a lot of traffic on this blog from the search string "lying down game". In case, you're not here on that search, lying down game involves taking a picture of yourself lying down... okay, lying down in unusual places I blogged about this internet meme in July as part of a post on generating user content and eliciting participation. Since then, I get a handful of hits every day from people looking for this subject.

I'm not quite sure what these visitors are looking for. Just an explanation of a wacky web phenom? Instructions on how to play? Pictures of people lying down? If you're here on that search, would you mind dropping me a comment to tell me your interest in the topic?

I can only imagine what the traffic is like on lyingdowngame.net, the "official" site of the game. Here you can read about the creators of the game (oh your mothers must be so proud), Gary Clarkson and Christian Langdon. There is also a map that shows locations where a "lie down was done." (I believe that's official terminology.) What I love about this map is that it appears that many of the lie downs were done in mid-Atlantic Oceans and the only Canadian lie down was done by someone named Chad about 150 km west of Kapuskasing.

The Lying Down community is actually way more active on Facebook than on the stand alone site. The fan page has over 75,000 members and 16,000 photos... of people lying down. Some are more interesting than others. Quite a few are taken on railroad tracks, roads and bridges.

What's the attraction? Why are so many people participating in what seems like a pointless activity? To be part of something, I believe. The community of lier downers is massive and a lot of people want to be part of that.

The bar to entry is set extremely low. Not everyone can think of a funny lolspeak caption to put on a picture of a cat, but pretty much anyone can lie down and get a mate to snap a picture of it. It's also an excellent activity for when to pursue you're drunk.

(I didn't really mean that about lolspeak, of course everyone can do it which is why the lolcat site is incredibly popular. I only wrote that because I thought it sounded good and sometimes a turn of phrase is more important that accuracy and truth.)

It's funny. I can imagine people killing themselves laughing while they're lying down... especially if they're drunk. And the pictures definitely make other people laugh judging by how frequently hahaha, lol and lmfao appear in the comments.

I think a couple of other factors may be at play as well.

• There's nothing cynical to the lying down game. No one's profiting, no one's pushing product, it isn't intended to build anyone's brand.
• There's a creativity to it. You have to think of some place unusual to lie down in order to make your lie down worth documenting.
• Everyone wants to be a star and here's a great way to get other people to look at you.
• There's a competitive factor to it. Maybe my lying down picture will be the coolest ever, the definitive lying down picture. Perhaps that's why it's called the lying down game.

One lesson is clear. The days of passive media are gone. People want to participate. Give them a way to participate that's easy, funny and has room for creativity, they are there in vast numbers.

The more I write and think about this, the more I want to take a lying down picture of my own. Actually I don't want to take the picture, I want someone else to take a picture of me -- lying down. Watch this space. When I think of a good spot to lie, I'll post the pic. ;D

What's up with these two messages I found in my Facebook inbox this morning? Is this some new virus?

Both are addressed to "Hi {RAND}" and have multiple recipients listed. Both contain a single URL followed by a 5-digit number as the message, but the URLs -- and the numbers -- are different. One message reads

bulitre.com (55355)

The other reads

junfunrun.com (95337)

Neither of the URLs is set up as a link so if you did want to check out the pages you would have to type in the address. That combined with the {RAND} in the greeting suggests this is a pretty clumsy attack. Somebody didn't test their code I guess.

On the other hand, I did receive two of these things already, one sent at close to 1 am this morning (Monday June 29) from a California based-user. The other was sent at 10:30 this morning from a Toronto-based Facebooker. So it does seem like this thing is spreading.

If anyone has more info, I'd love to hear it.

**UPDATE**

From Robert McMillan at CSO Security and Risk:

Facebook users are getting private messages from firends this morning containing the words Hi (Rand) and a link to a Web page.

Not surprisingly, this is a scam. In fact the link takes you to a Web site that attacks your computer.

Roger Thompson, Chief Research Officer with AVG Technologies say's the attack appears to be based on the Luckysploit toolkit, which throws a big whack of different attacks -- IE, Adobe, etc -- at your browser. If you're not fully patched, then it installs a rootkit on your PC.

I've seen a message that includes a link to the bulitre. com (don't go to these domains, they will attack you) and in Twitter messages Facebook users also mention the domain junfunrun . com. (which shares the same IP address).

True Blood is doing some very cool stuff on the web. The Canadian HBO site has quite a bit, but the US HBO site has more, so start your exploration there. Be sure to click on the left hand side of the home page screen just to see it scroll to the right. I haven't found much to do besides click through to character information for Sookie and Bill -- and still, I like it.

The HBO site has plenty to keep you busy for a while. There are episode synopses, character, cast and crew bios (can someone explain to me why the cast and crew information is left off the Canadian site?!), a wiki, fan forums and tons and tons of video.

There's a Facebook group and two official Twittering feeds (@TrueBloodHBO and @BonTempsGossip) plus HBO is also promoting fans who are tweeting in character. That's pretty cool (as is their suggestion that you use #TrueBlood in your tweets about the show). you can also download a fan toolkit that's lots of wallpapers, profile pics, etc.

But the best part of True Blood's web presence is the way they've built out the reality of the show on separate sites and through video. You'll see logos in the bottom right of the HBO homepage that should link you to other sites. I haven't been able to get onto the sites for the American Vampire League, The Fellowship of the Sun or Tru:Blood lately, but BloodCopy is going strong with new blog posts most days. It also has a YouTube channel with a 148 videos!

All this content does a tremendous job of enhancing the series, which is exactly what I'm looking for as a TV fan when I turn to the web. And I have the sense that there may be more content out there that I haven't discovered yet.

True Blood has also done some foreword thinking product integration to promote the second season. You can read more about it at MultiBrain.

CBS is launching a new web series on Monday called Novel Adventures. Kelly Lynne Ashton, alerted me to the series with this note in my Facebook inbox:

Check this out - online web series sponsored by Saturn for CBS. After I joined the fan page 3 of the characters befriended me. The show is actively using FB to extend the experience. Sound familiar?

Familiar? Indeed. (If you don't know the backstory, you can find it and associated links here, here and here.)

What interested me is this: Is Novel Adventures getting a free ride on Face by virtue of the fact that they have CBS and Saturn behind them?

Doesn't seem so. Although KLA was almost immediately friended by the characters after joining the fan page, I haven't been three days later. And this message appears on the wall of the Novel Adventures fan page:

I have to assume that the creators started friending the people who joined their fan page but then started to get warnings from Facebook that their actions were considered spam... as the wall post above suggests. So they stopped doing it.

Among the fans, I found Facebook profiles for four of the series' characters.

Oddly, their privacy settings are high, so you can't actually visit their profiles. You can however look at their friends. I did and in addition to lots of friends from CBS both in New York and Chicago, I found a number of friends from "Digitas", who bill themselves as "the first global interactive agency network" and are presumably the agency behind Novel Adventures.

Novel Adventures is also on Twitter, but not much is happening there as yet and on MySpace.

There's more of this story to come, I'll be watching it unfold.