Photo by Julius Drost on Unsplash
I’m excited about this one.
Always had a fascination about how the big brands do it, it’s often subtle and a layered approach, you can suddenly see one day across platforms how memes and adverts start making it into the general majority and all of a sudden everyone is talking about it. It’s no accident.
Trans media is about using a series of different platforms to convey a message, similar to putting up a billboard but in different formats and devices and all finely tuned to the platforms unique behaviour.
In recent years we have see some big brands use this incredibly well, from getting in bed with instagram influencers to people just using stories to talk about products they want to sell on shopify.
I think we are barely scratching the surface however of what i believe trans media can do in the world.
You only have to look at twitter to see how it can be used against the world as well, wherever you have the eyeballs and reach people are always going to look at hijacking the narrative and injecting their own message — it’s all about grabbing your attention from ‘that’ thing, onto their own.
The reason i started this transmedia hive is to hopefully share a few strategies and either collab or just inform and share what’s worked well for me.
Often time it’s platforms and tools that allow me to organise my content in a certain way that allows me to schedule the most impact of the output but i know I’m dropping the ball not having multiple formats on multiple platforms to really get that ground swell of messaging out there.
I’ve just changed things up with my YouTube for instance, to kinda add a bit of order to my whole channel because it’s basically a dropping zone for whatever content i want to share — I’ve decided to make that exact for three days of the week, my hope is to eventually have a release plan for each day to get the most impact for those content days — in between it’s clients, logistics and life admin.
Photo by Osman Rana on Unsplash
Cross platform social media adventures.
I also think there is a lot more that can be done across platforms that’s currently not being done that can be better than the whole ‘subscribe’ and ‘follow’ here mantra that is tired and done to death.
One example of this was the great narrative that @drdisrespect told through his stream at the end of last year — he created a whole story around the Area 51 facebook group event where people wanted to ‘storm’ the base.
The dr was really smart to take time sensitive, relevant real world event and wrap that into a story into his daily twitch live gaming streams — but he went an extra step and did not tell anyone about it until a good month later...
... in all of his additional ‘clips’ of rescuing Alex from the Area 51 narrative he was putting out in his twitch stream he was putting in codes and clues!
These codes and clues led you to explore not only different websites and use different tools on the web but also services — even going as far as to use discord and other apps to enhance the whole experience of being a streamer, he wanted to take live streaming to another level, in a transmedia way.
Multi-facet Social or Die
From 2020 and beyond i truly believe that every content creator, small or large will have to consider applying transmedia strategy to the way they create content, to support multiple platforms so they can grow their audience across many platforms so they have something to fall back on if for instance one of them changes their algorithm (youtube)
It’s not that the current way we put out content is wrong it’s just that it’s going to get drowned out by the creators that are putting strats and content pipelines in place to grab attention back to their core content — pulling them out of those platforms and back to the systems you want to build your main audience.
Platforms are going to start buying up ‘talent’ — that is content creators that have already developed tools, hired additional remote staff and have built loyal, paying subscribers already — they are slowly becoming the new internet celebrities, able to on demand bring in eyeballs with their reach.
Current Strats for Game Streamers
Core — twitch, youtube or mixer (mainly daily streamer location, changeable)
Reach - twitter, tiktok, instagram stories, discord
Organization - remote editors, social media managers, ‘clipping’ live video
Selling - T-shirt merch, sponsored streams, referrals from asset services
It’s a pretty straight forward setup but it’s a well oiled machine and it’s knowing how to ‘sell’ what you have to the audience that you have — while mostly people tune in for the ‘entertainment’ the entertainer knows they also have to scale their influencer business — and it is a business, the business of eyeball attracts attention and attention has a value for companies wanting to sell potential products to an engaged audience.
At the end of 2019 we started to see a bunch of the popular streamers making contracts with ‘platforms’ — the first time that’s really happened with companies realising what brings new content creators and streamers in is an engaged audience.
Ninja was the first by moving to mixer, then summit1g moved as well, then courageJD went to Youtube — what’s smart about this is that instead of hoping that your subs will maintain or keep growing those high level number streamers can secure a contract for a few years with the platform to bring audience daily back to their platform.
I think we will see a lot more of that in 2020.
__humble x
P.S — if you are interested at all in transmedia at all, are looking to live stream in 2020 and want to build out assets and help each other, drop me a message or comment on this post — join the hive mind to get updates! :)
