Google+ Pro Tips Round Up: Week 4

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• Google+ Pro Tips Round Up: Week 4
• Friday Indie Game Review Roundup: Civilization and MapleStory Hit Facebook
• 5 Eccentric Scrabble Variants That Never Saw the Light of Day
• How To Get Better at Halo: Reach
• +Tyler Neylon Creates 50 Models with 50 Legos

Last week, I demonstrated how to go a little deeper into your Google+ profiles, photos, and introduced cross-posting. This week, I’m highlighting a bunch of different unofficial resources that have sprung up that will help improve your Google+ experience, and give you the latest updates on Google+ Photos.

Google+ URLs

Google offers a few different ways to get directly to Google+. These URLs all work, and will take you directly to your Google+ stream if you’re logged in.

• http://www.google.com/+
• http://www.google.com/plus
• http://plus.google.com/
• http://plus.google.com/me – This will take you directly to your own profile if you are logged into your Google account.

Get Your Own Google+ Vanity URL

Google+ profiles are not very easy to link to, as your unique identifier is basically a long string of numbers. To make things easier on yourself, several sites have arisen where you can claim a vanity URL. Instead of sending people to https://plus.google.com/117751549758275478700 (which is my profile), you can send people to shorter links like http://gplus.to/yourname. 

Generally, it works in a few simple steps:

1. Enter the user name or nickname that you want people to use.
2. Enter your Google+ unique identifier. It’s the long string of numbers right after http://plus.google.com/.
3. Click on the Create or Enter button.

There are several different places where you can obtain vanity URLs. Note that none of these sites are endorsed or affiliated with Google. 

• http://dirpl.us/
• http://gplusnick.com/
• http://gplus.to/
• http://plus.ly/
• http://topl.us/ 
• http://zipl.us/ - This one has a few extra features. You can create an RSS feed for your public Google+ posts, and also install a Chrome extension that lets you take the Google+ bar with you while you’re browsing.

For those of you who know how to code, Android engineer +Daniel Sandler has a suggestion for setting up a redirect to http://www.yourwebsite.com/+. Just follow his instructions here. 

Find People to Follow

If you haven’t already, check out my lists of people to follow: Google insiders, Google’s Community Managers, authors, photographers, and celebrities. You’ll find many interesting people to include in your circles. If you’re looking for even more people, there are a lot of websites eager to help you find your match.

• FindPeopleonPlus – Over 4 million Google+ users indexed, and you can search for members in a variety of different ways. Sort by relationship, gender, number of followers, occupation, and location. If you want, you can add yourself to their directory.
• Google+ Counter – Created by +Ralf Rottman. The front page shows you profile pictures of the Google+ “Hall of Fame”, which are Google+’s most followed profiles. Currently it monitors over 30,000 profiles. You can add your own, or create your own curated lists of Google+ members. Remember that all lists you create are public, and can be accessed by anyone. Notably, this site also maintains a list of top followed women on Google+.
• GPeep – Lets you find people by tags, locations, and jobs. 
• Group.as – Maintains lists of different groups of people on Google+, such as celebrities, photographers, and bloggers. If you feel someone’s missing, just add their Google user ID and select the group they belong to and hit submit. You can go to All Groups to view every category listed, from artists to Xbox players.
• PlusOnes.in – Manually curated lists of Google+ profiles by groups and companies.
• Recommended Users – Beautifully designed site from +Alireza Yavari. These are unofficial lists of Google+ users by groups such as web celebrities, journalists, and artists. These lists are curated, and if you have suggestions for people to add, you can do so here.
• Share This Circle – Repository of interesting circles to follow. Add your own circles.
• Social Statistics – One of the first sites to start tracking Google+ users. It currently gathers statistics on the most popular users and posts, and tracks over 40,000 members. 
• Women of G+ – Highlights the many women who are already on Google+.

Get Even More Creative with Hangouts

Last week, we discussed 9 different ways you can use hangouts. What I didn’t realize was exactly how much further you can take the hangout concept. Check out this short list of what people have been doing with hangouts:

• +Samantha Meeker worked on a painting.
• +Thomas Stromberg used hangouts to monitor his daughter’s crib and preserve some precious memories.
• +Mary Robinette Kowal has been hosting a lot of great workshops in her hangouts.
• +Lee Allison decided to start a G+ Cooking School using hangouts. He’s also recorded the stream and posted the first video on his website.

A few sites have popped up that track public hangouts.

• gphangouts – Shows you when hangouts are started and scheduled, and recently added Google Calendar integration. You can submit your own hangouts via the web form, or a bookmarklet.
• HangoutOnGplus – Wants to be the longest hangout ever. As of this post, it’s lasted almost nine days. If you want to participate, keep in mind that it’s live, and you can be seen by anyone on the web.
• HangoutParty – Will promote and stream your hangout. There’s a chat sidebar that people can participate in.

Make the Most of Google+ Photos

+Matt Steiner announced the implementation of a popular requested feature – the ability to edit the title of your photo album in Google+. All you have to do is go to Photos My Albums Album and then click on the name of the album to edit it.

If you have photos stored on other services and want to move them all over to Google+, there are a few workarounds and sites to help you do so.

• Instaport - Exports your Instagram photos into a handy zip file. From there you can upload them to your Google+ account.
• Migratr – Does not support Google+ Photos directly, but it can help you copy your photos over to Picasa. This desktop application supports a lot of photo services, including Flickr, Photobucket, SmugMug, and more.
• Move Your Photos – Links to add-ons for Firefox and Chrome in order for you to download your Facebook albums and import them to Google+.
• PickZip – Lets you download your Facebook photos into a zip or PDF file.

If you are a professional artist or photographer, you’ll want to follow +Cora Reed’s advice on changing the settings in Picasa to prevent downloads of your images.

+Ryan Estrada was frustrated with the way Google+ Photos was not organizing his photos, so he whipped up a quick little tutorial for his solution:

For more tips, make sure to check out my previous posts. If you think I’ve missed something, please feel free to contact me or post in the comment section below. I’ll be sure to include it in the next update.

Photo by KEXINO

Via Google+ Pro Tips Round Up: Week 4 on googleplus.wonderhowto.com.

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Future of Film: 10 Tips for Crowd-Funding Newbies

After 22 years of work, filmmaker Jennifer Fox found that she had a completed film with no way to pay the bills and fund the distribution. With no hope left, she reluntantly turned to Kickstarter to ask for help (read more details of her story here). Future of Film wanted to tell more of her inspiring story, which came with some very useful and inspirational advice. Below are 10 things she learned while trying to reach a six-figure funding goal on Kickstarter.

By Jennifer Fox

1. Reach Out to Family and Friends
Unlike what many will tell you, I must say that for me family (and friends) are more about getting emotional support than money. It is very dicey to ask people you know and love to give you their hard earned funds. I had some friends tell me that they felt offended that I was emailing them about our campaign. Discussing this with them led to some very interesting insights about why I feel this is a democratic and legitimate way to support the arts. But I am not here to proselytize. I immediately backed off. In a way what they are saying is true: they don’t ask me to fund their passion, why should I ask them to fund mine? However, that’s not exactly how I see it: I believe that the film project, My Reincarnation, has a greater good for humanity and is a contribution to people’s lives. Hence, it must be seen and is worth funding.  

2. Build a Team
Filmmaking is a collaborative experience, but so is fundraising. It takes a lot of brainstorming and thinking out of the box. It takes multiple skills that one person rarely has all of. Without a team you just can’t get the traction and the reach into the world. But also it helps with the fear factor. I don’t know about you, but this kind of public fundraising scares the sh*t out of me. My team kept me from losing it. Having a team is also essential for Tip #3.

3. Brainstorm the Campaign as a Rollout with Different Phases
Our team, Katherine Nolfi, Lisa Duva, Stefanie Diaz and myself, discussed how the campaign would start and how we would keep rolling out new facets over time. This included building email lists, adding new incentives, and creating regular new videos for our website, Facebook and Twitter that could be linked with our consistent updates on Kickstarter.

We saw our campaign as having three initiatives: the web campaign; seeking out and approaching larger private donors to become Producers; and setting up “Sneak Preview Benefit Screenings” in key locations. The screenings were part of our plan because we had a unique problem: we were fundraising for a film that was technically finished, but that no one had seen. We hypothesized that people might need to see the finished film to give it money. In the end, festivals also helped on this account. But I also learned that the film’s trailer was often enough for people…

4. Make a Good Trailer
Of course “make a great trailer” is common wisdom for any kind of film fundraising. However, My Reincarnation was such a difficult film that I didn’t edit a trailer during the fundraising process. When I looked for funds, I always showed edited scenes assembled in a half-hour or hour format (which is probably why we failed miserably much of the time). Once we finally cut the trailer, right before launching at festivals, it was rather easy to do because the story arc was so clear. Now I’ve been told by some people that they cry when they watch our trailer. It has helped many people to make a donation when they haven’t seen the film yet.

5. Incentives
Since you can’t really put many images on your own Kickstarter page, Stefanie created a full brochure of pictures of the Kickstarter incentives on our My Reincarnation website so people could see what they were getting. She used the PBS pledge images as her model. We gathered a mixture of incentives, some Buddhist oriented and some film community oriented. One thing that we did very early on, even before the Kickstarter campaign began, was to offer a Limited Special Edition Pre-Release DVD for sale on our website at a very high price: $108. We started to sell this a good six months before our Kickstarter campaign to help keep our office running during the festival release. When we put up the campaign, we decided to offer the DVD in two ways: the Commercial DVD in 2012 at $25 and the Limited Special Edition Pre-Release DVD in September 2011 at $108. This was our most successful incentive.

For higher priced items, I raided anything I could find in my home: there are two of my own museum quality paintings by a very well known Buddhist Painter and a beautiful antique Tibetan chest that my parents gave me. I even put up a limited edition watch I received from being on the Zurich Film Festival jury last year. Basically nothing I own was off limits. It’s been a great Buddhist teaching to struggle with–and let go of–my attachment to my objects (that chest is one of my favorite possessions)!

6. Write, Write, And Write
Early on in the process, I would send my eblasts to my team to edit. We thought one page, max–so they cut and cut (my writing style can be a bit longwinded). Then we noticed that we were receiving the most donations following longer, more personal messages. They received overwhelmingly positive feedback. What at first seemed like a weakness, turned out to be one of our strongest tools. Writing became fun. As some of you may know, being on the road with a film can be the one of the most uncreative jobs one does over the course of film. But suddenly, writing these weekly Kickstarter updates and email blasts became a creative outlet for me.

7. Reach out to Appropriate Partners to Help Blast for your Campaign / Befriend the Tastemakers
The first tier we reached out to were listserves connected to the students of the film’s protagonist, Chögyal Namkhai Norbu. Rinpoche has centers around the world, so we regularly wrote new, special updates to be blasted to their membership. These letters were less chatty than the ones I send to the general mailing list or post for our Kickstarter patrons.

We started a web series called Outtakes From the Film (O.F.F.) that we edit and post online and in our Buddhist eblasts to give those communities new video to enjoy, and entice them to become more involved with the project. These videos have helped assuage Buddhist students around the world, who are anxiously waiting to see My Reincarnation and are not so happy that they have to wait for the distribution rollout. The other thing we did–but could only do with the Sneak Preview NYC Fundraising screening–was offer incentives to appropriate organizations to blast their membership on behalf of our campaign. We gave the heads of each organization a free ticket to the screening in exchange for sending out an announcement. And of course, this laid the groundwork for establishing partners and building an audience for the film down the line.

8. Use Web 2.0: Facebook, Twitter, Bloggers…
This is absolutely obvious in today’s world. We posted updates on social networking sites many times a week. We worked hard to build up our Facebook and Twitter pages daily. We also posted on other organizations’ and individuals’ pages and walls – searching for related topics like “Buddhism,” “Tibet,” “Spirituality,” “Religion,” and “Yoga” – with information about the Kickstarter campaign, new videos, incentives and screenings.

9. Blast Often, Regularly, and Best at the Beginning of the Week
Get those eblasts out on Monday or Tuesday. Later in the week they get lost in people’s over-loaded inboxes. It’s important to keep up the pressure. It’s hard to know what the “tipping point” is for someone to make a donation. It can be the first letter or the twentieth letter that brings them over to the Kickstarter site.

10. Go Beyond Your Limits
Every step of the way on this journey, I had to go beyond my comfort zone to publicly ask for money: on the web, in emails, in person, on stage – over and over again. At every point, I had to push through my reticence, fear and a general “I just don’t want to do it again!” attitude. Facing these inner demons is necessary if you are going do this type of campaign. Believe me, crowd-funding certainly pushes those buttons, but it also requires you to let go and not listen to your ego so much.

My motto is, “Never say die!” Despite years of experience facing rejection, it can still be hard to pick yourself up each time. Somehow we have to find a way not to take rejection personally and move on. Of course, with some potential funders, you just have to give up, back off, and try somewhere else. A person who says no today may still say yes tomorrow. And if you give them new evidence to change their mind, they often do.

All of Jennifer Fox’s helpful tips were posted originally on Hope for Film.

Stay tuned for her insights on how to round off a successful campaign.

Jennifer Fox is an award-winning filmmaker and educator known for her ground-breaking features and series, including Beirut: The Last Home Movie, An American Love Story, Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman and My Reincarnation. She recently co-wrote the half hour television pilot The Good Egg, and is developing the feature script The Horse’s Tale. She has executive produced many films, including Love Diane and On the Ropes.

The Tribeca Future of Film blog is a place where leading filmmakers and experts within the film industry share their thoughts on film, technology and the future of media.

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www.twitter.com/TribecaFilm

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