Some views and voices…we’re only gonna do this for a few days, don’t worry. We’ll be back at SBM on Friday am.
§ Brian Heater got to interview everyone from The Mighty Boosh to Seth to Stan Lee:
He’s genuinely funny and warm during our interview, and while he doesn’t seem to precisely grasp the intricacies of the Disney “electronic comic book” he helped to produced, he speaks of the project with a downright viral sense of enthusiasm. I ask him he reads comics and he answers, “no.” He just can’t find the time these days. He pulls out his cell phone. Says that one day he’ll learn how to send messages on the thing. Oh, and he bought himself an iPhone, too, but he doesn’t know how to use it. It’s perfect material for the PCMag name on my badge, which paid for me to come out to this coast. Before he’s finished talking about the alien gadget, I’ve got my headline “Stan Lee Has an iPhone.”
§ Our pal Jimmy Aquino also made copious use of press opportunities, and delivers a pretty comprehensive and typical look at CCI with the good, the bad and the ugly.
§ Elizabeth Rappe has The Hunks of Comic Con 2009!
§ American Originals’ Jeff Katz surveys the Hollywood scene
The view from the floor is as massive and jam-packed as ever. It’s clear that the economy and larger consolidation of the entertainment industry has put a damper on excess Hollywood spending in SD and it’s a fair bet that premieres and event parties will continue to be among the first and easiest trims on the studio bottom line. One of the important messages I’ve tried to convey since starting American Original is that the entertainment industry on the whole is looking at a 25 to 30% contraction over the next two to three years. This has a gigantic ripple effect on several symbiotic entertainment businesses we love – gaming, comics, wrestling, etc. – and we’re really only seeing the early stages of the larger change now. We’ve hit a perfect storm of economic crisis, rising marketing and production costs, digital piracy and distribution strategy that will play out for quite a while longer. I suspect we’ll see several more signs of this over the next several days at the Con.
§Did Twitter sputter at the con? Variety says yes, as a hoped for Twitter wave of fan buzz did not materialize:
Marketing mavens had thought fans would whip out their cell phones and use Twitter to spread the word instantly on what they thought about the movies Hollywood took to Comic-Con last week. But the number of tweets from San Diego fell short of expectations. Overall, buzz generated on Twitter from Comic-Con was so low that no movie generated enough tweets to account for 1% of the total messages sent during a given hour of the convention, according to data collected by Interpret, an entertainment, media and technology measurement and market research firm founded by former Nielsen exec Michael Dowling. By comparison, the latest installment of the “Harry Potter” franchise generated more tweets than Comic-Con or any of the pics featured during the show.
§ BUT Comics Alliance’s Caleb Goellner says Twitter was just fine:
While covering the convention most media folks were busy. Like really busy – too busy to keep up with their Twitter feeds busy. Standing in 1-3 hour lines for a panel might sound like plenty of time to update social networking statuses, but trust me — it wasn’t. Phone calls, E-mails and constant texts interrupted the most basic activities (eating, using the facilities, sleeping). Deadlines for panel reports and interview write-ups did not yield enough Tweet time for even the most savvy smart phone addicts to meet their usual sedentary office-based quotas.
We’d back up the idea that there was just too much chaos to Twitter, BUT we do have to point out that Variety was talking about FAN twitters, and Goellner is talking about WRITERS/REPORTERS…two different beasts.
thx for the shout out, heidi! yeah, my recap is a little linear and detailed, but the kids love it like that! :) check out our con recap on my podcast too! Comic News Insider
http://www.comicnewsinsider.com
“We’d back up the idea that there was just too much chaos to Twitter, BUT we do have to point out that Variety was talking about FAN twitters, and Goellner is talking about WRITERS/REPORTERS…two different beasts.”
Has anyone examined the “..will Twitter for pay” idea?
My understanding is that Comic-Con trended pretty high the weekend and Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of Comic-Con, and then fell off. So sounds like the same is true for fans as for writers. There may have just been too much to do, even in lines.
It probably didnt help that at least for me the At&t/iphone coverage in the area was pretty poor. Most days I didnt get around to looking at anything online until after being back at the hotel.
The Variety article is ridiculous. Comparing the 6500 people max who were in Hall H with the hundreds of thousands watching Harry Potter is absurd, even factoring in RTs. And I saw the white whale at least once during the show.
According to Twitter’s homepage Comic-Con was the second highest trending topic of the past seven days, over Jay-Z and the Iran Election and only beaten by Harry Potter. I don’t know what bizarre standard Hollywood is applying to twitter’s success or failure but they’re obviously setting it too high or grossly misunderstanding social networking (no surprise).
Some of us don’t know or care to use hashtags, either. And the coverage thing.
And the overthinking everything, too.
Twittering is as twittering does.
I wanted to echo Bon’s comments about the Variety Twitter story, which clearly didn’t look at the larger picture of Twitter’s role during Comic-Con, but only from individual publicity concerns, which is ridiculous.
I’m quite confident that were you to compare OVERALL Comic-Con trending tweets to Harry Potter, we’d see huge numbers. Comic-Con was the top trending topic every day during Comic-Con when I looked at it. But when you narrow this down to a panel-by-panel basis, it becomes instantly clear that huge twitter expectations were absurd.
Let’s put it this way — if EVERY single person in Hall H tweeted about “Iron Man 2,” and each of those tweets were retweeted an average of three times, and then those were retweeted an average of three times, that still would only account for 58,500 twitter messages about said panel. But the truth is only a small fraction of people in any given panel would tweet. If 1 in 6 people tweeted, that would only be 1000 tweets. Multiply that out by the admittedly pulled-out-of-the-air math above, that would only account for 9000 tweets.
Twitter can be an excellent tool to help promote your product if done well, but more importantly it’s a tool to help engage your audience directly. Publicity and marketing people who don’t get this — and I’m afraid there are plenty of them out there — need to figure it out soon, or they might find themselves out of a job when they set expectations so high.
Hunks of Comic-Con? How sexist!
Twitter as a news gathering tool was phenomenal.
It was SO good that we had people that were able to write entire articles about panels in almost real-time from reports from numerous people, using tweets as front line reporting and having people back at the home office doing rewrite– and did so well that people were upset that they missed seeing me at the convention, when I was at home hosting my wife’s 40th birthday party.
Being on twitter reminds me of being at a comic-con, so I didn’t feel any need to jump on while I was at the real thing.
Man, this gallery of convention hunks is a good idea. Enough boobs! More shirtless beefcake!
Now, I’m really disapointed there seemed to be no hawkman this year… THAt is one costume that you c’ant hide behind! :p
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