Promoting HBO’s Flight of the Conchords with Dave Fletcher

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Promoting HBO’s Flight of the Conchords, a new user management platform for the social web, and how to design and build the right website for any organization with Dave Fletcher, founder and executive creative director, The Mechanism, a multi-disciplinary web design agency with offices in New York, London and Durban, South Africa.

He presented a session titled “Compelling Social Media Strategies: Soaring With ‘Flight of the Conchords’” at the Public Relations Society of America International Conference in DC,. where the world’s top PR firms gather to share best practices.

INSIGHTS ON PROMOTING TV PROGRAMS  

01:15 — Flight of the Conchords website design and development process, managing the band’s online reputation and trying to maintain a direct connection with their fans while HBO was also marketing their reality-based television show online.    

02:24 — Rationale for gathering your social media marketing efforts together in one easy-to-access place.  

03:17 — Janrain user management platform for the social web, which the Lady Gaga website uses to allow fans to sign in.  According to Janrain, the platform doubles the registration rate of the Lady Gaga website.  The Janrain platform also captures and stores registration data locally, so marketers are not reliant on Facebook to access their customer data.    

06:20 — How to pick a content management system based on specific requirements.  

08:11 — What makes an excellent interface and tailoring the design to the needs of your particular users?  What does your audience need, and how can you give it to them in as few clicks as possible?  

09:57 — The level of ease that users expect from websites, whether Facebook has set the bar for ease of use, and what the growth of social networking sites means for corporate web design.  

12:29 — Dangers associated with relying too heavily on any social network like Facebook or Twitter for PR, marketing, or corporate communications.  

14:18 — Dangers of relying on social networks as mobile devices, iPads, and apps take off.

14:52 — Steve Rubel’s comment on For Immediate Release Live #18 about approaching social media communications with a homeland/embassy strategy, whereas the homeland is the organization’s destination site and the embassies are its profiles on social networking sites.  

17:58 — Hicksdesign.co.uk has built a website that’s a single bit of CSS, which is meant to work well on computers, mobile devices, and iPads. The web design community aims to develop ways to design single sites that operate effectively on different devices.   1

9:52 — Tools that help us focus our attention or “apps”, as opposed to tools that help us hunt and peck, drive the future of online communications.

22:23 — A bad customer experience in the mid-90s with AT&T that has kept Eric from giving them a nickel ever since, Apple’s anti-competitive business practices, and the iPhone vs. Android mobile platform development strategies.  

24:11 — Risks of managing an unregulated platform that is genuinely open, from poor coding to malware, and Apple’s decision not to use Flash on iPad because of concerns that poorly designed Flash files that crash a device reflect badly on the device developers, rather than the Flash programmer, who IS responsible for the failure.  

27:05 — AT&T’s network can’t meet the iPhone’s network demands, and other wireless carriers may soon encounter performance issues as smartphones become more popular and available on their networks.  

29:03 — End  

Photo by Renee Barrera