Yesterday, we announced our development deal with Matter of Fact Media.  As you can imagine, we're all super excited!  Read the coverage on Tubefilter.tv.

In case you've been too busy to watch it yet, this is the trailer to our second season.

You can catch all of Season 1 and Season 2 on bjfletcherprivateeye.com

Thank you to everyone for your messages of congratulations!  The media release is below.


***

Regan Latimer, creator and producer/writer/director of web series B.J. Fletcher: Private Eye, has signed a development deal with Toronto-based production company Matter of Fact Media.  Under the terms of the agreement, Latimer will work with MoFM Executive Producer Vanessa Dylyn to develop a television broadcast proposal for the web series, including a new pilot script based on the hilarious characters and adventures from B.J. Fletcher: Private Eye.

The online team behind the web series will continue to produce original content for the show’s website and blog during the development period. Regardless of the format in which it continues, unique content from the show will continue to be made available online.

Latimer announced, “It’s an exciting time for everyone involved with B.J. Fletcher: Private Eye.  We need to thank our wonderful fans and viewers, whose tremendous support has been a huge part of this development. We’re also very grateful to the blogs and websites that have actively promoted us.

“We want to say a special thank you to Sarah Warn and all of the team at AfterEllen.com for giving us our break and supporting us through the first two seasons.  They are very much part of the Fletcher family and we have learned so much from them.

“Our talented cast, including Lindy Zucker, Dana Puddicombe, Vanessa Dunn and Karim Morgan, and all of our production team, including Rochelle Dancel and Rikki Zucker, are committed to supporting the show as it develops and we are confident that our partnership with Matter of Fact Media will take Fletcher in a positive new direction.  We look forward to bringing Fletcher back to your screens in the near future, more wicked awesome than ever!”

One of the fastest growing forms of online entertainment is the web series.  As an industry yet to fully mature, the majority of web series’ are homespun labours of love, produced by groups of friends and collaborators eager to showcase their talents.  Despite the wealth of professional experience in their current or day jobs, a web series enables many creators to take the reigns for the first time.

I’ve put together a list of ten tools that we use to put our web series, B.J. Fletcher: Private Eye online compiled from the many ‘how do we get a website for our show…?’ themed emails.  Bear in mind that there are more complex and more expensive ways of going about achieving what each of these tools does for us.  This list is neither exhaustive or original, but if your expertise lies solely in producing your show, you’re a novice in the world of putting up a website and your budget is the sum total of the change in your back pockets then this is a not-too-shabby way to go.

1. Dreamweaver

Yes, our site was put up in Dreamweaver!  Dreamweaver is an example of a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor.  

Dreamweaver is not free, but there are any number of free WYSIWYG editors out there. Check out this article by thefreecountry.com on free HTML editors, web editors, and WYSIWYG web editors and site builders.

You might also want to check what free software comes with your computer; for example, Mac users should find a version of iWeb on their computers.  The website for one our favourite web series’, FEED, is built in iWeb and also features a number of widgets and tools, including Site Meter for all your traffic stats and a PayPal Donate button for fundraising.

FEED

2. Blogger

Life On Fletcher is powered by Blogger and we chose Blogger for two reasons.  Firstly, I wanted to keep the existing site intact and I didn’t want to do a big integration or move it off Dreamweaver.  Blogger allows us to update the blog online and publish it to our site via ftp.  Secondly, I wanted the blog published on our URL i.e. www.bjfletcherprivateeye.com/blog as opposed to, for example, bjfletcherprivateeye.wordpress.com, so that it would be search engine friendly.

Instead of adding a blog to your site, you can follow the example of some of our favourite shows and put your show straight onto a blog. For example, Seeking Simone is powered by Typepad, while GOLD is powered by Expression Engine (with comments powered by Disqus, natch!).  

Seeking Simone

GOLD The Series

I’m a big fan of both of those sites.  They’re both very clean and easy to navigate.  Most of all, the style of their sites is in keeping with the theme of their shows.

3. Daily Motion

Our episodes are available on Daily Motion’s player.  We chose Daily Motion after signing up to the Motion Maker programme, which allows us to upload videos of a higher file size and of any length compared to their standard offering.

The main advantage to having a third party video player is that we don’t have to utilise our bandwidth or server space to allow you to enjoy our episodes.  There are many video hosting services out there with embeddable players.  Look for one that gives you a nice encode, might offer you quicker upload times and allows you to upload videos suitable for the file size and episode length of your show.  Vimeo, another one of our favourites, is used by We Have To Stop Now, and blip.tv is used by Anyone But Me, as well as Seeking Simone and GOLD.

4. Picasa

We chose Picasa because you can upload and create photo galleries in five different sizes, something we were quite keen on to show off the skills of our photographer, Jonathan Thomas.  Other free, popular, embeddable photo gallery sharing aps include Flickr and Photobucket.

There are many advantages to hosting your pictures in an online slide show.  The main one is that, if you have a gazillion behind the scenes pictures like we do, as with video you don’t take up valuable storage space and bandwidth when people view your high res images.  The fact that it’s also embeddable means that people can embed them in their blogs and on their sites – free publicity for you!

5. Zoomerang

Have you taken one of audience surveys?  If so, you’ve already been introduced to Zoomerang, a free online survey tool.  We’ve used it to put together demographic surveys of our viewers to give potential sponsors a better understanding of who watches our show.

Another popular survey tool is SurveyMonkey.  However, Zoomerang allows you 30 questions for free where as SurveyMonkey only allows you 10.  Although the basic version of both of these tools is free, any reporting functionality is not, so if you have a few surveys on which you need to report it may be worthwhile taking out a monthly subscription to save yourself the time of manually compiling everything in a spreadsheet.

6. Google Analytics

If you're serious about developing your site and attracting advertisers, you're going to need the stats to back up your pitches, and that's where Google Analytics comes in.  It’s a free service that tracks not only the number of visitors to your site and where they came from, but also where they go once they get to your site – very useful when you’re trying to work out where to place one of your sponsor’s ads so that the most people see it, or to track whether anyone can find your deeply buried FAQ page.  How else would we know that, in the month of June, the most popular link on our homepage was the Season 2 link in our tag cloud?  

7. Add This

Make it easy for people to share your episodes, interviews and all the other cools stuff on your site with their friends on all of their social networks.  On our site you’ll see a handy little ‘Share This’ button courtesy of Add This on most of our pages that will allow you to share our content across 55 (and counting) different social networks.

8. Twitter

And speaking of social networking, I couldn’t let it go without mentioning the latest pretender to the social networking crown – Twitter.  We’re big fans, and it has allowed us to connect with some new friends, including the editors at Eurout and Cherrygrrl; some old friends, including the teams at AfterEllen and One More Lesbian, and some other web series talents including Mel Robertson from FEED, David Nett from GOLD, Renee Olbert and Rosemary Rowe from Seeking Simone.

Twitter allows you to keep your fans and supporters posted with up-to-the-second news on anything to do with your show.  On Fletcher, we tweet interviews, episodes, reviews and updates to do with the development of our show.  The Twitter widgets on our homepage and blog are from Twitter’s own site, and the ‘follow us’ tab that you see on every page comes courtesy of Go2Web.

9. ichat

Ok, so ichat isn’t strictly one that powers our website, but it is super useful when you’re talking to producers, other team members, PR people or journalists in far flung locales.  Fletcher is made in Toronto and I live in London (UK, not Ontario!) so mounting phonebills is one cost I was keen not to incur.  Luckily, all our producers come equipped with their own Macs (it’s almost a pre-requisite for joining our show) so very important video chats are powered by ichat.  Skype is a popular alternative.

10. yousendit

The only tool that we pay for, yousendit allows us to send, receive and track large files – incredibly important when emailing entire episodes or photo galleries for review.  Yousendit’s free service allows you to send files of up to 100mb.  However, we will soon be trialling Dropbox, a free file sharing service across computers that will hopefully relax the strain on our threadbare pockets!

So that’s 10 tools without which we couldn’t put our show online.  There are many more out there we’re currently playing with that you might see on our site in future, including Nabble, a free online embeddable forum where all of you can gather to ponder whether George will pick Fletcher or Jenna.  There are some incredible web series websites out there, ranging from sites that were put up on a wish and a prayer and absolutely no coding knowledge, to sites that were built by marketing powerhouses.  Take a good look at them all for inspiration for your site – just don’t forget to watch some incredible shows too!

What tools have you found useful for your web series website?

I recently spoke to a communications volunteer at a community group who had been tasked with looking at ways of increasing the group’s profile online.  When I asked what kind of activities were being done to promote their profile online, she responded, “Well, we have a website…”

I have news for you – that’s not enough.  ‘Brand building’ may sound like a term that’s too corporate or too ‘marketing’ to have any place in the non-profit / voluntary / charity sector(s) but there’s a lot that we can learn from our corporate relatives.

Before I give you five simple ways to build your brand online, here are five reasons why you should build your brand online.

1. It establishes you as an authority in your field

Ever feel frustrated that the bigger, better resourced organisations get all the media attention, are asked to speak at more events, are given the opportunity to work on projects on which you know you’d do a better job?  The reason they get these opportunities is because they are perceived as authorities in their fields, whether they are or not.

2. It’s cheaper than building your brand offline

Whilst it’s no substitute to running television, radio or newspaper campaigns, there’s no reason why you can’t establish your organisation online where, in this day and age, more and more people are looking for their information.  And that which you establish online will see results offline.
 
3. Everyone else is doing it

Whilst this alone has never been a good reason for doing it, consider this: if three similar organisations are very visible, why should anyone go to the bother of finding one that isn’t?  More to the point, how would anyone know that there are alternatives?

4. It drives traffic to your website

Essentially, this is where you want people to go online.  Your website is your organisation’s online presence and should contain everything that people need to know about you.

5. It puts your organisation into the mind of potential service users

With the explosion of social media and cheaper data packages for wireless and mobile broadband at home, whilst travelling and on our mobile phones, people are spending more and more time online.  If potential service users can find you in avenues that they already access, or if they are generally more familiar with your brand, they’re more likely to use you.

So that’s why you should build your brand online.  Here’s five ways you can do it.

Make it easier for people to find out about you

Get a blog and/or a website.  Contact everyone you know and ask them if they can put your web address into the links, resources or directory sections of their websites.  Make sure you include any resource centres, associations or councils that operate in your area or are relevant to your sector.

Ensure that when they get to your website there is quite clearly a section labelled ‘About Us’ and / or ‘What We Do’.  Sound simple?  You’d be surprised at how many organisations assume that people already know this.

Connect with people online

Social media isn’t just for planning your weekend.  It enables you to connect to people to whom sometimes you wouldn’t ordinarily have access.

There are a plethora of social media networks and communities and it can be overwhelming to select the ones that are most relevant to your organisation.  Put yourselves in the shoes of those that you are trying to reach and then consider – or better still, ask them – which outlets they use.

LinkedIn – more likely to connect with second tier, corporate or public sector people – think anyone with an office-based job

Facebook – because of its social nature, great for reaching potential service users

Twitter – the latest pretender to the social media crown.  Leah Williams, Communications Officer at the Women’s Resource Centre, has written a great article on the benefits of Twitter to women’s organisations although they very much apply across the board.

Engage with other blogs

Commenting on other blogs shows that you are engaged and up to date with all the developments of your sector or field.  You have the opportunity to put forward your organisation’s point of view, which will in turn be read by your peers and by those interested in the issues in which you engage (e.g. journalists or researchers). 

Identify, say, three blogs that people in your field read the most.  Whenever a new story is posted, comment on it.  Your comments don’t have to be very long – just informed and well written.

When you comment on a blog post, you state your name and your organisation’s web address, so if people are interested in what you say they can click on the link back to your site.  Ensure that if you can upload an avatar (an icon or picture that represents you online) you use your organisation’s logo.  Whatever image you use, keep it consistent across all sites in which you engage online.

If you comment a lot it is worthwhile getting a Gravatar.  A gravatar, or globally recognised avatar, allows your posts to be recognised by the same avatar across any website, blog or forum that supports them.  You register your website and email address in the Gravatar database along with your image and any blog, forum or website that doesn’t offer the option of uploading your own picture but still supports gravatars will display it alongside your post.

The next step after commenting is to offer to write an article for the same blogs.  This is particularly useful if your organisation has taken a particular stance around the development of a current policy or is promoting a new publication or forthcoming event.

Distribute information or news relevant to your sector

Don’t restrict yourself to distributing news and information solely about your organisation.  The point in this exercise is to establish you as an up-to-date source of information for your sector.

Distributing information isn’t just about sending out an email to your mailing list, although if you do that already that’s still an effective way of getting to people.  A more efficient way is to get your own RSS feed.

An RSS feed is a function on your site that allows people to sign up to receive information either straight to their inbox or via a dedicated feed reader.  I have to admit that an RSS feed is something that I know how to use and manipulate… but ask me to explain it and I’m at a loss.  So here’s a video:

The BBC published their simple guide to RSS feeds that you may find useful.

Getting your own RSS feed is simple.  If you use any of the popular blogging tools, such as Wordpress, Blogger or Twitter (yes, Twitter is a microblog!) then RSS feeds already come built into them.  If not, you can build your own.  Either type ‘setting up an RSS feed’ into any search engine to come up with several pages of tutorials, or create one with Google Feedburner.

Here’s the great thing - tools such as HootSuite for Twitter allow you to subscribe to a number of RSS feeds associated to your sector and output their news via your feed.  It’s a completely automated process so once you’ve set it up, you don’t need to do anything more.

Get advice on your online strategy

If you are serious about getting a more holistic, integrated approach to your online strategy, speak to a professional.  Online strategy is a bit of an obsession for me, so feel free to contact me if you have any questions; if you make great coffee, I may be persuaded to come in to talk to you!

Alternatively, I’m a big fan of the wunderkids at Beautiful World, an agency that works somewhere between the digital and non-profit worlds.  They are currently offering time on their now famous beautiful sofa to get advice on any subject you want.

Building your brand online doesn’t cost a penny.  It will raise your organisation’s profile head and shoulders above those that haven’t whilst capturing the attention of potential stakeholders who might prove beneficial to you in the future.  These brand building activities will also keep you informed of developments in your sector which will put your organisation in a better place to respond to them.  And then you can tweet about it.