To expand on the description in the panel picker where you can give us a push forward with a thumbs-up, here are a few of the concepts we’ll be discussing:

Circular Narrative in Film and Web

You may have taken your children to see a great recent example of circular narrative in the newly released “Shorts.” We see, and have always depended on “classic” or “3-act” narrative to tell stories. This narrative structure is the way all stories are essentially told: with a beginning, middle, and end. Typically, classic narrative starts at the beginning of a time line and moves the audience through a linear accounting of the events.

However, Circular narrative does something a little bit differently: it uses the different characters’ perspectives to tell the story, and typically does so in a non-linear time line. In Citizen Kane, the storyline starts after Kane dies. In Pulp Fiction, the movie starts with a scene in a diner, which in a linear time line would take place 3/4 of the way through the story.

Any of this sound familiar? With every iteration of social networking sites, people’s experience on the Web is becoming more like circular narrative every day, with a central piece of content that is shaped through the lenses of comments and sharing. People who are using these sites are creating their own beginnings, middles, and ends. As Website creators, it’s important to understand these dynamics, and take these lessons into creating sites.

Common-engine Technology

Circular narrative also has technical roots, which we’re calling “Common-engine technology.” Basically, a single database that serves up content and interfaces dynamically according to the needs and perceptions of the audience.

I started working in this in ecommerce way back in 1998, where we would serve up different “storefronts” that rearranged products, prices, and design based on brand.  So if “store A” is a price-based brand, the audience is seeing a selection of products designed and ordered around price. If “store B” is a brand known for brand and caters to an audience that is less about price, the interface can be drawn to start at the brand level.

Common-engine technology offers audiences an experience that meets them at their own needs and perceptions, and offers companies a scalable methodology for serving site experiences that achieve business goals more successfully and efficiently.

Recently, we created the Miller ServerSpeak platform with a common-engine framework depending on what kind of bar the visitor works in. This puts the content an the interface into a familiar framework, giving visitors an immediate comfort level and allowing them to dive right into the experience.

In film, this presentation of objects that have meaning on the stage and in time is referred to as mise en scene, and will eventually be a blog post unto itself.

Master-scene format and mental models

One facet that Websites and films have in common is that the space people are immersed in is artificial construct created to mimic our perceived worlds. In both cases, we rely on visual cues to tell us how time and space are defined.

In film, this is done in master-scene format. First, a wide shot of the entire area in which the action takes place. This sets our expectation and understanding of space. If the action happens in an apartment, it’s typical to start with the characters talking while we’re being shown a shot of the entire building, followed by a medium shot that shows the characters in place in the apartment, followed by close-ups of each character in the scene. While this sequence can be shot over days or weeks, and out of order, it is presented to the viewer in a way that continually shows the boundaries of the perceived physical space while revealing new information that propels the story.

Good Web experiences work the same way using Information Architecture, Design, and content strategy. Through a number of devices, whether it be bread crumb navigation, chunking content, and ordering pages to be quickly scanned and clicked through, the placement of these elements for interaction should also always keep users aware of “where they are” and “where they’re going” in the perceived world of the Website, since it has no physical volume like tangible objects (think books) that are always subtly cluing us in on where we are in a real, physical space or object exploration.

By designing with these constructs in mind, we can ultimately create an experience that manipulates perceptions of time and space: to bring more immersion to the table. Getting “sucked in” to a film or a Website is a product of this effective manipulation, along with direction and editing techniques like matched action.

Experience Themes

With all this theory floating around, the natural next question is “How do you do it?” Luckily, Cindy has created a process called Experience Themes that draws from screenwriting to create a process that aligns the people working on a Website to  develop the main themes for visitors, and builds the experience around those central ideas. She also has a presentation solely dedicated to the topic that is also worth your thumbs-up on the SXSW panel picker.

In this panel, we’ll be showing the high-level approach to making experience themes specifically related to the ways screenwriters go through the process of creating the story, characters, and outline of their script. Here’s her Experience Theme presentation from the IA summit to give you a feeling of just how interesting and deep this goes:

Hopefully, this gives you a better idea of the topics we’ll be covering in our panel. You’ve gotten this far, now you should help us get to the dais by thumbing-up our SXSW panel on How Screenwriting and Film Theory Creates Enchanting Websites.

But let’s not limit this to this one panel presentation. Please contribute your ideas here in the comment section, or on Twitter @mleis and @cchasitain.

No related posts.

Most social media brand engagements, after all, follow similar strategy guidelines as any new web or application presence. It’s going to where the people are, understanding what the brand’s role there can be, and then implementing it using tactics borrowed from a range of media, including television, Web development, radio, screenwriting, and simply watching what people are doing in that environment.

After having gone through  the years of Widgets as the next big thing (which they continue to be a valuable part of a marketing mix), social media is still important for brands to understand; the same thing Jakob Neilsen was trying to get across in 2000 (when discussing Web conventions): People will likely be more familiar with every other site than they are yours.

It’s all about the portable Web.

Now, brands have the opportunity to program for all these other sites, services, and platforms: and engage. To bridge offline with online, relationships and devices. Call it Widgets. Call it Social. Call it Mobile. They’re all important channels to have your brand engaged in because people are there, making decisions and looking for ways to express themselves without knowing programming.

How can your brand use these channels to maximize exposure, awareness, and drive revenue? That’s why you’d hire a strategist like me.

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Worse yet, this new media is full of strange dynamics: New screen sizes? Alternating lines of resolution? New specialized technological jobs? Live audiences being broadcast? Unpredictable, regular people?

Of course, this isn’t the dawning of the social Web, but the beginning of TV networks’ full slate of programming sixty years ago: when there was enough critical mass to have four national networks, and the need arose to be able to fund the new technologies. Brands found how persuasive short demonstrations of their product were, and how dramatically they lifted sales.

In a great article posted this week, Let History Repeat Itself, Syracuse profesor Robert Thompson makes these associations brilliantly. Would Milton Berle chatting about Texaco with audience members be the same as paid blog posts today?

Even more to the point, brands in the golden age of television were ultimately responsible for funding technical development and quality programming. This allowed the technical development of television to contune advancing, as well as the narrative development, production quality, and dare I say: the user experience.

So as much as things change, they stay the same. Personalities from old media are helping drive new adoption, and brands have drastically new and dynamic ways to use lower technical barriers to bring people, perspectives, and personalities to demonstrate their products. And people creating new strategies for those brands, like me, need to know where we’ve been as a society using mass media, and how to combine the strategies from past eras into the better services for the ways technology and discourse can help people today.

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Our communications economy is now, and maybe forever, valued by the context within which valuable relationships take place.

Television has, and may continue to be perceived as a major influencer on social discourse. How? People watch television, measure it against their own notions of what is acceptable within our society, and make a mental first draft of where it sits with them. They take that draft back to their peer group, and finalize their opinions. This is the broadest way to look at how television affects social discourse.

In the past, this process of consensus-building and social discourse was only available to communicators after the fact. This was generally okay, because television still owned the largest context within which these initial impressions were formed and reformed with each subsequent use.

Now let’s go even farther back to a time when television was in competition with movies, radio, and newspapers for a place in the social discourse. Quality content was everything, and the sponsorship model thrived as a win-win: allowing brands to demonstrate products, and for good programming to continue production. Regional shows that focused on specific topics were popular. Even into the 1980s, many cities still had locally produced entertainment.

This is what we see now in social media. People with similar interests group around well-produced content, that is quite often regional in its origin. The problem is that the context is no longer television’s alone.

The Context Economy

With every passing day, technology is converging the shared-experience space of television and social discourse more fluidly. What used to be a cycle of watching a program, then talking about it over the watercooler has been replaced, albeit awkwardly, by smartphones and laptops providing instantaneous peer mediation. The brands that can facilitate social discourse most effectively are the ones that will win.

Right now, Twitter and Facebook seem most poised to be the brands mediating discourse. Integrating trending topic searches on Twitter, and the Live Feed on Facebook demonstrate that the consensus-building process is in-and-of-itself a type of ambient-awareness entertainment.

This isn’t nutty future-talk. There are television networks who understand that right now, having both the content and the discourse in the context of their brand is significant.

Get your logo as close to the top of the page as possible

Its an adage as old as the newspaper: hierarchy and importance are determined by size, from top to bottom.

CNN has done an excellent job twice with the Facebook Connect API to connect two Obama events with the people watching it. Why build the system for social context when you can borrow Facebook’s for a fraction of the cost. The CNN brand is sponsoring this experience that adds incredible, personal dimension to the experience. No doubt: when watching the CNN stream along with your Facebook friends, there’s a significant flow state achieved.

MTV has known for years that the more abstraction you allow your logo, and the more you show viewers partying as social proof, the more powerful the brand becomes. To that end, they’ve gone even a step further by creating their own Backchannel. The interesting dynamic here plays on the same reason why people wave at the jumbotron: the ultimate prize is seeing yourself on TV, and completing the perceptual loop of being a part of the programming setting the agenda for the discourse in your group.

In the Backchannel, users are assigned roles of “Taggers” and “Clickers.” While you’re watching a rerun of say, The Real World, you’re either tagging moments with Twitter-like bursts of text, or clicking on tags you like. Because half the audience is dedicated to voting, good tags get voted up quickly and visually. You can see a tag starting to shake and light up; within seconds, a very popular tag will literally “blow up” and appear on the TV screen.

CNN and MTV are both showing different flavors of how people want to be entertained in the near-term. And with first mover advantage, many brands and broadcasters are already a step behind. These are signals that cannot be ignored.

Waiting will only cost networks more

While the TV networks largely continue to try and make the spot buy model work with syndicating content to mobile and Internet, they’re even losing ground to brands who see how the future is shaping up.

Last year’s gem of an debut was InTheMotherhood, brought to us by Unilever and Sprint. As I mentioned before, it’s another win-win scenario where moms sharing stories in the context of the brand site are rewarded in a lottery-kind of way by having one story picked at a time for a professionally produced Webisode, complete with all-expense paid trip to see your story brought to life on the set.

Just recently, PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay spent a year to expensively discover via neuromarketing that creating and promoting your own programming is more valuable to the brand than what networks can currently deliver in the spot model.

Only In A Woman’s World is essentially Sex In The City cartoon style. Created with the Internet’s circular narrative in mind, at awomansworld.com, users can watch small episodes, create e-cards, build custom avatars (called “Be one of the girls”), play games, download all manner of images, and share any/all of it. Again, the complete loop of entertainment and interaction in the context of the brand.

What struck me most about the content of the show is the setting. Setting is very important and meaningful to the experience of the viewer, both contextually (where does this take place) and subtextually (what does this place mean). You’ll see that all the settings are intimated with the barest of props. Mostly, every setting is a white backdrop. Why? Because the setting of the series is in the brand. The regular appearance of Frito-lay products is also key to show how important context is. Using product placement, Frito-lay is getting an even better value in terms of exposure than the TV spot buy.

Here’s the killer: they’ve leveraged the television model to show ads that are just teasers for the Website. Buying 90 seconds at a time, they’re going ahead without television to create the same model that launched the Simpsons on the Tracy Ullman Show: sponsoring small clips and asking you to take the next step in learning about the brand through this entertainment that replicates your own social circle.

Will networks learn in time?

Just a feeling, but it seems like television has about 3 years to shift away from the spot-buy and adopt a model where sponsors are buying into the complete context of social discourse in the peer group and programming together, within the context of the network’s brand umbrella. Otherwise, it’s only a matter of time before brands begin funding this ecosystem themselves, and pave the way to a new golden age of communications.

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As Alan Wolk describes so well, the early 1990′s killed the value of commercials: we’re only seeing the final throes of it’s ugly, drawn-out death now. With the rapid expansion of cable channels (which we’ll see again here soon in the expansion of DTV) living on this commercial model has proved fatal. Scarcity has been gone for just over a decade now, significantly depressing the market of both revenue and creativity.

So many interruptions have been created to try and recapture revenue, there isn’t enough money to create quality programming to fill all the space in between the ads. Much of television has been reduced to previewing and recapping as a workaround to the channel-flipping systems society has created on its own to find what solace exists in the small bits of original worthwhile programming left.

Coming Up Next thinking has dominated the culture of TV production for so long, it has blurred into the perception that we don’t like TV. But we really do. Our rooms are still organized around them. We’ll buy special clothes for optimized TV-viewing comfort. We’re willing to invest as much as thousands of dollars every year in technology and premium channels that take the commercials out and present the stories as fluidly as possible. We’re just coming to the end of our rope on the interruptions.

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