Quick recap: In Part 1 – Filmmaker, Lisa Murray shared her inspiring personal story about her life and her film production company SkyLife. I wanted to share the behind-the-scenes story about her “Free Hugs in Hollywood� video seen by 400,000 people. As you know, most of us can’t buy that kind of exposure.
So here’s Part 2 with a few more tips and the back-story to Lisa’s Yahoo sweepstakes win and her stint at Entertainment Tonight. Talk about a Win Win.
Do we really need Part 2? Absolutely, because Lisa is truly inspiring and what she has accomplished has the power to alter your mindset in a very positive way. And, here’s a tip—go record your own video for YouTube and stop being the World’s Best Kept Secret.
What role is YouTube playing in helping you become famous?
YouTube is an amazing, amazing thing. I wish it had been around 10 years ago when I seemed to have more time! But I am grateful to be part of it now in it’s early years!
YouTube isn’t just a video hosting company, YouTube is a community of people, from all over the world, who share an appreciation of making, posting and commenting on videos!
YouTube has been a big part of my success because I am able to reach people worldwide via YouTube’s easy-to-use viral marketing interface. Take, for example, my “Free Hugs in Hollywood” video. This video was featured on Yahoo’s home page for about 3 hours. To date, it has been viewed over 400,000 times. That same video was posted at the same time on my YouTube channel. Without any promotion, without it being featured on YouTube’s home page, it has generated close to 160,000 views!
That wouldn’t be possible without the awesome YouTube “community” and great features such as the “Share Video” (where viewers can send the videos to others) and “Add to Favorites” (where other users can subscribe to their “favorites” and thus further promote your video)
With YouTube, the middle-man is gone. It’s me, my video, and the person on the other side of the country, or world. And even though my videos and video blogs are online for the world to see, the community of YouTube is actually quite intimate. A bunch of well-known YouTube users just organized a big gathering in NYC on 7/7/7. I was unable to attend do to commitments at my day job. One of the most popular YouTube “celebrities” actually created a video for me to tell me that she was really sorry that I wasn’t able to attend and to let all of her subscribers know about me and to check out my channel and website, etc. I hadn’t seen her video but I did notice a surge in email subscriptions. I couldn’t figure out where it came from until I saw her video. So YouTube is a powerful medium to reach your audience immediately and intimately.
Making a feature film is a long, dragged out process. As a filmmaker, a huge part of the struggle is maintaining your sanity when you are making that first film, before you have “proven” yourself to potential fans and to industry folks. But with YouTube, I can reach both groups along the way. I post “director’s blogs” (where I talk about my journey of making my film and staying on track with my dream) as well as other expressions of my creativity.
YouTube offers me the opportunity to express myself in creative ways, as well as receive valuable viewer feedback. YouTube gives me (and millions of other creatively stiffled people) an outlet! If I had to wait until my film was complete to exercise my creativity I think I would explode. I am also able to send investors and potential promotional partners to my YouTube channel to gain a better understanding of what I’m doing with my documentary as well as build a “fan base” early, before my first feature-length film has even been completed!
I don’t know what or who I would be without YouTube. YouTube has definitely changed my life. After I received my first comment on my first-uploaded video blog I felt as if a mouth had been created where there was just skin before. I was finally free to express myself in a way that I had craved but didn’t know existed!
As an entrepreneur, what is your secret to attracting the media?Â
I send out press releases whenever I do something significant. I’ve been interviewed a few times in print, one radio interview in Chicago, and on television. I have a press page on both of my websites. PR is an important aspect to my progress. If people don’t know about you or what you’re doing then you’re done.
I won two national contests recently. One contest I won was with Entertainment Tonight. I submitted a 2-minute video to ET about what makes me a “Confident Woman.� My video was picked by casting directors and a panel of celebrity judges, out of thousands of entries, as the Grand Prize Winner! I was flown to Los Angeles (I was living in Arizona at the time) and spent the week leading up to the Emmys living like a star, staying at the “Pretty Woman Hotel� (Regent Beverly Wilshire), attending pre-Emmy parties, and appearing on Entertainment Tonight regularly. The public voted on my Emmy gear and cheered me on as I walked the red carpet at the Emmys.
The other contest I won was a national contest by Yahoo! to job shadow a person in an industry that interested me. I won a week in Los Angeles job-shadowing an entertainment reporter at Star Magazine. What an experience! The contests showed the people who support me that the road to your dreams usually comes in unexpected ways. I made a lot of great contacts by winning those contests. Plus, I furthered my press coverage in terms of getting the word out about my film.
Tell me about the Yahoo contest?
The Yahoo! contest was a sweepstakes. I was using my computer. It was late at night and I was about to close the window when I saw “job shadow” and “Entertainment Reporter” and so I decided to click the button to enter. They had, I believe, seven different job categories that you could “shadow”… one was with Conde Nast magazine in NYC, another was Godiva Chocolate.
The one I won was with an Entertainment Reporter at Star Magazine in Los Angeles. As one of the winners, Yahoo flew me out to Los Angeles, first class, picked me up in a limo, and then escorted me to my hotel in Beverly Hills where I stayed for the entire week of my experience.
Every day I was taken to the Star Magazine headquarters where I hung out with the magazine’s top reporters. I watched them in their meetings, taking calls from star’s publicists, developing stories and then joined them at the hottest restaurants for lunch. At night I attended red carpet events and dined at LA’s best restaurants for star spotting. I was impressed with the level of professionalism by everyone at Star Magazine. They were all gracious to me and extremely hard-working. I really enjoyed my time at the magazine.
Now when I check out at the grocery store and I look over at the tabloid magazines, I have a new appreciation for what is really going on!
(A little secret I learned is that most of the people that end up in the tabloid magazines have relationships with the magazines and either they or their publicists actually solicit the magazine’s attention for more publicity! They are not the victims that I thought they were at all. The entertainment industry is all about publicity and these magazines, like them or not, sell a LOT of magazines which is very good for a public person’s career.)
How do you manage juggling the responsibilities of being an entrepreneur with the rest of your life?Â
Balance is an important aspect to following a dream. I don’t ever want to become so single-focused that I trample on or ignore the rest of my life (but that’s easy to do.)
A dream is important, but so is the rest of my life, so maintaining that balance is vital to my overall happiness. I have a hard time with this one. I feel a powerful urge to keep going up the mountain and not to get distracted by anything, including the rest of my life, and so I miss out on a lot of stuff and get out of balance a lot.
I truly believe that always striving for balance isn’t the best way to go about big change. Look at the psychology of a boot camp. In boot camps you are in isolation for a period of time to accomplish something specific, right? Well, I see dreams as the same type of thing. You need that singular focus sometimes and not to be distracted by the rest of your life. However, because your dream takes longer than the usual “6-week boot camp,� and instead it goes on and on, over an indefinite period of time, you can’t live like that for long without the rest of your life starting to deteriorate. Relationships will suffer and other things will fall to the wayside.
From time to time I just force myself to get out of the dream mindset and focus on other things. In the beginning it’s hard because I feel like any “free� moment that I’m not putting towards my dream is a moment “wasted.� However, it’s not wasted. It’s just a matter of pulling back and investing into the entire picture of my life, and not just one part.
Even though it’s hard at first (every time!) I’m always glad I do pull myself away from my dream to take care of other things. Not only is it good to invest in your health, your family, your relationships and other parts of your life, it’s healthy to give yourself a break from your dream to keep your perspective fresh, so you don’t burn out.
Balance is an ongoing struggle for me and it’s something I address on a daily basis. The entertainment business is a highly competitive industry and if you don’t grab opportunities when they come knocking, there are hundreds of others who will. The hardest thing is sometimes saying “no� to opportunities that come around for the sake of balance.
Well that’s all for now. Check back for more exciting things that are happening in the lives of entrepreneurs.
Let me know what you like and how I can make the Weekend Entrepreneur blog helpful to you and your precious dream.
Your friend,
Michelle
3 Responses to “Part 2 - Bathtub Video That Spawned Squeaky Clean Assistant onto Entertainment Tonight’s Red Carpet”
Leave a Reply
August 14th, 2007 at 7:28 am
!!!! Fantastic and informative blog you have Michelle!
Yes, YouTube is more effective than TV advertising!
September 12th, 2007 at 6:52 am
Excellent article. Thanyou for sharing !
October 6th, 2007 at 3:19 pm
[…] Michelle Anton wrote a fantastic post today on “Part 2 - Bathtub Video That Spawned Squeaky Clean Assistant onto …”Here’s ONLY a quick extractQuick recap: In Part 1 – Filmmaker, Lisa Murray shared her inspiring personal story about her life and her film production company SkyLife. I wanted to share the behind-the-scenes story about her “Free Hugs in Hollywoodâ€? video seen by … […]