NEW Myspace …quite a place for transmedia entertainment and cross-media marketers

Myspace relaunched this week as an entertainment platform that now puts content, not people, center stage. Facebook, with its half billion registered users, may have won the race for social network dominance, but judging by this video tour of Myspace's new format, the site could reemerge as an online entertainment powerhouse.

Myspace's new multimedia platform is especially timely considering developments in transmedia entertainment, which breaks storylines into parts and artfully delivers them across multiple media channels. Viewers enjoy a rich and immersive experience when these channels converge, say on a dedicated website ... like the new Myspace. Mobile applications make it possible to view mashed up content on iPad and smartphones. 

NBC's hit TV series Heroes is a model for transmedia storytelling, the central TV story made richer with sub-story lines streamed out using video/film, animation/graphic novels, games, music, twitter and forums, etc. –  for convergence on the show’s website. MTV’s latest teen-thriller Savage County works much the same way. 

If NBC and MTV can host transmedia on their own websites, can’t Myspace serve as a destination aggregator of transmedia productions and cross-media entertainment? It's an exciting thought. 

  

Will commercial sponsors warm up to the new Myspace? Great content and a cleaner, safer social environment will surely help. So does the fact that Myspace still has 122 million registered users worldwide – plus, deep roots in Generation Y who are digitally adept and voracious consumers of entertainment and branded goods. 

"Digi-novelist" Anthony Zuiker erects "cyber-bridge” to mesh story across publishing, film and social networking.

What is a digi-novel? Digi-novelist Anthony Zuiker, who is also the creator of the hit TV show “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” described it to J.D. Biersdorfer, tech reporter at The New York Times, as “the best of publishing, motion picture and social communities all kind of meshed into one experience.”

Zuiker just published, “Dark Prophecy,” the second in his "Level 26″ crime thriller series, that is being marketed both as a printed novel and an e-book for iPad with Web links to a 52 minute-long film edited into 11 segments. There is free content on Level 26’s YouTube channel as well.

To promote “‘Dark Prophecy” Zuiker wrote a serial killer from the book into his Oct. 14 episode of CSI – the book’s release date. That’s a hefty publicity score considering CSI reaches nearly 15 million TV viewers each week.

Zuiker told Bloomberg’s Ronald Glover that disappointing sales of his first crime novel, “Level 26: Dark Origins,”  prompted his to engage “CSI” fans by creating a cyber-bridge” to link the story across publishing, film and social networking.  He said, “If I can just get 1 percent of the 15 million people who watch ‘CSI’ to buy this book I’ll have a bestseller on my hands.”  

Abundant social media at NY Fashion Week made everyone an insider

It used to be that NY Fashion Week was for A-listers and industry elite. No more, according to Mashable, which posted about social media’s democratizing affect. For the past six days, from September 9 -16, anyone from anywhere on earth, was able to be a fashion insider via social networks that brought them up close and deep behind the scenes - all for free. 

Back in pre-web days the fashion public waited weeks or even months to see what editors decided to report from the runways. This year NY Fashion Week held nothing back, spewing news and stirring the publicity pot with the help of nimble bloggers, some with VVIP  access, whose simple point, shoot, edit and stream efficiency fed the frenzy. Some designers worked even faster by putting out their own runway photos and video in realtime. 

For me, most notable about NY Fashion Week was the abundant, innovative mix of digital/social media in use: Facebook, Twitter, blogs, mobile, crowdsourcing, live streaming, geo-social, and more. The deluge of content worked to bond fans with designers and with other fans, and surely all the buzz was a huge victory for the fashion business.  During the Great Depression people flocked to movie theaters for a dose of fantasy. For some Fashion Week is a sort of escapism designed to excite and inspire people to get out and shop.