I believe that the projects that we, the producers of marketing related content, will be working on in the next few years will be based on transmedia and synergic storytelling: Stories so large that they cannot be squeezed within a single medium or platform and tend to evolve into worlds in which multiple converging stories can live and grow. The user’s experience unfolds across as many media as possible and every single platform makes idiosyncratic and distinctive contributions to the story. A story will possibly start with a short webisodes. However, for users to understand it, they will eventually have to follow the characters of the story on Twitter, join a group on Facebook or Flickr, visit a channel on Youtube or Vimeo, receive or send SMS texts or MMS, participate in a forum or a chat, play a game or an ARG, attend an event, and so forth. We will need to create as many point of entry into the content as possible and offer a transmedia experience that gives users resources to forge their own stories and fantasies. The transmedia projects need to be carefully planned from the very beginning to avoid redundancies or repurposing of the same content on different media and, for the contrary, to build a strong cross-platform experience for the fans.

How do you proceed in creating a transmedia story able to carry the values of the brands and achieve their objectives while engaging the users?

We have delineated this process to create a transmedia operation. We start of course working with the clients on the definition of the strategy, the objectives and the target market: This gives us the ammunitions to define the world in which the transmedia narrative is going to unfold.

The following step usually consists of the creation of one or several idea-communities or groups to test some concepts and to generate innovative and hopefully revolutionary ideas. We believe in the extraordinary power of diverse, large and well-managed groups to generate brilliant ideas and we try to use this collective intelligence as much as possible before we even start developing any type of content. We determine the number of members we need to make the group or the community work properly and we invest the right amount of money in recruiting them, typically using ads on social networks. In our experience, the acquisition cost of a member for an idea-generating community is between $0.10 and 0.60, which allow us to create pretty large, diverse and cooperative groups with a very limited investment. We have been working very successfully with groups in the last two years: two of the groups of fans we have created on Facebook, for instance, have reached respectively 28 and 14 thousand members and are giving us a lot information and ideas for the next episodes of two webseries. It was very inspiring watching these groups to grow and assume their own personality and nevertheless work with us and for the brands. On the other hand, we have developed proprietary software to create and manage ideas-communities: we are now experimenting with two of such groups.

After analyzing what the groups have to say, we proceed to the mapping of all available platforms and media for our target in a specific region. We have realized that this map tends to differ substantially not only according to the target we are going to engage but also to the country or region where this target is based.

When we have a clear map of the available platforms and a definition of what specific contributions each one of them can make to our storytelling, we start developing scripts and, simultaneously, scheduling or sequencing the releases of the different chunks of the story. In this way, we can define when and where each one of them should be available to the users. This process allows us to offer the fans many different points of entry to the content and give the brands the possibility of reaching many communities simultaneously.

The following phase consists of producing the content as well as designing and developing the original platforms we may need. Having four offices in different countries we execute the production phase wherever we get the best production value: This is true not only for the shooting but also for the designing and the developing.

The distribution of the content follows according to the established sequencing. We use all available techniques to attract users to the content including syndication, bookmarking, SEO, seeding, PPC, and so on.

Finally, we measure the results of the action from all different perspectives.

Transmedia storytelling is the most incredible creative tool we had access to in the last decades: it offers the brands the opportunity to tell several converging story to different communities using the platforms they want to use and, at the same time, to engage these communities in some sort of co-creation process. If we use the proper process in the development of a transmedia operation, we can indeed achieve very high levels of engagement from the audiences converting them into communities of fans.