Why Transmedia Is The Next Social Media

Room 5ABC, Austin Convention Center, Texas. A speaker passes a plastic box to a lady in the front row. 


She pries open the box. Inside is a rag that looks blood-stained, spelling out a website address. 


Audience members with laptops type the URL into their browsers. On the site are clues that hint at a kidnapping and a phone number. 


There is no shortage of phones in the audience, and the number is called. A French-sounding operator babbles, then is cut off by a desperate voice -- the hostage? -- saying "Find my site. A mime is a terrible thing to waste. A terrible thing to waste."


The web address www.aterriblethingtowaste.com is typed into browsers. 


A blog subtitled 'Oswald's Journey to Mime Enlightenment' pops up. It has only two entries by a Radio Hack employee, Oswald, who aspires to be a clown and is looking for schools to develop his skills in this performance art. 


Curiously, some letters in the last entry have been highlighted in red. They spell out 'youtubeoswaldthemime'.


People access YouTube and enter 'Oswald The Mime' into the search field. Oswald, in tear-streaked clown makeup, shows up in a grainy video taken in what seems to be a prison cell. 


Rushing because the guards could come at any moment, Oswald says he had been kidnapped after applying at a mime school fronting for a criminal organisation. The kidnapped mimes are forced to perform on the streets for a quota set by the villainous Master Mime. 


As sounds of approaching guards become louder, Oswald makes one last desperate plea. The lock on his cell, he says, is a Kryptonite Evolution Lock 2000. If anyone knew how to break it, could they email the answer to oswald at his website name? The video is then abruptly cut off.


Audience members call up Google and type in Kryptonite Evolution Lock 2000. The first link that shows up is an engadget article saying the lock can be hacked with a Bic pen.


Emails with 'Bic' are sent to oswald@aterriblethingtowaste.com. Alas, the audience members who had called the mysterious number earlier and sent the rescue email would receive a phone call not from Oswald, but from Master Mime. He had engineered this hoax and the hapless Oswald was still in his clutches.


I was in the audience at this South By Southwest (SXSW) session called The 10-Minute Transmedia Experience, and it absolutely blew my mind. 


No PowerPoint, no coma-inducing panels, just an interactive demonstration of what transmedia is and how it differs from multi-platform, with which it is often confused. 


What is transmedia? Experts like Convergence Culture author and academic Henry Jenkins can write reams and reams about transmedia. No Mimes Media partners Steve Peters and Maureen McHugh, who ran the session (and did the transmedia campaign for The Dark Knight), can articulate it way better than I ever could. 


My own takeaway from this remarkable session: Transmedia is narrative told through multiple platforms in a distinct sequence, at each point pulling in and heavily relying on audience engagement to develop the story, brand or message.

"It starts with a rabbit hole," said Peters. In our 10-minute transmedia experience at SXSW for instance, the blood-stained rag was the rabbit hole through which the audience fell, leading to a sequence of website, phone call, video, Google search, email and concluding with a phone call.  

As Peters and McHugh pointed out, transmedia is often confused with multi-platform. The first requires flow and a weaving of a trail through different channels: Content is contextual to the platform used. The second is usage of various channels, e.g. PR, web, advertising, social media, etc. for messaging. 


Multi-platform movie promotion, for example, would use a mix of theatre trailers, media interviews, product collaborations, etc. 


A transmedia campaign would be the year-long lead-up to the 1999 movie The Blair Witch Project. The blurring of fact and fiction on the website was unprecedented -- Out takes from 'discovered' film reels? Police reports? -- but the response was extraordinary. Fan pages, sequels, contrasting narratives cropped up and Blair Witch took on a life of its own. It's an early example of a transmedia experience where the film was a tiny part of what was going on.


Who owns a story anyway? The one who created the story, or the one with whom the story resonates? Shouldn't it belong to both?


Storytelling is as natural and instinctive to us as breathing. A story, powerfully told, moves the heart in a way no marketing campaign ever could. The most successful marketing in fact, centres on a story that the audience recognises and claims as its own.


The potential transmedia has for extending a brand's shelf life and relevance is staggering, particularly in light of the platform proliferation we have today. Just think of the success of the Mad Men characters on Twitter. The flipside is the risk: Think of Next Media's news 'recreation' of Tiger Woods' altercation with wife Elin.


The question is how transmedia can be applied to other categories that are not as story-rich as entertainment, automotive and video gaming. What kind of experience can you conjure up with, say, a microwave? And what about B2B? 


Some good pointers shared by Peters and McHugh from the flurry of questions that followed:

• Transmedia has to start at inception of the product, not after the fact.

• The actual plot should be very simple as transmedia is still in a 'naive' form. 

• No single aspect should take more than two to five minutes.

• How many platforms? A good rule of thumb: Five.

• Text is cheap but isn't the most effective.

• Transmedia doesn't require millions of dollars to design and implement. The speakers cited a successful example that cost $3,000 to $4,000. Unfortunately I was scribbling so many notes I didn't catch the case study.

• Effectiveness decreases the longer the game goes on. Most transmedia experiences are not replayable.

• Good narrative uses a 'show it, don't tell it' approach. Good transmedia goes further with 'Show the evidence of it, don't tell it'.

I would add that social media was the thin edge of the wedge in brands reluctantly ceding control to its stakeholders. Transmedia will require a whole deeper level of trust in and collaboration with the audience, not to mention a renewed appreciation for a timeless, yet underrated skill: Masterful storytelling. 


How interesting that we've come full circle.