When I first came across web developer Brian Seitel, his blog was named “Angry Deaf Guy In Atlanta”.
And even though he’s moving to California soon, I’m sure he’ll still have plenty to be angry about. Brian’s ability to speak his mind immediately impressed me.
As time went by I became even more impressed with his ability to pay attention to the problems people were having and then actually create something to remedy the situation.
His recent projects, Talkbackr and Off Book Market are great examples of how to use social media to create things people are interested in.
You’ll want to bookmark this post so you can come back and re-read portions of this insightful interview with Brian.
Would you tell us a bit about Talkbackr and OffBook Market: What do they do?
The goals for the two are quite different. Talkbackr is designed to be a simple, straightforward feedback mechanism for audience members to provide feedback to event administrators (whoever that may be). The “talkbackrs” can be anonymous if they wish. Event creators can create an account, add some events, and disseminate the URLs to their audience, allowing for convenient and simple feedback. And best of all, it’s completely, 100% free for both parties. I have recently added some “premium” features that were requested, and people can pay $5 to upgrade an event if they want. I don’t anticipate this happening often, as I feel the free version is actually pretty robust.
OffBook Market is a marketplace for playwrights and theatres to connect. A playwright can create a PDF version of their script and upload it to the marketplace. Theatres, organizations, schools, or even individuals can pay a small fee ($5 USD or less) to download the script. The idea here is that the playwrights should have as much control as I can feasibly give them and get the most bang for their buck. At this point, the playwright gets roughly 91% of the proceeds. (The other 9% goes to cover PayPal fees, which are necessary for the transactions to take place.)
One of the features that both sites have is the idea that the consumer (the average user) doesn’t have to login or register at all. If you want to review an event on Talkbackr or download a script, all you have to do is do it. No passwords to remember, no usernames to remember. I don’t need or want any information about the users. Content creators, on the other hand, have to have accounts for more obvious reasons.
How did you come up with the idea for each of them?
I like to identify problems that I am having or that my friends are having. Often my inspiration comes from other sources, such as my non-theatre/non-technical friends or from other services that are really helping another industry.
At my old day job, I worked with a bunch of artists. Literally every other employee in the company was a graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design and held degrees in various art-related disciplines like Broadcast Communication, Digital Animation and Graphic Design. At least once a week someone would tell me about how in their art classes at SCAD, each of them was required to put their work on display for the entire class, and each person in the class would critique every other person’s art.
This accomplishes several objectives:
- It teaches you to give constructive criticism
- It teaches you to accept criticism gracefully
- It teaches you that criticism is necessary to improve your art
My own background is in theatre, and I’ve realized that over the years as an actor I never really got any good, constructive criticism. I mean, think about it. If I asked my parents, they’d gush and praise me: “Oh, honey! You were wonderful!”
My director would often simply say “You’re fine”, because even if my performance wasn’t brilliant, he’s got bigger problems on his plate.
My fellow castmates would rarely offer criticism for various reasons, most often being that they simply don’t want to insult me. And finally, the audience isn’t going to tell you to your face that you sucked. Just not gonna happen.
And that was completely useless. I knew I could be better, but I can’t see myself act, so… how do I get better? The only answer seemed to be to find people to give feedback. And the same principle works on an organization-wide level, too. Ticket sales aren’t an indicator of whether the audience liked the show — simply that they showed up.
I thought about how a theatres go about soliciting feedback, threw out some questions on the #2amt hashtag on Twitter, got some interesting responses (short answer: they don’t ask), and the next day, had a prototype Talkbackr site up for use. It has been pretty successful thus far, getting about 2000 hits a month and over 3000 events created. I am continually astonished at the level of constructive feedback that passes through Talkbackr’s site every day. It’s working beyond my wildest dreams.
Off Book Market was a longer term project and was something that percolated in my mind ever since I worked in Chicago in 2008. I assistant directed a play by Bob Fisher called “Devils Don’t Forget”. After the show was over, I asked Bob what he was going to do with the script, and he basically said he’d put it on his bookshelf and remount it in a decade or so. I thought to myself, “What a terrible waste… surely there are people in Miami or San Francisco or Vancouver or New York that might want to do this!” At around the same time, I was talking to Travis Bedard and David Loehr and a few others on Twitter (this predates #2amt, by the way) about making an iTunes-like interface for plays.
It took me 3 years, four iterations of the website, and a lot of thinking before I finally got to launch it with the assistance of Shawn Borsky (graphic designer).
What was the biggest challenge in creating them?
Talkbackr wasn’t really a challenge to create. The hardest part was identifying the problem, then coming up with a viable solution. Like I said earlier, however, creating Talkbackr 1.0 took less than 48 hours.
Off Book Market, on the other hand, posed a ton of problems, not the least of which was legal. I had to figure out how to protect myself from litigation, should someone’s play be disseminated without their knowledge or should I violate some sort of copyright law. Another problem was at that time I didn’t really know enough about web programming to develop something of the complexity that OBM requires.
What was your biggest learning experience through the process?
I learned a few major things:
A) People don’t want to actually do anything. They’ll talk about it to death, but taking action is very rare and very difficult to get people to do. That’s why one of my goals for all my websites is to lower the barriers for getting things done, to make things easier for users to do. Wanna leave feedback? Bam. One page. One form. You’re done. Want to buy a play? Click, pay, download. You’re done.
B) Programming is easy. Marketing is hard. Talkbackr is doing well, but that’s because all of the event creators are actively sharing Talkbackr links with their audience and other theatre members. This provides sort of a snowball effect where the each organization’s use spreads to their audience, which spreads to their audience, ad nauseum. I’m hoping that in the next year or two, Talkbackr traffic will rise exponentially.
Off Book Market, on the other hand, has been pretty stagnant for the last 3 months or so. I haven’t quite figured out how to market it successfully to playwrights, which I feel may be necessary more than marketing it to consumers. At least for now.
C) You can’t please everybody. Not everyone thinks Talkbackr and OBM are the greatest things to hit the internet. That’s fine. I’m trying to focus on that niche of people that need that extra hand or think that it could help them improve.
Is there anything you’re working on now that you can tell us about?
I’ve got a few projects up my sleeve. The one I think will be the most successful will have to remain a secret for now, but I do have another project that I think is pretty cool. The working title is “Breaking the Block”. It’s an application that was inspired by NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). The goal of NaNoWriMo is to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days, which works out to roughly 1600 words per day. The reason they do this is to keep you writing. If you stop and worry about quality, you’ll never finish. They say: write now, edit later. It works. This past November, I finished my first novel (at about 60,000 words). It’s crap, but hey, I finished it.
I thought to myself “How can I motivate myself to keep writing, even when NaNoWriMo is over?” and that’s where Breaking the Block was born. It’s an app that will allow you to create documents, set goals for yourself, and share those goals with your friends. The app will automatically track your progress (word count) and offer various ways for you to encourage yourself and your friends to keep writing. For instance, there is a setting that you can enable where if you haven’t written for 3 days, it will email you and say “Hey, don’t forget to write The Next Great Novel!”. Alternately, you could have it humiliate you on Facebook or Twitter by posting, “Hey! I’m a loser because I haven’t written in my novel for three days! Make fun of me!”
Well, that last part is a work in progress, but you get the idea. You will be able to brag about your progress (“I’m 32% of the way through my novel!”) or taunt your friends (“I’m 32% of the way through my novel but Travis is only 21%!”). There will be charts and graphics, statistics and analyses, as well as other social-media oriented things to help keep you on track and motivated.
Anyway, it’s primarily something that I’m creating for myself, but I’m going to open it up to the general public because I think a lot of people could benefit from these tools.
I’m also building an iPhone/Android app for Talkbackr that will allow users to scan the QR codes on the programs or websites and immediately provide feedback on the phone. This should increase the frequency of reviews, since they can review it right then rather than having to wait til they get home (and probably forget about it).
Anything else you’d like to add?
The primary problem that I see in society in general, but particularly so in terms of technology and problem solving, is the unwillingness to actually do anything. With the advent of blogs and Twitter and Facebook, it’s so easy to offer your opinion on a problem or rant about what’s not being done. I see a lot of talking about what we should be doing or what’s bad for us, and solutions are a dime a dozen. I would love for more people to say “Here’s a problem. I think I have a solution.” and then gather some resources and implement it.
Don’t laugh, but I used to work out with WWE wrestler “Daffney” (her stage name). One day at the gym, we were discussing how hard it is sometimes to actually get to the gym to work out. We both loved to exercise, but I’m sure anyone reading this can attest to how we think “Ugh. I don’t wanna go to the gym” and then come up with an excuse not to go.
Daffney said to me, “I just tell myself “I’m going to the gym for 5 minutes, and if I still don’t feel like working out, then I’ll leave”.” And she never just turns around and leaves. Once she’s there, she works out and is always happier having done so. The first step is always the hardest.
I try to adopt that approach myself. If I ever think “I see this problem, but I can’t do it because ________” then I stop and say “Look. I’ll give it a shot for X minutes/hours/whatever, and if I still don’t want to do it, I’ll stop.” Almost every time that first step disproves whatever excuse I had before, and I wind up making it happen.
Talkbackr, Off Book Market, and Breaking the Block are just three things that have resulted from that attitude, and I think, you know, most of us could benefit from actually taking that first step. A little less talk and a lot more action would ensue.
In that light, I guess my final thought is a challenge. I challenge everyone reading this to promise that instead of just talking about a problem, you’ll find a solution and take the first step to making that solution a reality.
I’m excited to see what the next big game-changers will be for theatre and social media.
Thanks for reading and checking out Talkbackr/Off Book Market!
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