Feel like spending a bit of time for unlimited free access to university email addresses around the world?

Check out this website: www.webometrics.info.  You can search by the top universities for each continent, or by the country itself, and many sites have English versions.  BTW–Webometrics also links to worldwide hospitals, business schools, and more!

Limit your email choices to your primary target market.  If your film is about psychology, for example, choose the department chair in psychology along with the most likely library name–either the top librarian, or if offered, the social science librarian.

Begin an Excel sheet for the names and email addresses and add to it over time; no need to do it all at once.  When you’re ready, upload the addresses to your mailing list server.  I use www.yourmailinglistprovider.com which provides great statistical feedback and allows hundreds of mailings per month for a low fee.

It’s time to spread your wings and see who else besides American universities will be interested in your film!

DIY is great for everyone, right?  We buy our email lists from list providers, prepare our cover letters, and send out flurries of instant messages, fingers-crossed that we will make high-revenue sales for a ridiculously low out-put of effort and funds.

Who looses in this calculus?  If you guess no one, you’re wrong. As DIY has caught on, the noise that pervades other forms of self-promotion has seeped into academic institutions, making it increasingly overwhelming to the poor librarians who receive our missives, and thus harder for our wonderful films to rise above the fray.

What can you do?

As has always been the case, successful diy requires strong marketing materials (your diy platform of a correctly “positioned” website and cover letter targeted at the right audience), but now more than ever, it also requires simply spreading word-of-mouth about your film to the academic world.  In other words, some good old-fashioned pr. Read the rest of this entry »