 my mother's watching if she misses me, she'll be so excited. Hi everybody, welcome to this Contracts 101 seminar for the Dramatist Guild. For those of you who don't know me, I am Terri Stratton, Director of Education and Outreach here at the Guild. I'd like to welcome you to this last seminar for this season. Gearing up to start planning seminars beginning in the fall. And as always, if you have ideas about people you'd like to see on panels, if there are contracts that you'd like to hear explained by our wonderful business affairs department, feel free to email me and I'll be happy to help you. My email address is on the back of your program. Normally I would tell you to turn your phones off, but actually I'm gonna have you keep them on today for this event. But at least put them on vibrate, that would be very helpful. But make sure you check in on Facebook and tweet and tell everybody that you're here, that would be great. And you can also tell all your friends to watch this event starting tomorrow on Livestream.com and the channel is New Play TV. So you'll be able to watch tomorrow starting tomorrow and see how you looked, I guess, if you all stand up and stand in front of the panel. The panel will talk for about an hour and then they'll open up the floor for questions. I ask that when you ask a question, please make sure you ask it loud enough that our online audience can hear it as well. So, there's a question already, yes. Your question, are you know of this? It's spotty. I apologize, this room is spotty. Yeah, do you want me to tweet something for you? I'm good. I'll be sitting outside because there are ten naughty, tardy people who aren't here yet. So I'll be letting them in as they arrive. But then I'll be in for the end of the event. So without further ado, it is my pleasure to introduce our Assistant Executive Director of Business Affairs, Associate Executive Director of Business Affairs, also known as a rock star, David Farr. To introduce this panel tonight, this is the first panel that our Associate, our Director of Business Affairs, Deborah Murat, is chairing. And she joined the Guild last September to help us handle all the members' problems, the issues for contract reviews, any questions you have about the law pertaining to rights of publicity, defamation, rights of privacy, collaborations, joint authorship, anything like that, Deborah, she came in with a lot of heart and she has the two things that I require to like any attorney. And attorneys are hard to like, so I've boiled it down to two qualities. It's that she's super competent and she really cares. She cares about her job, she cares about you guys. She went to Barnard and she's been with us since September, so that's my introduction of Deborah. Starting at the other end of the table, we have Mark Merriman. He's a partner within the entertainment group of Frankfurt-Curnett. Production Council on a number of shows that you've probably heard of, the recent production of Once that came over from London and Glassman-Agery. He's also a Magic Professor at Brooklyn Law School. My, for entertainment, well, Simquits is to his left. Clown Therapy, it's done very well. What's that? Clown Bar. It's a bar. And he has a very well-respected blog called I Interview Playwrights. Sure. And he said, why do you say it's so, why do you say it's so well, well, you know, has a good reputation? I said, well, it seems to be a lot of people read it. And he said, oh no, we discovered that he was comparing his blog to something like a blog from Justin Bieber. I was comparing his blog to a blog of other playwright interviews, other blogs, and the theater industry. So it's all relative. To his left, we have Max Grossman. He's an agent in Abrams Artist Agency. Before that, he was creative executive at Scott Rudin Productions. To his left, we have Seth Koderman. Seth is the director of social media, manager of social media, director. I'll take whatever. OK. He's the king of social media at the Thomas Hill. And he's so good at his job that one day he was spouting all this advice to somebody. And I told him afterwards. I said, don't give away all of that great information. Those should be like trade secrets. And he was like, no, that's nothing. I have tons more with that. And then to his left is Bobby Lopez, co-author of Avenue Q. And the book of Mormon, his reputation precedes him. I don't think we'll be surprised if the F-bomb gets dropped tonight. I don't know. But I'll say very well. So this is our panel tonight. And Deborah, I'll hand it over. OK. I just want to thank you. Thank you. Yeah. As an attorney, I think one of the most exciting parts of social media is to see how the law is progressing so quickly. And we have to react and create new laws so quickly. And so too, do authors have to react to the social media and the new platforms that are coming up all the time. So the goal of tonight's program is to, one, teach those of our members who might not be using any sort of social media right now how to go about that if they choose to and why that might be helpful to them. And also to talk a little bit for those who are using social media, how they could better tweak what they're doing to really maximize the benefits. And of course, because we are the business affairs department, we want to talk a little bit about the pitfalls, some of the liability, some of the legal aspects that are there. I think that the internet tends to feel like an open forum where you can take and share everything. And we have to be careful because there are copyright laws and there are certainly certain things that we need to be aware of. So just to start, through our wonderful panelists, why use social media? What are the advantages? And maybe, I don't know, Bobby, you want to start us off and tell us why you use social media? Well, I can give a story. Yesterday, I tweeted that I was going to be coming to the panel. And Seth actually tweeted back. Actually, that panel's tomorrow night. And I tweeted back to social media in action. See, I would not have known that. But I don't know. I'm on Twitter. I'm on Facebook. I don't really use it so much for. I mean, I suppose it's all publicity because you're kind of interacting with fans and you're getting your name out there every time you last something. But I don't feel like I ever use it to directly promote myself. But I'm kind of here to learn. I would like to find out more stuff I could be using it for. And Adam, how do you feel about that? How do you feel that you use social media? What for? What are the advantages? Which are really exact? Yes. I just want to be online right now. That's terrible. Well, you mentioned Twitter. And I just want to mention because I neglected to do so that we're actually going to be on Twitter tonight. And Seth is going to be, I should say, hashtag new play. So you can write in for anyone that ends up watching this and post your comments. And Seth will also tell us if anyone has anything pressing to say. But in addition to Twitter, what are some of the other programs that you feel are pretty invaluable? The big ones are obviously Twitter and Facebook. And that's where the people are. And I think that as a writer, that's kind of the goal, right? You want to meet people. You want to tie up loose ends and put your name out there. So I think going where the people are is important. So Facebook, Twitter, I think eventually we'll get into talking about blogs and websites and that kind of stuff. But I think the big ones, Twitter and Facebook, and then if you feel fancy and free and want to try Instagram or Pinterest and... Those are for younger people. Well, there you go. Well, I mean, in terms of creating a website and blogs and all this, is the goal to create a package or is the goal just, let's get my name out there? And maybe it depends on what level you're talking about. Someone wants to speak to that. I think that what you typically do for people that are starting out into social media is to want to do everything all at once. And I think that you get really burnt out and really exhausted if you go out about it with that train of thought. It's like, this is what I typically would say to do. And please say I'm wrong if you want to make a conversation about this. It's like, you should have a home base. You should have a place that you house where your works are. More information about you, that kind of stuff. You should have a place where all of that can be found. And then from that, you build your relationship kind of things like Twitter and Facebook. You kind of go out from there. Maybe your home base is a website. Maybe it's a blog. Maybe your home base is a fan page on Facebook. But I think that you have to have somewhere where everything is kind of collected and then go out from there. Do you guys have that? I don't have a website. I need a website. That's one of the things I've been meaning to do for the last 10 years. It's possible that you don't need a website, though. I'd like to have one. Everyone sort of knows who you are, right? You know what I'm saying? I mean, I may just interject one thing about a website. I mean, the clients I do, what they're dealing with things that are real problems. Like you have your own website. There are costs involved, right? Like you have to register the domain. You have to. That implies that you have something that you have to police in terms of someone's ripping off your website or using a website with a similar name, redirecting traffic. So there are legal issues with it and it's just sort of like doing business issues. So that's something that people take into consideration. Even if it's just a matter of, I have to pay a couple of hundred dollars to register the website. That's real money when you're sort of could focus your money elsewhere. And I think what a lot of people are finding about websites is they consider them static. They consider them a bit like going to the public library. It isn't what people want because we tend to embrace as a culture, getting information quick that we, you know, our advertisers have done their job in that if we see something that looks like a bottle of Clorox bleach, that's bleach. Like that's what we want and it's a quick sensation. So I think what people are finding more and more is that Facebook and Twitter are essentially free. Or they're the cost of you, you know, having your own wireless at home or going to Starbucks and borrowing someone else's for a while. And I think that fast gratification is what people tend to grab at training tours because it's cheaper, it's free and they know that's kind of the lightest audience you can get. It's easier for someone to retweet someone than to sit back and send an email saying, oh my friend just did this website. I'm kind of in that cusp of like, you know, older and younger. So I tend to go to websites still, but I do know that I get the fastest information and probably respond best to tweets or a Facebook page or something else. And they're all what you make them, right? If you have a website, you can direct people to your website on Twitter. You can direct people to your website on Facebook. There are some issues with that, but there's ways to do it. And I think it just becomes a personal, like that's my financial reality. The only thing about a website is, do you constantly want to be updating it? Because to update a website, it's not the same as updating a Facebook page. You have to actually go back into it or if you have a website designer, pay that person to go back into it. So if you're a creative person, I feel like the bulk of what you're doing is saying you don't so much rest on your laurels, right? Like, this is what is new and active that I'm working on. So I'm sort of straying from the legal aspect, but I think that's sort of the sense of what I'm getting at least from clients. I have both. I have a blog and I have a website. And the website, I do have to pay someone to update it and make it look good and make it look professional. The blog has a lot more stuff on it. And I feel like it's a lot harder for people to find things on the blog than it is on the website, which is very clear and very easy to navigate. Which is, I mean, part of partially just like accumulating links over time and time. It's just, I mean, it's hard for people to figure stuff out that way. I think a lot of it depends on the goal. You're connecting to other people. You're sending messages to other people. It's much more interactive. Versus a website where I feel like it's kind of the basic information. Here in the place that I've written, here's how you can get in touch with me. Here's a headshot if you feel like doing that. And that's basically it. When I was working in a production office, if I needed to find out who somebody was, I wasn't necessarily on another Facebook page. You go to their website, type it into Google, pops up. I can't get too much information that way, so you're protected, but it's, look if you want to reach out to me here right now. And meanwhile, if you have plays going on, if you want to kind of give yourself a little bit of publicity, that's where something more geared towards social networking can come in. Where you don't have to worry about driving traffic to your website, it's kind of just a hold in place for your information. And you can use all the other tools to kind of build up a fan base and to get out there a little bit more. So I think I hear a lot about reaching out and getting that audience and getting people to listen to you. How do you do that? How do you create something worth listening to? Is the point, what is sort of your motivation then when you're starting to create a blog or when you're putting your Facebook page together, if you're trying to get people to sort of listen? Or maybe Max, you could even tell us, what would attract you? What would, even from that standpoint? I mean, in the end, in order to find out who people are, I would go to a website just to kind of basic information. If I hear about a play somewhere, if I, somebody says, oh, I saw something downtown, it was fantastic. You really have to go. Then I would try and look the person up, go to their website. But initially, whoever told me about the show, or however I find out about the show, probably would happen because somebody sent on an email, an e-blast, but through Facebook or through Twitter, you can actually kind of do that e-blast to a larger audience without having to go through your contacts and say, here are the 20 people I know and you're gonna get an email, you were probably gonna come anyway, you're my friends. You can put it on Facebook as a message and your friends will see it and they can send it to their friends and it kind of grows and expands. In terms of the information, I think the place to start is if there is a production or if there's a reading or if there's something, some event that's happening where you can, it's not just about, read my work, read my work, it's about come be a part of what I'm doing and engaging the community in that way. That's I think kind of the first step for me at least. There's two examples I can point to in terms of musical theater writers that have used social media in a way that I find really impressive and I've paid attention to. One was, I guess it was like five years ago, I knew this kid through my collaborator, Jeff Marks, he was friends with this kid, Benj Pasek. And I didn't know that much about him, Jeff was sort of mentoring him and Benj was his assistant. And then out of nowhere, all of a sudden Benj and his partner, Justin, had a big show at Joe's Pub. And I was just blown away that that happened and the way it happened was Facebook because they also went to the University of Michigan, they had a wide network of friends in the business and through Facebook they were able to get everyone in the industry, every single producer, every single writer and director that I had met were at this show and these kids were 17, 18, I guess maybe 19. But that was something I could only have dreamed of at that age that they got and they did it by savvy use of Facebook. And the other example that I live with every day is Lin-Manuel Miranda, who just is constantly on Twitter and Facebook, blasting away. He's just funny, I mean I think that's my model. Like if you could be funny and entertaining just using Twitter as a medium in and of itself, that's a way to build up followers and kind of gain, it's just sort of a way of connecting daily to people, whether they're your fans or just people you know and you tend to get more and more followers not less and less if you do it all the time. Yeah, I mean I think the thing about both of Bobby's examples though are you didn't have writers like tweeting and posting like I have this play and come see this play and this play, I think that what they did was they found a community and they talked and it kind of built out from there. So I think to think about it as promoting yourself may put you in the wrong mindset because it's not so much like come see my show, you have to come read my work, do this. It's kind of about finding people that share similar interests or side hobbies or people that are also tweeting or posting about craft and their experience. And I think that it's finding those communities and kind of building your place in. I hope that that. Yeah, I think that's true. And also, I mean, you know, if I go see Bobby's show and I can be like, oh, I saw this great show, everyone needs to see it. You might not know about it, you know. Yeah, right, right. Everyone of course knows about it, but. Yeah, I mean I find that I'm able to interact with people, it's kind of like you put something out in the world and sometimes you just don't hear, you're not there the night of, you're not there when the stuff gets heard or someone listens to your demo or whatever. And just being there, being on it is a way of staying connected and feeling like you are getting to talk back to fans and fans talk back to you. In terms of the talk back though, that's great if everything's positive. What happens when it turns negative, maybe. Mark, you wanna talk about some of the issues that might come up in terms of responding to negative commentary? When does that cross a legal line as well? I mean, I think it does go back to like there's no such thing as bad publicity. Of course there is, it's awful. It's awful to have someone say, you know, and I'm guilty of it too. Maybe I'll check in and see a show and sort of feel like I wish I had this two hours of my life back. My life is ruined because of this experience. You know, we all have that experience. But I think there's two levels. One, it's that, you know, as big as it feels in terms of the theater industry and the entertainment industry, even within New York, it is all about relationships. And relationships are a lot about respect and they're a lot about boundaries. So there's two levels to this. There's a scary legal level that I'll get to second because I think that's the thing that's probably easiest to avoid. The sort of decorum level, it just goes back to what Bobby was saying, which is that you can be reciprocal people in terms of returning a favor. And I think you will find that that ability to build a relationship, even if it's just on a weird social media site, that you went to see someone show and you really liked it or you liked one part of it or you liked someone in it, you give them that favor. You give them that gift. You comment on their wall or you tweet about it or you check in on force where when you're at the theater, you do something that says, I'm a part of this community. If you don't like something, times are a post reviewer. Be kind. I sit through things and I often think, why am I here? But I will tell you something that at the end of everything I see, and I'm not just being fakey because I'm in a room full of creative people, there is something that I like about it. And I'm a firm believer that if you're able to find that thing and you're able to connect to that person who gave you that thing, they're gonna return the favor someday. So there's a free way, easy way to do it, right? The legal problem you get into is if you're suddenly lambasting something and you're personally attacking someone. And even if you don't cross the line to do something that is libelous, that you know this person did this and it's just an all out lie because you were so outraged that it was such a terrible experience, even if you're not quite doing that, you don't want to be the person getting the letter from someone saying, person's lawyer saying, you've defamed my client, we're looking for a million dollars, but they're never gonna collect. But you don't need that because it all goes back to the first thing. You're suddenly that person in this small industry. You don't want that. You're allowed to be honest. Honesty is a great thing, but you're part of a community. So the honesty has to be sort of the ability to help someone. It's being honest to the point to say, I would have done it this way or I'd like this, something simple, that it all comes back to you. That's the sort of dangerous thing and great thing about social media is that it's there forever. People retweet it. People copy it. Look what this bozo said about my friend's play. Never deal with this. But you know, that you don't want. But there's a way to do it. And what you don't want to do is be kind of the bottom of the barrel. Bad, bad, bad, it was terrible. And what you really don't want to do is to somehow find someone else's intellectual property. It's a trademark. It's a song that's somewhere else or a trademark infringement problem. And then they also have the defamation problem. And if you add them up, the claim letter gets longer. Your life gets shorter because it's so stressful to have to deal with these things. And you suddenly have to hire somebody like me that says, I do this and I take a $10,000 retainer before I start. So you just want to sort of be a member of the group. You want to be good citizens of this industry I think is the basic lesson. There's a question? Yeah. What I would encourage you to do is on any social networking site you're on, carefully read the terms of use. They will put you to sleep by the second paragraph, but carefully read them because they're gonna talk to you things about their policies about link-throughs. Link-throughs are generally as a legal matter safe. Copyright Act talks about an illegal act of copying. Link-throughs are the legal current now is that we don't consider that copying that you're not actually physically porting a copy of it. That's often safe, but what I'm talking about is a little deeper than just whether it's copyright infringement or not. It's linking it because even if it's legally safe, a clever lawyer is gonna say, well, we still think it's copying. Come up with 500 reasons that the current trends of the law is incorrect. And the copyright law. Copyright Act may change. They may change their tune on it because the Copyright Act remembers in 1976 and it was barely caught up to what was going on in 1976 and it certainly hasn't caught up to what's going on now. There will probably be and the current wisdom is there will be a further amendment to the Copyright Act to deal with that very question because it's the legal current is one thing. The actual statute is something else in terms of what the good members of Congress will actually say it should mean or does mean. So just get to be careful with it. But terms of use. Because terms of use teach you things and also like if you're posting your own content, I'm saying to the panel before we started, some of these websites, not Facebook, but some of these websites will say anything you post we own. That's crazy. But you're signing on. When you sign on in terms of use, there's consideration, a contact case consideration. Your consideration you're given is the ability to use this site. But there are terms of use say we own what you've just posted and let's say you have an agreement for use of what you've just posted with the producer that says, I Joe producer of the exclusive right to do X, Y, and Z with this musical including the songs in this musical. You've suddenly breached that agreement. Whether there's harm or not, who cares? I'm just a lawyer telling you that's a breach of an agreement. That's not a good thing to do. But even more perverse is a lot of these sites change their tune and say, well we don't own what you've done. Of course you own your intellectual property. You're telling us you have the right to put it on here. But we have a non-exclusive to license to use it and to authorize others the right to use it. You still have the same legal problem which is that you've given Joe producer exclusive rights to something. You can't give someone else non-exclusive rights. So you gotta be careful with that. And the other thing before I put you out of sleep with the scary parts of things is in the entertainment world there are often provisions and contracts. The theater business has been kind of immune to this but not always. And though there are often confidentiality provisions that carry with them a no right to publicize. That they actually say to you creatively as long as Joe producer has the rights to display Joe producer and it would be a very specific clause. Joe producer controls what happens with a show including publicity for it. It is wisest best to always know before you start talking about your own show if it's underoption to start publicizing yourself because you can get a ticked off producer and that just leads to a bad relationship where that leads to a producer that says I'm not interested in doing this anymore. There are dozens of things like that can happen. So it's easy for me to say like read, read, read but I encourage you read the terms of use on any social networking site you use. You will be surprised by some of them what they say they can do. And you read in the news. Facebook uses people in these sponsored ads and they make ad dollars off of people. They make ad dollars off of name image like this. Guess what? I signed the same terms of use right to do it. So you just have to know what you're dealing with and I think that helps you. If you do that first, maybe people should start saying and I've started saying to producers we need a carve out for the fact that they may have incidental bits from the show on their Facebook page or they might have had it before and it doesn't go away. And maybe it's not a real issue where it becomes a real issue is later down the line like let's say the show gets optioned to be a motion picture. Who really cares about it? Our motion picture producers. Cause that's a world of like you show me everything you've ever done with this and show me that you've always controlled it that no other person has ever had a license for this. And if you have it up on a social networking site maybe it doesn't matter. And most people will do just the pill that says well of course it was on Facebook that's how I found them. But just know what you've done and it's tedious and it's boring and it's awful but it's important. Do you, the author's appeal do you take some precautions when you're putting your own stuff online? Do you try not to put? Well I'm always curious cause there's no good way of sharing music in a playlist form. I've always wondered about, I guess it's because of Napster and things like that that they just make it as hard as they can for you to share your iTunes playlist with another person over the internet. And so I've always wondered like well how? I've been doing a lot of work with Disney and so I can't share it anyway but and I don't really wanna share my stuff before it gets seen but for when I do like is there any other way to share music and I found this thing called SoundCloud and there was something about filling out the application that just made me kind of smell like they own this, they're gonna own everything I put on it, right? So I just, I didn't even read it. I gotta read it, I guess I gotta read it. Is anybody, so I don't have to read it. I don't know. I don't know. Oh yeah, yeah, that's, okay. So that's probably okay. So that's what German, cause nobody likes to download anymore. Right. And I use Dropbox cause that's a convenient way of sharing stuff but it's not that convenient for ordering a track list. You can't, you have to like go in and rename every file 0102, it's ridiculous. So you kind of wanna just be able to like line up a track list. What's that? No, Dropbox. Well, I didn't even read it so I don't know, yeah. Well I think you should start reading it. You should start reading it. You should start reading it. Right, Mark? Read, read. It's a private thing. I don't, yeah, exactly. But it's hard to share things privately too. I mean, Max, one of the things we talked about briefly when we spoke was overexposure and growing too much out there. And maybe some of these sites puts you in that position because you've put too much out there and you can never get it back. Do you want us to talk a little bit about that? I think for, you know, on my side of things this idea is basically to sell the work. So you wanna be very careful in terms of if everyone has read it and everyone has an opinion on it and people have posted about it, you know, you're gonna maybe run into a producer to go and even read it because they can just Google it and hear the 30 different responses from other people. Oh, I can get the copy to play without ever having to get in touch with the author or the author's representative. So I can kind of take my time and read it and develop my own opinion without really having to respond or doing anything official with it. So that's where you wanna be careful, I think. I mean, I advise all my clients that if they're gonna put anything up to be very basic, if it's a play no more than 10 pages, I think, you know, if people wanna read 10 pages, that's fine. There's nothing that could be produced there to make sure, you know, if you've got a website, if people are interested in, I am not one to understand Twitter too much, but if for some reason you were able to get something on other social media snippets and then allow them to contact you and say, look, if you really liked this, let me know, because in general, people are, you know, if you can then be a judge of the character and say, I'm happy to send you this play, happy to send you these songs, but on an individual level, much like you were saying about the Dropbox, that it's one on one versus kind of putting it out there because once it's out there, it's out there. And you know, there are obviously copyright laws and it's hard to get it back at that point. And similarly with music too, I think, yeah, I'm sure you can speak more to it, but I think it's important, particularly if you're writing a musical, that you're able to give people an understanding of what the tone is and what the aesthetic is, but if you're putting whole songs out there, then someone go, I like that melody, so I'm just gonna take that and you don't want to do that, putting snippets, 20 seconds, 30 seconds. We had an interesting thing with the Book of Mormon because it became this kind of point of contention, the producers wanted the cast album up streaming on Facebook all the time on the Facebook page because I thought, well, their argument was, well, it drives people to come see the show, it's setting people can share easily, blah, blah, blah. And my music publisher said, that's cutting in, and the record company said that's cutting into our business, take it off or just stream part of them or just stream a few songs, whatever. And so the producers didn't want to take it off, didn't want to take it off. And then eventually they said, okay, we'll try it, we'll just take it off for a little while and as soon as they took it off, the record sales jumped, they spiked considerably. So it was weird, usually you hear, don't worry about that stuff, just let things be out there. In this case it seemed to, there might have been some other factor, but it seemed to receive a bump from making it a little less successful. Well, I think the other factor, and this is where the fine line comes and why there's a difference between something that's being produced or if you're trying to get people to hear something for the first time. It's the word of mouth. Now people have heard it, it's almost the idea of giving it out for free momentarily and pulling it back and it's like, what happened? Okay, I guess I have to go buy it now. But if no one knows about the show or you're just trying to publicize yourself, I know it's a little bit more difficult. It's a different context like that. There's actually a different way that I've used social media actually, I've realized that the one cool thing to do is to just use it as a way of contacting people, your fans. My daughter fell in love with the show, Phineas and Ferb, I don't know if you've ever seen it on Disney Channel and I got to be a fan of it too. And I saw that the guys who created it were on Facebook and I just kind of sent a message blindly saying like, wow, I'm such a big fan, blah, blah, blah. And like within a month, I was in a room with them working on a song for Phineas and Ferb with them just for kicks. But it was, and I realized like that thing works somehow, like maybe it just takes the place of leaving your house and going to parties and stuff like that. But for people, I don't like to, I wouldn't have, in the age of leaving your house and going to parties, I probably wouldn't have been as connected because I don't like to do that as much. I do like to surf in that. I think that the way to kind of go over arching around this is to say, if you focus less on putting your work out there and more about putting you out there, you'll get a lot further. Like what you did about reaching out like, that happens all the time. I mean, we have members come up to us and say I found myself into a workshop, into a production because I followed a certain artistic director on Twitter and they were tweeting all this stuff about recipes and we actually exchanged like gumbo recipes or whatever. And a few weeks later, they contacted me and said, you know, oh, I saw that you're a playwright. I'd love to read some of your work. So I think that it's less about putting, you tell me if I'm wrong. No, no, I think it's less about putting your work out there and people's face all the time as it is putting yourself. And I think that's brilliant, honestly. I think that's correct because it is taking the place of, like you said, going to a cocktail party. You're able to interact with these people in another setting. You know, when I was more pointing out a separate note, I think that I am a little bit wrong, frankly. Oh, but the idea is that you're, if you, once you're going to use Twitter or anything like it blasts, like that's the place to do it. And that's the way to reach out to people for that kind of thing versus through your own website or blog and traffic is inside. So that was the distinction there. But in terms of, yeah, using it as a, you have ideally several pieces of work. So you're selling yourself, so to speak. And it's interacting with people just like you interact with them anywhere else. And, you know, being a part of, like we've said a couple of times, the community. You know, there is with the actual community and there is the actual community on Twitter and the actual community on Facebook. And it's making sure that you're a part of all of those participating in, you know, serious discussions and also Gumball's space. Yeah, which could be serious, so. It's also, I feel like both Facebook and Twitter are not that useful for actually saying, I have this show going on. Right. Which is not a reason not to do it because you'll get a certain number of people knowing about it. But also, I feel like, I feel like actually the best way is to put something in someone's mailboxes. You just have to email, you just have to build up an email list and send out your, and invite people personally if you want them to come. Because people are inundated by stuff on Facebook. People are inundated by stuff on Twitter. It's just, and it's changed even since the beginning of Twitter. Like a few years ago, it was completely different than it is now in terms of like the amount of stuff that actually gets through. Which is, maybe it's also the number of people that are on there now. We were talking about releasing our material out into the world. And to what extent it is the author's responsibility to go out there and check that these things are police, that people aren't taking snippets or using songs in any way. And do any of you do that? As a matter of course, is that something that just you deal with if it comes up? And then you call Mark? Or do any of that sort of self-regulating or are you pretty open? I mean, I personally have only, I haven't had a lot of productions of plays that weren't licensed. I think I knew about, I found out about one recently and just got in touch with my publisher and was like, check this out, make sure that they paid for this because I never saw it listed anywhere, but I know it's on the internet. And you can do that, you can just search for your own stuff out there and see if it's being done somewhere. And either if it's not published, contact the person yourself and hope you get somewhere. But I mean, the only thing you can do is like get the drama skills on their back, basically, right? Which I mean, that's not nothing. No. Absolutely, I think MTI is always the music theater international. They're guarding their clients' copyrights and I'm sure they use the internet as a way of policing it. Does the fair use standard change on the internet at all? I mean, I think what becomes interesting is, I mean, as a basic matter of being a copyright owner and the MTI comes, that's a good example. You as a copyright owner, you have a lot of responsibilities. You own something and part of ownership is that you have to maintain that copyright, right? And part of maintaining copyright is that if someone's infringing it, you have an obligation in order to make sure you have the strength of the copyright law behind you to stop infringers. Or if you're not stopping them to give them a license, like to do a license after the fact. Because if there's repeated infringement and you've done nothing about it and suddenly you target someone, let's say, you know, it's just like, well, this person's infringing close enough that I can actually march in and make them stop. If you get involved in a legal battle, if you have a history of never enforcing your copyright and suddenly you're just selectively enforcing it, it weakens your argument. It doesn't mean that you've lost your copyright, it actually weakens your argument as to how much you value that copyright. So it could go into a damages calculation. It could go into whether you have, the strongest thing a copyright owner has is a right to injunctive relief. Do you all know what that means? You have the right to stop them, to shut them down. And the standard for injunctive relief is that you have to show that there is no other way that monetary damages would not be sufficient to stop this wrong, to cure this wrong. And the ability to get injunctive relief, if you have a track record of, and the other side's gonna say, but there were 30 other productions. 30 other people did this over the course of five years and suddenly they picked us. And we know, because of things like Google Alerts and everything else, we must have known this was going on. So why would suddenly you judge, issue an injunction to stop us if they're just sort of picking their battles? And the only reason they're picking us is because we have a deep pocket and we feel like they want to pay off. You don't want to deal with that. But you do have an obligation to police that. If you have a licensing agent like MTI, part of a licensing agent's job, much like a music publisher's job, is to enforce copyright on behalf of its clients, right? So you may have someone to do that. That's not the reality for everyone. So the idea of, I wrote this great play, I want people to know about it. So I'm gonna post it, serialize, post it on the Facebook. Like I'm gonna everyday post a scene from it. We've talked about the issue with Facebook and there being possibly a non-exclusive license going on. You've also basically given the gift to the world for free, which is that someone may say, that's a great idea for a play. I'm gonna write my own play that's like that. One of the taking what they're copying is a classic example of fair use. We accept fair use, we're inspired by fair use. Fair use is a fairly good thing, except when you're the person who has discovered that, oh, who liked this was someone that was actually connected enough with the producer, they wrote a different enough play that I don't have any recourse except to say to myself, I will never post my entire work on Facebook again, but you've done something really that's irreparable. You've sacrificed the fact, because now, if you send your play around, everyone's gonna say, there's already, that's exactly like this other play that's being produced. You do yourself a disservice. So fair use kind of comes into it. It more just gets to the point that it's like, why would you share that much? Like a great thing about being an artist is that you can selectively share and the great thing about social networking sites is you're marketing yourself. If someone likes you, if someone's interested in who you are and you open that door and say, I have this treasure trove of things that I've created, you've done, I think, what social networking is really for. You've done what Gypsy Rose Lee taught people. Show them a little bit of me, right? Like, you can give them enough, you can give them enough to bring them in and that's how you develop a relationship. It's a weird thing because it's not, because then you do go to a cocktail party and now everyone stands around sort of like, what are we doing here? How do I talk to other people without typing? I always saw that thing posted on Facebook. Yes, that's what it is, the talk is. So you start to be smart about how you're using it. Trust me, I don't want to read your play on Facebook. I would never read it. But somebody devious might read it and take it for their own. That's what you've got to be careful about. You're not really gonna find a producer that posts on your play on Facebook. I'll just be totally crazy and say that's probably gonna happen one time in someone's life. I mean, it just, it's not the way it works. So just be smart about how you're using it. And also for people posting, we talked a lot about people's, their own material, putting their own material up. What happens when somebody posts material on your site or you're drawing from other sources? What sort of permission, so to speak, do you need in that context? A fairly complicated question. I want to sort of not really give specific legal advice since it's being brought. I mean, here's the basic rule. If it's someone else's and you want to put it on your own website, you better think long and hard before you do it. If it's a matter of, it was a news story. Like that's fairly safe zone in terms of like, that was reported, that's public knowledge. That's probably okay to link to it. But here's the distinction. If it's your website, bottom line, if you're posting someone else's intellectual property on your website, you have a lot of liability for that. If you're linking through, if it's on someone else's site or it's on the news organization's site or it's on the original playwright's site or it's on, you know, it's coming from the original source material and you're linking through, you're probably okay because linking through again isn't copying. But I would encourage you to really think twice before you do anything. A minute you're taking something that isn't yours. If you don't have this general feeling of kind of, I don't know if I should be doing this, you're not thinking and you need to think before you do something. So someone else's work, we have great laws in this country that allow for fair use, that allow for commentary, that allow for things that make it okay, but let a lawyer do that work for you. I'm not plugging like hire me, but that is what a lawyer's job is because a lawyer's job is to take you to the edge without pushing you over it to give you the basic guidance you need in terms of like that's okay. There's always risk involved in what you do, but when you're dealing with other people's intellectual property, to think the same thing, would you want them not doing that to you? Would you wanna see your work on someone else's site? And even if a lawyer eventually tells you that's okay and I've had to tell a number of clients that's okay, that's fair use, we allow that, that's how we function. If you have that feeling about your own work, think about what the other person's feeling. And again, it goes back to that respect issue. Maybe what you wanna do is if you don't know and you can't afford a lawyer, ask the person whose work you're taking. Would you mind if I quote you on my website? Again, you're marketing yourself, you're making a connection, you're skipping the cocktail party and just getting to the gumbo recipe. I mean, you can do that and it's okay. And that's another great thing about social media is you're not on hold waiting for someone forever. You're sending the message, right? Whether it's responded to is another thing, but listen, it's an easy way to connect with people and it's easy way to ask permission. Reviews are different because that falls well within why we have the First Amendment, that's commentary. Reviews are commentaries. A number of a news organization you're providing commentary, there might be a little pushback in terms of whether you're quoting extensively of what was in the play or using production photos or something else. That may be an issue. I don't think ultimately it's a winning, something of a lot to worry about. But again, it's just a matter of what you're taking. Reviews are always safe because reviews, that's what we want. That's how we further the arms. Interviews as well. Interviews is the same thing. I mean, with an interview, especially if you're gonna put it on a website, you're gonna want the person to sign even a basic release because a lot of times interviewees may think, oh, they told me it was just gonna be on this little website and suddenly it's on Facebook and suddenly it's on someone else's website. It expands the basic contract you enter into with a person. So you want some sort of release that says, I may use this. I may give others the right to reprint this. I own it forever. It's just a good practice to get into because what may happen with an interview later is maybe you're a playwright who works like Anna DeBeer Smith or works like a playwright who builds things based on interviews and you may not have the rights to use that interview. So it's a good practice to get into the playwright. If you're being interviewed, like if you're the subject, again, that's generally safe. But again, have you entered into any other contracts that may say you can't do that? Do you have any contractual restrictions on doing it? Probably not, but it just sort of connects the dots on your thing. Adam, have you run into any of that in your... I've never asked anyone to sign anything, which probably will be a problem if I try to publish it, which I'll have to kind of contact each individual playwright and be like, you wanna sign a release? Which could be time consuming, which is partially why there isn't a book right now. Well, I mean, that's another issue of time. I mean, how much time do you spend? Wait something. I mean, how much time do you respond to every tweet? Do you go on there every 10 minutes? I mean, what's the time requirement on this? It's not hard to suck your whole day away just so I can be blowing at your head. But you can be really smart about it. Do you use... Tell me about that. No, I mean, okay, so there are some dashboards that you can use, like Hootsuite or a tweet deck. It kind of like loads all of your social media to one place. I have Hootsuite in front of me right now, and so I can see anyone that's tweeting with the new play hashtag, and then if anyone has mentioned the drama skilled, so on and so forth down the line. Has anyone tweeted? Yeah, we actually have a couple of questions that we'll get to at the Q&A. So it kind of collects all of these things in one place, so rather than going to Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and all these other places, kind of get one skim across. And it's incredibly helpful, yeah. What is it called? So there's a tweet deck and then there's Hootsuite. Have you tried it out yet? Hootsuite, like an owl. Oh, hoot. Hoot. Do you ever use thee, ph, ee, zee? I don't, but I've heard a lot of people using thee. I mean, okay, so then the feed. I mean, I wait, I wait for that phone. So then the other part of this is how you gather information, because part of being in social media is that you can learn from it, right? So Google Alerts are like, my live or die by. I have a, I know, well, I'm still getting them, but they're not as good as they used to be. Yeah, the searches aren't good. There's another thing called Twit Alert that is like Google Alerts for Twitter, so you can put in like, oh yeah, these are all my favorite, so I'm addicted. So like you put in like, submission opportunities in Twit Alert, and then every day you get an alert that that has been mentioned on Twitter. So it kind of does the work for you, so you don't have to go through everything. And then the other thing that like, I am, it is my morning routine now. It's called paper.li, and it's kind of like your own newspaper in the morning. And like more and more people are doing it, and then they're tweeting out like their daily newspaper, which is useful I guess, but like I like the work being done for me, like bring it to me. So you put in like the news source or like the person that you want to follow or the search term, and it collects it all for you and then delivers it neatly to your inbox in the morning or evening, whatever time of day you want it. But then you can publish that to other people, right? Yeah, right. So like it collects all of these articles, and then you can go through and pull what you don't like and keep what you do like, and then you can put that out onto social media. So it's this kind of big bundle of information. So anything that will do the work for you is good. We are ready to open it up to a few questions, but before we do, maybe we could just go down the line. And if everyone just gave their one piece of advice, whether it be don't do this or I love food, sweet, I'm sorry, tweet, whatever it was. We will tell us again. Just go down the line and just give us our one takeaway. And then we'll open it up to some questions from the room. Mine's repetitive. Read terms of use. Just really know what you're doing. Mine would be use the internet to make friends. I'm gonna say don't put full bodies of work on it. I would say treat social media like you would anything, like anything in real life. Treat it the same way. Still thinking. Do some Q&A, I don't know. Yes, we can do some Q&A. If you come up with anything, raise your hand. Sure. Okay. I have actually a couple of questions. If you're putting a synopsis of like a play or plays that you've done on... Personally, I think it's a good idea. I mean, anyone could always steal anything like at any point in the process. It's pretty rare. It doesn't happen a lot. It does occasionally happen. But I feel like if putting a synopsis on your website is probably a better idea than on Facebook, but or you could even put it on Facebook if that's the only thing you have. But I would, if I were you, I would put it on your own website and then I guess there wouldn't be the fear of Facebook owning it, the link to it. From the, you say here's the link to my website and then people will click to your website. In fact, I think there's actually an option that on your Facebook page, it's like name website. I mean, it's one of the things you want to see constantly, right? I mean, you might run into equity problems with that in terms, like if you're using equity actors, I, it depends. What I've had for plays, especially recently, is they do a sort of short film that gives kind of the tone of the play but doesn't have any of the text of the play in it whatsoever. And those were really successful, I think, in getting attention to the play. And actually, we didn't even use the actors that were in the play, but it was the world of the play that we were trying to get across. In my case, I'm talking about, I had this play Clown Bar and we had like these short films of like basically violent clown things happening. And they were really, really well done and I think they got people excited about it but like are not directly related in such a way. And that's sort of how we get around some of the union issues right now. So you had just to talk about it. Right, where you get the actors to talk about something else or talk about what they like about the play or that kind of thing instead of actually reading lines from the play, if they read it. Yeah, the issue you run into is think about everything that's copyrightable to play since costumes, lighting designs, play itself, direction, everything you're doing. So to truly be able to do that, you need consent from every single one of those persons for what you're doing. I'm also a real purist when it comes to theater and the thing I think you need to be careful about is watching a digital version of a play is very different than sitting in an audience seeing it and it could very well send the wrong message and that's easy to say for audience members or people like ephemerally sort of just like experiencing it and maybe that's the only other arguments on both sides of it. What I fear about from the lawyer's point of view is that if you have a play that someone sees and then says to someone, oh, look at this, there's a link up to it on YouTube. It's really good. You're a motion picture producer, take a look at it. You could actually be doing a couple things which is that it's already out there for the world to see. The beauty of theater is that it's sort of like it's a safe environment for many people that it kind of feels elitist but it's a special thing that you pay admission, you go, you sit and you experience something that's more than just what's happening on the stage. You're actually having a community experience but if you do something like that, think of the bundle of sticks that's involved in what you've written. There's motion picture opportunities, television opportunities, there's sequels, there's everything you can do with what you own. You could make a very bad decision and decide like, oh, because I really like this production when I sort of want to spread the word, I want to put it on the internet that could break a lot of the sticks for you. You could sort of send the wrong message about the play itself or other things that the play could be. So there's just reasons to be savvy about, if you have a reason to do it, that's one thing but just to do it, I think again, it's just thinking about why you want to do something. I've noticed that musical theater writers, I don't do this but most young musical theater writers have a collection of clips on YouTube with equity actors doing their stuff in cabaret form and I guess they get away with that because of small rights and it's not really the sort of play. I always thought like playwrights would have an evening of monologues and the criteria. It's tricky because unless you really have someone who's very good with the camera, unless you really know what you're doing, it's almost always going to look terrible and that's kind of the unfortunate truth about it. But watch 10,000 of them and you kind of get to learn to see through it and you cast the whole Book of Mormon workshop from looking at people's YouTube. Oh, really? Oh, wow. I think for that, that's actually a really good point that you can actually get deeper into the talent pool. That's a very positive use of it. My fear is like actually taking your own play and sort of just like throwing up what you present in the theater. It's different to have people sort of singing kind of in that cabaret context songs because that kind of, that again is marketing yourself and I'm just really marketing one piece and it's also a really good tool to use for talent because you may find talent that way where that talent goes on to do something else. That's also part of why we're in this bizarre community, right, like it's a sharing sort of experience. I think that's a positive use of it. I think that cabaret situation works too. I mean, you mentioned that designers like designers things like that. It's a space where they're not bringing in a designer for everything. The space's agreement usually is, you know, we're going to bring everything together. You have the right to tape it. The actor will sign off on it in most cases but are happy to because as we discussed they can get cast from that snippet. And because as a composer, lyricist, I mean, Tommie, just agree with any of this. There's, you own the actual music so you're happy to put it up there but it doesn't actually necessarily tell the whole story. Again, it's a portion, like I was saying, not the whole time. Yeah, plus because it's such a poor quality video it's really not cutting into anybody's enjoyment of it. It doesn't eat away at the live experience or even the cast album because it's got background noise or whatever. It's just not such a great experience but it does get it out there. I've chosen not. We're on the shows that they put out there. Watch our video about our show that they put out there on their company's website. And I'm like, really, I don't know. That's why we don't do that anymore than we just do. Yeah, it's what it felt like very often. I was like, wow, I have seen enough. I don't need to spend $200 and go see this now. I've seen enough. I know what it's going to be about. And I'm totally videotaping them. So far I've not seen one that's made me want to go see the show. Or I feel like I've seen enough of the show now. I don't need to spend the money in the time. We have the show going up in the Italian International Theater Festival this summer. The musical, right? No, it's not a musical. It's called Yesterday Iran, Today Iraq, it's a drama. And I hope you will all come to it. It's July 24th, 25th, and 26th. And that's my marketing pitch. I just wanted to ask Bobby a quick question. I'm still trying to film my way up on Facebook. To get Twitter, that'll be sometime in the future. But when you got the response from the producers for that Kids Show, did you put that on your Facebook page that you liked the show? Or did you go and seek their Facebook? Can you put it on their wall or something? What I did was I guess I was a direct message. A direct message. The guy, he hadn't blocked people from, he happened to be on Facebook and was kind of open. I don't think we were friends yet, but I just sent him a direct message saying, are you talking about Phineas and Ferum? Phineas and Ferum, yeah, yeah. But I also put fan stuff, you know, I tweeted like, I mean, I put on Facebook, I think the show is the greatest thing, I love it. I'm becoming a crazy fan. I tried to do the same thing with my little pony friendship is magic. This is pretty awesome too, but I haven't heard back from them. You'll probably see this. Do you want to take a Twitter question? Well, yeah, so there's a couple. I guess it goes back to how do you get people to actually, so when you're starting out on Twitter, how do you actually get, or Facebook or anything, how do you get people to actually care about what you're putting out? So do you have any tips about, about something that people care about? Which, okay, that's, I mean, yeah, I don't know, it kind of depends on what you're interested in, but talk about what you're interested in, if that's what you want to spend your time doing, then spend your time talking about what you're interested in, and then find the other people who are interested in that. I noticed there are narratives going on all the time on the internet, but the internet is kind of like a cauldron of people are talking about a certain thing a lot, and if you can attach, frame what you want to talk about in terms of the news of the day, whatever the narrative of the day, it gets a lot more traffic, it gets a lot more hints and stuff. I don't really like doing that, but you notice that. If you spell something wrong. And then just one. If someone's name wrong, you'll get a lot more hints. Then the other question is, how does the panel feel about tweet seats? What is that? Do you know, really? What is it? Nevermind, we're gonna skip the question. Certain theaters allow a section for you on Twitter and your screen. Was that like in Smash where they decided to put it? Yeah. I mean, it's just interesting. Like if you're in the dark watching a play, it's really distracting to have even one person with one screen there. So that, I mean, if that was my play, I would hate it, unless like somehow the lights are on the audience, but that's also horrible. They put them in a section, so they all sit together. Oh, really? Yeah, they co-ordered them off, and they put them in a section. Oh, that's a good way. But I don't see how those people are actually involved in the play, because the whole point of the interview is to lose yourself in the show. Right, yeah. You just put yourself out there. I think that's part of it. I mean, I don't want to step in, but I think part of it is, too, that, you know, we're all on this panel kind of discussing what is all of this stuff and how do we use it. I think that, you know, production companies, I was at a Yankees game that I began, the red t-shirt, I mean, people are starting to play with it and forgot exactly what it is. So, I mean, to answer the question, how I feel about it personally is I think it's interesting and we can see if something comes of it, but I also think they're right in that, well, then the person's not engaged in the play, so what's the idea behind it? But, you know, I think it's important to kind of push the boundaries and see what we can do with the social media, because if we just say no, then we'll figure it out. You can't tweak the drives. If you read the technology issue of the dramatist, like, there are a few articles in there where they talk about, you know, how they're using social media for their shows. So, I think that there's a case to be made that there are smart ways to really integrate it, but I think that like personally, for me, for me is like, you know, there isn't necessarily a, tweet seats for like Virginia Woolf doesn't seem as fitting as like a new play where they thought about it when they were writing it. It's like, you know, the character was gonna tweet to you, you know, so you get both sides of it, you know? There's a smart way and then there's a not smart way, so. It's interesting because you, like the footage from the musical doesn't work for you. That doesn't draw you in, right? It turned me off. So, here's the issue. Like, how do we market this industry to people that generally don't go to theater, right? Like 20-somethings theater's not for them. It's what grandma and grandpa did to them. To me, it was what mom and dad did. Blessedly, I liked theater. I mean, there has to be a way to sort of figure this out for people. The industry does fine, but it's not gonna do fine forever because if 20-somethings aren't going to play, is there, if they're only going to, you know, maybe an American idiot or maybe rent, they're not getting the reason that theater exists, right? Like, there's a broader reason for it. So, you know, like maybe it doesn't work at Virginia Woolf, but could it work one night a week at Virginia Woolf, or could it work during an admission? But you know what I mean? There's a way to do it and I think this sort of like, marketing is about sort of that broad stroke. How do we find the target, right? So there has to be a way to do it. Personally, I would be irritated if I saw a glowing section of theater tweeting during a show. I would be appalled. It would be literally appalling to me. I like your admission idea. You know, there's things I'm just saying, like you know, but the only way to find that out is for us to be saying, like would I mind an admission? I'd be irritated, because I'd be thinking, I want to talk to the person I'm with, but I'd look at people and say, hey, if there's a way to market this, and it's free, you know what I mean? Like it's an easy thing to do. So you have a question over here. Two nuts and both questions. If one is putting up a whip, it's like, ya! I mean, I'm on it, but I never go there, ever. The only time I go there is when people request me, and then like once a week or so, I'll go on and say yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and then I leave. Licton's great for like full contact info, or like a bit more depth of sort of who this person is. I think that it's become sort of a joke of the social media world in terms of like, like then, like ya, and who can't, you know what I mean? I use it as a lawyer because it's easy for me to connect to other business people or to find people quickly. I feel weird about going to Facebook to find a professional. It feels strange to me as a lawyer if I'm in dating someone's space, so I think it's good for that. It just, it doesn't function the same way, because there isn't the same amount of interactivity that I think that's more exciting about the other social media. It's not really to necessarily endorse one type of thing over another. It's just sort of where the flow of energy seems to be going, and this is probably gonna change, change all the time. That's right, that's right. I think it's good for, you know, you can find out who your friends. I'm one link away from a director. You can go, do you know this guy? And he's like, yeah, best friends, you know. I think it's really good for... Rooms are very specific, I'm honest, yeah. I think it's good for that. I think the thing is that I don't think that younger people think of it the same way, and I don't wanna keep saying it's only the younger people that matter. I think that because it feels more static, it feels more like a database that people don't use it the same way, and it doesn't function the same way. I mean, I thought the function of it was kind of to get jobs, to connect with people in the industry. But I think... What's up? Isn't that why we're all here? But I think that most of the people are on, more of them are on Facebook than are on LinkedIn, so I think it's just like, that's, I would go to Facebook first, and then I would search them, and then whatever pops up, either their LinkedIn might pop up if they don't have a website, but I wouldn't go to LinkedIn first to find someone because probably they're more likely to be on Facebook. Like, what was your first question? Actually, that was your first question. I wanna actually just help LinkedIn just for a second, because I think it's not a complete waste. Like, LinkedIn is a great place to go for information. Like, if you have a question about a certain thing, like, so the Dramatist Guild has a LinkedIn group, and like, there are people on it all day long asking questions about, you know, their experience at a certain theater, or a certain region, or what opportunities are out there. So I think that like, it's great to house like, one conversation, and not to say that Twitter and Facebook don't have those, but because of its professional kind of vibe, that's kind of, to go to LinkedIn, that's kind of what you go there for. So that's, I'm just, I wanna help LinkedIn just a little bit. I did not mean to disparage it. My yawn was more like, that's the reaction I hear from people. I do use LinkedIn, but I'm a lawyer, so it fits well within, you know, it's sort of like, that's what it, I think that piggybacks onto what your other question was, because the idea behind, in terms of getting people to your page, and trying to traffic, you know, the idea behind LinkedIn versus Facebook, I feel like is, you know, LinkedIn, my 12 year old niece is not talking about boys with her friends on it. It's, you know, it's very much a professional environment, and I think there's, you know, depending on the sites, as you guys go out and experiment with some of them to find the ones that work better for what you need it for. But one of the reasons I think Facebook does so well is because it has so many different purposes. So it allows, it drives more traffic through it, and therefore advertisers are there more and more people are linking to it. So in terms of your question about linking to your page, the idea is to kind of put yourself in a position and in a place where people are going to see you the most. If your website is completely separate, it's not necessarily gonna drive people, people aren't just gonna Google your name and then go on your website. That could happen, but the better way to go about it is to, you know, link to Facebook, link to all sorts of other different sites. And the idea being that Google and the spiders will crawl through every website all over the place and they'll keep getting driven back to your page. And the more that happens, the more you're able to join traffic. I don't think there's a specific tag or anything, but it really is truly just, you know, going on Twitter and going on Facebook. And the longer you do it and the more times you're linking back to your page, the more people, the more ways that those spiders are gonna find a way back to your page. So I feel like you're gonna be a better way to handle it. Well look, so here's the thing. There are plenty of people that would tell you that there is like an algorithm. There's like a formula to put in your website that makes you the top search. There are plenty of people that would tell you that. The truth is, every time someone figures that out, like Google, all the search engines have already gone around it so that they aren't like clogged with that code. So the way to go about, you know, making your site active or making people come to your site is to make it active. It's to do exactly what you're saying and like link it out, share it. The more that you update something, all of these are things that factor into whenever someone searches either your name or one of your play titles that it is driven to your site as opposed to someone else's site. Does that make sense? It's almost like planting seeds. I mean, you're kind of just, you're throwing out a link here and a link there and then over time, the more people that go to that website and click on that link, all of these search engines are gonna see people are clicking on that link and people are going to that site and it's all feeding back to you, to that original source which was your website. So the longer they're there and the more there are, the more traffic it's gonna drive but it's something that just takes time and takes a lot of back. But are you talking about blogs here? Or are you talking about? I mean, I'm just talking in general, the SEO, like search engine optimization. Sure. But in terms of like if, in general, like the old way of having a website, you kind of put your information on it and then try to link to the other places where you are. Right. But are you, when you're saying put out links, are you saying have more and more and more links on that website? Or are you saying have links from other locations to linking back to your website? I think in general, okay. So then just to make this like really, it's like, I think that the main thing is so that it looks really active, whether it's a blog or your website, to make it look active and make the more traffic that is coming to your website, the better. So if it's updated regularly and if people are coming to it, so you get people to come to it by sharing it out through Twitter and Facebook and all that stuff, right? Another thing that you see on blogs are that people will, they'll write an article and then they'll link it and say, if you like this, then you might like this article because it applies. Or within the article they'll say something about their summer vacation and then they'll link to that article. So I think there's a way to kind of tie it together so you can think that way. Okay, yes. Is it your website? Correct. Well, you can certainly go to it at any time and log in and post whatever you'd like to. Well, it's a relatively new feature of the website so I do give it some credit on that. Look, the goal, look. You gotta drive some more traffic to that. We gotta drive some more traffic. No, no, no. Look, the thing is this. From the Guild Sample, we wanted a place for Guild members to be able to talk to one another in a secure place. And I think that the more that people do that and the more people see it and get comfortable with it, the more that they will go to that place to share information. So I think that it's in like, it's starting phases and I think that you'll see it kind of develop. I really do. And you know, the other thing is our website is being worked on all the time and we're trying to make it more user friendly and give you more through our website. So I think in time you're really, listen, I don't wanna drop any secrets but in time you're gonna fall in love with our website. So. I have a licensing question. If you have your play out there and somebody uses it and you find out about it, what should your steps be? I have a play that's come out, Agent Slash Promoter and he's going crazy with it already. I'm thinking, what if somebody picks this up and they're using it, which is what I want but then how do I catch up with, wait a minute, you're supposed to let me know that this is being produced or being done. Because I have all kinds of copyright stuff all over the play and nobody's allowed to use it unless they contact me and blah, blah, blah. Because Amazon just wants to sell the play. They're just selling a printed play. Which is, it's not to produce it. I'm the one who wants to know if anybody's gonna produce it. What do I do if somebody does produce it and how do I go after them? I just say, cease and desist. You just send a cease and desist letter and you say you have no permission. Or you should just call the guild office too and they'll help you with it. Instead of, or you could call Mark. Yeah, it's, your instinct is right. You tell them to stop, that's what cease and desist means. Or pay me, or pay me if you wanna do it. But yeah, talk to the guild office. Do you think it's a good idea to talk to a self-employed person? I think it's different for everybody. I mean, I don't, we talk generally about the dangers of it. I think it's a personal decision. I have clients that don't wanna do that because they're very protective of it and they believe in the process of this is the right process for me, which is that it's a personal, private road to getting it produced the way I wanna get it produced. Other people feel like it's a great way to get the information out there and get people interested in that. It's just different for everybody. And there's dangers in that, right? Like the more you hold something close to you, it's a business decision. Maybe it's no one ever sees it and maybe it's never produced. And the opposite is that the whole world has it and it leads to this problem, that people are producing it without a license. You know, it's a necessary part of the business though. It's just the way it works and it just becomes a decision you have to make. Sorry, not out of max, sorry. That makes more sense. I will be honest and say that I'm not the most active in social media. And I'm trying to think about, I don't know if it's happened, but it's not that it couldn't happen, I guess. You know, I feel like a lot of agents and managers are positioned where they're getting recommendations from people that they have relationship with already. And for reasons of keeping that relationship up and also because you trust their tastes, they usually kind of rise to, okay, I need to read this now. And when that happens quite a bit, it's harder to kind of go on a whim. But I do think, particularly when I was getting started and I think when I can, those are the kinds of things that, if the interest is peaked, then yeah, why not? Why not give it a read and why not see? I think, you know, you had a great example of just knowing these guys and saying, look, I love the show. I love to write with you and it happens. So I don't know that it's the most common thing, but it is possible. And I feel like people will listen. It's going to be a little far afield, but podcasts and you experienced doing them, and so what kind of technology is it? Oh, I just got a few responses. Yeah, I just dealt with this. So I don't want to speak to it too much because we're still figuring it out. But it's an interesting, there are actually a couple of companies that are doing this now that are interested in broadcasting full versions of plays, like radio plays and having them available for free. And, you know, depending on where you are and what the exposure you need, the question is, is it good for the writer or not? And what are the royalties? And the idea is with something like a podcast, most people are getting them through other organizations like Apple, obviously, who have just abuse, which are rather complicated. And even if the writer and the producer of these podcasts have a great agreement, everyone's on the same page, it may not necessarily just be up to them, it has to do with the distributor and who has access to that content. So I've been doing this quite a bit in terms of, you know, can it be a podcast where we can expire? Are there ways it can stream exactly? Is there a way to manage who is streaming it and how and to be able to remove it from computers can it be recorded? So it's a complicated issue. I had a good question, but I don't know. I think this goes back to the point earlier, the really good podcast I listen to on a daily basis are someone talking about their work, like it's someone sharing the five tips for better marketing or the five tips of using social media. So it isn't necessarily putting your work out there, it's again, it's putting yourself out there. I will say the Guild has the podcast series in the room and it's all about writers talking about their craft and talking to each other about it and kind of building up that. And it's been fairly successful What technology do you use? We use, it's all archived audio. So we have all of the literally reel to reels digitized and then we have the MP3 and then we edit that through GarageBand and then, you know, then it makes it up to our website and then through iTunes. Okay, great, thanks. Yeah, I should be clear. I mean, podcasts I think are a good thing, particularly with all this. I just mean that in the work itself to put an entire work on is on their competition, but you know, if it's just like I enjoyed the song, great. I hated the song, fine, you're allowed to do that. It's, I can't really describe because it would be such a ridiculous situation. It would be saying, I listened to this song and I met this composer once and this composer had sex with a goat. I mean, it would have to be something. I mean, it would have to be something. You didn't have to do with a goat. You didn't have to do with a goat. You'd have to cross a line, but I'm hoping no one in this room would ever see it cross it. So, you know, it's that kind of thing. It's going into sort of like the definition range of things. We're allowed to comment on things. We live in a great country when it comes to that. We're allowed to do that. It's when you cross a line. And again, I can't tell you what line you're gonna cross because I don't know you, but you know, so it just, you'd have to just be mindful of what you're saying about something. On that note, thank you all for coming. Thank you to our panelists.