Nowadays, a fan page on Facebook is a must-have for every brand. Having a fan page alone, however, is not enough. A brand also has to activate and constantly engage its fans. It’s about turning passive fans into active brand advocates, who recommend the brand to their friends.

The website Kino.de attracts more than 4.6 million visits each month and it is the leading movie and cinema related website in Germany. The company behind Kino.de, Gruner + Jahr, is publisher of leading b-to-b and b-to-c print magazines with focus on films. With Kino.de, it also takes advantage of Facebook and so far, it has attracted more than 5000 fans, which makes it the largest German language movie  fan page on Facebook.

To further grow and engage its fan base, Kino.de now partners with SnipClip. The result of this partnership is a digital collector’s album featuring the movie highlights in March:

The collection consists of eight movie recommendations made by Kino.de. Each collectible shows the trailer of a recommended movie. Users gather “movie stars”, an in-game currency that they then exchange for collectibles. The goal of the users is to complete the collection. If they do so by March 25, users have the choice to enter a sweepstakes and the chance to win a Blu-ray DVD player and free movie tickets.

In order to have more trading partners for their duplicate collectibles, users want their friends to participate the game. Jointly, they will also be able to gather more movie stars. As a result, users are highly motivated to invite their friends to the game and thus, they spread the brand across their social network.

Growing the fan base is one goal. Activating and engaging existing fans is another one. Therefore, Kino.de also publishes bonuscodes that can be redeemed for collectibles on their fan page:

The availability of codes is limited and only the fans who click the link first get a copy of a specific collectible. As shown in the picture above, fans like those activities and they also comment on them. This results in increased exposure of the posts and the Kino.de. Further, it increases the value perception of being a fan: as a fan you receive bonuscodes automatically delivered to your Facebook news feed.

This leaves us with inviting you to become a fan of Kino.de, to play the collecting game and hopefully, to win one of the valuable prizes. Good luck!

Today, we published another fanbook on SnipClip:

It contains seven video scenes and one commentary from the new and award-winning movie Wüstenblume! The movie tells the story of a nomad girl becoming a topmodel. If you watch the video collectibles of the fanbook you get an impression of the story and the movie. So, have fun with SnipClip!

These guys are true fans:

Via D/B

If you wake up one day in such a company: then run!

David O’Reilly – I met him at Webinale in May – posted a showreel of his work. Amazing stuff. Here it is:

Thanks to a posting from Bret I discovered the following article:

In April, Viacom’s Paramount Digital Entertainment signed a partnership agreement with Makena Technologies, making thousands of movie clips from the Paramount movie library available on There.com, an online virtual world. Visitors who purchase the clips can use them to communicate with others by having their avatar “speak” lines from movies while the actual clip plays in a small window. Links allow users to purchase DVDs of the featured movies.

Read the full article: Movie Studios Expand Into Virtual Web Worlds

What a cool open source movie:

You may also download a high quality copy.

“21″ is the name of a new movie – watch the trailer here. Last week, Advertising.com invited us to a sneak preview. It was an entertaining evening at the Filmtheater Sendlinger Tor. Thanks to Nicola from Advertising.com, who invited us – we meet Nicola at the Munich Online Network. Today Advertising.com published photos from the evening. You find us on the fifth page, second column, fourth row.

(click here and read more…)

This question comes from my favorite movie WarGames. It’s about an artificial intelligence called WOPR, which is hacked by Matthew Broderick. The computer is trained to fight the World War III and loves to play Tic Tac Toe (btw: my first computer program, written in Pascal, was Tic Tac Toe; not so easy as you might think). However, the computer can not distinguish between game and reality and so it is beginning to launch the nuclear weapons …

There are four insights I’ve learned from this movie:

1. Arthur Rubinstein makes remarkable movie soundtracks.
2. The most used password of this time was “Joshua”, because everybody watched the movie and thought, this a cool password to remember (btw: there have been several famous hacks, where hackers used this password, so don’t use it!)
3. With the right strategy on both sides no one can win Tic Tac Toe, or a nuclear war!
4. Playing games makes you smart!

You don’t believe #4? This insight isn’t new – or take for example this famous book:

Johnson, Steven [2005]. Everything Bad is Good for You. Riverhead. ISBN 978-1594481949.

However, the debate is still actual as more and more people spend their time playing games. The good news: computer games becoming more and more social games. In the old times of video games people play alone against the computer. Thanks to multiplayer consoles like the Wii (a lot of friends of mine arrange regular Wii parties) and multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft people play together and not only learn strategic thinking or train their reactions, but also gain social intelligence while playing together.

The next step will be to use online gaming for dating. Think about how you made your first friends in live! Probably by asking: “Do you want to play?”

So play games and have a good time!