The Power of Watch Instant

Honestly I had a really hard time answering the question how did this documentary incorporate blogging, vlogging, user-contributed media, and other online and mobile tools into their plans for outreach and distribution.  I was able to come up with two different mobile web tools they used. 


The first tool was letting Netflix use it as a Watch Instant. This was really smart on their part. If you have Netflix and use Watch Instant you know that after watching a good assortment of films, it will start recommending them too you. This allows for the chance that a movie you usually wouldn't see, like Deliver Us From Evil, to show up on your screen. It helps get it out there, and it is easier to sway you into watching it because you don't have to wait for it to come to you in the mail. Just one click and the film is streaming on your screen. That's one way to get the film and the issue at hand out to people that normally wouldn't think or know of it.

The second tool is by setting up the website http://www.deliverusfromevilthemovie.com/your-thoughts. This site wasn't as developed as some of the other sites we've looked at, like for Promises http://www.promisesproject.org/credits.html, but it did do one key thing that the other didn't. Each section like Movie Reviews, Movie Claims, and The Director all had a section where you could bookmark and share that piece to other online social networks like Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and 286 sites and sections. This will help get the film and its message out faster then just setting up a site and hoping people will stumble upon it in search engines.


I think on the topic of websites creating a meaningful discussion or a breading ground for crazies can go either way.  You are always going to get that one person who wants to just go on an epic rampage not truly caring in the whole "discussion" part of the discussion but more just wanting to preach and hear themselves, or in this case, read their own typed preachings.  Take this discussion page I found as an example :
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=174839  It's a forum called Catholic Answers Forum which claims to be the largest Catholic community on the web. This is post from a thread going on about Free Will. The quote from the thread they are commenting on I feel is just trying to preach. But when I dug around the site a little more, some topics were having civil conversations on issues questions or concerns. 
So in that case, I really feel like these kind of websites are asking for and going to get a little bit of both, active participants and the attention getting preachers.