Guest Post: Kim Garland on Scriptchat and Building a Twitter Community
I had the pleasure of meeting Kim Garland when I was in NYC for Independent Film Week in September. I was fascinated by how she and her Treefort group built a devoted community on twitter using regular Twitter chat sessions. She graciously agreed to write a post explaining their process – but in the process she provides great guidelines on building community.
Building a Dedicated (and Rocking) Twitter Community
By Kim Garland
Sometimes the real action is happening in the peanut gallery. There’s the main show on stage, carefully planned and rehearsed, and then there’s that wild bunch in the crowd, landing more jokes than the paid performers. I’ve always been partial to the rebellious, high-spirited nature of a good peanut gallery, and that’s where the Twitter community called Scriptchat began.
A year ago, a few screenwriters and I popped into a Twitter chat for writers. We found it to be entertaining, and a cool way to talk craft, but quickly realized the chat was geared to Fiction writers – a fine form but not the one we were obsessing about – and we started bellyaching to each other about how we didn’t have a chat of our own.
In the time it takes to type 140 characters, the idea for #scriptchat was born, and by the next week we were hosting our own chat.
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