Without doubt 'Social Media' has been a huge blessing for Movies and TV Shows, we can't help but share our passion, dilemmas, and sometimes spoiler alerts.  

'Downton Abbey' was/is a worldwide hit.

At its height the weekly viewing figures in the UK for the show peaked at 9 million, in the US it peaked at 12.6 million viewers for each episode. 

There are circa 220 countries who pay for the rights to broadcast the show, around the world. 

Social media has even been used to advise the Wardrobe and Set designers of 'bloopers' on the show, such as the plastic bottle of water left on the grand mantelpiece during a series of photo shoots to promote the final series of the show, all great 'free' publicity for the show around the world.

Several years ago I helped a client recover from a Google site wide penalty (case study here) in record time - 2 months. The recovery was mainly down to ‘content creation, blogs, articles' etc, but mainly through the power of social media and the sharing of relevant and engaging content.  

So, you could say I had been awakened to the true power of 'social media' for something more than just posting pictures of my pet Labrador, romantic holidays, and advertising products and services many years ago. 

Shortly after this dilemma with the Google penalty I was asked by someone on LinkedIn for some help and advice in growing her fledgling business. 

She had managed to convince 'NBC Universal' (owners of the Downton Abbey franchise) to award her a 12 month 'Royalty based' UK license deal to produce, market and distribute a mail order catalog she had called ‘Downton Abbey at Home’. 

All inspired by the TV show. 

She was struggling to make it work, and wondered if I could help - I subsequently acquired the company (and said rights) and immediately began renegotiating the 'heads of terms' for the license with NBCU which was due for renewal. 

This was to now include the worldwide rights for eCommerce and Mail Order, all of which was jointly agreed subject to contract and new terms. So, whilst the lawyers did their bit, we selected and bought product, we created the website, mail order catalog, every step of the way needing face to face sign off by the NBCU brand police. 

All the time the clock was ticking as we neared the end of the final series. 

Our ambitious goal was based on the assumption that if we could do this for 'Downton Abbey', then NBCU (and others) would trust us with other franchises. 

With 2 weeks to go before the signing and finalising of the new contract, which now included an extremely hefty upfront quarterly fee, including royalties we started to set up our 'Social Media' presence on all the usual platforms.

As part of this process I began to notice lots of small companies on Facebook and Instagram promoting 'Downton Abbey inspired’ goods & services, Books, Cooking Recipes, Furniture, Clothes, even video's. 

When we checked further it seemed these numbered in the 100’s, in many different countries, across many different big/small companies, and as far as we could tell, all unlicensed  - so why were we being asked to pay such huge sums upfront, along with heavy royalty fees?. 

On the day of signing the renegotiated terms I asked the guys at NBC Universal about all these folks on social using the 'Downton Abbey' brand name to ‘sell’ products and services. "Do they have a license"? we asked, the answer that came back completely floored me because they said "some do, some don't".

We then asked them as the ‘Rights owner’ what they were going do about the ones that don't. 

The following answer incensed me and my team, we had been working on this project for over 18 months, I had personally cashed in a significant chunk of our pension and savings (my wife can't be excluded from the pain) in order to get it off the ground; 

“We don't know who the unlicensed ones are, and we can’t do anything about people doing this on social, we also don’t want to piss-off the fan base” 

was their overly blunt reply.

Inevitably I asked why I should pay a 6 figure sum and royalties for something I can do on Social media without their permission or payment - as you can imagine the conversation didn't get much further than this.

Unfortunately that relationship (and others) along with what we had hoped would have been a great business opportunity died on that day, but also so did a number of job losses, something I still regret to this day.

My final point on all of this, is that without the adversity of the Google penalty, the significant financial kick in the nuts from NBCU I would probably be where you are right now.....

Thinking that Social Media is just for posting pictures of your latest award win, finding a job, or announcing you just got a new one with a fancy new title, intrusive advertising, and showing me what you just had for lunch.  

What epiphany helped you to realise that social networks are for more than intrusive advertising?

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