I saw this video posted earlier this month on Facebook by someone by budding self-described actress, director, writer Anna Akana and recently saw that The Huffington Post had picked it up. Although I’m a guy, I liked the message that Akana is delivering – that beauty is both outside *and* inside. The YouTube video has over 1.4 million views now!
If you’re starting off in Hollywood (or entertainment in general), it definitely makes sense to develop an audience on YouTube and in social media. The still precocious musician Taylor Swift wrote had some interesting insights when she wrote an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal recently on the future of the music industry, which I think is applicable to entertainment overall:
“A friend of mine, who is an actress, told me that when the casting for her recent movie came down to two actresses, the casting director chose the actress with more Twitter followers. I see this becoming a trend in the music industry. For me, this dates back to 2005 when I walked into my first record-label meetings, explaining to them that I had been communicating directly with my fans on this new site called Myspace. In the future, artists will get record deals because they have fans—not the other way around.”
Looks like Akana is hitting all the social media channels with YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, and her own website, and on her resume, even lists the number of followers:
She of course, has an IMDB, but not famous (or infamous) enough I guess to have a Wikipedia entry yet and it doesn’t look like she’s on LinkedIn. It’ll be interesting to see if she can achieve mainstream success through her social media efforts or make a living off of YouTube, like KevJumba, Ryan Higa and Michelle Phan. Although I live in Silicon Valley, I don’t make it to LA that often, but would be interesting to meet her in person one day (I’m sure the degrees of separation are small), especially now that she’s declared herself single. 🙂
