By this point you will have read countless tributes and obituaries to Roger Ebert. Following Mashable’s excellent roundup of his digital life (link here), I wanted to put focus on Ebert’s shrewdness in promoting himself and his passions for film and film criticism. Ebert is an endlessly fascinating man, and this piece, among others, will not do justice to his legacy.  He was a great social media marketer, in the same way that he was great as a mass media personality in what seems like a lifetime ago. This tribute intends to be more practical and sentimental. But first, let’s start at the very beginning:
 

Who is Roger Ebert?

Wikipedia notes above all else that Ebert was a film reviewer for the Chicago Sun-Times. He had worked with them from 1967 literally until death.
Ebert was also known for bringing film reviews to TV with perennial friend/rival/colleague Gene Siskel. They started out with a small, popular PBS show called “Sneak Previews” in 1975, and then conceived their first show “At The Movies” with Tribune Entertainment from 1982-1986, until finally settling for a syndicated program under Disney. Ebert and Siskel coined, lost and regained the show title “At The Movies”, but was able to trademark the “two thumbs up” rating system the show had become famous for. Ebert’s tenure with Disney ran from 1986 to 2008, surviving Siskel (died of cancer, 1998)
Ebert’s third life came online in various forms and incarnations. His early dalliances with CD-ROM and Compuserve are noteworthy, but we know him very well today from having established a site that hosted and archived his film reviews, as well as becoming one of the more popular voices on Twitter.

What are Roger Ebert’s achievements in the mass media?

Ebert has been pivotal in the popularization of film reviews. The way he reviewed films makes them very accessible to everyone, and he encouraged others to form and share their own opinions of films. He also championed favorite films and filmmakers, even when those films may not have been popular with other critics. He can be very critical of the industry that makes the films he does and can have very harsh opinions. He is particularly known for his acerbic takedowns and disses of people.
He spread his passion for film and film criticism very deliberately and brilliantly. In his Chicago Sun-Times film reviews, many of which were archived for a new generation in his website, Ebert wrote not for himself, but for the viewing audience, describing his work as “relative, not absolute.”
Ebert’s intentions were more overt when it came to television. Between him and his co-reviewer Gene Siskel, and later Richard Roeper, Ebert popularized forming opinions on movies, even arguing about them with each other. Whether both reviewers were to come to a consensus was not as important as making them care enough to assert their views in the first place.
Behind the scenes, Ebert and Siskel fought to keep their shows going in the direction that they wanted. They had left both shows under PBS and Tribune after contract disputes, finally settling in with Disney.
Unlike Siskel, Ebert had the foresight to expand his following with the advent of computers. This started with his Cinerama CD-ROMs, which were effectively reference books for movies in a cheap digital format.
More forward thinking than that was his presence at Compuserve, before the World Wide Web even existed. Beyond posting his reviews online, Ebert used Compuserve as a second mail box, taking questions from other users.
The Chicago Sun-Times gave Ebert his own site in the 1990s, including an archive of his reviews, and in 2003 he launched RogerEbert.com, hosting expanded archives of his work. By 2008 Ebert was effectively blogging on his sites, and started a presence in Twitter a year after that.
Ebert enjoyed steering his ship online. He may have also published books and did TV, but in those media he had to contend with editorial direction, and many times he had to compromise or bow out. When it finally came to his blog and Twitter, late in life, Ebert felt firsthand the consequences of the digital revolution. He could say whatever he wanted, in the way he wanted to. No need to worry if advertisers would back out or if he might piss off some bigwigs. His most famous online squabbles revolved around his ‘videogames are not art’ statement, his criticism of 3D cinema, and his secular humanism.

What can Roger Ebert teach us about staying up to date in the new media?

a)      Stay on top of technology that connects with people.

Ebert dabbled in everything; from a newspaper column, which he never left, to books, television, and several incarnations of the internet, Ebert experimented with all the avenues available to spread his love of film and film reviews.
Physically, Ebert’s health started a painful road of deterioration in 2002 when he was diagnosed with papillary thyroid cancer. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, he found himself blogging and tweeting to keep communicating with people. One would imagine he would have lived a less happy and fulfilling life if these avenues were not available for him.
In fact, Ebert had broader online ambitions than he could accomplish. Even when he first passed the baton over for his Disney show “At The Movies”, he was already talking of bringing the show online, with some monetization model firmly in place, way before Hulu or Funny Or Die showed something like that was even possible.

b)      Share your life and passion online.

Ebert would share much of his private life in the relatively short span of time he was on Twitter and on his blog. He loved to come back and annually revise his list of the 100 best movies, reminisced on his rivalry-turned-friendship with Siskel, named his favorite foods long after he could physically eat them, and other diversions.
He made public the conversation on long term care and physical illness in the elderly, in ways that may have made many uncomfortable, but those who followed him were concerned and made intimately familiar of those details.
It’s hard to gauge if he could have really kept his influence online the same way he did on TV so many years ago. Hollywood used to genuinely fear that thumbs down from him, as it could make or break the fortunes of a production, comparable to how Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes affects the business of movies now, but back then in the hands of only two (he and Siskel).
What we do know is Ebert kept his own name relevant. The Ebert brand itself, which was synonymous with the movies, movie opinions and movie reviews, predated and dominated those search terms, and will now likely continue to do so as Ebert.com remains a going concern.

c)       Archive everything.

No doubt, Ebert had a lot of help retaining and maintaining his archive of reviews. He may not have had the technical knowhow to backup his WordPress, and probably knows less about this than most of us.
But even if he needed help, he knew it was important to archive all that work, and make it easy for his followers to access and find it. It was not just for the benefit of his hardcore fans, or to boast that he had done all this before. You archive all your work so that you can clearly define your identity.
Ultimately, his branding served to fuel back his conversations, which is what he used the web for the most, but even if we have other intentions, it’s infinitely invaluable for us to follow his example on this end. This may seem like a relatively minor consideration, but Ebert’s fans actually learned more about him in the last five to ten years of his life than in the first few, because of this invaluable action.
 
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