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As the web becomes the quintessential tool in the arsenal of film producers, the good folks at the University of British Columbia are making sure the next wave of filmmakers and film financiers understand it’s power.

They are doing so through a new four-evening seminar series on Digital Media for Entertainment that teaches how digital media is changing the way the industry creates, produces and distributes entertainment.

The program is part of the highly innovative UBC Certificate in Entertainment Administration program (which received the 2009 Program of Excellence Award from the Canadian Association of University Continuing Education).

Back in June I participated in the first round of Digital Media in Entertainment seminars delivering a talk and leading discussion on Social Media’s role. Yesterday I had the pleasure to speak to another round of UBC business students eager to navigate these waters.

Once again it was an energetic evening covering social media’s impact on traditional media, a survey of social media forms, and an in-depth look at how we can use social media to finance, produce, distribute, market, and measure the success of our entertainment properties.

The thing that struck me the most this time: just how much has changed in six months. The numbers are bigger, the tactics more innovative, the possibilities that much greater. One can only wonder where we’ll be by summer.

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking to a group of business students at UBC.

Their focus is the entertainment industry and the talk was part of a four-part section they go through on Digital Media. My co-presenters were Earl Hong Tai, former Regional Director of Telefilm Canada, Rochelle Grayson, Vice-Chair, Canadian Women in Communications, and Danika Dinsmore, Editor at Script Creative. Together we covered topics ranging from content development for online to cross-platform planning to revenue and monetization models. I was asked to focus on social media in entertainment.

Despite my initial reservations about the topic (I’m terrified of the term “social media expert”), I had a great time putting my talk together, and the night itself turned out to be quite positive and energetic. The social web really is amazing. We went for four hours!

One of the more amusing insights to emerge from the evening came from a discussion about the media’s use of social media before the Internet. We talked about America’s Funniest Home Videos, Speaker’s Corner, radio call-in and music request shows, letters-to-the-editor, and many other examples of user-generated content, conversation, and opinion from the time before web 2.0 “changed everything”.