Yesterday, I had the opportunity to join a panel discussion on The Strategic Growth Concepts for Small Business, a blogtalkradio show discussing the basics of social media and how small business can leverage community activity to grow. For many small business owners and marketers, navigating social media can be a challenge due to lack of time and resources. As a result, many companies miss out on an opportunity to harvest customer insights and data through online relationships that could drastically impact their bottom lines.
Simply getting started can be daunting for many folks who haven’t grown up with the technology. The panel stressed that having a strategy and plan in place that details your goals and expectations is crucial before jumping headfirst into the social media conversation. This isn’t just good practice for small business, many large organizations should think long and hard about their current activities and how the disjointed efforts may impact future initiatives and segment their audience. All too often, many marketers fail to see the big picture, understand the extent of the commitment and know where to participate to obtain the greatest ROI. You don’t need to be everywhere and you don’t need to reach everyone - reach the right audience in the right place with the right information.
For more insights, listen to the panel discussion featured here and feel free to leave comments on the blog or direct message me on Twitter (http://twitter.com/KevinMGreen) if you’d like to discuss further.
DIG felt honored to work on a campaign that sought to draw attention to the plight of the Burmese people for human rights, freedom and peace. During each day in May, a different video appeared with celebrities urging viewers to sign an online petition, share the site with their friends and take action to improve the dire political situation in Burma. Celebrity voices included Will Ferrell, Ellen Page, Anjelica Huston, Jennifer Aniston, Judd Apatow, Julie Benz, and many more.
We hope that this recognition by the Forrester Groundswell Awards continues to draw attention to the situation in Burma. While our initial 30 day campaign for a million voices has ended, the need for advocacy, education and action continues. Visit uscampaignforburma.org to see how you can help make a difference.
” alt=”F” />
Lucas Cruikshank is the creator of Fred, a web-based series on YouTube. According to Wikipedia:
“On October 16, 2008, Cruikshank’s FRED channel became YouTube’s most subscribed channel overall with 585,506 subscribers, and altogether his Fred channel has received over 22 million channel views and over 125,000,000 video views since its launch May 1st, 2008.
Cruikshank has turned his web popularity into commercial success signing deals to advertise products through product placement in the Fred series. The “Zipit” text messaging device has been featured in several episodes. Cruikshank appeared in a commercial advertising the text messaging device, which aired on MTV, Nickelodeon and ABC Family.”
Videos of the keynotes from the Inbound Marketing Summit last month in Cambridge, MA have just been posted online. The first video is the opening remarks from HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan. Brian describes the concept of inbound marketing and makes a strong case for why businesses need to adopt these practices. This clip also includes the presentation of the Inbound Summit Awards where Digital Influence Group is recognized for our Burma It Can’t Wait campaign for Fanista.
The second is the keynote from David Meerman Scott. David is the author of “New Rules for Marketing and PR” and this speech summarizes the key principles from this very popular book. David delivers a fun and informative presentation so if you haven’t seen him before, this is one you don’t want to miss.
If you missed the Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston last month, many of the presentations have been posted on Slideshare. You can check out the agenda page for a directory of all the presentations available.
I was on the “Inbound Marketing Challenges & Solutions from the Trenches” panel. There were no slides in this session, but they did post the video:
So my highly esteemed colleague Scott IMed me a link this morning to a YouTube video, Interactive Card Trick. At first I got caught up in the trick, which I proudly recognized was one I had fallen for in an email my sister Kim sent me last year. As you probably already know, Scott didn’t send it to me because of the trick, and of course, he already knew how the trick works. (I have an annoying tendency to be slow on the uptake.) It’s the interactive component that makes this simple video noteworthy. Just think of what that means for videos we create with our clients moving forward. Awesome creative possibilities!
In this week’s episode of Market Edge on WebmasterRadio.fm, Larry Weber interviews Akamai CEO Paul Sagan about the evolution of rich media content on the web.
In this interview, Paul describes the dramatic shift in consumer behavior from TV viewing to computer browsing. But with so much of today’s market dollars still dedicated toward TV a tectonic pressure is building that will soon cause a huge change in the business model of television in the next couple years.
Enjoy the interview and feel free to add your comments on this issues here.
Web Content Technology
Akamai CEO Paul Sagan profiles his companys work in web content technology developed so that end users can easily access web content with the help of thousands of servers , plus he discuss the evolution of delivering rich media content
I caught an episode of “Access Hollywood” the other night. One of their feature stories was the re-launch of their companion website www.accesshollywood.com – Who cares, right? Well, Access Hollywood does…and BIG time (and they should). While I was intrigued by the length and depth of airtime given to this story, it was host Billy Bush’s voiceover commentary that grabbed my attention. In it, he described how central and integrated Access Hollywood’s website has become (in a very short time) to the distribution of entertainment news & media. What used to be a second thought to the on-air broadcast is now a rush to post content online.
And then while watching CNN’s coverage of the New Hampshire primary results, I literally had a “holy crap” moment: Suddenly my “viewer experience” became a seamless “user experience” because of the way CNN converged its online and on-air media.
The highly watched cable news network managed to pull this off in a number of ways:
Purposeful Crossovers: The on-air broadcast of the results maintained a persistent running tally of votes framed around the visual commentary – if a viewer was watching CNN in HD, they’d get access to additional data points along both sides of the frame. Throughout the broadcast, host Wolf Blitzer would lead viewers to reference their laptops and check out CNNpolitics.com in order to drill down and hone into more granular real-time specifics. While lots of broadcast programs lead people to the web, it was the effortless, integrated, “live”, and complementary nature of the use of their website that grabbed me.
Embedded Content: At certain points throughout the broadcast, CNN would feature segments from the various campaign’s live video feeds and direct viewers to CNNpolitics.com to tune into any of the candidate’s specific coverage for further viewing and analysis. Since the on-air broadcast only gave samplings of each campaign event, viewers were easily able to target their preferred candidate online and augment the on-air content. Although CNNpolitics.com was referenced constantly throughout the broadcast, it wasn’t disruptive – it felt right.
Integrated Look & Feel: CNNpolitics.com was a natural creative extension of CNN’s “Election Center” set design and broadcast graphics. The two mediums visually became like one. Viewers who frequently turned their attention from being an online user to an on-air viewer felt a single, integrated experience.
The fundamental shift in the way in which we consume and interact with media has now tipped the scale from the after thought of “supporting Web information” to primary online content. We’ll be seeing many more examples of this in 2008 as TV continues to become an inefficient content consumption technology.
On December 13, ad agency Arnold announced the start of “a viral video series which gives the agency’s perspective on current trends, happenings and important issues in the world of advertising.” They call it Arnold On.
It amuses me that they’re calling it a “viral video series.” A viral video is one that is passed along from user to user (usually because it’s funny or really cool). However, it’s immediately apparent how un-viral the Arnold On videos are, without any regard to the content. There is no “send to a friend” or “forward” functionality. You can’t embed the video on your blog or profile page (not that I imagine the demand to do so is high). Users are instead asked to keeping coming back for updates, which for now involves going to www.arnoldworldwide.com and finding Arnold On under the Our Agency section of the nav. Sure… that’s likely to get tons of repeat traffic.
What should they do with Arnold On? For starters, turn it into a video blog. Allow and encourage comments and feedback. Give it a unique url and/or feature it more prominently on the website. Oh, and if they want it to be “viral,” make it easy for users to pass it along. Duh.
Heavy.com, providers of such online video hit series as “Superficial Friends” and “Behind the Music that Sucks” has today announced the public beta of its own ad network, The Husky Network.
According to the press release, Heavy will be wrapping video players, such as YouTube or Revver, with branded skins and selling them on a CPM basis. According to the screenshot below, Heavy will be dropping a big static pop up on your page with a hole in the middle for the video to play in.
” alt=”F” />
