Move over, American Idol. The new tune of music competitions is here—and it’s more interactive than ever before. Rock The Camp, a national talent search, is looking for the next big thing, and it’s turning to online video (and Endavo) to do it.
Already nearly 600 bands have signed up, and the site has received more than a quarter of a million views. What’s more: The content has attracted a host of big-name sponsors and 10,000 registered members.
The prizes aren’t bad, either. The winner opens for multi-platinum music artist TobyMac in Nashville, receives a recording session with Grammy Award-winning producer Paul Ebersold, and performs on the K-LOVE Friends & Family Music Cruise.
Through the end of February, bands across the country can upload a video or MP3 through Endavo Media’s Platform. Fans then register and vote on their favorite performers (through the end of March), and the top ten entries are judged by leading industry professionals.
This hits all the right notes for content producers. Rock The Camp has secured sponsors and advertisers, is capturing valuable user information and is creating brand awareness across the nation. And all this Idol-like buzz required was some user-generated content, a custom-branded look and a healthy dose of creativity.
Without a question, social media and web communities are becoming increasingly important to businesses looking to engage and connect with their target audiences. Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and other social networking sites allow companies to join the conversations forming around their products, services and brands. They can attract new customers, reinforce marketing efforts, build brands and even find new ways to generate revenue.
However, as Krishna Kumar writes in 10 things CEO's should know about social media and online communities, navigating the social media space where 99% of content is irrelevant can be a daunting task. And finding and creating appropriate web communities requires dedication of time as well as sufficient human and financial resources. It’s much more than just putting up a Facebook profile and seeing what happens.
Now don’t get me wrong, Facebook and other social networks can be critically important to your business…but they are not necessarily the only way to leverage the power of social media. This is where building your own web community comes in. Why not create your own online community where your potential and existing customers can interact with each other and your brand? By doing so, you’ll be able to engage with your audience in an environment that you can easily monitor, control and manage according to your business goals. You will also build relationships with your community members that extend far beyond a product or service. Just remember that with social media you cannot, and don’t want to, control the conversation. You can only facilitate the environment in which it takes place.
But before you jump into planning your branded web community, check out Mack Collier’s blog post in which he gives six reasons why online communities fail. In this post, Collier writes that heavy emphasis on monetization, insufficient value creation and lack of engagement on the community owner’s part are the main factors why business-sponsored online communities tend to fizzle out before they get a chance to grow. So, based on Collier’s analysis, here are some things you must address to increase the likelihood that your web community will be a success.
Focus on establishing a following of dedicated fans. Monetization may be part of your overall strategy, but the primary purpose of your web community is to connect people and provide a user-friendly social environment that facilitates conversations. How you ultimately monetize should come naturally, after the community has already formed.
Offer something of value. Provide your community members with an abundance of interactive tools, encourage content creation through forums, blogs and comments or start a user-generated contest. Online video is another great way to add value to your web community. From weekly announcements from the company’s CEO and insightful industry overviews, to a fun web series featuring your products, to educational ‘how-tos’ and user-generated uploads, online video content will engage your community members and keep them coming back for more.
Become an active community member. Participate in forum discussions, comment on your members’ blog posts, create content, respond to your members’ concerns and treat each of your community members with equal respect.
Make it easy for members to promote your community and content. As people enjoy participating in your community, give them the tools they need to share their enthusiasm with family, friends and co-workers. For example, allow users to email and link to your video content or embed it on their personal websites and blogs.
Good luck on your new web community! And, as always, let us know if Endavo Media can help.
With the exception of top tier universities, college athletic and sports marketing departments are notoriously lean operations with everyone wearing many hats. But they have access to help. Universities have a stable of willing and able resources right at their fingertips: the student intern. But like any other business bringing on an intern, the question becomes how best to use their time; not only to benefit the school, but the student as well.
Social media marketing, including blogging, user generated video, Twitter, Facebook and other online awareness techniques, has become a key consideration for marketing and promotional campaigns both small and large. It can drive online awareness, build brand/team advocates, spike ticket sales, create fan engagement and more. However, the challenge in executing these programs is creating the content required to sustain relevancy in the crowded social media space.
Interns are nothing new for college athletic departments. But how they should be used is changing. While attending the NACDA conference recently, the social media marketing and technology tracks were packed with assistant athletic directors eager to learn social media tricks-of-the-trade. And that's part of the problem: there are no "tricks" or magical shortcuts to social media. If anything, it's just the opposite. It is a time consuming commitment that requires dedicated resources and planning. Specifically, a content strategy and a resource to produce/gather/organize the content. It may be cheap, but it's by no means free.
Here's an example of a current Internship description for Auburn University. Not to pick on Auburn, but I'm a Gator, so it's understandable. You can see it has no mention of social media. This is typical of what I found with most other universities.
Comparing the overwhelming interest in social media I found at the NACDA conference with the fact that very few university athletic department internships are focused on social media, I discovered a gap. University athletic departments want to use social media, but don't fully understand how to do it themselves, much less teach a student intern how to do it.
The reality, however, is many students today are very media savvy. They understand the technology; the content creation process; the conversational marketing style. What they need is someone to channel that activity towards established branding goals and defined marketing objectives -- something assistant athletic directors are especially good at.
So here are a few suggestions to all you college athletic department internship description writers out there. Start including these activities:
Title: Social Media Marketing Intern
Description:
Grab your digital video camera and laptop, bring your passion for your school, and start building an online audience for your content.
Plan and schedule interviews with coaches, alumni, students, student athletes, local community businesses.
Create a content deliverables schedule including blog posts, twitter updates, Facebook updates and video posts.
Comment and engage with existing fans online, bring them into conversations, promotions and niche content on the university's web properties.
Coordinate with ticket sales and events group to drive core business goals through the use of social media techniques.
Establish method for measuring social media campaign effectiveness.
They great thing about this kind of internship is the department will learn as much from the intern as the intern does from the department.
According to a recent study by Lightspeed Research for Trendstream, online video is the leading social media platform with over 70% of US web users watching clips on the web. And gen Y is not alone in fueling the growth. The study showed that 65% of those aged 55 to 64 watch video online. In addition, when it comes to web video, people love to share. More than 50% of 16 and 17-year-olds and 29% of 55 to 64-year-olds shared video clips with their friends, family and colleagues.
These numbers show that online video presents a tremendous opportunity for brands and organizations to connect with their potential and existing clients online and grow audiences virally. Brands can use the social power of online video to build communities across the web and establish relationships that go way beyond products and services.
By Pete Contardo Are you a small business owner or a marketer working with, or in a small business? If so, you should spend a few minutes reading these articles. Each one provides useful insights on how you can target your audience, create compelling content, and connect with customers and employees through social media in ways that help grow your business:
Social networking is key to business, worker success “Companies are using social media to solve customer problems virtually, interact with customers to solicit feedback, and provide new ways to interact with the brand, according to research by Cone, a strategy and communications firm. Whether employees are on social media sites on behalf of their employer or for their own interests, their postings should be useful or informative.” Online Video and Small Business Go Hand in Hand “As a small business, you can use video to engage your customers and make more personal connections… Using video allows you to speak directly to your customers, looking right at them and using your real voice to tell them why you’re the best at what you do and how you can help them. It’s the difference between picking a name out of a phone book or calling up a friend.” Marketing Basics for the Small Business “When it comes to your customers keep in mind the importance of target marketing. The reason this is important is that only a proportion of the population is likely to purchase any products or service. By taking time pitch your sales and marketing efforts to the correct niche market you will be more productive and not waste your efforts or time. It's important to consider your virtual segmentation by selecting particular verticals to present your offerings to.”
There’s a growing trend among small and medium-size businesses of adding videos and social networking features to their websites. And Melissa Johnson, a personal branding guru and president of the Velvet Suite Marketing Consulting Group, is setting a great example.
Johnson is using our Internet TV Platform to enhance her website Brand Me Live with online video, client testimonials and branding tips and to offer her community members such interactive features as rating, sharing, live chat, user-generated uploads and even a forum. What’s more, premium members get access to additional features and content. How cool is that!
"We believe that the Brand Me Live community is a social platform of the future. Endavo Media has enabled our vision to become a reality and to create an opportunity to monetize our value through the Internet," Johnson said.
Online Video for B2B BtoB Magazine is all about online video these days. Check out their article New online video tactics and learn how you can incorporate online video into a b2b marketing mix.
“…for online video to be an effective marketing channel, it's not enough to post a clip on your Web site or buy a video banner placement on your favorite content network. With so many more companies and individuals using video, your video must stand out and must be managed across different domains.”
Driving consumer action with video
While online video is powerful branding tool, it can also used as a great direct response vehicle that drives sales. Read 10 ways to drive consumer action with video to discover the 'secret sauce' of a successful direct response online video campaign.
"...with new production methods, quality online video can be produced for as little as $1,000 to $5,000 per piece, making video a marketing tool that can be used across web campaigns while driving high return on investment."
In previous posts, I covered how production and publishing are central to a strong online video content strategy. But it's how you promote your content that impacts measurable results the most.
The key to success in social media marketing is participation. Posting regular tweets on Twitter, updating "what your doing now" in LinkedIn, commenting on your Wall in Facebook, and including links to ultra-relevant content in your blog posts are all opportunities to promote your online video.
While seasoned social media experts can accomplish more than a novice, it's not a secret art. The function is very much about ongoing activity online, being timely with your updates and authentic with your voice. In other words, it's hard to fake it. The name of the game is building online credibility, and in return, increasing your influence. Social media experts are not born, they're raised. The only way to get better is to engage and participate.
Okay, so social media marketing takes effort, it's not always easy to measure, and, while cheap, it's not free (as many marketing execs seem to think). However, there are ways to measure effectiveness and ROI:
Increasing video views by seeding viral sharing of your content and promoting your online video content as part of your everyday social media participation will drive inbound traffic. A good tool to use to measure click-throughs on specific links is URL Brief. This service lets you abbreviate the URL and provides tracking for those links. Another tip: make sure to alert everyone in your company when new videos goes live and encourage them to promote it, too.
Building inbound links is a great way to earn SEO "juice" for your content, as most search engines (especially Google) use inbound links heavily in their search algorithms. SEO takes time. Increasing your search engine results page (SERP) to 1, 2 or 3 is the result of continued link building over time, as well as the relevancy of your content (a whole separate topic). But it is measurable.
In summary, alway be promoting!
Link to your content EVERYWHERE (where relevant)
Encourage employees, friend and followers to link to your content
Marketers don’t get to decide the best features of their products, customers do, according to Seth Godin’s marketing insight of the day. In his post What does better mean? Godin writes about how a simple buying decision – zip-up jeans vs. jeans with a button fly – can teach marketers a tough lesson. It’s up to the customer to decide what they like the most about your product. When it comes down to it, all that marketers can really do is to present customers with the features, benefits, and advantages of their product. So as a marketer, what are your most effective methods to present your product? Well, that’s where online video comes in.
First of all, online video is much easier to produce and distribute today thanks to advances in equipment technology, broadband adoption rates and the functionalities of Internet TV platforms. Costs associated with an online video campaign are much lower, so any brand, no matter how big or small, can launch one. Video in general is a very powerful medium to deliver a marketing message. But the best part of it overall, is that it is easy for your customers to share with their friends.
So, what are you waiting for? Get your company’s creative brains together and show your customers through video what your brand and products are all about. Then, let your customers tell you, and hopefully everyone they are connected to, all about what they love best about your products.
I became aware of it from Shane Steele (Tremor Media) at a recent AMA Atlanta Luncheon. The term’s based on video being metaphorically “liquid” ... or, “free-flowing” over various networks (broadband, TV, mobile). I thought it was a smart and accurate way to look at what’s happening with online video and social media, so it got me thinking that video is actually more of a “liquid asset” generating real ROI and revenue—liquidity (okay, yeah, that’s my financial background shining through).
Let’s briefly expand on both definitions ... Liquid Video Strategy Online video content becomes liquid when you enable it to be “free-flowing” with your audience and community (note: free-flowing doesn’t mean “free-for-all”). Don’t restrict video and rich media to a single screen or destination. Let it flow to your website, social networks, mobile devices, television—all the screens your audience wants to access.
You can also create liquid video by letting your audience, community or third-party producers/aggregators contribute to your video and social media strategy. Obviously you need an Internet TV Platform to pull content from multiple sources into a cohesive strategy and experience. Engaging your audience by providing interactive features like commenting, rating and sharing and allowing your audience to take your content viral via the social web greatly enhances the liquidity of your online video.
Your Internet TV Platform must allow video to become liquid, while not compromising control over quality, distribution, audience relationships or brand integrity. This is why publishing video on YouTube and MySpace is a poor business strategy for most brands or content owners. Having the right control and tracking mechanisms is critical to maintaining brand integrity and to launching a distribution engine that can be properly managed and monetized—which gets to my second definition of liquid video. Liquid Video = Monetization Once a successful liquid video strategy has been deployed, a brand or content producer can create the best liquid of all—money and ROI (as we blogged here before, there are multiple ways to monetize online video – ads, sponsors, subscriptions, pay-per-view and syndication). You can answer a lot of challenges every industry is facing by offering real access dispersed but targeted, liquid but controlled (and tracked), distribution to a target demographic.
A Liquid Video strategy can be developed for any small- to medium-sized enterprise who’s serious about monetizing their online video. Tell us what you think.
