Conversations About Social Media

About two weeks ago my business partner Terry and I met with Edward Barrera the editor of Adotas, an online news publication dedicated to the interactive advertising and marketing industry. We had a great conversation and Edward video taped some of our conversation and posted it on the Adotas website. Edward has broken our conversation into a couple of different segments. I've posted below two he's run recently and if he runs more, I'll post that too.

I like posting video clips because when we speak, we don't really edit ourselves the way we do when we write. If I write a synopsis of something that happened or I pen an article about something, I've usually slaved over it for quite some time; making sure to use the right words, correct grammar, etc. In a video interview, you just have to go with the flow. No time to edit. Which in this case is great. Edward asks some very good and poignant questions about Social Media, where it's going, how it's implemented, and most importantly - how our clients respond.

Fanscape: Brands Should Go Where the Conversations Are

June 23rd 2009 |by Edward Barrera

ADOTAS — It’s more about social media being complementary to traditional advertising, according to Larry Weintraub.

Weintraub and Terry Dry are founders of Fanscape, a digital engagement advertising agency. I talked with them last week about social media and Internet advertising. Social media is not changing the world, Weintraub said, but it’s changing how we view advertising. We’re just not watching advertising the same way; we’re sharing it through multiple channels, fostered by social media, he said.

One thing they did say that stuck with me is that brands are sometimes resistant to getting involved in social media campaigns, saying that they don’t want to lose control of their message. Their general response is that most brands are already being talked about or will be somewhere online. The only question is if the brand wants to be involved in that conversation. They talk below about how they discuss options with reluctant brands as well as how they help brands that have problems with their products. (Here’s the link if the video disappears)

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Fanscape, On Social Media and Traditional Online Advertising

June 22rd 2009 |by Edward Barrera

ADOTAS — Last week I met with Larry Weintraub and Terry Dry, founders of Fanscape, a digital engagement marketing agency.

We talked about a variety of subjects within the social media world, so I broke it into several video segments. This one is about metrics used within social media. The tension between traditional Internet advertising metrics, page views, etc., and the use of time and engagement in social media has been around for awhile, but it has grown because of the rise of social networks. In the video below, Terry notes the difference and the overlap between traditional and social media metrics. (If the video disappears, here’s the link.)

Francis Ford Coppola with Adam Carolla

I've recently professed my new found love of the podcast and I've also mentioned Adam Carolla many times. The other day Adam took it up a notch and interviewed Francis Ford Copolla. The interview was excellent. And for me it was extremely timely because I had just viewed Hearts of Darkness - A Filmaker's Apocolypse, the documentary Coppola's wife shot during the filming of Apocalypse Now. Thankfully Adam had seen that movie too and they touched on that during the interview.

If you're thinking about giving Adam's podcast a spin, this would be a good place to start.





Another great bonus is that he filmed this particular interview and you can watch it all on Adam's site or YouTube (I've put the clips and the links below).

Enjoy!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-2IOayikKg


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Cmm716M_aM


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ByMfgB3BaY


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mJdjlRIEfo


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBHGjQXmpyc

Marketing Renaissance: The Age of the Consumer

On Wednesday, June 2, 2009 I was on a panel at this year's Mediabistro Circus. The topic was Marketing Renaissance: The Age of the Consumer and here is the description of the topic:

Marketing Renaissance: The Age of the Consumer
Social Media. Search. Customer Engagement. Word of Mouth. Authenticity. These terms are critical drivers in a new era of marketing and advertising strategies. This group of digital marketing experts will discuss how customer behavior is evolving around technology, explore emerging trends and business models that will shape marketing, PR & advertising in years to come.

There were four of us on the panel. We were each given 10 - 15 minutes to speak about how our individual occupations intertwine with the topic.

First up was Doug Jaeger who works for the agency Taxi where he is the Innovation Director. Doug showed us the power of social media by exhibiting the inspirational Jumping in Art Museums.

Then Valeria Maltoni from ConversationAgent.com presented on the social media landscape as a whole. You can see her presentation and notes HERE.

Then Garrick Schmitt, VP Experience Planning at Razorfish gave a very entertaining presentation showing the power of social media as recently exhibited by Starbucks and through a recent Razorfish campaign celebrating Barbie's 50th birthday. You can see his presentation on Slideshare.

Finally, it was my turn. Here is my presentation...

The number one reason people buy something or try something is because someone they trust told them to.

That's Word-of-Mouth

A few years back a caveman was sitting out in the cold, freezing his ass off, and he rubbed a few sticks together. He started a fire.
He told another caveman who also started a fire. That cave man told another, and so on.


Word-of-Mouth

Fanscape is a Digital Word of Mouth Marketing Agency

We are hired by brands and by agencies on behalf of brands to create and foster conversations about their products online.

It is also known as Social Media Marketing because the Internet has become a very social place.

We used to write letters to each other, call each other on the phone, hang out at bars... But now we just do that all online.

We're friending each other on MySpace, uploading videos of ourselves on YouTube, Tweeting on Twitter, and re-connecting with people we haven't seen since 3rd grade on Facebook.

For a brand, it has become more complicated to reach people to tell them about their products.

Which is where we come in.

Now, there is one rule we've learned in our 11 years of business

People do not like to be interrupted.

Let me give you an analogy. On most Monday nights you will find me and my wife on our couch glued to our television set watching 24. Each week we watch Jack Bauer try to save the planet. He's beating people up, being beaten up, stopping bombs, you get the picture. We're enthralled. Action packed excitement. And at 12 minutes, bam! A commercial. There's Valerie Bertinelli telling me how she's lost 40 pounds thanks to Jenny Craig. I'm sitting there, with food all over me, sitting literally at the edge of my seat. I don't care about Valerie.

So what did I do? A couple of years ago I went out and purchased a Tivo. I've trained myself to now watch 24 delayed by a 1/2 hour or even a week. Basically whenever I want. And when the clock ticks on 24 and Valerie shows up, blip blip blip I skip right through the commercial.

That's what people have learned to do on the Internet. When we were getting to much Spam, we installed Spam filters. When pop up ads began to annoy us, we installed pop up blockers. We even tune out the ads that surround our favorite websites.

So once again, how does a brand reach the consumer when the consumer is tuning them out?

First, understand that social media is searchable. You can actually see what people are saying about you. And they are talking about you. Odds are somewhere, there is someone talking about your brand or product. So step back, take a moment, and...


You don't have to jump in and start marketing immediately. Just see what people are saying. And yes, there will be complaints. But a lot of people just have questions. They don't understand something. They need clarification. They need help.

Once you've observed for a period of time, then you can identify who is talking and who you should be marketing to.

At Fanscape, we take our time and we make lists of places we need to reach out to. And once we've made our lists then we stop.

We step back.

We imagine ourselves as the customer. We put ourselves in their shoes and we ask the question...

If we were being marketed to, what would we want? Why would it be ok to interrupt us? This is how we start EVERY campaign.

Let me give you a case study example of what I mean.

A few months back we did a campaign for GameStop, one of the largest video game retailers in the US. Each month GameStop does a promotion tied in with the release of a major game. We helped with a campaign for the latest version of the tremendously successful GuitarHero franchise.

It was a dream promotion. GameStop was giving away the opportunity for someone to win a chance to actually be in the next version of GuitarHero. Yes, a GuitarHero fan could find him/herself immortalized with a character of themself in the next game. All they had to do was upload themselves to the special promotion website and then the people with the most votes would win. There would be a winner every week for 8 weeks.

Now stop for a moment and think about that. This promotion addresses the two key issues I previously mentioned...

A) The audience is huge and definitive. Gamers. Specifically gamers who play GuitarHero and similar games such as RockBand. There are literally thousands of websites, social network pages, YouTube channels, and blogs dedicated to people's love of these games.

B) This answers the question: "Why do I care?" Isn't this the ultimate prize for a fan of GuitarHero? To be in the game!

So, we made our lists and we reached out to the influencers, the people who loved to broadcast their skills and their love of the game.

Which brings us to Freddie Wong...

Freddie is the definition of a GuitarHero guru. A few years ago he uploaded a video of himself hopping off a motorcycle, having his "roadie" strap on his "guitar" and shredding to the Rush classic, "YYZ."

That video has been watched over 6.5 Million times.

And it's both hysterical and amazing. I recommend you watch it.

Since then, Freddie has built up quite a following. He has over 10,000 people who subscribe to his YouTube channel. He has a a blog, a Twitter. He's a true influencer and considered one of the best, if not THE best GuitarHero player on the planet. He's even jammed alongside some of the greatest real guitar heroes like Joe Satriani.

We told Freddie about the promotion and what did Freddie do? He created a video. He asked his fans to vote. But Freddie went a step further. He told his fans, if they vote - and he placed a direct link on the video - then he would give away a $400 Peavy GuitarHero guitar that he had won himself.

Note: We didn't give anything to Freddie. All we did was tell him about the promotion. Freddie went the extra mile and created his own promotion, a thank you if you will, for his fan. Incidentally, that video he made has been viewed nearly 50,000 times.

And Freddie won the week. Hands down.

Turns out, over the course of the 8 weeks 65% of the votes to the promotion came as a result of people we reached out to.

Needless to say, the promotion was a tremendous success. The goal was to make people aware of the promotion and get them to the site. The RIGHT people! And we succeeded.

Keep in mind, we weren't the only thing going on. There was a lot of money tied up in this promotion and it was spent on advertising, activation, implementation, etc. We were a relatively small part. But we drove 65% of the activity.

That is the power of Digital Word of Mouth.

And we're just scratching the surface here. Social Media encompasses so many sites and avenues for reaching and interacting with people. Social bookmarking sites, social networks, blogs, wikis, information sharing sites, are just some of the outlets we use to create conversations with people on the web.

Now, the question that comes up most often when we're hired is measurement.

How do we measure success?

The GameStop example shows that success was determined by traffic to the promotion. But each campaign and each client is different. The object is to identify what is important to the client and that is what we establish as the goal and then we attempt to measure based on the achievement of that goal.

This graphic shows a snapshot of the various forms of measurement.

The list of measurements goes on and on. And what I tell each client is that we have to identify the Goal.

Once we know the goal, then we plan the strategy to achieve that goal. And our measurement is based on how we achieved that goal.

It is rarely that simple, but that is how we approach each campaign.

Because ultimately we want to move the customer. We want to engage them. To excite them.

And if we do it right, then they tell someone else.



You can see the whole thing here, but it doesn't really come through without the words, does it?

Media Bistro Circus June 2009

View more OpenOffice presentations from lardog2000.

Conversation Agent

I am way behind on my posts. I actually have some things to report, I have just been in one of those runs lately where I can't carve out a half hour to sit down and write things out.

I was in New York last week speaking at the Mediabistro Circus. I will post my presentation in just a bit, but in the meantime, I wanted to re-post this article that just ran today on the website www.conversationagent.com. Valeria Maltoni runs Conversation Agent and she is an absolutely fascinating person. I'll talk more about her when I post my wrap up of the Mediabistro Circus, but until then, here is an interview she did with me for her blog / website that ran today...

The Agency Side of Business: Larry Weintraub, Fanscape

I've always been fascinated by the entertainment business, and a couple of weeks ago we learned a thing or two about sound design from Diego Stocco.

Larry Weintraub and I met when speaking on the same panel at Mediabistro Circus a week ago. He is the CEO and co-founder of Fanscape, a company that believes in creating a better connection between brands and consumers.

Over lunch we talked about the state of marketing communications, media, and our respective projects. This is my follow up conversation with Larry about his work.

How did you come to the decision to start your own company?
Larry: I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was 12 years old. I started by mowing people’s lawns and painting their houses. When I was very young, I mapped out a career for myself in the music business and did that from the time I was 15 until I was 28, the latter 8 years I’d spent working for a major record company, A&M Records.

When that record company’s parent company was sold, I decided it was time to strike out on my own and try running my own business. I could have gone to another record company but I knew that I’d always regret it if I didn’t try my own thing, which is why I started Fanscape.

When you started Fancape 11 years ago, was your focus exploring alternatives to traditional advertising from the beginning? Were there other types of services you offer today available from the onset? What I'm trying to get at here is has there been an evolution of your work in a specific direction?

Larry: Continuing from the other question you asked, when A&M Records was sold, there was a 6 month period while the transition took place. During that time, my business partner and I concentrated on coming up with an idea that hadn’t been done.

We’d both spent the last 8 years helping to market bands and we realized that the old way of developing artists wasn’t being done any more, the record business was focused on chasing pop hits. The history of the record business had been to put out a record, hope it got played on the radio, and then if you were lucky, millions of people bought your album.

Then when it came time to put out the next album, the record companies had to try and find the buyer again. No one had ever thought to keep track of the fans. Sure, there were mailing lists, but none of them were well maintained.

We created Fanscape as a company that musicians could hire to keep track of their fans and ultimately communicate with them. Thus, this was not really an advertising-minded business, it was a database management and customer service focused business.

Over the years it has evolved into what we now call social media marketing, but the same core components are intact, which is to communicate with the customer through open and honest dialogue.

There has definitely been an evolution of the services we offered. When we started we literally had people fill out address cards at concerts, then we entered them into a database, then we printed out brochures and sent them to people in the mail.

Within a few months we put that whole process online. Our focus early on was e-commerce and ultimately selling a product – a t-shirt, CD, hat, etc. But after about two years we evolved into a marketing company, shed the e-commerce and subscription services and became pretty much the company we are today.

The other evolution over the years has been our clientele. For the first 5 of our 11 years, we were exclusively music. We were a dominant music marketing company but as the music business lost their way, we concentrated on other areas such as film, TV, and now products/brands.

You are an active participant in many social networks and have direct experience with social media. How much did your direct involvement help you feel you understand its dynamics well enough to explain them to your clients? Larry: For much of the past 5 years or so, education has been a major component of our business. I’ve had to explain to people why they needed to embrace social media; I literally had to simplify it because it was so confusing.

We used to start a conversation with, “you know how your kids are on MySpace?” or “Do you ever watch videos on YouTube?” – “That’s Social Media!” The term social media has actually evolved. First we were doing New Media Marketing, then Digital Marketing, and now it is Social Media (aka Digital Word of Mouth) Marketing.

It is all the same thing really – at least how we do it, connecting with people through the Internet. But most of our clients understood traditional media and the Internet was just this place they heard about but didn’t know what to do with.

In the last 2 years people have really woken up to it and that education process has become a little easier. Now, however, there are a new set of challenges, specifically measurement – and how our clients often want to measure social media the same way they measure advertising and search.

From the corporate side I have not been impressed with agencies over the years. Creative that did not sell and account teams that did not understand the business have by and large been a real challenge. Social media is transforming work, the dynamics and business models. Yet, it seems that agencies have underestimated this shift. As an agency that was born around the idea of joining the conversation, does Fanscape have the opposite challenge - that of educating and enlightening clients? Larry: Yes. I spoke to much of that in the previous question. The main thing that needs to be understood, and we’re not there yet, is that social media is not a campaign-based project. It is ongoing.

It is hard to really feel the effects after just 2 or 3 months. You have to build trust, you have to prove that you are going to be there and that you aren’t just popping in to promote your product and then you’ll disappear. It's very hard for a major corporation to understand that this is a division they have to have in their company.

It's merging customer service, marketing, and public relations. You can’t start a Twitter account, tweet for a few weeks, and then stop. Same with Facebook, YouTube, and on and on. But most companies run on quarterly systems and right now social media is primarily a project-oriented function and it needs to be put on the level with marketing, public relations, and customer service which never end.

Credibility and value are the currency of social media. Companies are struggling to figure this one out, especially those that are used to think in terms of their messages. You have an advantage over internal resources in companies: as an outsider, your advice may be followed. How do you work with companies to help them build better relationships with their customers? Larry: One common thing we hear is that companies want help making their media viral. Which, as you know, is impossible. You can’t make something viral, it is or it isn’t. If you have a community of people that like what you have to say, then you’ll have an audience to start your marketing with.

If you’ve built up a great report with your customers and they trust you and they know that you will give them good information then they’ll listen to what you have to say. If you want to show them a funny video, they’ll watch it. If they like it, they’ll share it.

I’m a big believer that every company needs to build a community around it and its product(s). This means creating an interactive online destination, i.e. a social network or socially minded website where people can interact with you and others like them.

You also need to have extensions in other communities where people congregate – Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, etc. But there should always be a consistent knowledgeable voice that can answer questions, ask questions, and inspire the audience. It’s a privilege to have customers come check you out, reward them, entertain them, engage them!

We tell each company this when we start a campaign. We let them know we need access to information and the ability to communicate with people and to allow people to communicate back – even if it’s negative. If you do this, then you will build better relationships with their customers.

What do you think is in store for agencies in the next 3-5 years? Will agencies rethink their dependency on media? Is there a new model in sight? Larry: I like what Shiv Singh at the Razorfish agency says. He basically states that there is no traditional media and social media, it’s all one. My extended thought to this is that every form of media will have a component that is social.

A television commercial that you see during your favorite show is also available for viewing online. You can comment on it, share it with your friends, and maybe even re-do it through editing tools. If you are brand, you shouldn’t care. It means people are spreading your message.

This is counter-intuitive to the historical advertising and the agencies that deliver that. Usually the agency creates the message and it’s a one way street. I see this social convergence of media happening quickly and agencies will just have to keep that in mind when they are creating media. I really think this is already happening and happening quickly.

What is your personal secret sauce? How do you influence your colleagues and team?

That’s an interesting question. I don’t really know. I’ve always just been a hard worker who cares about the people around him. I also believe in collaboration and that everyone should collaborate on new ideas. I like to make everyone feel like they can contribute and make a difference.

Who would be your ideal client?

A client that is excited to try new things. A client who says, please show me all the great new things that we can do to market our products. And then they let us do it!