Episode 1: Social Media Strategy

Social Media Strategy Webcast Presentation

Learn how to increase your marketing and PR effectiveness by understanding social media, online video and podcasting through this webcast series. This program includes presentations on new media and social media strategy, how to use web based video, video podcasting and audio podcasting to increase sales and brand exposure for your company. Presentation highlights include:

-       Modern marketing challenges
-       Communication theory applied to social media
-       How search engines have changed marketing
-       Search engine optimization via social media to increase sales
-       Advertising is moving to consumer education
-       Trends in multimedia learning to build brand
-       Rise of multi-media search and how to profit

Transcript

Are you looking to devise a social media strategy to increase sales and brand exposure for your company? Hi, I’m John Houghton, CEO of MobileCast Media. I’ve helped develop ecommerce strategies for the Fortune 50, twice championed ecommerce brands that have grown to over 100 million in sales and now I’m here to help you.  If you want to inexpensively reach new customers to increase sales, there’s simply no better way than through online video and podcasting. 

In this presentation, I’ll be teaching you about the challenges that marketers face and how you can use social media to your competitive advantage.  Specifically, you’ll learn how advertising has changed, how to find new prospects and how to convert prospects into customers using podcasting and online video.  So sit back and relax and let’s learn about social media strategy.

MobileCast Media helps companies increase sales and brand awareness through online (web based) video and podcasting.  MobileCast Media was one of the first companies to dedicate itself to corporate podcasting services.  We were also one of the very first companies to handle a corporate media buy for the teen podcasting segment.  Our work has been shown in 120 theaters and broadcast to 215 radio stations and also to the 3500 square foot LCD Jumbotron at AT&T Park in San Francisco.

There are a wide variety of services that we offer and the first of which is media strategy because a lot of companies that have dealt in traditional media find that new media is a whole new classification and that consumers will be looking at them with a different mindset.  It will take some branding strategy work to make it work under that new lens.  We also offer online video strategy and production, video podcast production, audio podcast production, podcast syndication (using XML via RSS), which is very easy to get wrong and very difficult to correct.  And then also content marketing and distribution.

I’d like to start with a question, and the question is what do you think is the number one brand fear for an established brand?  What is the number one brand fear.  So think about this for a second.  The number one brand fear is irrelevance.  Irrelevance means that  the market has changed and the market has passed you buy and they no longer need your product or service.  So this would be the number one fear for brand managers.  That is unfortunately is what happened to Tower Records.  By 2006, CD sales had slowed to the point that they had to go bankrupt.  They saw the signs that downloadable media was taking over but they failed to adapt their business model and in October 2006 had to close all 89 of their stores.  Even their bankruptcy lawyer commented that “the CD sales model doesn’t work anymore.  I’m 62 and I have an iPod.” The old model was no longer working and they fail to adopt a new model.  Have you failed to spot the shift in the marketplace towards social media? Are you in danger of failing because of it?

We’re going to be talking about traditional media versus new media or social media and how we must adapt our marketing practices to the new social and new media practices if we are to survive.  Today’s challenges are that brands are having trouble connecting with consumers.  Media has fragmented.  Where we use to have three networks, ABC, NBC, CBS, now, if you count the number of places that a consumer could be spending their time, including cable TV, including the internet, including video games, you could say that there are potentially millions of channels out there and there’s no one good place to reach consumers with the exception of maybe the Super Bowl and American Idol.  That’s very expensive ad time. 

While TV consumption is slightly increasing, TV ads are being watched less because of Tivo devices and DVRs that zap and fast forward through ads so that consumers don’t have to watch them.  Newspapers and magazines have been folding.  There is a notorious problem with young people not reading newsprint and that’s slowly eroding those subscriber bases.  General Motors (GM) has recognized this problem and have committed to moving half of their ad spend, that’s half of three billion dollars, so that’s a billion and a half dollars that they are moving from traditional media to online media.  That’s from Ad Age in March 19 of 2008.

The important thing to know here is that branding strategy is changing as it moves online, because a lot of things that are found online are found through search engines and through keywords.  Not only is it important to design content for searchability but it is very important to align with the audience’s consumption habits.  A lot of media haven’t followed the audience.  We have to design our content to be available anytime, any where, and on any device.  The old model of making an appointment with your television, say on Wednesday night at 7pm is gone.  They want their content available on demand and they want it on their device.  Devices that are very popular are the iPhone, the iPod, the computer.  While we were able to make a lot of progress in making emotional connections with video, for example with the 30 second spot, we can still do that with online video, which helps with that prized emotional connection that we can make and also the retention of our brand message.

Audiences, as we have said, have fragmented and we have to reach them now one segment at a time.  While we can save a lot of money on ad spend, there is more work by marketing managers to reach and to research each of these demographics.  The most effective strategies have been able to reach into demographics one segment at a time. 

It’s very important to understand some of the basic changes with online demographics, and that is that a lot of the folks that are available on these newer devices and are available through social media are younger audiences.  Younger than, for example, TV audiences, and they’re frequently high income because it does take a decent amount of income to have a fast computer that will run video, or the mobile devices that will be able to take part in social media.  

The psychographics have changed, especially when your starting to talk about gen y and gen x (generation y and generation x). That the youngest segments, they see brands as big brother.  They don’t trust the brand messages and a lot of brands are still pushing the old style messages and they’re having trouble connecting with their audiences. 

These younger demographics are seeking objective information.  They want to make their own decisions.  They want to hear from their peers.  They value authenticity.  They don’t value messages that are pushed but they value a brand coming to their level and meeting with them as they join in conversation. 
And so where as brands used to dictate to the market through mass media, and without active feedback loops, technology throughout time when it is used by the masses, has a democratizing effect in that it empowers the average person.  The invention of the printing press and people learning how to read coming out of the dark ages and had tremendous effect and gave birth to the renaissance.  Printing had a large effect coming out all the way from the invention of the use of radio, which further gave real-time information out to outlying areas.  Television began to be used for giving visual information in the form of news and entertainment.  Now we have the internet, social media and new media making two way communication much easier and much more possible. 

The rise of web 2.0 has allowed a conversation to take place and allowed consumers to speak to brands in a public forum.  Bloggers, podcasters and YouTube publishers are now on equal terms and equal footing with brands.  It is very important for brands to realize this, not only because your competitors could be gaining market share by taking advantage of these trends, but also you can get backlash because if you make a mistake and you’re not plugged in with your demographics and you’re not understanding their communication styles, you can get a stronger backlash than you would have had otherwise.

A lot of our ideas of democracy, education, philosophy and of communication come from Socrates.  He provides a great lens to look at this interaction, this interaction with brand and consumer.   He advocated two people or entities talking to each other beginning with general questions and then more specific to arrive at depth and truth.  Eventually between the two of them would be a common understanding that sat between them and that was the understanding of their identity.  It get’s down to the level of their soul.  He said it’s very important to understand the soul and know deeply the person that you’re communicating with.

When you apply this to more of a large-scale medium, such as social media, that the brand can have a connection and a conversation now with consumers and arrive at the same depth and arrive at the same truth and hopefully to understand each other and influence each other as is proper through the Socratic dialectic. 

So while the old model was one way advertising intrusion, through say for example the 30 second spot, which makes ad impressions, which establishes familiarity so when the consumer goes to pull the product off of the shelf or the business buyer makes a purchase that they’ll remember this brand.  The problem is that it is very inefficient and that a lot of message are going out and being wasted on demographics that are not potential purchasers. 

What some of the more cutting edge brands are realizing is that consumers are most accessible when they are seeking information and that has given rise to inbound search because a lot of people are using the web now to search for product information, to search for reviews before making a purchase.  It starts with a need, then a keyword search, browsing, self education, and then buying; either online or on the store shelf, or through a purchase order.  The key is to provide information when people are seeking it.  As we said before, making your content searchable, understanding search engine optimization, also understanding how you can make that sticky connection with your target audience through video, through multi-media.  It makes web pages much more effective when you have multi-media.  It makes advertising much more effective when you can reach them through their mobile device, such as podcasting.

For search engine optimization (SEO) you have to realize it’s all about page ranking.  When people enter various keywords, and you’ve hopefully thought through what your customers are saying to themselves when they’re thinking about what they need so that when they’re coming to your website via search engine, they can respond to your message and your call to action.  Also to understand that search engines value and discriminate toward multi-media content which is more valuable than text content.  Just a basic understanding of how the algorithms work for the search engines.  Search engines such as Google.  iTunes now has a search engine for multi media, which used to be used for songs, is now being used for multi-media content.

One thing that people aren’t aware of is that really simple syndication (RSS), which is the driver for blogging and podcasting, is how podcasts and blogs are pushed out to the various directories where they are consumed.  RSS has a large impact on search engine optimization (SEO).  When you write an RSS feed, it gets pushed out and creates quality listings in other directories that point back and create inbound links.  Those inbound links which are quality links from quality sites (it doesn’t help to have low quality) it helps to have high quality links.  These links improve search engine rankings, which in turn send more traffic to your site, which if done properly with the proper call to action can help increase your sales.  So the strategy is to drive traffic to your website and then convert that traffic into sales or some other call to action.  It could be that maybe you’re trying to influence public policy, or it might be a PR (public relations) goal.

The key is to understand that by using podcasting that this is the effect that it has is driving traffic to your site through search engine optimization.  When you’re thinking about converting traffic into sales or traffic into whatever your call to action is, it’s very important to realize how effective video is.  Video is five times more effective than text.  It comes back to some basic axioms that we learned in our college study skills class.  We only remember ten percent of what we read, twenty percent of what we hear, and fifty percent of what we see and hear, which is video.  If you want your website to be effective and for people to come to it, maybe five times more effective, you’ll put video on your website to better engage your audience and better make them respond to your call to action.   That can be done through online video (web video, videocast, webinar, webcast) or podcasts.  This way you educate your customers and prospects into buying your products and services. 

It’s important to understand the modern consumer and that they have a strong appetite for knowledge.  When people have an ailment, sometimes the go in knowing more than their doctor about their particular problem and challenge their doctor.  Those who do a lot of research and enjoy researching on the web, frequently become key opinion leaders (KOL) because they come to know a lot more than their peers about a certain subject.  Then their peers begin to ask them about their subject and ask them for recommendations.  Word spreads through this type of very targeted education, say through online video or podcasting, spreads from there to a larger segment of the population by word of mouth (WOM).  It spreads through these key opinion leaders.  This is how education and learning and multi-media combine together with what’s going on in the web and social media to give you greater sales, give you better penetration and increase your business. 

Some very important trends in learning.  Online learning is growing, almost exponentially, there are a couple of sites that do video based training for software products, TotalTraining, Lynda.com, that are excellent and getting a lot of traction because they teach people very quickly how to use software products such as Adobe and QuickBooks.  Concepts that lend themselves to description are good for audio, although video is good, usually, you can save money just by using audio.  If something is process or technique oriented, it’s best to demonstrate it through video.  Video is very good at showing sequential process.

A lot of people don’t realize that iTunes now has a very strong anchor and that is higher education.  That is the anchor tenant for iTunes podcasting.  Seventy four (74) Universities, as recently counted (August 2008), are now podcasting a portion of their courses.  For example, University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley), my alma mater, has over 100 complete courses available on iTunes, which represents over 4000 audio and video lectures.  That’s just UC Berkeley.  There are 74 other institutions that are podcasting their courses. 

What a lot of marketers are beginning to realize is that people are using the iTunes search field as a multi-media search engine.  Just like they use a regular search engine, they are now entering keywords that they would normally enter into a search engine, into iTunes.  The old model is that people would enter their song titles or movie titles into iTunes and buy their music.  They are doing the same thing now with search terms that they’re interested in.  The term “clean energy” brings back more than 10 college courses and 12 podcasts.  This represents hundreds of hours of multimedia education.  When I say 10 college courses, this isn’t 10 lectures, these are 10 complete college courses.  With 12 pod casts, these are 12 pod cast channels, each one having separate episodes, so it’s hundreds of hours of multi-media education and that’s growing every month.

I hope you’re getting the message here that you can gain a lot of exposure and a lot of traction by connecting with you audience by educating them and following this current trend and using online video or pod casting to achieve a greater impact with your message.  The nice thing about using online video and podcasting is that compared to other media, they are very inexpensive to produce. 
MobileCast Media offers consulting services in this are to help your company get on track with what’s happening with new media.  People chose to deal with us because we have very strong domain expertise, we’ve been dealing in this for a long time, we can help them get to market much quicker with much better outcomes while avoiding embarrassing mistakes, allowing you to focus on your core competencies, that is developing better products and services.

So feel free to contact us, visit http://www.mobilecastmedia.com or write contact (at) mobilecastmedia.com or call us at 1 800 508-8155.  [Note: We serve internationally with strong presence in Silicon Valley, California (CA) San Francisco Bay Area: San Francisco, San Jose, San Mateo, Palo Alto, and Sunnyvale, including 415, 650 and 408 area codes.]. I hope you watch some of the other presentations that are available on the website, or via podcast or YouTube, which deal with online video solutions, video podcasting solutions, and audio podcasting solutions.  Thank you.