Stage Two's blog

Twitter’s attraction in the past year or so has been quite intriguing. For most companies, there’s probably still some confusion as to what it’s good for to generate leads, sales, profits, etc., but this number is slowly dwindling as the months go by. And in a sure sign of Twitter’s growing popularity, a study conducted by the Society of New Communications Research (SNCR) found out that in 2009, companies listed in the Fortune 500 were eagerly signing up and jumping on the Twitter bandwagon. It seems that these large brands like General Motors, Exxon Mobil, US Steel, General Electric, Proctor & Gamble and Boeing are finally understanding the potential Twitter can play across all spectrums of the communication channel.

Here are some other interesting statistics:

• AdWeek reports that 35% of the Fortune 500 companies on Twitter had active accounts – meaning that they had posted something within the past 30 days.
• With the top 100 companies, 47 of them actually had a Twitter account
• 22% of all the Fortune 500 brands only had “public-facing corporate blogs”
• 4 of the 5 top corporations consistently post to their Twitter account – Wal-Mart, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and GE
• Insurance was the industry with the largest Twitter presence – 13 Fortune companies participating
• 19%  of Fortune 500 corporations were using podcasting and 31% using video blogging

So what does this mean? From the standpoint of companies and brands, it shows that now the large companies are starting to pay attention to social media. In its infancy, social media was probably viewed by large corporations as something that couldn’t scale. However, more companies are now embracing it and what may have started out as a small experiment within brands like Wal-Mart, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and GE has exploded into being a major part of their marketing channel.

But why is Twitter becoming the medium of choice to communicate with customers instead of blogging? Sure, blogging will get you to post your own thoughts and get your message across, but when you compare the potential audience on Twitter versus the one currently visiting your blog, there’s a big difference. For one, you can send out a tweet to anyone  - just a random thought on Twitter and it’s not limited to being seen by the people following you. Secondly, you’re going to be able to see how viral your message can really get through retweets and commentary. Without wanting to sound cliche, you’re going to be able to join in the “conversation” in near ‘real-time” as well. Imagine being in a large reception area where people are talking about different things. You being there is representative of you being on Twitter. In walking around, you might hear something said about your company, brand and/or product OR something else not-related, but interesting. By you interjecting to be a part of that discussion, you’re engaging customers. You can’t necessarily do exactly that in a blog, or at least not in real-time. This is probably what companies are discovering and find that Twitter lets them relate to their customers on their level, NOT from the customer. This is pretty much the same thing with all other forms of social media.

So what is the power behind this social media and what is its appeal? It seems pretty clear that companies are starting to think more “outside the box” and seeing a little less clutter in social media than there are with other mediums like traditional advertising, radio/broadcast, websites, etc. Also, the statistics shown above are saying that these Fortune 500 companies are thinking that if they want to get involved with customers, they’re going to have to find a new way of reaching them – essentially going to where the customers are spending their time.

Source: AdWeek and iMediaConnection

20 year wireless industry veteran, Jean Tripier, joins WorldMate as CEO today. Jean comes most recently from Good Technology, where he was Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Operating Officer and built the company’s OEM business from the ground up. Before Good, Tripier was Vice President of Corporate Development at international mobile giant Vodafone, overseeing the entire Asia Pacific region. Jean will lead discussions of co-branded deals, with travel brands looking for a quick-to-market mobile app. WorldMate recently signed one such deal with Virgin Blue.

Founding CEO Nadav Gur, remains with WorldMate. He will run business operations as the company’s Chief Commercial Officer.

Amir Kirshenboim, who was the company’s VP of Product Development from 2004-2007, returns now as CEO of  WorldMate Israel, where he will lead product innovation and technical development.  Since 2008, Amir has been Senior Vice President of Products at the video ringtone company, Vringo. He brought the product to leading industry partners such as Marvel Comics, Maxis and Etisalat and helped build a wide user base. Before originally joining WorldMate, Kirshenboim founded two mobile companies, DITIO Software Ltd. and Smart Mobile Applications.

We look forward to working with WorldMate as they continue to innovate and forge new co-branded partnerships that bring their best-in-class service to a wider audience of business and elite travelers.

Coverage so far:

tnooz.com

Simple Mobile Review

VUDU, in the wake of their acquisition by Wal-Mart, is continuing to innovate and improve their streaming movie service.  The company has announced as of this morning a new social feature baked right into their user interface, specifically the ability to share a recently viewed movie (and how much they liked the movie) via a tweet or a Facebook status update.  Friends of the VUDU  customer who follow their updates in a given service will see an update that the viewer watched the movie in VUDU, and see how well they rated it (out of 5 stars).  If you happen to see the tweet or the Facebook update from within VUDU’s own native Facebook or Twitter application (inside VUDU Apps) then with one click you’ll be able to go watch that movie within the movie service app.

This is another gret example of why a streaming user interface offers maximum flexibility and advantage for VUDU.  They can quickly and easily push down new features as often as needed or useful. No software download by the user  or firmware upgrade for the device is necessary. The new feature just loads the next time a user turns on the service.  VUDU has been making feature updates at a rate of 1 ever 1-2 weeks since they launched this streaming UI, including theatrical trailers, Rotten Tomatoes, Wikipedia, and now social features to share recently watched movies on Twitter or Facbeook.

Last year, I was very fortunate enough to attend the Inbound Marketing Summit hosted by Chris Brogan and Justin Levy. It was there that I was first introduced to Tim Street, a video producer and social media marketer – perhaps better well known for French Maid TV. It was there that he brought up the topic of how to create a viral video. You know about a lot of them – you’ve probably seen them and also passed them along to your friends and family. They’re the ones that really catch on – like the one featuring Susan Boyle from Britain’s Got Talent – remember that one? Well since that conference, I’ve been hearing a lot of people asking what does it take to create a viral video. The answer is a lot of work…just because you can create a video does not mean that it’s automatically going to be a hit on the Internet and that millions of viewers will want to watch it.

According to Street, there are four components to making a video viral:

• Make it easy to share.
• Make it OK to share.
• Controversial – takes risks.
• Emotionally engaging.

The first part is pretty easy – make it easy to share. If you’re going to create a video, don’t just put it on your website. Make sure that it’s placed in a high-traffic area, like YouTube or Facebook where people can find it and refer others using other viral tools. If you put it only in one spot and don’t help people share it on social networks, then you just have a video, NOT a viral one. People love it when the options are there to make their lives easier. If you make it too difficult, chances are that they’ll simply watch it and give up on sending it to friends. Why? Because no video is that good to endure such difficulties. Keep it simple and accessible.

When talking about being “OK to share“, I believe that you shouldn’t make it too risque – but I’m sure it depends on the tastes of your audience. In other words, make sure that it’s safe for work and that your message gets through without diminishing the intent of the video or being too vulgar that it soon gets pulled off the website. But let’s not confuse this with the third component: be controversial – take risks. A plain video with no message about which side to take probably doesn’t go anywhere, but being controversial always sells and can be a good attention grabber – if anything, people who have seen your video will tell others about it just so they can either support or admonish it later. Make sure that you take a risk and play on your issue’s provocative nature.

Lastly, never forget that people become invested in something when they are emotionally engaged. Videos of Susan Boyle were a hit because people felt compelled to watch and the emotion they felt helped to spread the movie clip further. Find a way to get the viewers involved…whether that’s a comedic bit, happy ending, anger or sadness, emotions are a powerful tool in video virality.

So now you’ve created a viral video, what steps can you take in order to help people pay attention to it?

Through relationships, strategic placements and syndication can you achieve virality – at least according to a ClickZ article.

One of the first things to do is to make sure some influential people in that industry take a look at the video and see if they’ll pass it along. It is also recommended that you penetrate the video networks like YouTube, Vimeo, Blip, etc and see who is doing the most sharing. Just like you might do with a story idea to a journalist or how you pitch an influencer, doing video marketing is no different. It would behoove you to go ahead and start building a relationship with some of the people in the community and after a while, when you’ve earned their trust, you can go ahead and see if they would be interested in your video. Granted, simply being friends with them will not guarantee that your video will be shared – in fact, at that point, it depends on whether your video is good to begin with. You can also tap into some video seeding services like TubeMogul and VidMetrix for help or talk to social media enthusiasts either in your company or agency you work to see if they have any leads.

As for strategic placement, if you have money in your budget, you might want to consider doing some paid placement. You’re not paying for people to share your video, but you’re just non-chalantly placing your video where the most trafficked areas on the site are. For example, you could have your video on the front page of YouTube where that’s the starting point for millions of people everyday to find interesting things to watch. That alone could generate the returns you seek.

Lastly, make sure your video is syndicated. I’m sure this goes in line with the principle we discussed earlier of making it easy to share, but just to re-emphasize that you want people to easily pass along your video. Don’t be afraid to let influencers embed the video on their website or other networks. Like it’s written in the ClickZ article: “Let your viewers decide where and how they want to view your videos.“  Don’t disrupt the process or interfere in how they share.

While you might think that the above steps are easy to do, I must caution you against underestimating what it takes to build a viral video. Yes, it is easy to create a video, but when you want to begin trying to make it viral, you need to balance between making sure people find your work organically and without pressure  AND that it’s also not bordering on being too marketing/sales-like. The best viral videos are user-generated and anything commercial may be frowned upon.

A closing thought?

Advertisers will always have a difficult time playing in the viral space. People want pure entertainment. Even the most minimally branded videos are often rejected.

Where will you draw the line on your video?

Today, Spot.Us the pioneer of community funded journalism, takes a new form in its on-going evolution with new features that give communities more ways to participate in the journalism that matters to them. The organization also hopes the new ways it uses technology will help lead to the first open API for journalism — allowing developers to innovate new, dynamic tools to engage with stories.

Starting today, community members can:

• Pledge time and talent to actively participate in realizing a story
• Show support and raise awareness of a pitch with an easy Spot.Us widget on their website
• Get updates as an investigation evolves  from each story’s progress blog
• Get the word out through enhanced social sharing features for Facebook and Twitter
• Suggest cities for the next Spot.Us expansion

The ability to give not just money, but talent to an investigation, opens up new possibilities. Teams of interested individuals can collaborate with a lead journalist and be an integral part of the work.

All of these improvements are embedded in a redesign of the site that Spot.Us believes will better serve the communities, journalists and other news organizations that work with the site.

Stage Two has been working with Spot.Us since its inception, when it pioneered community funded journalism right here in San Francisco. We were thrilled to see them expand to L.A. in November and congratulate Spot.Us on this latest step!

Coverage So Far:

Business Insider

Idea Lab

Lost Remote

Nieman Journalism Lab

Poynter