Why you need video content for effective marketing

Search through the statistics in the article http://www.inc.com/larry-kim/visual-content-marketing-16-eye-popping-statistics-you-need-to-know.html and you will find that many of them tell you about the growth of video content on the web

e.g. videos on Facebook's news service have increased by 3.6x


However, the statistics that tell you about user reaction to images and videos are key to realising how powerful (and increasingly necessary) visual content is for your online content.  For example, the fact that posts with videos attract 3x more links than those that only have text.

Of course, none of the statistics PROVE that adding images or videos will increase the attraction of your posts; it could just be that people who write the most interesting posts are also those that care about illustrating them.  Given the way we have evolved to respond to movement and colour however, it is a pretty good bet that attractive images or videos will help you attract more attention for your content.

Have a look at all the statistics in the article and see which ones are relevant for your content marketing.

Does a "Like" button give enough feedback?

Reading a recent article from the Nieman Journalism Lab about testing a "Respect" button instead of a "Like" button for news items led me to think more about the benefits and disadvantages of "Like" buttons.

Facebook is well known for its "Like" button which allows users to "give positive feedback and connect with things [they] care about" but other sites have their equivalent: Google+ with "+1" to "give something a public stamp of approval" ; Twitter with "Follow" ; YouTube has thumbs up or thumbs down icons; Pinterest has "Like"; and Tumblr has a like.

So most of the major social media sites have one or at most two simple ways for a viewer to show approval and YouTube is the only one that allows viewers to rate an item negatively as well as positively with one click.

Allowing users to give positive feedback or approval with one click has the obvious benefit of making it very easy for users to interact with content.  It only takes a second to "Like" whereas adding a comment could take a minute or more.  So one-click approval encourages more interactions and keeps a site lively.

But how much does it measure, and more importantly, increase customer engagement?  More sophisticated ratings or comments provide much richer feedback, including making it clear whether the user finds the views expressed in the content interesting and worth sharing or perhaps just the topic itself, while not agreeing with all of the views expressed.  There are some interesting ideas on increasing customer engagement through social media in this prezi (and the Nieman article mentioned up front has some interesting insights on comments and polls)

Which is more important for a site?  Volume of instant feedback or in-depth engagement?

Well, of course you can have both with buttons and comment fields.

But maybe there is a way to gain more information from buttons without losing significant volume, and possibly encourage more comment by just making some users reflect a little more on the feedback they are giving.  How about one or two more buttons to record better the positive and negative sentiments and to rate the importance of the topic being discussed?

I feel most sites are in a rut of just using one standard button.

Time for an experiment?

Who owns the online community?

The biggest online communities are businesses that tap into people's general or specific interests and offer great value to users and contributors.  In today's world they often do not charge any money for the use of their services, instead making money from selling adverts on their sites or from services sold to premium users or to companies providing add-ons.  Think of Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn for example.

Looking at these communities today, it is hard to think of a future without them, but they face constant pressures not to go the way of previous stars such as MySpace (now growing again slowly), AOL and SecondLife.  For example, Facebook experiences considerable pressure from younger rivals as it tries to maintain growth and the amount of time users spending on the site as noted in this CNBC report on Facebook growth from May 2013; while it is growing fast in emerging markets, there are signs of a loss of interest by users in established markets such as the USA and UK.

These pressures highlight the fact that the communities depend on their users who are free to go elsewhere if something new grabs their attention (for example Tumblr or Pinterest), if the site annoys them (e.g. not addressing privacy concerns) or just if they grow bored with the activity on the site.

Are there ways to combat this and create longer-lasting online communities?

One possibility would be to involve the community itself much more in running and setting the direction for the site.  Could the community actually co-own the service?  A real sense of ownership would increase loyalty and should also ensure that the site develops in ways that the community wants.  But if the online site was run as a business, this would inevitably create tension between the profit-motive of the company running the service and the demands of users.

There are two other drawbacks to the idea of community involvement or co-ownership.  Firstly, most users do not want to get involved.  They want a service, one that is useful and is used by their friends but do not want to spend time or effort on working out how it should be run; if it stops meeting their needs, then they will just go elsewhere.  Secondly, the active members who would be willing to participate in setting direction are not necessarily representative of the majority, let alone new users whom the business might want to attract.

All of these drawbacks can be overcome, in my opinion, (after all, two of them exist in democratic governments) by adhering to three principles

• clarity on the aims of the community and how both the company running it and the users will benefit
• balance of benefits between operator and users with limits on both sides
• realistic controls that meet the long-term objectives and concerns of the users while allowing the business to operate commercially from day-to-day

I am working on building these principles into a new community for the travel industry.  By focusing on a specific part of the travel industry, the community should also cater to a long-term interest that will help the community to survive (as long as it is well-run).  I will share my plans in more detail in future posts.

Maybe you have any experience of building or even just participating in communities that have long-term success in maintaining user commitment or enthusiasm?  If so, it would be great to hear your experiences.

Social Media as a Part of Market Engagement

Social media tends to provoke one of two widely different reactions from business people - they either embrace it wholeheartedly and devote enormous amounts of time to it at the expense of other activities or they avoid it either out of fear or out of belief that it is just a fad which is a waste of time for them. This is particularly true of small businesses who do not have the luxury of appointing a person, still less a whole department, to manage their interactions with social media.

The reality is that social media can be valuable for all businesses but it is not a panacea to be pursued to the detriment of other tasks, and even other marketing. I have mentioned this before in a previous blog - http://rogerstonemarketing.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/reality-behind-social-media-hype.html

Social media has tremendous potential as part, but not all, of your marketing engagement. To understand this, we must first understand what marketing engagement is.

For much of my marketing career, one major element of marketing was called marketing communication (marcom) but this was in the days when companies told customers and prospects what was on offer and the only communication back from most of them might be a negotiation on price, possibly a purchase and after that maybe one or two requests for service. Feedback on new ideas, new offers or even new marketing campaigns was done at best with a focus group or small survey.

But now customers and prospects not only expect more involvement and dialogue with companies but also are willing to be your advocates if they like your product or service and the way you treat them. So now one-way marketing communication has evolved to two-way communication with the aim of going beyond simple expressions of "Here's what we have to offer" and "Yes I'll take it / No, I do not want that" to engaging the attention of the market. Now it is about discussing how the offer and its message can be adapted to the needs of the prospects and how they can be enthused to tell others about their experience.

Social media is a great tool for this because

• you can find and address communities with particular interests, and build your own communities
• conversations can be rich in structure and include short messages, links to detailed material, photos, videos, podcasts, slideshows and webinars
• feedback is quick and direct
• the means for passing on the message about your product is built into social media software

But social media is not the only way to engage with the market. Customers still appreciate face to face meetings, go to conferences and events, read newspapers, listen to the radio and watch TV. So your market engagement mix should include all types of communication that are relevant and affordable.

In thinking about the effort you should spend on social media, you should first decide on the amount of time. effort and money (and the number of people) to devote to market engagement as a whole. Then you must decide how to divide this up into five different activities that make up market engagement:

1. Building and maintaining a shopfront: for most people this is not physical but a website or set of Facebook pages where the market can see who you are and what you have to offer.
2. Meetings and events: face to face time where you have direct contact with prospects, customers, suppliers and partners. You might also include video conferences or even phone calls in this activity as long as you obtaining a rich feedback from people's expressions, manners and voices to help build personal relationships.
3. Listening and joining in relevant conversations: this is done on sites such LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+,Twitter, popular blogs, and discussion forums. To succeed you need to be interested in your customers, so it is vital to listen to them and comment on what they say rather than hogging the conversation with your own opinions. People are going to engage with you and Like/Follow/Link with you if you are interested in them as well as if you have something interesting of your own to say.
4. Starting conversations yourself: when you have something to say, or even better when you want market opinion on a particular subject, then you can start a conversation, be it a Tweet, a post on Facebook or a topic on a LinkedIn group.
5. Publishing detailed information that shows your expertise in a particular area (whitepaper, blog posts, slideshow, how-to video, etc) or that explains your product and service in detail.

Decide how much time you have to do all these tasks and then set realistic goals for how often you can do each of them and stick to it. Better to follow one or two of the most relevant groups and comment every few days than follow dozens but comment so infrequently that you do not leave a lasting impression.

Marketing engagement is a vital part of your business. Nowadays it can often perform the bulk, if not all, of the task of selling. Social media is a necessary and fantastically useful element of this engagement, but it is not the only element so you have to balance the time you spend on it.

For jobs be aware of social media rather than beware

For some time now there have been stories about people, particularly youngsters, being identified in embarrassing social media entries ( videos on YouTube, pictures on Facebook or Flickr, blog posts on WordPress or Blogger, tweets on Twitter) which causes problems with their employers or, if they are still teenagers, could cause problems when they come to look for their first job. My wife and I have been telling our children for a while that they need to careful what they publish even when they are young, since it might come to the surface and count against them in five or ten years time.

But this article in imedia made me think again. It talks about employers starting to look at Klout scores and favouring those who score highly. Those who are active and engaged on social media are demonstrating their ability to communicate and to influence others, which can be important characteristics for some jobs such as marketing. This leads to the conclusion that it might be useful to be active in social media to give yourself an edge when applying for jobs.

Also the fear of embarrassing incidents from the past being visible on social media and being a major disadvantage in finding employment may reduce over time. We have all had embarrassing episodes in our past, but until recently they have only been seen by a few people. Yet the younger generation are growing up with a more open idea of what can or should be shared. In a few years, those hiring may well think it as normal that the embarrassing incidents can be viewed online as we now think it is normal that they happened at all.

So instead of telling people to beware of their social media profile and to keep it low, we should be telling people to be aware of their profile and raise it in the right way