The art of engagement in the moment

By Kishore Jethanandani

Short and snappy web videos grab a moment and engage while the emotional

iron is still hot. They have carved out a niche in branded content within less than

a year of the launch of the first of them, Vine from Twitter.

The appeal of short-form videos waxes and wanes, fleetingly, with the waves of

emotions, cravings and seeking. Canny brands make their presence felt by

pitching entertainment, information and suggestions with each surge of waves.

Branded content has been quick to embrace short-form video—it has touched the

attention nerve. The share of branded content in the top 100 Vines, tracked by

Unruly Media, was 4 percent. This is in contrast to 1 percent in the top 100 of all

online videos. The Unruly Media study of branded video content concluded that

for Vine, “contagious content which elicits powerful emotional responses is the

key.”

Urban Outfitters is one brand that hitched on the Vine bandwagon the day it

launched. It has 40,000 plus followers on Vine and keeps its audience agog with a

stream of content ranging from music events in its stores to newly launched

products, contests and trivia.

Lowe’s customers are receptive to Vine videos when they find themselves

stressed over niggling chores that drain their energy. The harried customers are

relieved when a six second video visually demonstrates a tip to solve the problem.

Lowes’s can have their attention in countless such situations.

GoPro, the manufacturer of head-worn cameras for extreme sports enthusiasts, is

in a space where users don’t need to be motivated to produce short videos of

their adventures. When prompted, they are too willing to share the footage and

keep refreshing it in the community maintained by GoPro. The interest is

sustained with contests and gifts of GoPro products.

Vine’s success attracted competition from Instagram which added features for the

production and sharing of 15 second videos in June of 2013. At launch time,

Instagram seemed to have overtaken Vine with a larger number of the top 100

brands engaging and vastly more sharing. Vine responded with channels of

content such as music, adventure and more as well as a version for Android. The

strategy has worked as its users boomed from 13 million in June to 40 million in

August.

The founders of YouTube added a new twist in August with the launch of Mixbit

for iOS which allows users to capture videos of any duration and string them

together for up to a length of an hour. This is not dissimilar to applications in the

music industry where fans enjoy mixing music of their favorite artists and engage

with them. Mixbit will likely be useful for video content creation by customers

who engage with the communities created by brands.

In its brief existence as a media form, short-form video has gained currency at an

astonishingly rapid pace. Short-form videos are proving that lasting impressions

are possible even with fleeting engagements. The key is to strike a chord enough

for it to jingle and echo into social media circles. Lasting impressions are etched

when the tune changes several times with the rhythm of life and registers each

time.

Brands dance to the tune of Digital Music

By Kishore Jethanandani

Digital music has evolved into a media channel distinct from digital video. Brands

are learning that music lets them connect with the emotions of fans. They can

engage with fans by being on beat with their favorite bands, and online they are

more likely to be indie groups. Digital music sites like Soundcloud have developed

the platforms for especially indie artists to reach out to fans on social media sites.

Soundcloud experienced a breakout year in 2012 beating all other social media

sites in terms of growth of fans. The monthly average number of fans engaging

with each artist on Soundcloud more than tripled in 2012. The only other channel

that experienced growth was YouTube which was less than half the growth of

Soundcloud achieved albeit on a much higher base.

The brand choices of digital music consumers are influenced by their online social

behavior and their virtual relationships with their favorite artists. According to a

survey by Nielsen, those streaming music are 96 percent more likely than an

average US internet user to follow a celebrity on a social network, 76 percent

more likely to follow a brand and 90 percent more likely to be heavy spenders on

digital music. They are also 55 percent more likely to follow news feeds of artists

and purchase rates for brands increase 28 percent when they sponsor an artist.

Independent artists and brands find it mutually beneficial to have an online

business relationship. The well-known labels zealously protect their copyrights

and participate on online channels only conditionally. Indie artists, by contrast,

are more willing to partner with brands when their values match. It does not hurt

that sponsorships have proved to be a major boost to fledgling artists. The payoff

for brands is high when they back an artist with the potential to be a rising star. A

talented artist quickly goes viral online especially with help from applications

available on digital music channels.

Lowe’s clientele was largely among the baby-boomers and for growth it needed

to be raise awareness among the millennial generation who are going to be the

new home buyers. The millennial generation also avidly searches for new artists

online. Lowe’s reached out to them with music videos produced by indie artists.

Soundcloud has developed a platform for linking applications for music

production, community outreach, fan engagement and brand promotion. Sound

tracks can be uploaded and downloaded from artists’ websites by clicking

widgets. Tabletop is a music production application for iPad and Soundcloud

powers the application that helps share tracks with fans on social media

communities. Flipboard has now added Soundcloud to let users browse their

media choices just as they do it for publications. Soundcloud initiated the Pro

Partners program that lets brands promote the music videos or jingles that

feature their products or engage a larger audience with the performances they

sponsor. Premium members also receive analytics services to learn about the

demographics and media consumption behavior of their fans.

Digital music sites like Soundcloud have been able to carve out their own media

channel by cultivating an entire ecology of producers, consumers and promoters

of online music. The old models of monetization by labels are crumbling. Brand

sponsorship is the new way to pay for performances and online communities to

engage with their audience. Talent counts more in this world where digital music

channels have become the springboard for indie artists to thrive.

Info-graphics drive the upward growth curve in Pinterest

By Kishore Jethanandani

There is a method in the wild growth of Pinterest over the last two years. Curated

info-graphics attract swarms of customer segments that compulsively spread the

word on their own boards.

Bit Rebels, an online newspaper that specializes in serving news in the form of

info-graphics, measured the precise impact info-graphics have on engagement. It

compared linking activity for 500 of its info-graphic posts on social media sites

with equivalent activity for its traditional posts with text and images. The impact

on engagement was measured by the number of times the posts were linked on

social media sites. They found the difference between info-graphics and the

traditional posts was a whopping 500 percent!

Curiously, the difference in the impact between info-graphics and traditional

posts was zilch on Pinterest itself. Similarly, when measured in page views,

Pinterest came in last among the social media sites compared. The dynamics are

different on Pinterest where pinners create boards with a common theme that

interests a peer group. The assorted posts compared by BitRebels did not meet

that criterion.

While low in sheer volume of traffic, Pinterest performs better on some of the key

performance measures. According to research conducted by analyst firm,

BloomReach, based on over 46 million site visits on social media sites in the last

quarter of 2012, the conversion rates on Pinterest were 22 percent higher than

on Facebook, the money spent by Pinterest traffic was 60 percent higher and the

visitors viewed more pages—1.6 pages on Facebook and 2.9 pages--on Pinterest

according to numbers presented by Readwrite.com.

Pinterest’s architecture emerged from an old habit of one of its founders, Ben

Silbermann, an Iowa native, had from his childhood days. In an interview to

Fastcodesign, he revealed that he was fond of collecting insects and pin them to

cardboards. When one of his earlier businesses was not gaining traction, he

changed course and decided to create a platform for digital collections of info-

graphics.

Digital boards on Pinterest tend to attract smaller clusters of visitors with shared

interests when the theme of a board resonates with them. Jason Miles,

Marketing Director at his wife’s firm Liberty Jane Clothing Company,

serendipitously discovered the high referral rates from swarms of visitors on their

Pinterest boards.

In an interview to Trafficjamcast, Mr. Miles revealed that Pinterest is very

effective for niche markets; Liberty Jane is all about fabrics, patterns and clothing.

Their Pinterest boards touch on themes related to sewing with Liberty Jane’s own

showing up more prominently and includes a referral link to their web-site. These

boards go viral very quickly as they are repinned in the community with the same

shared interest. Mr. Miles found that the referral traffic from Pinterest was ten

times more than from their YouTube channel and five to six times more fan pages

than Facebook.

Social media is all about human creativity and much less about financial firepower

for advertising. Pinboard costs a lot less both in terms of media purchase and

human effort to create visuals. Info-graphics inform and captivate and are more

compelling without even the razzle-dazzle of high quality videos or flashy images.

YouTube competes with commercial TV

By Kishore Jethanandani

Youtube’s harum-scarum expansion of goofy user-generated content is giving

way to first steps towards professional content on premium TV channels. Sports

content is the linchpin for commercial TV and will likely light the blaze of the trail

to its long anticipated disruption by online social TV.

Youtube’s spending on premium channels has more than doubled in 2013 over

2012. The “grants” received by producers of content for premium channels

increased from $100 million dollars in 2012 to $250 dollars in 2013 according to

the numbers cited by a Needham Insights report. Content producers set aside all

their revenues up to the amount of the grant to payback YouTube.

YouTube has not yet purchased broadcasting rights from mainstream sports

clubs but it is able to gain the rights for broadcasting niche sports or a geography

outside the main centers of the game. Skydiving is largely unknown outside

small groups of hobbyists but found an audience of 8 million on Youtube when

Felix Baumgartner did a sound barrier breaking jump. Professional Bull Riders

Association (PBR), a game known to few people, saw an advantage in an all-

digital strategy, in collaboration with YouTube, in order to expand its reach.

Major League Baseball streams games on Youtube outside of the USA, NBA

streams its minor league sports and the London Olympics expanded its reach to

Asia.

The future of broadcasting rights for major league games is caught in a limbo as

conflicting forces drive them in opposite directions. Cable companies need

exclusive broadcasting rights to retain their customers and they are bidding at a

higher rate to keep them. On the other hand, the hold of cable companies on

broadcasting rights is tenuous as the audience shifts online to access content on

mobile devices or any device. The number of households without any television

jumped to 5 million in 2012 compared to 2 million in 2007.

Meanwhile, Youtube is able to cater to the demand by sports clubs to keep fans

engaged with highlights of the game, interviews with sports men and women

and peeks into the backrooms. One such Youtube channel is Love Football that

has snippets of the game with captivating content like the footage on the goals

scored, moments of suspense and moments of skillful maneuvering and reviews

of the news.

Some of the more successful and competitive sports broadcasters supplement

their live programming with partnerships with Youtube. ESPN, the leading sports

broadcaster, has 1.2 million subscribers to its Youtube channel. Fox Sports, the

upcoming challenger, has over 69,000 subscribers and sees their growth as a

priority. They are looking to gain an edge with the interaction of fans with the

content.

The demand for streaming media will only grow as 30 percent of cable

subscribers have expressed their willingness to switch to streaming media.

Youtube will be able to tip the balance of forces in the broadcasting industry in

its favor when a high speed broadband network like the one Google is making

available in Kansas is more widely available across the USA for superior quality

programming.

Youtube’s premium channels will bring some of the benefits of commercial TV,

such as ease of discovery, while keeping the fun of personalization of the

Internet world. Not all of the freewheeling ways of the Internet world will be lost

as fans will still be able to contribute their content in conversations, within the

communities created by sports clubs, with the added benefit of convenient

cataloging. A tough battle over broadcasting rights looms as the numbers of fans

participating on Internet channels rise rapidly.