Drew's Articles Archives - Page 27 of 55

CMO Insights: The Growing Power of Networks

Posted on June 30, 2013 by Drew Neisser

One of the reasons I love my career choice is that I get to meet so many clever people who bring fresh thinking to age old challenges. Porter Gale is one of those people, who’s four year tenure as CMO at Virgin America represented the triumph of the scrappy start-up over the intrenched Goliaths, rich with innovation from the seatbelt instructional video to the reservation system and multiple points in between. Having left Virgin, Porter Gale is sharing her some of things she’s learned via a new book, Your Network is Your Net Worth, a topic we discussed on video at the recent IBM Smarter Commerce Summit. Recognizing that most of you won’t want to devote 12 minutes to watching this video, here are the highlights of our conversation on the power of networks and how marketers big and small can capitalize on the growing importance of big data.

Drew Neisser: Tell me about your new book?
Porter Gale: It’s all about the power of connections and networks and it talks about how important our relationships are but there is also a lot of digital media strategy and conversation about how the world is changing because of social. So it is a fascinating book, lots of great interviews and my mom loved it and I hope that you will.

Drew Neisser: Talk to me a little bit about that how technology and social are coming together?
Porter Gale: Well, as you know I was with Virgin America for four years and so I think that is a great example of a company that has put digital in the forefront of their strategy. For Virgin, it is not only through the product experience (like WiFi on the planes), but also the whole marketing strategy is really focused on empowering the customer with digital. We’re talking to them through their [smart] phone, through their iPads and so I think we all have to recognize that the world is digital and it is not going back.

Drew Neisser: By the way, I love Virgin America, I fly it whenever I can from New York to San Francisco or LA and I felt this connection. I was on the plane and was having a little bit of trouble with something so I tweeted, hey @VirginAmerica describing my problem and they were on it. It was very impressive.
Porter Gale: That was probably Nick our intern who was running that Twitter stream and making sure that you were okay. The team there does an amazing job and they should be really proud of their efforts.

Drew Neisser: Where is all this networking happening?
Porter Gale: Networking can be inside the organization with just the employees and how they are connecting and collaborating and it can be with your customers, how you are networking with them too. What I really wanted people to think about is that if you put more energy on relationships, you can have a lot more productivity, more success, more happiness and that is true both personally and professionally.

Drew Neisser: Interesting. So specifically who is doing this well right now?
Porter Gale: Well, I work with a chef right now, Michael Mina who has 18 restaurants, and the thing that I find really amazing about him is that he really looks at each restaurant as an extension of his home and so he is really connecting with his customers, he knows all of them, it is very personal, he has great relationships with them and so that is an example of recognizing the power of that relationship with that customer.

Drew Neisser: You mentioned it is no longer six degrees of separation, it’s four degrees, where did those other two go?
Porter Gale: That is actually a fact. I worked with Peoplebrowsr and they analyzed Twitter data from 2007 to the present and they figured out the number of degrees of separation between people and the old saying “six degrees of Kevin Bacon,” it’s now four.

Drew Neisser: Got it. So what are implications of 4 degrees of separation?
Porter Gale: What this means is that every single connection is more important than before because we are more closely linked, we also have larger circles of empathy which means that we are connected to more people, our thoughts and our feelings are impacting more people, there’s emotions that are spreading through social network and so the world — the way that we connect and talk to each other and influence decisions has completely changed. I like to think of it as the world getting smaller and smaller and that a connection that could change your life is maybe just one person away.

Drew Neisser: Do you think that all customers should be treated equally from a service stand point or are some customers just more important than others?
Porter Gale: Well, that is a very debatable question. You know the democratic response that I would have is that I would like all customers to be treated equally and that you can learn something from every single customer. If for some reason they are not as engaged or they are not as fanatical, you know you can learn from that. That said, I think it is important to really understand the segments of your population. So who are the customers that are driving most of your revenue? What are they interested in, what are their buying behaviors, what are they doing in terms of shopping. You need to at least acknowledge who the high engagement groups are and understand them but if you have the bandwidth, and you have the resources, treat every customer with love and respect.

Drew Neisser: Let’s talk about this network and the role that big data plays in all of this.
Porter Gale: Data has been the buzzword for the last couple of years but it [really] is completely changing the game. Let’s take the example of an airline. We might know your seat preferences, your drink preferences, what routes you like to fly. There’s all sorts of [opportunities for] personalization. That personalization improves your potential for networking because networking is really based on having authentic relationships that are connected and based on shared values and passions. So big data is just going to give us more information but the key is figuring out how to get the insights out of the data.

Drew Neisser: Is there an opportunity for small businesses to use big data?
Porter Gale: Well actually for the small business, I think there are some really great advantages, because one, you won’t get into analysis-paralysis because you don’t have the time and the resources, right? My advice for the small business would actually be to pick three core metrics that you want to focus on, find an analytics platform that is affordable to you. It could be something as simple as Google Analytics, but make sure that you are checking your data and figure out the important variables. Maybe it is your conversion rate that is really important, maybe it was the cost per acquisition but figure out the metrics, track it and make sure that you are staying connected and true to your customers. Net Promoter Score is another one; that is a really good one to track.

Drew Neisser: Can you provide an example of an offline company that is doing a really good job activating on mobile and engaging on mobile?
Porter Gale: Sure. One company that I think is very interesting is Uber. It’s a town-car service but what is amazing is that they have gone up against the taxicab business and they have completely changed how people order a car. So you have on your phone an app, the Uber app, which you have already pre-loaded in your credit card. Through GPS or location devices you hit the button and they know exactly where you are and so Drew if you need a car, you hit the button, you’ll have a beautiful car come pick you up and in a couple of minutes. You can see it driving on the Google map, so you know when it is going to get to you and then you don’t even have to think about payment, because they have your credit card. It is amazing, there is all sort of scoring mechanism, so you can rate the drivers. That is showing online and offline technology merging together and creating better customer experiences. I think we are going to see more of that in the future.

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Tips on Influencer Programs courtesy of IBM Smarter Commerce

Posted on June 20, 2013 by Drew Neisser

Evidently, I’m an influencer. Or at least IBM thinks so which is why I was invited to their Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Nashville this May. There I joined 15 or so true influencers like Pam Moore, Glen Gilmore, Sandra Zoratti, Ted Rubin, Dino Dugan, Rob Moore, Pete Krainik, Bryan Kramer, Bryan Eisenberg, Peter Shankman, Tonia Ries, Kim Garst, Steven Dennis and more including the emcee Jay Baer. None of us were asked to write anything or say anything favorable about IBM but of course, we did. Not because we felt obligated but because IBM served up genuine news, impressive case histories and provided access to senior sources for interesting content.

For me, the real education was seeing how to put on a world class influencer program. Here are a few of the tips I gleaned:

Assemble an eclectic mix of influencers so they aren’t all talking to the same people.
Bring the influencers together so they can bond, cross-pollenate and help amplify each other’s content.
Have a social media center with a leader board so there’s a bit of a competition during the event.
Have a photo booth of some kind to make it easy to get pics that will get shared.
Let them do your video interviews–its fun for them and saves you the trouble.

Which brings me to the other purpose of this post–give you a quick overview of my video interview with Craig Hayman, General Manager, IBM Industry Solutions. Figuring that most of you don’t have a spare 17 minutes and 7 seconds to watch the whole thing, here are some of the highlights of our conversation which focused on how big data is changing the way companies do business.

Drew: Tell me what you think are the three biggest takeaways from today’s activities at the summit?
First off– how big data analytics applied through mobile, social and cloud is better serving the customer. The second thing [is the] very exciting announcement here — Watson has another job. Watson, the doctor, is now Watson call center agent as an advisor or behind the scenes. And the third area [is] the moment of engagement. That precise moment when we as individuals, we as consumers lean in. Lean in to a discussion that’s occurring and we become interested in something. I think we all experience that as individuals but how do you get large companies to do that at scale [and in a] reputable way.

Drew: Interesting. Can you share a real world example where a big company is leaning into an individual and catching them at that moment and doing something with it?
One of the examples we talked about earlier was ING Direct in Canada. So, you know everyone’s got a mobile application for banking. You can check your bank account. You can move money. I think most of us are used to that by now. They did that and they did something special. They caught onto that moment where you don’t buy something where perhaps you forsake a purchase. Maybe you don’t buy a cup of coffee [or an mp3 download]. And, so they found a way to connect that moment with their brand.

In their mobile application you can mark that moment by moving that money into the account, to say, ‘I just saved a couple of bucks here — I didn’t buy a cup of coffee,’ and even better than that you can share that we your friends. Together you’re sharing to buy something, maybe a summer rental or something with some friends. And you become a passionate advocate for that brand.

Drew: What role does IBM play in the ING example?
First, we have mobile capabilities that we deliver to allow them to deliver that mobile first application. Secondly, we’re collecting the data allowing the transactional systems connecting to that mobile application. And third we’re sort of guiding them in terms of reinforcing [and encouraging ING Direct] to do more of that.

Drew: How about another example?
We’ve helped Costco replatform their commerce engine on WebSphere Commerce. We’ve connected their suppliers into a B2B network so new suppliers can on board as Costco goes through this amazing growth of over 50 to 60 million members of Costco.

But for me personally, a great moment was I was able to order a year’s worth of contact lenses [from Costco online]. It was delivered to the store in less than three days and this was an example of their supply chain connected to the online experience in the store. And that’s the reason why Costco is in the top four optical suppliers in the United States because it’s just so easy to do business with them.

Drew: I heard at the presentation today that IBM is helping Caterpillar, especially in the area of post-purchase support. Tell me about that.
So, let’s assume you have a piece of Caterpillar equipment. You need a replacement part. So, what they’ve done is come up with QR codes that can be attached to the part that are actually in the Caterpillar goods as they’re manufactured. So, if you need a replacement part for something, you hold your phone up, scan the QR code, and you’ll now get precisely the right part. Not the part you think you need, but, precisely, the right part that you need for them.

The second thing they’ve done is connect through social and mobile to reach out to dormant customers. To progress them. Perhaps they had a relationship with their distributor. Maybe today they don’t. Maybe they’ve moved or something. So, they reach them through social, mobile, progress them, and educate them. Give them information about advances in technology.

And at the right time, hand that lead together with the information about what that person is interested in back to the distributor, to again convert from what is a digital handshake of relationship education into a physical relationship based on trust and authenticity.

Drew: We’ve been talking a lot about big companies. I’m curious, is there an opportunity in this sort of big day that customer service world person midsized companies?
I think for midsized [companies] this is where cloud really plays a role. Of course, if you buy software, then you have to install it. You have to buy the machines to install it on. You need the services to configure the software, etc. The beautiful thing about buying things through the cloud is you avoid all the capital expenditure. You have minimal operational expenditure to run it.

So, what we have been doing is delivering more and more of our capability as a service in the cloud. Most recently, we delivered Websphere Commerce as a service. We delivered something called IBM Marketing Center as a service. We’ve actually made this available to our business partners for one year for free, so they can kick the tires and make sure they understand it. And so for these small and medium businesses, this is a great way to consume marketing or procurement capabilities or online e-commerce capabilities.

Drew: How is IBM using some of these tools to market themselves?
We push our own internal teams to use our capabilities. So, for marketing, IBM Marketing uses Unica and Coremetrics. For procurement IBM uses Emptoris. For commerce, we use Websphere Commerce. And even internally, we’re using Watson ourselves to understand our customer.

Drew: Interesting. So, let’s sort of wrap up here and if you could sort of, as we look at smarter commerce and big data and customer services, give me sort of the best practices really in a nutshell in this world.
We have worked with [nearly] 3,000 global brands now. And we spent a lot of time understanding what it is that they did that worked and understanding what they did that didn’t work and try to let everyone know what’s the recipe, right.

So, first, [leverage] big data and analytics, apply that through mobile, social and cloud.
The second is, understand your customer. Capture data about that customer at every touch point. Every time you touch that customer in store or online capture data so you can better predict their behavior.
Third, engage with that customer in a way that’s very compelling using that data.

Drew: Let’s dive into the 3^rd point a bit deeper.
When you walk in a store and someone says hello, welcome to my store. It’s not that engaging. Whereas perhaps if you know that you’re browsing the shirts and you’ll looking at a certain stack of shirts then maybe assist them [by] checking out a collar size or sleeve length or something, that’s an engaging dialogue. Or do that online. Progress and engage people.

Metrics Matter

Posted on June 13, 2013 by Drew Neisser

I popped out of the office briefly this week to hear Facebook’s Graham Mudd speak at the Integrated Marketing Week conference on the subject of measuring success across publishers. Graham, by the way, is the Head of Vertical Measurement at Facebook and is thusly well positioned to guide marketers on what metrics matter and which ones don’t. Given the seemingly universal obsession with Likes, I was quite curious what Mudd thought about this and other Facebook-related metrics. Here’s what he had to say…

Drew: Many digital media buyers are still obsessed with Likes and Clicks as a measure of ad efficacy. Is this a mistake and if so, what metrics should they be looking at?
It’s a mistake unless the business outcome they are trying to drive is either directly related or correlated to clicks or likes. If a marketer’s goal is to build a community of its strongest customers online or drive people to their website, then likes and clicks are a great measure of success. On the other hand, if they’re trying to drive sales, either online or offline, then they should be measuring sales, not likes or clicks. For instance, we’ve seen that for 99% of sales generated offline are from people seeing an ad online, not clicking on that ad.

Drew:For several years, marketers and pundits have tried to put a value on a Facebook Like. Is this a fool’s errand or have you seen cases where a Like ultimately translates into business value?
The degree to which the value of a like is important is really driven by the marketer’s goals. If the marketer wants to focus on building a community online or connecting with influencers, then understanding how much those customers are worth is obviously critical to understanding how much to invest.

If a marketer has more traditional goals like customer acquisition or driving online or offline sales, then they shouldn’t be paying attention to likes as much as how much their marketing efforts drove sales.

One thing that’s abundantly clear is that just like customer LTVs (life time values), there is huge variance from industry to industry and advertiser to advertisers in terms of the value of a fan.

Drew: Measuring cross-publisher effectiveness seems like a smart idea. Are there any barriers preventing this from happening now?
The primary barrier is siloed data. By that, I mean that each publisher is measured using a different technology/methodology so the ability to make comparisons across media partners is inherently limited. While there are definitely options out there, we believe there’s a real opportunity to focus on comparability and standardization of measurement across platforms, which is why we acquired Atlas recently.

We really believe in cross publisher measurement for three reasons: (1) our customers are pushing for this and we believe it’s good for digital marketing to be as accountable as possible; (2) we’re confident that when measured accurately, Facebook will perform really well as a marketing platform; (3) we recognize that marketing budgets generally aren’t growing, so in order for us to grow, we need to work closely with brands and agencies to demonstrate that we are a cost effecient and effective channel.

Drew: How exactly do you measure cross-publsiher effectiveness?
Really depends on the marketing objective: If the marketer has direct response goals, then we believe multi-touch attribution is the best methodology for understanding and valuing all the ad exposures that ultimately lead to a conversion. The last click before a purchase shouldn’t be getting all the credit for exposures and actions taken along the way to purchase. If the marketer has branding objectives, then we believe they should be measuring and optimizing on reach and frequency using a tool like Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings (OCR) or comScore VCE. They should also measuring brand lift and if possible, offline sales. Our customers are working with a company called Datalogix to measure how ads on Facebook impact lift in advertisers’ in-store sales.

Drew: Can you provide any real world examples of brands/agencies that are measuring cross-publisher effectiveness and how this is working for them? (What kinds of things are they learning?)
Many major direct response advertisers in verticals like Telecom, Financial Services and e-Commerce are using highly comparable measurement techniques like multi touch attribution. Within campaigns and from campaign to campaign they are constantly learning how various publishers perform and can reallocate budget accordingly.

Brand advertisers use tools like Nielsen OCR and comScore VCE to understand which publishers are deliver their desired audience with controlled frequency and maximum reach.

Drew: Marketers tend to look at Facebook as exclusively a B2C channel. Can you give me an example or two of B2B marketing campaigns on Facebook that are moving the needle?
HubSpot is one that comes to mind right away. It wanted to promote its brand as a thought-leader in the business-to-business field on Facebook to lead fans to its Page and ultimately engage them with other content and drive customer engagement and generate more leads. The company ran ads that targeted different age segments, including 24-34, 35-44, and 45-44, along with Likes and Interests such as “marketing director,” “marketing manager,” and “marketing manager.” HubSpot increased engagement on its Page by posting updates about marketing conferences and e-commerce tips as well as links to demos and videos. As a result it saw 71% sales increase from Facebook over the course of three months and 39% increase in traffic coming from Facebook during the course of three months

Drew: Should B2B marketers look at different metrics than B2C brands when putting together a Facebook and/or cross-publisher ad campaign?
Just as is the case for B2C marketers, B2B should try to use whatever metric mostly approximates or directly measures their business outcome. Measuring sales leads using MTA is certainly possible if the lead generation occurs online. Recently we’ve developed the capability to allow advertisers to upload CRM data to Facebook and reach customer segments on Facebook using a targeting feature called custom audiences. This is a really powerful tool for B2B marketers — and because CRM databases typically track transactional data, marketers can effectively connect exposures to ads on Facebook (and other online and offline channels) with conversions.

Drew: Big companies with big budgets tend to have more sophisticated tools to work with. Can a small advertiser measure cross-publisher effectivenes and if so, how?
Smaller advertisers that have DR objectives often utilize ad products that are more straightforward from a cross publisher perspective. Tools like coupons or discounts, such as our Offers product, can be tracked on a redemption basis, which is easy to compare from publisher to publisher. Same is true for online conversion measurement — Facebook and others provide conversion pixels which can link ad exposure to buying and be compared across sites.

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Going Viral

Posted on June 12, 2013 by Drew Neisser

Paul Greenberg is CEO of CollegeHumor, a division of IAC that is growing faster than you can say Rodney Dangerfield. At this point, it is easy to believe that Greenberg’s mission for his organization, “To be the best and largest multimedia multi-platform comedy studio,” will be realized soon enough. In the meantime, I thought you would appreciate more insights from Paul on making viral videos, budgeting, how marketers can work with CollegeHumor and lastly, how to lead a creative organization.

Drew: Is one type of video more likely to viral than another?
Often the ones that go really viral are new sketches. Because it is a new idea, it gets introduced, people latch onto it, they love it and they send it around. And so for example, we did one that was called, Gay Men Will Marry Your Girlfriends. The thrust is, let gay men marry each other because if not, they’re going to marry your girlfriends and they are going to be much better husbands than you would ever be!

Another one that went really viral was called Look At This Instagram (see below). And it wasn’t again in the Zeitgeist per se but it was a great take on how people use Instagram and it really kind of turned it on its head and parodied it beautifully and people just kind of I know I’ve seen those pictures a million times, I know what they are talking about, and so we really hit those.

Drew: Are series any different from a virality standpoint?
With series you are less apt to get into the Zeitgeist really quickly and so you build an audience over time. So we’ll often see in a series episodes further down the chain do better than the original ones or we’ll see them catch up. People will discover Very Mary Kate on its 10th episode and go ‘oh wow, I didn’t know about this, and I am going to go back and re-watch all of them. We see binge-watching all the time, people just come in and they watch fifteen videos at a time, and a lot of times it is going back to start series when they’ve come in the middle. Not that everything is serialized in terms of its plot, but it is just obviously thematically serialized and so we want to make sure that people love to go back and check it out.

Drew: So how do you budget for production?
We work a monthly basis. So, I say to the team, ‘here is your pot for the month, some you are going to spend more on some and less on some and you know do what you got to do.’ And we work very closely as a team to make sure that if, for example, we are going to go for broke on a Batman video, we are going to do a couple of more Hardly Workings or batch-shoot those and try to do things cheaply. Overall, we’re very efficient in terms of costs. We have figured out lots of ways to cut corners: we shoot in the office so we don’t have to pay location and we batch-shoot sometimes. It’s very efficient.

Drew: Are your videos the primary driver of traffic and new users?
To an extent, although sometimes the non-video content gets shared just as much as the video stuff. For example, the article Eight New Punctuation Marks That You Need got over a million views because it just got shared everywhere. And now there is interest in a series of it. So it really depends, [non-video] content can really drive a lot of view as well.

Drew: Do the video creative team also create the other stuff?
No. We have a separate production team including separate writers who have to be very topically driven.

Drew; Okay, do we get to the point where there is a cable station called CollegeHumor?
No, I don’t think so. I mean I feel like being the multiplatform studio that we are, we are as close to a new age cable channel as you can get.

Drew: So tell me about Coffee Town, your upcoming movie—did you write this in-house?
We actually did finance it but we didn’t write the script. Our agent UTA found Brad Copeland who was the writer for Arrested Development. Brad wrote his own movie script and was looking for somebody to help to allow him to produce it and direct it. So we were the studio. Brad wrote it, directed it and we produced it. We went out to LA and hired a film crew, a real legitimate movie crew, etc. (see trailer here)

Drew: I would suspect you are hoping to rally your army of CollegeHumor fans to see the movie, right?
Yeah, oh yeah. We’ll definitely use the army without question. A big part of this is the fact that we can mobilize 20 million people immediately to say or to at least raise awareness if not to get them off their butts into the theatres. And if we put it on iTunes, we can say, hey click here and you’ll be able to watch CollegeHumor’s movie.

Drew: What exactly is native advertising and what are you doing in this area?
Native advertising is when the advertising blends more with existing content and it becomes less distinguishable as an ad. We’ve been doing that for five years whether we called it branded entertainment or branded content or branded advertising or native advertising, About a year ago, we reorganized an entire group around native advertising. We hired two comedy writers just to write branded content and native advertising pieces and we also reorganized a production team so now we have a native advertising production team that just creates videos for advertisers. Out of those 50 videos we create in a month, maybe less than half are advertising video. But it still feels like CollegeHumor content and people — advertisers [like KFC, AXE & Listerine] come to us because they are interested in our sensibility.

Drew Neisser: What’s the best way for marketers to work with CollegeHumor?
Great question. We need to understand what you are trying to do. Are you trying to increase sales? Are you trying to just increase your brand perception? Are you trying to increase relevancy? Are you trying to activate an audience to go do something? Is about getting more Facebook likes? What do you want as a brand? And then we can help you come up with content that fits that goal.

Drew: How involved are you in the content decision making process?
Not that involved, at this point, certainly not day to day. We have a phenomenal team of very creative people who are very good at what they do. I get involved at a high level making sure that we have a strategy and we are trying to follow it and everybody knows what that strategy. I’ll get very involved if something is questionable from a legal perspective or a taste perspective. But on balance, and that’s how I try to manage my team – hire the best people you can, hopefully people who are smarter than you, and who are experts at what they do and you get obstacles out of their way and you let them do what they do. And so I don’t see any need to micromanage the content team. Besides, I’m not that funny.

Drew: Have you gotten funnier since you joined?
Much. Much funnier–I’m hilarious. Actually it is intimidating in a way because these guys are really funny. And they are so quick. We have our weekly staff meetings and even a lot of the executives are standups [comics], and they are just hilarious. I mean it is like somebody took all of the best class clowns and put them all together in one room, it’s hysterical. It is a really fun place to work.

Drew Neisser: Do you ever say to yourself, ‘I can believe I have this job?’
Yeah. Yeah, it’s awesome. I love creating content and creating products that affect people’s lives in a positive way. That’s one of the things that’s always driven me from a business perspective.

Drew: How about a few secrets to your success?
One is, never stop working ever; just be as aggressive as possible and want to win and do your work your absolute hardest because there is always somebody who is going to work harder than you are and ideas are wonderful but they are a dime-a-dozen. Everything comes down to execution and doing it right and doing it well.

Drew: Do you have any advice for new or aspiring CEOs?
The advice somebody once gave me for managing is, only do what only you can do and spend your time doing that. To that end, I wrote an article on this recently that identified five things that CEOs should spend their time doing:

Set the strategy for what the company needs to be and what we are trying to accomplish and what’s our mission and where are we going. And that’s not done in a vacuum per se, that’s done with the team but ultimately the leader has to be the one who puts his or her stamp on it and say this is the direction we are going to go.
Then it’s making sure that the strategy is communicated very well and that everybody knows what’s going on and that there’s absolutely no misunderstanding. And making sure that everybody is coordinated so that ad sales and editorial and marketing and PR all know what each of the other ones is doing, to help support that overall strategy.
Then its hiring and firing. Personnel. Putting the right people in place, and making sure that they are — smarter than you, they’re experts in their field and they are great.
Then it is getting obstacles out of their way and letting them do their jobs and not micromanaging them but making sure that if there is something wrong, that you are there to help them.
The fifth thing is making sure there’s enough capital to run the business and making sure there is a business plan that can be executed.

Drew: You’ve been on both sides of the creative development process including being a voice over talent and a radio announcer. Do you think that has helped you as a leader of a creative-driven company?
Yes. If there is somebody who is never been a creative before and never been on the talent side, you’re going to make decisions purely based on the bottom-line and probably potentially the wrong ones.

Note: this is the 2nd part of my interview with Paul. Click here to see the first part.

Funny Business: Humor Within Content Marketing

Posted on June 11, 2013 by Drew Neisser

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: So, a rabbi, priest and the content marketer walk into a bar. The bartender asks, “well gents, what’ll it be?” The rabbi glances around the crowded room lamenting, “I see you are serving some of my tribe here, would you mind sending them to temple on Friday night?” The priest, echoing the thoughts of the rabbi, says “yes and if you would send my flock over on Sunday that would be most kind.” The content marketer, ignoring his companions’ discretion, jumps onto the bar and shouts at the top of lungs, “Drinks on me everyone, our ‘Sobriety Rules’ video just went viral!”

Now that we’ve established there are no jobs for me in comedy, let me introduce you to a veritable lion of laughter, Paul Greenberg, the CEO of CollegeHumor Media (owned by IAC). Paul and I had a lengthy chat a couple of months back about the inner workings at CollegeHumor, part of which is transcribed below. I think you will agree after reading this that Paul has one of the best jobs around, working with funny people to make other people laugh AND making money doing it. Look closer and you’ll also see how I was able to glean a few of the 18 Things College Humor Can Teach You About Content Marketing for an upcoming FastCompany.com post.

Drew: When did you join CollegeHumor and how its been going since then?
Sure, I joined two and a half years ago. I was brought in to help grow the company and we have grown 40 percent year over year in traffic over the past two years. We’ve also grown our revenue and we’ve grown 40% in traffic, we are now the eighth largest YouTube channel with over 4.5 million subscribers; we have 15 million monthly unique visitors which again is up, way up over from where we were a couple of years ago; we do a 100 million video streams per month.

Drew: So you’re a lot more than a website?
Yes, look at us as a multiplatform, multimedia studio. We’re not a website. We create enormous amount of content and we publish it on our O&O website, we publish it on YouTube, we publish it to game consoles, we publish it to connected TVs and now we are starting to create traditional long-form television shows and are very close to several deals with major cable networks to do that. We are also going into lots of other areas of business like publishing three books, numerous DVDs and have shot a full-length movie called Coffee Town that will be released in July (see trailer here).

Drew: Tell me about the video production process.
We do about 50 videos per month and it’s all created in-house. We have a production team here in New York a team in LA. It is all original content; we have our own writers, we have our own directors, we have our own producers and editors and it’s all created under the banner of CollegeHumor.

Drew: Do have some kind of schedule for your series like Jake and Amir?
Yes. Jake and Amir comes out every Tuesday like clockwork and Hardly Working comes out every Friday. Some of the other series we do more in seasons. Very Mary Kate, for example, will have a run of 15 straight weeks with an episode and then it’ll take a break. It really depends on the production schedule and the actors, the writers, and how we can work around their schedules. But we try to be consistent and let people know when things are coming out — that’s the best way to build an audience.

Drew: I happened to watch an episode of Very Mary Kate (Drinking Party) and I have to ask, has there been any pushback from the real Mary Kate?
You know I can’t speak for her, from what I understand, completely anecdotally she is a fan and she thinks it’s very funny.

Drew: How do the parody movie trailers fit in?
There are two kinds of videos we do; one are series, which we just talked about and one are just one-off sketches. And a movie trailer for us is like a sketch. It is just like a Saturday Night Live skit that we do and if it hits, we’ll do more and if it doesn’t hit, we won’t do more. So for example, the Dora trailer was an enormous hit — not only was it a hit in the sense of people who said we want to see more of this kind of thing but we also wished this were a real movie. So we made a 12-minute movie which is out in three installments and that was responding to the community.

Drew: How do know when to stop doing sequels to a sketch?
We now have three of the Startup Guys but that was enough. We didn’t want to beat the joke to death, So it really depends on the kind of life that a sketch will get, we have a series we call The Six which is The Six girlfriends you’ll meet when you are back home, The Six dads that you could have — we started off with The Six dads and that did really well so we thought, all right there’s something here and now we have a bunch of Sixes.

Drew: When you say “really well,” what does that mean in terms of traffic?
Once it starts to get to the half a million level, we start to really pay attention. And we don’t just look at views, we look at Facebook likes, we look at shares on Twitter and shares on Tumbler, we are a very social media oriented company. We have a lot of data and we spend a lot of time analyzing data, loking at the ratio between likes and views, if this getting shared a lot but not watched a lot? Do we need to give it a little push somewhere? Is it getting watched a lot on our site but not shared very much? Is there something that doesn’t make it go viral? And we are very good at making content that goes viral and gets shared and so we are always sort of tracking those metrics about social media.

Drew: So you’ll know pretty early whether it is going to be successful, and if you think you see those early signs do you then do more to fuel the fire?
Yes, absolutely. We look at it and we say all right, we got to keep this on our homepage, or we need to make sure we post it again to Facebook or something like that. Creatively we have something called The SIV, which is our secret formula for viral videos and so it needs to make sure that certain videos have certain aspects about them and we keep that very tightly protected, as you might imagine, but it is the sort of the secret sauce of how we create viral videos and we have a team that has honed that art. You know, not everything hits, obviously but I’d say our track record on balance is pretty good and we are very happy with how it is doing and the team is great at it.

Drew: Is there a dedicated team to social media?
We have one person who is a social media manager; all she does is spend her time on social networks. She’s completely in the loop in terms of what’s happening and what is coming up in terms of our schedule, so she’s always out there pushing it to our PR partners. We have another person in our marketing group who pushes stuff to other partners, so we have a well-oiled machine that is constantly making sure that we’re getting our tentacles out everywhere.

Drew: How does Hardly Working fit in?
Hardly Working is a sort of playground for us. That’s where we put the weird ideas into motion, the ones that we want to experiment with, so we are less concerned about how that does. It is totally bizarre and fun and interesting and it gives us a safe place where we are not expecting huge amount of traffic. We do get some that blow up like Startup Guys [which started as a Hardly Working sketch.] Not everything starts there, but it is one place that things get started.

Drew: So it really is all about sort of rapid experimentation?
Exactly. You can’t be afraid to fail, you have to be willing to put yourself out there every day with something new, and they’re not all going to be gems but you get enough hits so that people start to realize wow, these guys have something interesting going on and I’ll go along with them when something is not as great, but I know when I come back there’s going to something for me.

Drew: If we look at, I’m just focusing on the video, we talked about 50 a month, how many of those have to be hits for that month to be a good month?
Two or three big hits, I would say. Which is not as easy as it sounds!

Drew: We’ve been noticing this with business related videos that length matters a lot. What’s ideal for you?
Absolutely, we try to keep it under 2 or 2½ minutes. Anything longer and people really just glaze.

Drew: Are you guys into Vine? Must be tough to do any fun in six seconds?
We’ve done a lot of Vines actually and they are fun experiments. We did a very funny thing for the Oscars–we recreated every Best Picture nominated movie as a Vine.

Drew: Do you ever say to yourself, “I can believe I have this job, this is so great?”
Yeah, it’s awesome. I love creating content and creating products that affect people’s lives in a positive way. That’s one of the things that’s always driven me from a business perspective.

Footnote: Paul also appears in some Hardly Working videos as himself. Here’s one of them.

B2B ≠ Better to Bore

Posted on May 30, 2013 by Drew Neisser

Once upon a time in the realm of corporate America, there lived a stalwart named B2B. His purposeful walk and confident grin belied his unwavering subservience to all the almighty Sales King, who demanded daily tribute in the form of leads, leads, and more leads. Then one day, quite without warning, B2B died. No one mourned. The end. (Note: If this article seems familiar, then you read it first on FastCompany.com).

Or was it?

Okay, enough with the fairy tale, but here’s the truth: Long synonymous with “better to bore” communications, B2B marketing is in the process of being reborn. Leading this rebirth is a new generation of marketers like Jonathan Becher of SAP and Trip Hunter of Fusion-io, who are overturning conventional wisdom and establishing four new B2B marketing decrees that just might stand for years to come.

Culture Trumps Strategy
When he became the new CMO of software behemoth SAP in 2011, Jonathan Becher (pronounced Becker) was keenly aware of the imbalance of power between Sales and Marketing. Sales demanded leads and Marketing kowtowed. To make matters worse, his team battled internally about metrics, tactics, and budget, not to mention the overall strategic approach.

To fix this, Becher eliminated departmental silos, moving staffers around every six months and committing all to the same primary goals. Staffers no longer just had “majors” but also “minors” that broadened internal expertise. As Becher explained recently at The CMO Club Summit, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, so fix your culture to make your strategy work.”

The focus on culture went well beyond reorganizing his staff. Becher banned empty adjectives from internal documents in an effort to eliminate “SAPanese” and other self-indulgent communications. Applying this same “eliminate barriers” mindset to SAP’s external activities, Becher encouraged his team to get to know their customers as individuals, reminding them that “big glass buildings don’t buy products–people do!”

Pursue Hearts, Not Just Minds
When your product is truly disruptive and offers significant price and performance advantages over entrenched competitors, the conventional wisdom would be to focus on rational, feature-heavy messaging. As VP of Corporate Marketing for the rising tech star Fusion-io, Trip Hunter has taken an entirely different approach, finding uniquely “emotional” means of connecting with his targets.

Following the highly successful he engineered in 2011, Hunter has taken Fusion-io marketing to the top of the world–literally–by partnering with mountaineer and U.S. Memory Champion Nelson Dellis, who is currently making his second attempt to summit Everest. Along the way up, Dellis is also testing his memory and raising money for Alzheimer’s research.

Chronicled on a Fusion-io microsite, Dellis’ climb is a multi-dimensional metaphor for the new era of B2B marketing. Explains Hunter, “The Everest Memory Challenge is about getting to know us a bit better, beyond bits and bytes, by sharing something that we think is worthwhile, compelling, and has an emotional connection.” (Proud disclosure: My agency, Renegade, LLC, designed and architected this microsite.)

Less Really is More
As companies grow and products multiply, there is a tendency among B2B marketers to carve up budgets and splinter messages. When Becher took over as CMO, he heard from customers that they received as many as 50 different emails about SAP events and products in any given month; at one point, Becher even realized that multiple events were scheduled in the same week within a few blocks of the same customer. As you might suspect, this marketing onslaught did not endear SAP to its clientele.

In response, Becher and his team created a new evaluation process for events that emphasized quality of engagement over quantity of attendees; in doing so, SAP ultimately reduced the number of events around the world from 3,500 to 1,200. The event overhaul proved its success: A tiny 10-person event led to two deals valued at 70 million euros.

This process of optimization, Becher argues, is a marketer’s best friend, and he practices what he preaches by placing a small number of bigger bets in each of SAP’s communication channels. This also means avoiding what he calls “ego metrics” such as Facebook “Likes” and instead shifting to outcome-focused KPIs that also acknowledge the lengthy sales cycles that are inherent to many B2B efforts.

Content is the Message
Much has been made of content marketing as a powerful new discipline and complement to traditional messaging approaches. Inspired next-generation marketers aren’t bothering to make the distinction between what they say in their ads and the content that they create. For them, this “content” is in fact the message–a message they consider just as effective, if not more so, than traditional ads.

This is certainly the case with Fusion-io’s two-year partnership with Nelson Dellis. Hunter notes: “The Everest Memory Challenge represents qualities that Fusion-io values and embraces. Like Nelson, the Fusion-io team and our customers are people who are adventurous, and take calculated risks to overcome obstacles.”

Prior to his climb, Dellis also appeared at several Fusion-io customer meetings where he could demonstrate his astounding memory skills, including one stop in Japan where he remembered the names of over 70 attendees after meeting them just once two hours earlier. Hunter concludes, “Attaching ourselves to something that is inspirational and representative of who we are as a company says much more about what drives us and our business.”

Final Note: Becher, also known as the “Social CMO,” delivered a keynote at The CMO Club Summit that was well-received by fellow CMOs and well-chronicled by other bloggers (link here). For more on Hunter, see my complete interview with him right here on TheDrewBlog.com.