How to Use Social Networking Sites to Drive Business

How to Use Social Networking Sites to Drive Business

WhoseTube? (monetizing social media)

The lead singer of OK Go, Damian Kulash, Jr., has an interesting op-ed in today's NYT that raises some hard questions about "monetizing" social media in the music industry.

For those of you who didn't catch it, OK Go's homemade YouTube video for "Here It Goes Again" was one of the hottest viral videos of 2006 and essentially launched that band's career. Many of those views came from blogs and websites that promoted the video by embedding it on their page. The band knows it, and their record label, EMI, knows it.

Unfortunately, EMI is now preventing YouTube from enabling the embedding capability of OK Go's newest videos. (otherwise, I would embed one or two to the post for ya'll to see). So, no one can post OK Go's videos to a blog or facebook feed or whatever.

EMI argues they are doing this because YouTube won't pay them any royalties when the video is viewed from non-youtube.com websites. Kulash argues that the economic benefits of wide-spread viralization of their videos would far outweigh the lost revenues from those not required to visit youtube.com to view them. I tend to agree.

But whose to blame here really? How has YouTube not been able to monetize embedded videos successfully? (and if they can't, why do I still see those annoying ads in every YouTube video I watch?). And why is EMI so close-minded when they saw the success that viral videos brought their clients 4 years ago?

Moreover, is the progress of successfully monetizing social media actually limiting the opportunities available for users to those which can be successfully monetized at all?

How Social Media Has Changed Us...

This post from Mashable is really interesting for anyone who has not already seen it.

In business school, it's all too easy to think of social media as just impacting the world of marketing but its influence runs much deeper than that.

I also strongly agree with the article's strong position against social media critics and their reasoning.

Monday Night Social Media Event at Black Bear

I got passed along to me info about an event run my New Media Haven. They are bringing in two guest speakers and are giving social media people time to network. It looks like there will be a lot of people attending. The event runs from 6-8. I may be there for the tail end.

To sign up and get more info, you can go to:

http://newmediahaven.eventbrite.com/

Simple Indulgence - Sporcle

NERD ALERT!!!


Sporcle is both the best and worst website that I have found on the internet.

I found it by chance when I was looking up Thomas and Friends.
It let me unleash my pent up geography, pop culture, and random knowledge.
But it didn't stop there. It was like the Energizer bunny. It kept going and going and going...
Now I can stay up until 4am each night trying different puzzles.

Sporcle.com <-- try it if you dare!!!

Chad Ocho Cinco: A Personal Branding Case Study

Marc Schiller, founder of Electric Artists, talks about the proliferation of personalized brands and the evolution of social media. The democratization of information has changed not only the marketing landscape. He referenced the idea of walking into a job interview telling the hiring manager across the desk from you:

“If you hire me, I’m bringing 20,000 people (read: twitter followers) with me. How will you handle that?”

A great example of this is NFL player, Chad Ocho Cinco. In the NFL, players enter into legal employment contracts that teams are authorized to break at any point. This leaves these players at the mercy of their employer with little recourse. So, to look at the current example as a Human Resources case study is more relevant than it seems.

Chad’s last name, Ocho Cinco, is a Spanish translation of 8-5, his uniform number. Known for countless league violations, he was fined during the 2006 season for altering the name on his jersey to read “OCHO CINCO” instead of “JOHNSON,” his legal name at the time. In the offseason, he legally changed his name to Chad Ocho Cinco in order to circumvent the NFL’s policy. Now you can see it in stat sheets, commentators refer to him as Ocho Cinco and his jersey reads the same.

He has always created a spectacle with his charisma and publicity stunts, which he has transitioned into social media. Currently, Chad has a UStream channel with 7,000 followers, a Motorola-sponsored Facebook fan page with over 15,000 followers, nearly 750,000 fans on Twitter under the handle, @OGOchocinco, and his very own iPhone app.

On Twitter, he has been commonly known to invite all of his followers to meetups across the country for a free dinner or a movie. He has also responded directly to fans that reached out while their friend was on his deathbed or just to get a pep talk. To reinforce the point, Motorola sponsored a 1,200-ticket giveaway to a home Bengals game in order to prevent a regional broadcast blackout of the game. He promoted this heavily on Twitter and was able to ensure the game was televised in the Cincinnati area.

What makes this so relevant to Schiller’s point is to look at Chad Ocho Cinco for what he is: an employee of the Cincinatti Bengals, and ultimately the NFL. The NFL established a strict social media policy for all employees and even fired some due to violations. When the Cincinnati Bengals were the main characters on HBO’s original series “Hard Knocks,” Ocho Cinco was temporarily banned from Twitter, UStream, Facebook and any other social media platforms to communicate with his fans.




Most recently, Ocho Cinco partnered with Motorol organized a full-blown media effort to cover the Super Bowl and enlisted other NFL players to join his OCNN press team. His and his team’s presence at Super Bowl media day received just as much, if not more, media coverage than the athletes actually competing in the game.

Sports figures and celebrities are clear prototypes for building a personal brand since it has become standard procedure for them, and Chad Ocho Cinco has mastered the art. The gift and the curse for the Cincinatti Bengals is that this guy has built his personal brand to the point where it is engaging fans at a higher level and undoubtedly increasing the fan loyalty to the NFL. However, as Ocho Cinco walks into the office of a team’s Director of Player Personnel, he can say, “If you hire me, I’m bringing 1 million people. How are you going to handle that?”

If they can continue to effectively manage the risk, then it is an extremely valuable asset. If they can’t, then it could become a toxic liability. For now, there’s only upside because Chad brings the loyalty of a million or more followers to the Bengals’ fan base. If I were a betting man, I’d wager my money that he retires in Cincinnati on that point alone.

When Expertise is required

I was reflecting on a comment Dina made in class yesterday that for doctors, the best referrals are in fact loyal customers, whereas for the Trap Rock Brewery amateurs were better. One clear difference between someone who chooses restaurants and someone who chooses medications or treatments is the amount of expertise and experience required to make a judgment.

For restaurants anyone who had a one time positive experience may choose to give a positive evaluation and that evaluation would for the most part seem considered credible. Even on websites like Yelp, we receive what we perceive to be credible feedback from people we have never met or whose reputation we are unfamiliar with. So in these situations, loose networks can lead to new referrals.

For doctors, however, expertise and experience must exceed beyond a single exposure. Drugs and treatments must not only go through an FDA approval process, but even after legal vetting, still undergo in office trials and get validation through conference presentations, or repeated doctor experiences. In this case, vouching for a product that turns out not to be credible has higher cost, so a harder bar to cross to get referrals, and since doctors are looking for people whose opinions they can honestly trust, rather than people who may be indirectly benefiting from either the product manufacturer or from the increased credibility of being perceived as an expert. So compared to restaurant customers, doctors are more wary and risk averse.

It would be interesting to determine whether there is a spectrum between customer risk aversion and product complexity to the amount of expertise required in a network referral. For instance between pharmaceuticals and restaurant visits are consumer electronics; some expertise is helpful, but it's not life or death - a high complexity product that doesn't automatically generate risk aversion. Another is vacations where product complexity is low, but where people are very concerned about having a bad experience.