National Geographic’s Senior VP for online content development Rob Covey was interviewed at OMMA last month by Beet.tv about Nat Geo’s social media strategy. Covey explains how their approach around user-generated content website, Everyday Explorers. While the site is still in beta it has been received extremely well by Nat Geo’s audience.
National Geographic is using our APIs for both the video and community aspects of the website. Here’s the video and the link to the Beet.tv page.
A few months ago, I had a conversation with a longtime radio industry insider who shared his thoughts about the similarities between radio, online communities and social media. He talked about how radio was one of the first mediums for user-generated content, with listeners dialing in and expressing themselves, local communities/local conversations, and so on.
As a follow up on this, we decided to host a webinar yesterday on the topic: Re-inventing Radio With An Interactive Web Presence. Joining KickApps’ founder, Eric Alterman, were Jim Kerr of Pollack Media Group and Bob Hamilton of New Radio Star. During the hour long presentation they talked about the opportunities for radio, creating online communities and how to involve sponsors. You can view the archived version here.
What we’ve found is that taking existing on-air communities online is very natural for radio. You have listeners that are already part of a community and social media gives them a venue to drive even deeper relationships with each other and the radio station (not to mention the station’s sponsors).
If you work in radio, here are some examples that should get you thinking:
We want you to get the most from your online video content. That’s why we introduced innovative tools like the Widget & Video Player Studio, it’s why we serve all of your media through Akamai’s global content delivery network, and it’s why we’ve woven viral syndication functionality across the entire platform.
But as you know, maximizing the value of your video isn’t just about reaching the most people, having great looking video players, or even delivering ultra-fast streams every time. It’s also about having the tools to monetize those experiences effectively.
To that end, in our latest release we launched drag & drop support for ads in your video players. Out of the box, you can integrate pre-, post- and overlay ads from Google AdSense for Video, ScanScout, adap.tv, 24/7 Real Media, and from your own servers, with more options to come.
The response has been great, so we put together the below video to show you just how easy it is for you to do it yourself.
I spent a couple of days last week in San Francisco at the Social Media Marketing Summit. In all of the presentations and the discussions that I had during the two days, one thing is for sure, we’re all starting to talk about the same thing: “Marketing is about relationships.”
Now, I’m not sure if its ever been all that different, in theory at least. Mass media armed marketers with tools to be able to ’scale’ and gave them reach. However, marketing seemed to lose something along the way. Afterall, as consumers, we love being treated like everyone else, don’t we? We like assumptions to be made about our likes and dislikes. We like being sold to…
When did a brand’s relationship with consumers become so cold? So unfulfilling? Charlene Li, author of the Groundswell and founder of the Altimeter Group, showed this clip which I think says it all:
Consumers have always had a voice, but unfortunately didn’t have scale and reach. As I talked about in a post a couple of weeks ago, consumer expectations have changed and the tools that enable scale and reach are more accessible than ever. As Charlene said in her keynote last week, “people have the power in the Groundswell.”
The question for marketers and the brands they represent remains: where’s my place in the multilogue world (where many-to-many conversations are happening simultaneously).
Tara Hunt, one of the industry’s most highly regarded thought leaders and practitioners, and author of the upcoming book The Whuffie Factor, talks about this in terms of connections, reputation and subsequently, a brand’s social capital–or as she calls it, Whuffie.
In traditional marketing, brand commonly equates to trust. In today’s social web, this same definition applies, however, as we all know the opportunities for a brand to build that trust differs but also increases substantially.
What does Whuffie buy a marketer? I’ll leave it to Tara to tell you that in her book next Spring, but, my take is that if marketers are able to start thinking about and acting on real relationships with customers (earning Whuffie), we’ll start to see greater brand loyalty and more cost effective ways of reaching our customers.
If you’re thinking about your brand’s social media strategy, it’s a good time to ask yourself what you’re doing to maximize your brand’s Whuffie mojo.
We recently announced multiple language support for the platform—a feature we’re really excited about because it means you can customize all the text on your KickApps-powered pages and in e-mails to be Spanish, French, German, Italian, or Brazilian Portuguese.
We’ve included pre-loaded, editable language packs for the languages mentioned above, but for a deeper customization you can replace any word or phrase on your pages with your own UTF-8 text or even HTML.
Check out the below video for a quick overview of how this feature works.
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