Mediaboss Marketing

Before the internet took over the economy, "marketing" used to mean spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a creative team, communications staff, and messaging. And that's before the billboards, print ads, and TV spots necessary to get a brand in front consumer eye-balls.

Now all thats changedtheres been a major disruption, says Mike Heller, founder and CEO of Talent Resources , in an interview with Fortune senior editor Anne VanderMey. When you have an influencer that has 30 million followers, 20 million, five millionthats more powerful than any of the other traditional media outlets out there."

Talent Resources, a company with an inconspicuously understated name, is one of a number of new firms now transforming the advertising industry by championing the new, growing business of influencer marketing.

Influencer marketing capitalizes on social media's reach, by paying Internet celebrities of varied levels of fameincluding pets to tout products in their social media accounts to their followers. It's gaining popularity among brands who would rather not shell out for the relatively inefficient and hard-to-measure traditional advertising tactics. Even Internet behemoth Amazon is looking to recruit influencers with its recently launched social influencer program .

One key advantage, other than the relatively lower costs and ease of production, is that influencer posts dont get shut down by ad blockers and can be highly targeted. People trust and identify with the celebrities they follow, which often means they'll like the same brands favored by their favorite starsas long as the brand aligns with the influencers lifestyle. Weve turned down millions of dollars on products that just arent aligned with the talent and their lifestyle, says Heller. It has to be authentic.

Influencer advertising certainly raises some ethical concerns. While the consumer thinks theyre looking at the Instagram feed of people whose style and lifestyle they admire, they might in fact be looking at a feed of advertisements. One of the most recent examples is the lawsuit against the now-infamous Fyre Festival , where numerous celebrity influencers such as Kendall Jenner and other Instagram stars were paid to tout the ultra-exclusive and expensive music festival, which turned out to be less glam than advertised , and the celebrities paid were not even at the festival.

Of course, social media itself is not exactly authentic in the first place, and looking at someones social media posts is basically looking at a manufactured version of what they want to display of their lives, complete with image filters and other enhancements that show them in the best light. That's legal, of course, but when money changes hands it a different story. The FTC requires such advertising to be disclosed to the users, though the sheer number and speed of production of such posts can make it hard to oversee. In April, the FTC published a press release to remind influencers and brands to disclose their connections.

Legal technicalities aside, the influencer marketing trend seems to be here to stay and is expected to become a $5 to $10 billion market within the next five years, according to mediakix .

For the inside track on how the sausage gets made, watch our interview with Talent Resources founder and CEO Mike Heller above.

Link:
Brands Are Relying on 'Influencer' Marketing More Than Ever - Fortune

Segment has raised $64 million in Series C funding, with the Y Combinator Continuity Fund and GV leading the round.

The continuity fund is the $700 million fund led by former Twitter COO Ali Rowghani. It selectively writes checks for YC startups as they raise bigger rounds.

As part of the deal, Rowghani will be joining Segments board of directors. In the funding announcement, he said the startup is on a path to be among the most successful Y Combinator companies.

Three of Segments founders, including CEO Peter Reinhardt, dropped out of MIT to participate in YCs summer 2011 program. The companys products allow businesses to send their online data to different analytics and marketing tools, and to combine that data with customer information from services like Stripe, Salesforce, Mailchimp and Zendesk.

Reinhardt argued that the need for this kind of data infrastructure is only growing.

For the last five years, a lot of investors have been saying that at some point, this industry needs to consolidate you cant have more and more email marketing tools, he said. But instead, Companies are piecing together these best-in-class tools rather than these broad suites People like more and more specialized, niche tools for companies of their size or their geography or their industry.

And as companies employ a broader arsenal of marketing and analytics products, Reinhardt wants Segment to serve as their central customer data platform.

The product is already used by more than 15,000 customers, including Intuit, Atlassian and Gap. Reinhardt said that while Segment was initially adopted by startups, theres a big opportunity in selling the technology to large enterprises.

Hes also hoping to see Segment turn into a broader platform, where third parties can build products that tap into its data he said there are already more than 200 tools built on top of Segment, with 30 percent of them created by partners, rather than Segment itself.

The new round brings Segments total funding to $109 million. Previous investors Accel, Thrive Capital, SV Angel, and NEA also participated.

See the article here:
Marketing data startup Segment raises $64M - TechCrunch

Facebook focuses on idea sharing, Twitter is all about broadcasting your thoughts, Instagram prioritizes the visually interesting, and Pinterest provides storage for the content and products you love. Each social media site is designed to serve a different purpose, so we use it differently. Its no surprise, then, that well watchand expectdifferent types of video on each platform.

In this post, were going to go over how to use video marketing on each individual social media site for best results, including ideal length, file size, and best practices.

Facebook video is more flexible than other types of social media video marketing; there arent time limits that would affect most businesses, and the diverse audience means that multiple types of content will perform well.

Facebook requires that all native videos be under 45 minutes long, and less than 1.75 GB. You should almost never get anywhere close to that 45 minutes. Instead, aiming for video lengths between two and four minutes long is ideal for Facebook. This allows for enough time for you to provide value without risking losing the viewers interest. In my personal experience, Facebook Ads should be kept to a minute and a half or less.

In general, Facebook users are most likely to share content that they find extremely emotionally engagingregardless of the emotion. Whether the video makes us laugh, cry, or both, we like content that makes us feel something.

Tutorials are also extremely effective on the platform, and are frequently saved by users because they provide value. As a result, users save the videos to benefit from the knowledge later.

Other Facebook video best practices to consider include:

Twitter is all about brevity, so it makes sense that the time limit is a heck of a lot shorter than Facebooks 45 minutes. Twitter requires that all videos be under two minutes and twenty seconds (which is up from its previous 30 second maximum). Videos also must be MP4s with AAC audio, and need to be 512MB or under.

Because Twitter is all about trending topics and breaking news, videos that are share brief snippets of valuable information can flourish on this platform. This includes videos of announcements about your business or product.

Videos about (or of) your event also perform well on Twitter. Encourage attendees to create their own videos and share them with the events hashtag.

Some Twitter video best practices to keep in mind include:

You can use Instagram videos in two places: in stories, and in the apps feed. Your video must be between 3 and 60 seconds long, though I highly recommend that stories are kept to 10 seconds or lessusers want to scroll through these quickly, like Snapchat-styled content. The file size for Instagram videos must be kept under 1 GB.

A wide variety of video types work well on Instagram. This includes tutorials, emotion-evoking content, breaking news, and more. Videos that center user-generated content (UGC) also perform exceedingly well on this platform, and should be used whenever possible.

Sharing brief snippets of a live event or information on upcoming news works incredibly well in the Story Format. Even boomerang videos (an example of which is pictured below) can be exceptionally efficient in stories.

Webcast, July 19th: The Blueprint to Build Trust in a Digital World

Instagram video best practices to keep in mind include:

The last time you were on Pinterest, did you see any videos? If your feed looked anything like mine, you didnt see many. This is good news: Pinterest has a native video player, meaning that users can watch the video from the pins close-up, but not a lot of businesses are using it yet. If you do, it can be easier to stand out.

To create a video pin, youll need to have the video uploaded somewhere else online. Then, pin that page, and choose the video as the pins feature image.

Given Pinterests audience and core usage, its no surprise that DIY content and tutorials will be the highest performing content on the site. Make sure to mention what the tutorial is in the videos description, and choose a video thumbnail that will represent it well. Pinterests video best practices include:

Each social media platform offers a different user experience, so it only makes sense that users will have different responses to different kinds of videos on each. By understanding these differencesboth in terms of platform requirements and user preferenceyoull be able to more successfully adapt your videos and your marketing campaigns to each site, increasing your results along the way.

What do you think? How do you adapt your videos for each platform? Which platform do you prefer most? Leave us a comment and let us know what you think!

See the original post:
How to Use Video Marketing on Each Social Media Platform - Business 2 Community

Owned media and paid media are merging enter rented media.

What was once taken for granted as free access and unfettered distribution to brands audiences is now increasingly being charged for. For all the discussion of martech and ad tech colliding, whats been overlooked is that these technologies are simply following the media they power. Social, email, and now even web presence channels are increasingly not pure free media, but the media equivalent of freemium heading to premium only.

When Facebook and Twitter first exploded onto the digital media scene, brands couldnt get enough of it. These platforms encouraged brands to build out their pages, acquire followers and invest in regular publishing on social. The tech companies promised brands a way to engage with their audiences and told investors not to fret monetizing because the key was building a vibrant community first.

After significant investment by the brands, and huge growth by the platforms, we now live in a world where brands can organically reach only a small percentage of all those audiences they built, and they have to pay to actually reach the most and get noticed.

What was supposed to be a replacement to email for communicating more engagingly with audiences has become a much more expensive, but now necessary, way to do it. The marketing tech that supported social marketing has now evolved to support social advertising. Owned social media has become paid social media.

Email, a cornerstone of digital marketing, has for the longest time remained solely the province of marketing technology. Two developments have pushed the channel into advertising.

First, web email providers like Google have introduced paid email delivery where brands can now bid to place their emails at the top of the inbox, especially now that promotional emails may be hidden behind tabs that users dont bother to check regularly. So brands now once again have to pay to reach the same consumer or pay to reach new consumers in a channel previously free.

Second, the social platforms have evolved to more one-to-one communication messaging, like email, and have introduced paid formats around messaging. For example, LinkedIn now allows brands to send LinkedIn mail to target audiences on a cost-per-delivery model.

If beginning to pay for email and social werent worrisome enough, brands increasingly need to worry about their own web presence. While theyve been paying for search traffic to their websites for a long time, they are now beginning to have to pay for App Store traffic to their apps as the platforms continue to further monetize even free apps. Ad tech now supports mobile app installs and discovery.

Most worrisome in the future is the increasing power of telecom powerhouses that are entering advertising and media while controlling the actual pipes for digital bytes. Some have already begun to strike deals to not count traffic for consumers for certain brands, which, in effect, disadvantages those who dont pay up similarly.

The next step simply would be to charge brands for making websites load faster. Your own digital channel will no longer be owned, but rented you pay to stay.

Earned media will always have its place, but expect owned media and paid media to increasingly look alike. When they are identical, martech and ad tech will be one, and the brands will all be tenants of their tech landlords, not digital owners.

Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily MarTech Today. Staff authors are listed here.

Originally posted here:
Rented media: When paid and owned media combine - MarTech Today

[Corrected, 2:25pm. See below] Tis the season for Boston tech startups founded in 2010and their productsto get acquired. Kinvey and Intrepid were bought last month, and now its SocMetrics turn. The Cambridge, MA-based social marketing companys original productcalled SocMetrics Influencer Platformhas been snapped up by Grapevine, a Boston marketing tech firm. Terms of the deal werent disclosed. [A previous version of this paragraph said SocMetrics the company was acquired. Wording was corrected to say its product has been acquiredEds.]

The acquisition seems to make sense for both companies. SocMetrics identifies social media influencers in specific categories for advertising and marketing purposes, and helps agencies engage with them. Grapevine works to connect brands and advertisers with these popular influencers to drive business.

SocMetrics raised a $1.2 million seed round in 2012 from Google Ventures, Charles River Ventures, CommonAngels, Boston Seed Capital, 500 Startups, and angel investors.

Grapevine is led by CEO and co-founder Grant Deken. The company previously went through the Techstars Boston and MassChallenge accelerator programs. (SocMetrics is also a MassChallenge alum.) Earlier this year, Grapevine sold a majority stake to Sun Seven Stars, a Chinese media and investment group led by Bruno Wu.

In an e-mail, Deken says the SocMetrics platform acquisition will expand our strategic footprint and diversify our revenue and customer mix. He adds that SocMetrics software will be rebranded as Scout, and that Grapevine is on track to double its core business this year with half the staff size, as compared to last year.

SocMetrics was co-founded by Roy Rodenstein and Rebecca Xiong. They wont be joining Grapevine, but are advising the company during the transition, Deken says. Rodenstein says in a Twitter message that SocMetrics the company continues with our other marketing apps. [Comment from Rodenstein addedEds.]

Rodenstein and Xiong have a history of startup exits: a previous company of theirs, Going, was acquired by AOL in 2009. Xiong says on her LinkedIn page that she is currently CEO of GrowEpic. Rodenstein and Xiong are both involved with a service called MyTwitterManager, as well.

Marketing tech is as strong as ever in the Boston area. In addition to big players like HubSpot and Constant Contact (now owned by Endurance International Group Holdings), newer companies like ThriveHive, Crayon, Mautic, and Zaius have made recent progress in the field.

Gregory T. Huang is Xconomy's Deputy Editor, National IT Editor, and Editor of Xconomy Boston. E-mail him at gthuang [at] xconomy.com.

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SocMetrics Scooped Up by Grapevine in Social Marketing Deal ... - Xconomy