Twitter Goes the Video Way - The Vine App for Your Visual Short Stories

You shared a tweet about  the latest product your company launched. It has all the catchy keywords and a link to a equally catchy video on Youtube. Add a picture of your product along with the tweet and the chances of it getting clicked increase manifold.

Now, imagine if you could add a short video right here in Twitter - a quick view of what you offer, with a link to a much more detailed video. I say the interest level of your audience will automatically increase. 

Twitter snapped up a video clip company called Vine in October 2012 and now the tree is bearing fruits. Just few days ago the Vine App was launched for iPhone and iPod users and is already hot news. The tie-up allows Tweeples to share short 6-min videos which are looped continuously . It remains to be seen is how long it take to launch an Android version and let the rest of the world join in. Unfortunately, since I am one of those who loves their Androids, I have been unable to post a video-story as yet.

For marketers there is definitely a huge scope…. Give a preview of your CEOs latest press interview, showcase the features of your products, make video testimonials go viral, show your event's highlights, or enable the recruitment folks to entice new talent by posting videos on company culture and fun@work stories.

You can see some great examples of how the Vine is already being used in the blog Twitter Makes Video Marketing More Accessible With GIF-Like Mobile App, Vine.

You can also see a video on How To Post A Vine here: 

However, there is a bit of grey-area too. In these short few days Twitter has also seen numerous short porn videos. One can flag content as unsuitable but content has a way of slipping through the tightest grasp. Will the Terms of Policy change or will we see some Tweet-Policing? How will Apple respond to this considering it has, in the past, pulled off Apps with graphic sexual content (Vine, Twitter's New Video-Sharing App, Already Has A Porn Problem)?

What do you think? How will you use the Vine and the 6-sec video-storytelling?

What Cooking Competitions and Email Marketing have in Common

I love watching Top Chef. I will sit and watch even the reruns - Top Chef, Top Chef - Just Desserts, Masterchef Australia (That's where I draw the line). And every time I watch my current fav-chef creating his/her culinary delights, apart from my tongue salivating, my brain is echoing what I am sure are also the chef’s thoughts, – “Let the judges like it. Let the judges like it...”

Image courtesy digitalart/ Freedigitalphotos.net

Creating that perfect email campaign, in some ways, is exactly like the experience of creating the perfect dish. You start by keeping the challenge in mind - a product promotional campaign or, a thought leadership article; a webcast on the latest trends in your field or a series of mails ending with an invitation to your target audience to attend an event. Then you flip the challenge – have a look at the same from the viewer’s point of view. What is it that would really excite them enough to take a bite, what flavors are they looking for…what would it take for them to click on ‘Read More’? And then, you start the prep-work.

Unfortunately, you could have the perfect recipe which you feel is so right for the audience, the ingredients are fresh, you have all these amazing equipments and tools at your disposal and when you plate the food you can’t help but feel a sense of pride and joy. But if the judges comes along, take a bite and decide it does not suit their palate, preferring to move on to the next competitor, all you can do is store the learnings and tweak your style in the next round, i.e if you don’t get eliminated.

The last part is where the difference between the parallels drawn emerges. With cooking the contestants are dealing with a specified number of judges – professional celebrities whose taste-preferences are well-known or, easily researchable. On the other hand, while planning an email campaign the audience can run into hundreds and even thousands – customization of the messaging to that degree might just be close to impossible. So how does one ensure the maximum clicks and the highest interest quotient?

If you have the recipe down to a pat and the mix is what one would call ‘ideal’ – if the campaign is what you can truly say the result of studying and surveying a decent-sized sample of your key target audience, and you ultimately get above 60% success rate then, I say that you have just served yourself a very good deal.

What do you think? What parallels would you draw?

Check, Check and Re-check - A Content Writer's Biggest Challenge.

It happens to everyone. You can do an activity n number of times but the n^th +1 time you will mess up, just because you forgot the 3 magic words – ‘Check, Check and Re-check’. Learning the hard-way is definitely not the way things are supposed to be done but then, as laws of human psychology go, one has to undergo the silent mortification (humiliation being too strong a word) of being corrected before there is, once again, the determination to self-check any piece of work a million times. Content writers, more often than not, will go through this, unfortunately more often than they should.

This quick one-two-three guide is easy to remember and actionize.

1. Once the work is done, re-read/ re-trace the steps taken and the showcased end-result.
2. Take a break, ideally an hour – Do anything other than that work. It gives your mind the opportunity to refresh its cache memory.
3. If it’s a written piece that needs to be submitted then take a print out. What I am suggesting is definitely not ecologically-apt. So please recycle or re-use the sheets lying around. Reading from a paper, akin to a book, creates a more lasting impression and makes it easier to pin-point mistakes.

If there is no immediate deadline to be met then a post-24 hr re-check should give you a fresh perspective.

Now if only, I could stick to my advice and actionize it 24*7*365. Unfortunately, as laws of human psychology would have it, I might find myself at this exact place, sooner or later.

Do B2B Marketers Hibernate Come Christmas, New Year and Financial Year-end?

A friend who works for a telecom company raised this question to me just yesterday. Day after day for months without fail, just like an alarm clock, we get bombarded with mails which share product updates, thought leadership articles and event invites. And suddenly, just as Q3 comes to a close, all you get is a seasons’ greeting card. Given this, how can one grouse someone for asking if we are hibernating?

Unlike B2C marketing, where the merry season brings with it sales, discounts and crazy promotional tactics, B2B marketing suddenly takes a back seat. And rightly so! What’s the point in jamming someone’s mailbox when they are either holidaying or, preparing for year-end results or, are knee-deep in planning their next year’s strategy?

These 2 months (15-Dec onwards till mid-Jan and the whole of March), as most have found, are most effective for strategy revisiting. There is less dilution of your concentration and the year-end is a perfect opportunity to analyze what worked and what did not. This is, of course, not to state that B2C marketers do not carry out these activities. 

While defining ‘What will my brand speak about next year?’ it will do us good to visit:

1.       “What worked and what did not?”

2.       “What are the key messages we will talk about”?

3.        “Are my people aligned right?”

4.       “Which channels will be most effective for me?”

5.        “What kind of budgets will I need?”

You will notice that I have put budget-consideration as the last step and that’s the way it would be in the ideal scenario. Unfortunately, this is not the way most organizations see it. B2B marketing is often considered an overhead and changing that mindset will not happen overnight. In the meanwhile, keeping a larger number in mind and then breaking it into different activities and channels might be a good idea. One could always revisit the overall number, towards the end, for tweaking and fine-tuning.

Why did the Dog Climb aboard the Elevator?

It did happen….while I was on my way out of the office, right when we reached the ground floor…a brown mix-breed dog (no collar so not a pet) calmly walks into the elevator as the door swishes open. I am more shocked than amused and try to shoo the little doggie out, but to no avail. A co-passenger quips "Must be tired of the ground floor and would like to visit the basement!" We reach the basement and sure enough Jingle (Yes, I named the dog in those 30 seconds) walks out, all prim and proper, her head held high.

The question is why did the dog climb aboard? I have been thinking and believe either the dog is a thinker and a visionary for its kind or, is simply a follower of the other beings in its existing environment - in this case, the humans.

Translate this to our daily life and we can learn from Jingle that it is all about doing things in a new way!

•    A new way to reach an old goal can lead to doing things more easily - Till the world was introduced to emails, marketers promoted their products via letters and print media. When social media came into being marketing communication saw the birth of micro-blogs and informal connections across Facebook and Twitter.  Building relationships, the age-old goal, just got simpler and faster. The effort and time invested might be equivalent but the costs reduced and the networking became more real-time.

•     You might become the first (in your circle) to try out a new idea -When Facebook started becoming a rage amongst the people for staying in touch and building personal relationships  who would have thought that the same platform could be used  by global organizations to build social connections with their end consumers. Today, from Coco Cola to Ford to Lufthansa, companies are using this channel as part of their everyday marketing. Many of these social connections also attribute to the bottom line – a Coco-cola loyal Facebook fan will buy his favorite soft drink next time she is thirsty.

•      Learning from cross-species - You might be a B2B brand but you could learn from a B2C company like Coco-Cola how to engage with customers and keep them involved. You might be a B2C company but learning how Lady Gaga has created her Little Monsters community can help change how the relationship game is played.  A manufacturing company can learn from Walmart how to ensure that the supply chain is operating as efficiently as possible. In fact, the spill-over is already happening – for example, banks are going the ecommerce way; insurance is available online, just like your favorite sweater is!
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•     Patience is a virtue - Once Jingle got onto the elevator and the doors closed she did not start panicking or, scratching the doors in an effort to get out. She waited till the doors opened, walked out and assessed whether she like the new surroundings or not. Similarly, once you have made the effort, done the research and started on a venture it is best you follow it to some kind of conclusion. Ditching the plans mid-way when you hit a block, without any kind of analysis done on the proceedings, will only lead to frustration. When you start a marketing program, say an e-campaign or, a PR effort, make measurable checkpoints in the roadmap. Every time a checkpoint is reached, review whether the program is going as per plan. If not, recheck whether you could do certain things differently to map to the expected results. Only when this fails should you drop the program. Keeping an eye on the way the program is being carried out can usually help identify problem areas and help rectify them.

Jingle may or may not have stayed in the basement but she tried something new on the way. We might not like where we end up once we start on a marketing program but that does not mean that the learnings from the effort will not help us in the future - after all what good is a best practice repository if the best practices are not updated often enough!

What Twilight (the movie) and Marketing have in common.

Let’s admit it ...Drama enhances likability.

 Those who have seen the last of the twilight saga and have even managed to get through the last of the book series will have to admit that the movie is much more likable. Had the drama - the slight embellishments, the nicely shot fight sequence towards the end of the movie - been missing we would have been watching a picturised version of a very bland, boring, no-content book.         

Translate this thought to your day-to-day marketing. When one sits to design a new campaign for what is in reality a boring product with too many functionalities...say an IT product for the financial industry....you must look at it from different perspectives and if required, change the good ole sales story . If we were to focus on how would the product affect the end consumer and then create a story-line around it we are adding drama to an otherwise boring pitch.

The 1 min elevator pitch is actually all about tweaking the long story and bringing the dramatic bits to the front ....not changing it so it becomes totally out of context.

‘So what’s the game plan?’ - B2B Marketing Plan for Newbies

When the opportunity to create a ‘Product plan’ came to me the very first time I had the look on my face which clearly reflected my thoughts (at least that’s what my senior colleague said)….”Hmmmmm I think I will throw 4 emails, 2 events and a webinar together and voila the plan is done!”. 

Of course it doesn’t take a real genius to figure out that it’s not all that simple. So here are my newbie learnings in a nutshell. 

When one is faced with the challenge of creating a game plan – a full fledged global cross-channel campaign – especially for a B2B product, one simply can’t put those 4 emails, 2 events and a webinar together and say “I think this is the best way to take this product to the market”. While the MBA classes had taught the same thing to me, somehow translating it to the real life scenario is well a completely different experience. So start with the basics – an opportunity study is the best thing to do. I don’t mean go out carrying a survey questionnaire and stopping Tom, Dick and Harry to share their thoughts (I agree that for a B2C market this might be the only way, so don’t beat me over it), but rather understand your market from these angles:

· Global and regional – What is the current market size? What are the predicted future trends? Don’t worry – these things are quite easily found. Google – the world’s best invention. 
· Your ‘Target prospective clients’ strategy – Have a broad target segment in mind. Is the offering a cross-vertical product? Is the business targeting a particular segment or will the product be for any company, irrespective of its size? Will each segment’s need be same? 
· End customers perspective – It’s not enough to research the above two and slap them onto a powerpoint presentation. You need to establish how this product will affect your customer’s customer. If you do not have an end-to-end framework established, if you cannot convince the prospects that the product will enable them to gain their customers trust and build a relationship then you might just have failed before you started. 

 Once the dynamics of the market are clear and you have an understanding of the business’ objectives – the revenue projections from product, any particular regions planned for short-term and the long-term – you will need to define what marketing’s objectives will be. 

The key thing to remember is never to spread yourself too thin. No plan can achieve it all at the first go. Break up the objectives into logical sections – you may want to direct only particular regions in first year or, particular customer segments. The main thing is this should tie in with the organization’s business objectives. 

The last step, and perhaps the most important one, is identifying the marketing strategy – 
· What is the key messaging that will be used for your targeted sections? – This can be a common messaging or can even differ depending upon what your opportunity study has told you 
· What is it that you hope to achieve – What is the intent – is it awareness or, opportunity generation or, both? 
· Define the marketing approach – Will you talk about the value the product will bring to market to each of the segments? Will you showcase success stories to strengthen your proposition to build awareness or, will you use thought leadership?

After this it is simply a matter of deploying the most effective channels – yes, those 4 emails, 2 events and a webinar! The key thing being knowing what works where. The best thing to do would be study how your competitors are marketing their products – which influencers are they tying up with or, which events are they showcasing their wares. Set-up your Gantt charts and then define the budgets. 

And here, I am going to end with a slightly controversial statement. Having a ‘Budgets-then-Plan’ point of view will restrict the scope of your reach. Of course budgets are important. However, once you have the key activities you will like to undertake in mind, you can scale them up or down to suit the available budgets. This approach allows you to have a more long term perspective rather than ‘Do it now and get it over with’.