In what it claims is a first for a service of its kind, online video tracking and measurement firm Visible Measures this morning announced it has been accredited by media industry ratings watchdog the Media Rating Council for a range of its core video metrics products. The accreditation, which follows an extensive audit of Visible Measures systems by the MRC, took nearly a year to complete, and is an important stamp of approval in what is becoming an increasingly crowded field of video and social media metrics and analytics firms. While MRC accreditation doesn’t guarantee that ratings service will be used as a “marketplace currency” the way Nielsen’s ratings are used for buying TV advertising, it at least gives the users of the data the peace of mind that the service is doing what it says it can do. “It’s not any kind of approval for being used in the market,” acknowledges Brian Shin, the founder and CEO of Visible Measures, noting: “It’s really just saying our metrics have been audited and accredited. It’s really up to us, working with major marketers and brand publishers, to decide what to do with it.” What Shin plans to do with it is use it to generate awareness that Visible Measure’s methods for tracking brand exposure across the entire spectrum of online video – including so-called “owned, earned and paid” impressions – actually work. Among other things, the MRC accredited Visible Measures’ True Reach platform, which tracks, measures and assigns values for the exposure a brand reaps regardless of what part of the online video spectrum it comes from, including conventional advertising (pre-roll and in-banner video), branded content, or even user-generated content about the brand. Shin acknowledges that those lines sometimes get blurry, such as consumers remixing a brand’s original content into a user-generated mash-up version, which could actually have a higher or a lower value for a brand depending on how it is executed and distributed. “If you’re a Procter & Gamble, you’re not just trying to measure that one video that you uploaded. It’s really all of the above,” says Shin, noting that marketers may be able to trigger online viewing behavior – and even sharing – with their own content, but they cannot control it. They can only measure its effects, how it gets passed along, shared, changed, and consumed in the process. “The original mandate was to measure and track all video,” Shin explains. “What we were seeing was the lines between what is branded entertainment and user-generated content is blurred, and increasingly so. We’re pretty close close partners with YouTube, and even they struggle to define the barriers between, essentially, everything. “What we have learned is consumers are in control of this distributed content, and marketers need to understand and measure that.” In fact, Shin notes that new genres of blurring brand content are emerging online, such as the so-called “unpacking and hauling” behavior in which consumers are so in love with the brands and products they buy that they film themselves unpacking the haul of goods they bought while shopping and post it on YouTube or Facebook. At the same time, Shin says the volume of brand-generated video content has “exploded” and that most of the biggest marketers now have “entire divisions” responsible for creating and distributing video online. “In the last year alone, the viewership of social video or branded entertainment from marketers has gone up over 300%. In 2011, there were 5.6 billion video views of branded entertainment,” Shin says citing a Visible Measures stat that isn’t just a big number, it’s now also an accredited one.
In what it claims is a first for a service of its kind, online video tracking and measurement firm Visible Measures this morning announced it has been accredited by media industry ratings watchdog the Media Rating Council for a range of its core video metrics products. The accreditation, which follows an extensive audit of Visible Measures systems by the MRC, took nearly a year to complete, and is an important stamp of approval in what is becoming an increasingly crowded field of video and social media metrics and analytics firms. While MRC accreditation doesn’t guarantee that ratings service will be used as a “marketplace currency” the way Nielsen’s ratings are used for buying TV advertising, it at least gives the users of the data the peace of mind that the service is doing what it says it can do. “It’s not any kind of approval for being used in the market,” acknowledges Brian Shin, the founder and CEO of Visible Measures, noting: “It’s really just saying our metrics have been audited and accredited. It’s really up to us, working with major marketers and brand publishers, to decide what to do with it.” What Shin plans to do with it is use it to generate awareness that Visible Measure’s methods for tracking brand exposure across the entire spectrum of online video – including so-called “owned, earned and paid” impressions – actually work. Among other things, the MRC accredited Visible Measures’ True Reach platform, which tracks, measures and assigns values for the exposure a brand reaps regardless of what part of the online video spectrum it comes from, including conventional advertising (pre-roll and in-banner video), branded content, or even user-generated content about the brand. Shin acknowledges that those lines sometimes get blurry, such as consumers remixing a brand’s original content into a user-generated mash-up version, which could actually have a higher or a lower value for a brand depending on how it is executed and distributed. “If you’re a Procter & Gamble, you’re not just trying to measure that one video that you uploaded. It’s really all of the above,” says Shin, noting that marketers may be able to trigger online viewing behavior – and even sharing – with their own content, but they cannot control it. They can only measure its effects, how it gets passed along, shared, changed, and consumed in the process. “The original mandate was to measure and track all video,” Shin explains. “What we were seeing was the lines between what is branded entertainment and user-generated content is blurred, and increasingly so. We’re pretty close close partners with YouTube, and even they struggle to define the barriers between, essentially, everything. “What we have learned is consumers are in control of this distributed content, and marketers need to understand and measure that.” In fact, Shin notes that new genres of blurring brand content are emerging online, such as the so-called “unpacking and hauling” behavior in which consumers are so in love with the brands and products they buy that they film themselves unpacking the haul of goods they bought while shopping and post it on YouTube or Facebook. At the same time, Shin says the volume of brand-generated video content has “exploded” and that most of the biggest marketers now have “entire divisions” responsible for creating and distributing video online. “In the last year alone, the viewership of social video or branded entertainment from marketers has gone up over 300%. In 2011, there were 5.6 billion video views of branded entertainment,” Shin says citing a Visible Measures stat that isn’t just a big number, it’s now also an accredited one.
According to the National Library of Medicine, Presbyopia is a condition in which the lens of the eye loses its ability to focus, making it difficult to see objects up close. I’m afraid that many in my generation are also at risk for social presbyopia: the inability to acknowledge the seismic shifts in behavior driven by social media -- and worse yet, the reluctance to personally embrace these changes themselves. Sure -- baby boomers are catching on to Facebook, but I still find tremendous resistance to the notion that social media is more than another dot-com fad. To quote one such reader of my recent MediaPost article on the future of social shopping: “Sheesh. There is nothing -- NOTHING -- solid out there, yet, to suggest that social media (SOCIAL MEDIA!!!!) is going to have much of an impact on, well, anything.” Clearly, this particular gentleman is fed up with all the social media hype, or perhaps he’s simply overwhelmed by the seemingly endless drivel he sees on Twitter and Facebook. But regardless, he does have an acute case of social presbyopia -- one that is undoubtedly aggravated by his inability to focus on what’s happening below the surface. You, however, can avoid this problem with the following prescriptive steps. When in doubt, scan the search results On the surface, Google+ is a classic example of over-hype. Its rapid enrollment of 100 million users seems mythical; its purpose is not easily differentiated from Facebook; and its role in the marketing mix is still unclear. But stopping here would miss the point. If search results matter to you, as they do to 99.9% of brands, then consider who owns and operates this social network. Google is already indexing Google+ posts -- quite favorably it seems -- so frankly, it’s be there or be missed. Peek beyond the pictures After attracting over 12 million unique visitors last month, Pinterest has become the poster child of the next new thing. Given the simplicity of this online “pinboard,” which simply aggregates pictures people find “pinteresting” into virtual scrapbooks, it would be easy to dismiss it as the domain of young women with too much time on their hands. In truth, many enlightened brands like Oreck, Chobani, Mashable and GE have discovered that Pinterest is a traffic-driving dream come true. (Shareaholic reported that Pinterest ranked 4th in referral traffic in January -- just behind Google!) It’s time to start seeing double Social TV is one of those emerging ideas that gives traditional couch potatoes fits while the CE industry and start-ups from the Valley to the Alley try to figure out how to integrate social media with TV viewing. Considering that over 12 million comments were shared socially during the Super Bowl, including a vision-blurring 10,000 tweets a second in the final three minutes, it is apparent that having a second screen open while watching TV is a new behavior worth monitoring. Clearly, waiting for the water cooler to share reviews is simply passé -- and also, it’s time to take a closer look at social TV apps like GetGlue and Miso. Keep your eyes on mobile MoSoLo is not a new neighborhood in Manhattan, but rather an acronym for the dynamic combination of mobile, social and location-based applications. Unfortunately, with FourSquare’s growth out of the headlines, this trend also could be dismissed as a fad and marketers might be tempted to throw the mobile social baby out with the location-based bathwater. Bad idea. Over 50% of shoppers consulted their mobile devices while at retail this past December; therefore, having a multi-tiered mobile strategy is essential for just about any brand. If your Web site isn’t mobile-friendly, fix that. Next, think about apps that deliver genuine value, integrate social and capitalize on mobile functionality like barcode scanning, GPS and voice. Don’t get trapped in the current fog about blogs Blogging -- one of the early wonders of the Web -- has been losing steam lately, particularly among B2B marketers. Some are undoubtedly distracted by newer social channels, while others find the commitment to generating quality content on an ongoing basis a bit overwhelming. Big mistake. Blogs are still among the best ways to improve natural search results, as well as provide genuinely useful information to ultimately appreciative prospects and customers. Final Note: Optical presbyopia is far from fatal and typically corrected with glasses, contact lenses and even laser surgery. Similarly, social presbyopia is hardly terminal and can be fixed with a steady diet of social experimentation and the vision to see past the naysayers.
Pinterest supports more than 10 million unique monthly U.S. visitors, but how can search engine marketers tap into the growth? Digital search marketing agency Greenlight published a paper on Best Practices that search marketers will find valuable. Learning the personal interests of consumers becomes the benefit for brands. Charlie Elliott, content and creative strategist at Greenlight, and co-author of the guide, tells us that the content found in Pinterest is typically the sort of insight and intelligence a brand needs, but would need to go to great lengths to attain before tailoring its product offering to the tastes of its target audiences. Categories in the platform include Pinners you follow, Everything, Videos, Popular, and Gifts. These categories will eventually provide fodder for ad targeting. Today, it's a way to categorize pinnings, adding a pin from a URL or computer, or adding a new board, along with a user panel Settings, and Boards & Pins. Along the left rail, users can see how others have interacted with your pins, individual images that people post, and boards -- themed areas where users collate a selection of similar Pins, followed by the most recent pins from people you follow. Think of the boards as bulletin boards displaying pictures of events taking place in your life or products you like. Repinning is when users copy a Pin they see to their own board, and Like represents something users may not want to repin, but show their appreciation, explains Greenlight Search's Pinterest Best Practice Guide. Think of the social data related to interest or intent from Pinterest users that could one day contribute to ad targeting. Then think of the relationships with search engines Pinterest will likely build to serve up some of that content in query results. Type in the keywords "Bose portable speakers" in a search query box on Google or Bing, and a paid-search ad for Logitech serves up at the top of the page or down the right rail, along with boards, pins, pictures and comments related to the audio equipment from people you know. Pinterest already allows users to share the Pin on blogs and Web sites. Users can email an image URL or share the content as a Facebook Like and Twitter Tweet, just by clicking on a Pin. The guide tells us that Pinterest has just been introduced as one of the 60 new apps available on Facebook's Open Graph. Greenlight explains that Pinterest allows users to share images by copying and pasting the code on blogs and Web sites. The sourcelink generated is crawlable. It can pass authority to the original source where the image was originally found. The paper outlining best practices reminds marketers that Pinterest is not a broadcast tool similar to Twitter and Facebook. It doesn't encourage what Greenlight calls "product pushing," meaning that brands must look to create Boards that are related to culture and lifestyle based on trends, behind-the-scenes stuff and preliminary product sketches. The platform provides a place for brands to listen to followers by watching the Pins and boards that users create about personal interests. Greenlight suggests creating a crowdsourcing opportunity by asking people to Pin pictures of themselves with products on themed Boards. Use open boards to initiate competitions, such as pinning an outfit to a Board or ask users to share their own ideas. Pinterest is also testing affiliate links using skimlinks, a service that automatically replaces links to a product when associated with a program. Greenlight warns that Pinterest could change links for their products if an affiliate program exists. Do you use Pinterest -- and if so, how do you use it and how does that match up with Greenlight's best practices?
“People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy… As a man, I'm flesh and blood. I can be ignored. I can be destroyed. But as a symbol, I can be incorruptible. I can be everlasting.” – Bruce Wayne, “Batman Begins” Bruce Wayne understands brands better than anyone. A brand is different from the sum of the people working for a company. A brand, as Wayne noted, can be everlasting. But brands have a challenge now. This is the age of real-time content production. The focus has shifted from being iconic to posting a status update. With the demands so great for brands to keep telling new stories, how can brands keep up? After all, don’t consumers only pay attention to what’s new? This issue came up last week during a Social Media Week panel, “Who Owns This Sh#t, Anyway?” Moderator Adam Devine brought it up after the panelists kept discussing storytelling. It seems like community managers, strategists, and brand marketers have a practically impossible task with nonstop demands to micromanage output across dozens of channels. I fully appreciate the challenges marketers face today, but the challenge has to be put in perspective. Fortunately, the morning of the panel, I caught some of the movie “Batman Begins” on television, and I was reminded of how the fundamentals of storytelling work. The Batman story is probably familiar. An orphan, the scion of American tycoons, becomes a vigilante, fighting the city’s most heinous criminals by dressing up in a bat costume. He is a skilled detective and fighter cooperating with the local police commissioner, but he is often derided for his unaccountability and his flying mammal alter ego. It’s a story that first appeared in May, 1939 as a saga in Detective Comics, issue 27. Seventy-three years later, his story continues to be refreshed through comics, films, cartoons, video games, and other media. In all that time, plenty has changed, from the tone to the villains to the love affairs. Yet if you ask anyone around what the Batman story is about, most people should have very similar responses. All enduring brands have overarching stories. Apple’s is the story of sleek, user-friendly, best-in-class consumer technologies. Coca-Cola is about a kind of happiness that’s always within arm’s reach. The Mets are about 162 games -- no more -- of overpaid underachievement. If you recognize those bands’ logos, those are probably the stories you’ll tell, because the brands have been such relentless and successful storytellers. That means community managers don’t have to create entirely new stories at all. It’s not their job. What they have to do is constantly create new episodes and editions that fit in with the story the brand created. Community managers can team with strategists, creatives, and others to create new arcs, with subplots that go on for months and span various social channels. Those arcs can’t be independent stories, though; they have to tie in to the one that already exists. This doesn’t make managing social marketing any easier. It does at least define some roles and guidelines as to what the socially focused team should be doing. The most important part is learning the brand’s story. It was Bruce Wayne, the unmasked face of Batman, who acknowledged this himself in the New Earth comic series. Wayne said, “There's a lot we have to learn -- about each other and about ourselves -- before we can present ourselves to the public in any major fashion.” Learn the story well, and then tap social media to keep on telling it and to bring it to life.
Noting that there now are hundreds of metrics for measuring and defining the behavior of consumers sharing brand-related content online – 90 from Facebook alone – Seraj Bharwani, Chief Analytics Officer, Visible Measures says Madison Avenue has entered a “metrics arms race.” Bharwani, made this observation during his opening keynote at today’s OMMA Metrics & Research conference in New York, said that “at least some brands and agencies are joining the race.” By that he means they are helping to fuel the proliferation – not to mention the hyper-fragmentation that comes along with it – out of something he described as “metrics envy.” Bharwani said some brands are “blindly chasing” metrics like likes, fans and friends, just because they consider some new form of bragging rights that are essential to their brand’s dominance, but without knowing what it really means for their brand’s performance. “If Coke has 30 million likes, apparently Pepsi marketers want a respectable number to match the results,” he said, adding that the logic is being driven not necessarily by a new consumer behavior, but by a new marketing executive behavior: “not missing out on the likes party.”