Archive for the ‘Viral Video’ Category

The more I watch, study, learn, and interact with others on the Social Web, the more convinced I am that Social Technology is a Game-Changer in business. Now I know that some of you will say, “Well, of course you do, Mike. That’s your business. You’ve got a vested interest in saying that…” Yes, that’s a true statement. I AM driving revenue for my little enterprise. But a statement like that is yet another example of very simplistic and dismissive brush-off’s that executives and business leaders at all levels are making – one that completely misses the point of emphasis. A few more:

1. “Why would I use Twitter? What do I care what Charlie Sheen had for breakfast?!?!”
2. “I don’t want my people using Facebook at work – it’s a waste of time.”
3. “YouTube is nothing but a bandwidth problem on our network. We shut it down.”
4. “I’m on Linkedin, but I’m just connecting with people. I have no idea what the value is.”
   

   Pick your Social Network

5. “Show me the ROI of Social Media and I’ll be more than happy to use it.”
6. “I can see using Social Media if you sell consumer products. But we’re B2B.”
7. “I can’t keep up with email. I can’t imagine keeping up with Social networks, too!”
8. “I just don’t have time for all that nonsense.”

Let me get right to the point of how I’m seeing Social Tech accomplish business goals. The following is a VERY brief list of 12 undeniable ways smart companies are leveraging Social Tech. Remember that, as I say in Boot Camps and Keynotes, Social Tech boils down to this statement: “The goal is to 1. build your Social Networks through which you can 2. share Social Media and thereby 3. amplify your Social Relevance and influence.” In other words, build your connections, develop and share helpful stuff, and drive your business objectives, whatever they may be. Just like you can’t mail people stuff without mailing addresses, you can’t call people without phone numbers, you can’t email without email addresses, you can’t reach people via the Social web until you make the connections. And with ALL of them you have to have a solid , meaningful, and compelling message. And the holy grail is word-of-mouth referrals and recommendations that amplify your efforts. Pretty basic stuff. Social Tech is just making it a whole lot easier – and trackable.

1. Recruiting – Linkedin is so incredibly powerful, even the novice is finding utility with it. If you know how to get up to 4th and 5th gear in the system, holy cow! And that’s just one tool, not to mention others like Twitter and hashtags, Online Reputation Management, Viral Video’s, e-Word of Mouth, and more.

Laptop or Smartphone?

2. Information Gathering and Education – Who hasn’t used Google to feed their brain on some topic? Well, the same concepts apply to Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube, RSS, and a host of other tools that can be positioned to feed your brain on any topic you want – on an automated basis. In my humble opinion, this is one of the best kept secrets of Social Tech savants – and will be the key differentiating skill for employees in the years ahead.

3. Customer Service – Many, many smart companies are using Twitter and Facebook as customer service channels. Why? The vast majority of Americans are using Social Tech at some level. And they often use it to solve routine problems – as efficiently as possible. That’s a big reason why they are following their brands and business partners across the Social web. FAQ’s?? OK. But at the same time as your customer service rep sees the tweet, the crowd also sees it, and maybe has had the same question and already has the answer. And this concept will only grow.

4. Relationship Management and Nurturing – Man, once you get someone on board, don’t you want to keep them there? Of course. So how do you do that while at the same time getting more people on board – all as efficiently as possible while keeping overhead low? Create reusable, sharable content and make it easy for your fans to share it with their networks. Create useful content – stuff that answers questions, expands the utility of your gear or services – blog posts like this, video tutorials and aids, in-depth e-Books, real-time and archived Webinars, Tweet-ups, infographics that educate, inspire, and otherwise communicate. People want to business with people that help them, not just sell them.

5. Sales – The Social Web was practically MADE for sales people. Man, if you’re in sales and you don’t know how to leverage Linkedin yet for warm referrals, just like you might at an industry conference or networking event, get on Google and start feeding your brain. Social Tech can feed the pipeline, shrink sales cycles, improve close ratios and competitive advantage, and of course generate referrals to feed the pipeline. If you do it right, it’s Revenue on Demand, no matter what business you’re in.

6. Marketing – Inbound marketing to drive leads is where it’s at. I’ve got one word on that – HubSpot. Beyond that, Social Tech helps enterprise marketers with Reputation Management, Organizational Voice, Advertising, Public Relations. How many times have you Google’d an unfamiliar person, brand, or product that you needed to know more about? Every day is a common answer? So what makes you think that people aren’t doing it WITH YOU??? Don’t you think it’s thus kind of important to have a powerful presence across the various Social Channels?

A Socially-enabled Conference

7. Getting things done – Crowdsourcing is simply a huge, largely unknown and untapped opportunity in American business, especially in the insurance space. Sites like LogoTournament, PopTent, TopCoder, and Chaordix are huge opportunities to help companies increase their velocity. One insurance company I’ve mentioned before leveraged PopTent for video content – and accomplished something in a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost, and with a terrific end result. You know the dreaded IT Project Priority List? Use TopCoder for the bottom third that will likely never get done, or be too late, off-target, and hastily made. How about product innovation, creative writing, adjudication, the list goes on and on. Yet sadly, most executives are at 0 or 1 on a scale of 10 relative to Crowdsourcing. Yikes. Huge opportunity for the competition, eh?

Well, that’s all the time I have for right now. I’ll get back to this list later.

The Next Five:

8. Reputation Management

9. Environmental Influence

10. Work Spaces

11. Efficiencies

12. Cost of Doing Business

How is Social impacting your day-in-day-out activities?

What’s the next big thing?

What are your comments and questions, barriers and obstacle?

Perhaps I, or another reader, can help answer them.

What d’ya say?

Social Media, one of the three legs of the Social Technology stool, and the term most often used as a blanket reference to Social Tech, is critically important to an enterprise – on so many levels.

I recently attended an insurance industry conference. I had no part in the conference organizing other than recommending the Closing Keynote speaker. But I was very interested in the content as it reinforced Social Tech concepts to an audience that could benefit greatly from sophisticated use of Social Tech (see the last post). I was also interested in networking and meeting with current and potential clients. Lastly, I wanted to develop strong and compelling Social Media to share with my Networks in order to enhance and amplify my Relevancy.

If you look back at the last several posts to this blog, you will see that I accomplished that mission. Combined with the viral video I launched via YouTube last week, I developed three podcasts, one video, and have a bunch of left over media. [I also started three new meaningful conversations with prospective clients, scheduled two more Social Tech Boot Camps by demand in Philly and Dallas, and met with three current clients, reinforcing those relationships.] All of this was started by capturing media at a two-day conference – Social Media.

Here’s the final piece – a YouTube Video. Interested in your Comments…

What are some of the keys to Social Media in the B2B realm? Ten important elements:

1. Social Media has to add value, be educational, move the ball forward relative to a given topic.
2. Social Media has to be well-crafted, easy to read, listen to, or watch, compelling, high quality.
3. Social Media has to be real, genuine, authentic, unscripted, extemporaneous.
4. Social Media must be timely, launched in close proximity to the event itself.
5. Social Media is best received when it is unofficial and not extremely polished – just well-done and to the point.
6. Social Media must be delivered via an interactive interface, where the audience can Like, Comment, and Share – easily. Otherwise it’s not Social. Sorry – thanks for playing.
7. Social Media (B2B) should have a pattern, should reinforce an organization’s value prop and brand.
8. Social Media should feature people whenever possible, but should rarely be talking heads – yuck.
9. Social Media should be understood, deeply understood, by the leadership of an organization – critically important.
10. Social Media should NOT cost too much or take too long to deploy. There’s always a delicate balance between time and resources.

As I say in the Boot Camps, good Social Media should be brief, funny, and true … and yet still carry an essential point.

What would YOU add to the list. DO Share.

Speaking of sharing, I’ll be sharing a ton from the HubSpot Inbound Conference this week. Following me in Twitter. I’ll be sharing using the conference Hashtag as well. I’m sure the hashtag with trend at least a few times. We’ll see. Looking forward to it.

Pew Internet: Over 50% of Seniors are now online. They are also among the fastest growing demo on the Social Web. Online, Social, and Growing in numbers – an interesting recipe for a marketer, eh?!?! <<Full Report>>

4 Thoughts to Discuss…

iPad Helps Stroke Victim

1. Don’t Seniors also have the highest discretionary income, combined with the best understanding of the value of insurance/protection?

2. What is the most effective way to reach these Tech-Savvy Seniors with our messaging and related products, insurance and non-insurance? Mail? Phone? Email? Search? Facebook? Video? Blog? Multi-channel? What do you think? and Why?

3. What about the down-stream influence of Seniors on Gen-X’ers and Millenials? Now that they are online and beginning to use Social Networks and engage with Social Media, can we leverage that Social Influence? As an example, would a viral video work, perhaps sponsored by a senior life company, spoken by seniors, one that specifically encourages following generations to take insurance and protection seriously, to save their money, to make a difference, or as my 22-yr old daughter said in her recent “Digital Philosophy of Teaching” video for a class project, that “accomplishment without contribution- is insignificant.”  Could we do a whole campaign around that, maybe even sponsored by an association rather than one company? Or both?

4. As anyone will testify who had a Mom who suddenly learned how to Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: emails a few years back, aren’t Seniors also a VIRAL demographic in that they share stuff like crazy – both good and bad?

If my hunch is right, we now have the ingredients for a tasty recipe here. We just need to figure out the right combinations of measurements that will yield a “restaurant-quality” meal. What do YOU think?

Come on now, don’t leave me hanging. Let’s discuss.

…

Shameless plug: I touch on these very concepts in my Social Tech Boot Camps for Insurance Exec’s. Still a few seats left… Chicago, Boston, Hartford.

…

It’s interesting what strikes executives at Boot Camps. That’s why it’s never wise to assume and put my own filters on things, especially in the dynamic and ever-changing realm of Social Technologies.

At the last Boot Camp in Columbus, based on the feedback I received from the 14 people in attendance, Crowdsourcing was the big Aha!

Curious about that. I had another conversation with a CEO in Toronto about Social Tech. Same thing: Crowdsourcing was a big flash of insight. I heard him shoutout to his CIO as we left his corner office, “Hey, we need to talk about Crowdsourcing!” A perplexed look flashed across the CIO’s face.

So I thought it might be helpful to do a podcast on Crowdsourcing. And who better to interview than an experienced insurance veteran with specific experience in Crowdsourcing? Not sure what Crowdsourcing is? Listen in and read along. And then Register for an upcoming Social Tech Boot Camp for Insurance Executives where we talk more about it – as well as a host of other Social Tech opportunities that are transforming business. Or better yet, organize a private camp for your team or distribution partners.

Episode 36 – Crowdsourcing, with Ken Hittel

Read along as you listen. Perhaps grab and share Comments on Twitter.
WebWisedom Transcript courtesy of

Crowdsourcing with Ken Hittel [ 21:18 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Mike Wise: It’s May of 2012 and time for a much-needed podcast on a new concept which holds much promise. To further illuminate the concept, I’m speaking over the phone with an insurance industry veteran who has “been there, done that, bought the T-shirt.” This is Mike Wise, president of WebWisedom and I’m helping insurance companies leverage Social technologies within the unique environments of the organization, markets and regulatory guidelines.

On the podcast today, we have a very special guest, Ken Hittel. Ken, would you like to introduce yourself to the listening audience?

Ken Hittel: Sure. And thanks, Mike, this should be, in fact, a very engaging conversation. As you mentioned, I’ve been in the insurance industry for quite some time, working for New York Life, consistently, for 25 years. The last 15 or so have been in the Internet space and have been involved in running their Corporate Internet department. Currently, I’m working as the Digital Strategy Advisor for the Board of Advisors of Fairwinds Partners, in Washington DC.

Mike: Great. We’re podcasting today on Crowdsourcing as it applies to the insurance space. By the way, just a word on technology, we are recording this via Google Voice. We are editing it in a tool called Audacity. It will be uploaded to WebWisedom.com and on iTunes, with a companion article.

The goal of the podcast is to educate the insurance community on what we consider to be an essential element of Social technologies, Crowdsourcing. I understand, Ken, there might be some noises in the background. You’re podcasting from New York City and as anybody knows, New York City has noises. So, there’s a little bit . . . What’s going on there?

Ken: Well, for one thing, we have a dog who likes to bark whenever anybody walks down the hallway. Right now, he is quiet. Then, also, some work is being done, so you’re liable to hear some pounding in the background and also occasionally drilling.

Mike: Those workers, they just don’t care that we’re doing a podcast on Crowdsourcing for insurance executives. [laughs]

Ken: That’s exactly the case.

Mike: Well, life is full of little things that have a tendency to create noise, and we just have to work through them. Right?

Ken: Yep. Exactly.

Mike: Okay. So, let’s get started. What I’m going to do is, I’m going ask Ken questions about Crowdsourcing because he’s coming at this from a point of experience. He’s actually done Crowdsourcing in previous jobs. And I know a lot about it from a philosophical and a strategic standpoint, but I thought it might be interesting and better for the listeners to hear some perspectives from somebody who’s actually done Crowdsourcing.

So, first of all, let’s start off with the definition. For those, where this is a relatively new concept, Ken, how would you define Crowdsourcing?

Ken: Well, Mike, there are several different ways that you can come at this. Crowdsourcing, as a term, has become somewhat amorphous. So, actually, I decided why not check the dictionary and the dictionary, in this case, being Wikipedia. So, let me just read you a couple of sentences from Wikipedia. “Crowdsourcing is a process that involves outsourcing tasks to a distributed group of people. This process can occur both online and offline and the difference between Crowdsourcing and ordinary outsourcing is that a task or problem is outsourced to an undefined public, rather than a specific body, such as paid employees.” I think that says it pretty well and, in fact, since this is taken from Wikipedia, that is itself, probably, the most prominent and best example of Crowdsourcing. But, I think the important part here is that, from a company standpoint, you’re not necessarily relying on your own employees. Although, as we talk some more, I’d like to actually give you some examples of how, in fact, you can use your employees, very, very effectively for Crowdsourcing.

Mike: That’s right. They can be the crowd.

Ken: They can definitely be the crowd and their Social network can be additive to that, but let’s get into that a little bit later.

Mike: Okay. One of the things I’m talking about in my social tech boot camps for insurance executives . . . and side note, a little plug, the next one is scheduled for July 12th, in Chicago, at the Aloft Chicago O’Hare, which is going to be . . .
[Dog barking]

Oh, there’s the dog.

Ken: [laughs]

Mike: Somebody must’ve walked by the street.

Ken: It’s the hallway here, actually. Anytime anybody comes or goes past the door, which he regards as his territory, that’s when he starts up.

Mike: [laughs] This hallway is mine.

Ken: Exactly.

Mike: [laughs] So one of the things that I talk about with people about Crowdsourcing, there’s a couple of good, really good examples of Crowdsourcing in our space, that can really make some changes. One of them is from an IT development standpoint. There’s a couple of websites, actually several websites, out there like TopCoder’s a pretty prominent one, one of the first ones, where you can submit the specifications of a programming project, traditionally an IT project like a quote engine or an e-application, workflow or who knows what, that you have that needs to be done from an IT standpoint, and you can submit that project, the scope of work for that project, and put a bounty up with it. So, in other words, you’ll pay X amount for the code, the finished code, for this particular specification and put it up on TopCoder. Whoever wants to bid on that, or try to program that and compete for the bounty, can do that, as a registered user of TopCoder.

And so what you’ll get back as… Let’s say you’re the CIO and you’ve got a raft of projects that you need to get done, that you just can’t get done because you don’t have the bandwidth, you don’t have the expertise or whatever the situation is. What you’ll get back is several really good results where the actual code has been placed in a way that you can download it and test it and these people are competing for the money. So, you only pay for the one that you choose. So, you get what you need out of this process and it conforms to your specifications. Your programmers test it, etc., etc. So, it’s a beautiful way to use Crowdsourcing to get that bottom third of your IT projects done, that you’ll probably never get to, and if you do get to them, they’ll be done quickly, probably haphazardly. Not that I’m slamming anybody. That’s just the way it is in the business world these days. And it will be expensive. So, that’s a really good example.

Another example that I use is actually your example of video and Poptent. So, I won’t steal your thunder, but I like the Wikipedia definition. Be sure to go to Wikipedia and search on Crowdsourcing. Go to Google and search on Crowdsourcing. There’s tons of information out there.

So, turning the conversation back to you, Ken, what has been your experience? What comments do you have to start out with?

Ken: Well, you mentioned the experience that we had with Poptent. That turned out to follow, essentially, the same type of model that you just spoke about. In early 2010, we had launched a micro-site called guaranteesmatter.com, which was a little bit out of the ordinary, in itself, for New York Life. It was meant to be a platform for rich media experimentation. Along those lines, we thought, “Is there a novel way that we can promote this website that is outside of the normal ways that we might promote a micro-site?” And we came up with the idea of producing some online videos that we could perhaps post on our Facebook page, send people to from our Twitter account, obviously post on our YouTube page as well.

So we went to a company called Poptent, which is a Crowdsourcing video site, and we engaged their community to come up with short videos, under a minute, 30 seconds if possible, to promote the main creative behind Guaranteesmatter, which of course is that guarantees matter. We supplied them with a short creative brief and set, I believe it was, a three-week time limit to come up with ideas and submit actual completed videos to promote the website. In three weeks, we ended up with over 100 submissions. It was our choice as to which video would be the overall winner and would receive the prize money. In fact, we ended up paying for five of the videos. We probably could’ve paid for ten of them, but we did end up paying for five of them. So, five creative individuals actually received a bounty for their work. The others, as it always works in the Crowdsourcing process, we didn’t have to pay for at all.

So, we managed to get five extremely creative, funny and, in some cases, actually quite profound videos around the idea of guarantees. It took us only three weeks. If we had done this internally, it would almost certainly have taken us three weeks to simply write a script and get it approved by our compliance and legal people.

But, like I said, we had five complete videos. Unfortunately, they never were used publicly. We did use them internally and, in fact, we actually used a process called “crowdvoting,” that is, obviously, an example of Crowdsourcing itself. We placed the five videos on our employee Intranet and asked employees to vote for their favorite and actually to rank them one through five. And then, that way we were prepared, actually, to release the videos in that order to the public. Unfortunately, as I say, it was decided that we wouldn’t unleash the videos publicly.

Mike: OK. Let’s come back to that lesson learned. Let me just recap what you said. So, you put this project into Poptent, which is a Crowdsourcing site for video creation, Poptent.com. You have the script for the videos or essentially, what you were looking for. You had the bounties. You have the timeline and within three weeks, you got back over 50 submissions, five of which you found to be spot-on and brilliant, which you paid for. At that point, you were pretty much done with Poptent.

Then, you rolled those videos into your, probably, intranet, and rolled them out to your internal employees and ask for them to vote and rank them, which is another form of Crowdsourcing, internally. Which, by the way, further cemented exactly what you were trying to accomplish with GuaranteesMatter, with the employees, if they haven’t heard about it already. It sure is a great way to learn and get buy-in on that. OK. So just net it out. How much did that part cost you, in total?

Ken: Well, for anyone that knows anything about video production, producing scripts, hiring actors, filming, postproduction work, I think the figures will be quite astonishing. We ended up spending $35,000 for five winning videos.

Mike: So, that was probably about, what, three to five minutes of content?

Ken: It was roughly four minutes, in total, between the five winning videos.

Mike: If you strung them all together?

Ken: Yes.

Mike: So, I’m more than happy to say that the average price of a five-minute video is usually about, somewhere between $5,000 to $10,000, per minute, when you throw everything all in, depending on how sophisticated and polished, etc. or how much money you want to spend on this stuff, but that’s a good rule of thumb, wouldn’t you agree?

Ken: Yes. That’s a fair amount. Working here in New York, the figures are a little bit higher. But, yes, at the end of the day, $35,000 for roughly four or five minutes of video is . . .

Mike: Very cheap.

Ken: Yes. It’s just a tiny fraction of what it would’ve cost us to use their own internal video production talent, by the way.

Mike: Yes. Your own studio, etc., etc.

Ken: Yes.

Mike: And it was done in three weeks.

Ken: And it was done in three weeks. And it was done in such a way that the ideas that came in were ideas that simply would not have originated within New York Life itself. I think that’s one of the most important aspects of Crowdsourcing to be able to point out. Certainly, I’m not saying that you want to use Crowdsourcing for everything or anything, but certainly, when you have a need or desire to bring in outside ideas that you know, simply, were not going to originate within your own organization, Crowdsourcing is the way to go.

Mike: Yes. And by the way, if you go to crowdsourcing.org, there’s just an unlimited amount of information on ways you can use Crowdsourcing. As I mentioned before, IT, you can use it for marketing. Crowdfunding is a really big, hot subject right now. There are laws being considered at the national level about crowdfunding, crowdideation, crowdscribing. There are books. I contributed to a book, “Enterprise Social Technology,” that was crowdscribed. So, I wrote a chapter of the book and a bunch of other people wrote another chapter, very neat way to create books and, of course, these videos. There’s just so much that can be done.

Now, this project ran into a barrier. Let’s talk about that because that’s a very important subject, as well.

Ken: Well, without getting into a lot of the details, I think, my experience would say that while you always have to be somewhat politically aware of any endeavor that you end up in, within a corporation, I think it’s particularly the case when it comes to Crowdsourcing. Getting buy-in from the very beginning, from any of the major executives that can be impacted, or believe that they can be impacted, by a Crowdsourcing project, I think, is absolutely essential. And perhaps, we didn’t do that as well as we should have because at the end of the day, while pretty much every single person that saw the videos loved them, at the end of the day, it became very difficult for our executive management to approve unleashing these videos to the public. So, they never actually were.

As I said, we did go to our employees. They were extremely happy with them. We probably had the highest level of voting for anything we ever asked employees to vote on. But there were still some executives who were, I think, unnerved by, let’s say, the non-New York Life stance, of these videos. It seemed to some people, to conflict with our established brand. I felt it was more of a brand extension than a conflict, but clearly, there were people who saw it as a conflict.

Mike: Yes. So, like anything else, change is hard. There’s a certain level of lack of understanding and confusion about Social technologies at the executive level, and Crowdsourcing, even more so. It’s often a term and a concept that people know very little about. That said, Ken, what would you recommend to other people in terms of overcoming some of these issues?

One of the things that I talk about, in the boot camps, is that Crowdsourcing is really an essential part of an enterprise social technology strategy. And in order to really pursue it, a deep understanding of it needs to be had by the executive, by the decision-makers, by the stakeholders of any project. So, in my mind, if they haven’t already, I think it would be a really good idea to get all of these stakeholders, and all means all, right, get all these stakeholders in a room together and spend a couple hours going through what Crowdsourcing is. What are the issues that need to be addressed? So, you definitely want to have compliance in the room and talk about intellectual property, legal and you want to have marketing and branding in the room, customer service. You want to have, really, all of the critical stakeholders in the room to talk about these issues. That’s my perspective. What’s your perspective on best practices in terms of rolling out a Crowdsourcing initiative?

Ken: I think you’re absolutely right. And I think we may have been a bit premature. We certainly, when we did our venture with Poptent and its creative community, we really didn’t wrap it up in terms of our overall social media strategy, certainly not as convincingly as, looking back on it, we should have. We did go to all of the individuals, executives, and groups that you mentioned. Our five winning videos were, in fact, all approved by our Compliance Department. The Brand Manager at New York Life had some qualms about one of the five videos. We decided to not use that one. But I think our mistake was in doing those separately and individually, as opposed to bringing everybody together at one time and explaining what we were up to and why, how the process worked, and what our plans were then for a future rollout.

Mike: Okay. Interesting. Let me ask you a question, Ken. Knowing what you know now about Crowdsourcing, what kind of urgency, how important is Crowdsourcing? What do you see down the road in the future of Crowdsourcing in the insurance space? If you were talking over breakfast at an industry association meeting, with an executive from another company, what would you talk to them, how would you encourage them, looking forward, regarding Crowdsourcing? Is it really important? Is it moderately important? Is it going to change our way of doing business?

Ken: I do think that it is an extremely important aspect of a Social strategy. I think that it can be extraordinarily productive. It can be an extraordinary cost savings for things that you might otherwise attempt to do internally. To me, the most important aspect of Crowdsourcing is precisely being able to harness the so-called “wisdom of the crowd” and, obviously, you can only do that to a certain extent, in terms of your own staff, your own department and your own company even. So, there are just tremendous advantages to Crowdsourcing.

As I said earlier, I don’t believe we need to crowdsource everything, but certainly, there are so many things that can be crowdsourced in one way or another that it almost seems silly to me not to take advantage of it.

Mike: You mentioned a really big brand. What about some of the smaller brands and medium-sized, even down to local agencies, is Crowdsourcing applicable?

Ken: I think it definitely is. Quite enterprising sales agents that I know, that are willing to invest a little bit of time and a fair number of dollars promoting themselves, advertising themselves, I know many agents who have gone out and used professional videographers to create videos for themselves. Why not, instead, use a video production company such as Poptent, and there are competitors out there as well, obviously, to crowdsource a video for yourself in your practice? For the amount of money that it would cost you to do that, it’s going to be far less than anything that you dream up yourself or that you and your videographer dream up together. And you’re likely to get much more creative solutions than you ever could just pulling them up out of your own mind. So, yes, I think even down to the individual agent level, I think there are certainly lots and lots of opportunities for Crowdsourcing to work productively for you.

Again, I think the crucial aspect of this, even if we’re talking about a case of individual agents, is enabling the creativity of the wider community, so it isn’t just you coming up with an idea, which may be a perfectly great idea and maybe that’s the basis for your creative brief. But allow the creative community to come up with the idea and give you the realization of those ideas. I think that’s where the real strength lies.

Mike: OK. Well, this has been very interesting, Ken. Again, thank you so much for spending some time and talking about your experiences in the area of Crowdsourcing. I really appreciate it. Just a plug for Ken. I got to know Ken through the blog, when I was talking about his former brand a couple of years ago. In fact, I’ll put a link to that story on this podcast article. But, Ken is really one of the brightest lights in Social in the insurance space and it’s a real treat and a privilege to have him on the podcast talking about some of these things. Ken, how can people reach you?

Ken: Well, the easiest way right now is either through my page on LinkedIn, which would be Kenneth Hittel, but also Gmail … khittel@gmail.com.

Mike: Great. Any closing thoughts about Crowdsourcing or Social, in general?

Ken: Yes. Definitely. I think, clearly, we are going to see more and more creative investment in social space within the insurance industry. We certainly started seeing it a couple of years ago with companies like State Farm and Allstate. New York Life has come in, I think, very strong from the life insurance industry perspective and is doing some very successful things. But, clearly, there’s a huge future in Social.

Mike: Great. Well, thanks for listening. Please comment on the podcast on WebWisedom.com , where the podcast will be hosted. Please share this with your network as you see appropriate.

Again, this is Mike Wise, President of WebWisedom, and I’m helping insurance companies leverage social technologies within the unique environments of the organization, markets and regulatory guidelines. Connect with me across the social web via MikeWise07 and learn more at WebWisedom.com.

WebWisedom-Crowdsourcing-podcast-w-Ken-Hittel-May2012.mp3

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A recurring question I’ve been asked this past week since this video launched, “Was that hard to do?”

Thought it might be useful to write about it. But in return, I’d like to ask readers to give their opinion on a question. I’ll ask the question first so you can be thinking about it.

In watching this video, how would you characterize the “commercial use” nature of it?

Yes, no doubt the intended purpose is to drive brand loyalty and attendance at future ICMG meetings. But the video is not ‘for sale’, not driving direct revenue, noone’s going to buy it, etc. In my mind, that would be a commercial use worthy of paying royalties. So if we used, for example, a U2 song as the music bed rather than the royalty free one, shouldn’t that be fine without jumping through all the IP hoops? No money is changing hands because of the song. Regardless of whether you are a legal expert or not, what do you think? What’s your gut feeling? Just curious… Plus it’s free publicity for the musical artist, too?

350+ bit.ly clicks in a week. Mission accomplished. A few tips without going into an exhaustive essay:

1. Find a theme for the video. Funny, Short, True. If these are the three keys to a viral video, how can you follow a theme through the vid that accomplishes all three? In this case, the idea came to me based on a true story of what Mark Hill I believe once said about me taking pictures at insurance conferences. “Mike, it’s like you’re on a safari! You’re taking pictures of insurance people in their native habitats!” So funny. The coup-de-gras this time around though…? I must give credit to Craig Blake who encouraged me to get a safari hat on the way to the conference – brilliant because it reinforced the theme as I got pictures and sound-bites from people.
2. Get some good media elements that support the theme – again Funny, Short, True. Good quality pictures and lots of them; sound bites and other audio elements. Of course we have to serve the ROI expectations of the vid, right? So you can’t lose focus on the economics of the thing – it’s got to serve the goal of the organization. So notice in the vid the opening question is, “What did you get out of the conference?” That serves the business purpose – simple enough. Don’t need a lot, just a representative sampling. Note that I probably got twice the number of comments that I ended up using. That’s cool. I set the expectations with the folks I interviewed. But the key to making it funny was to get them to do something funny – no small trick in a business setting – while still keeping things professional and not embarrassing, right? Thus the animal sounds. Had no idea that that would be as funny as it came out. IMHO, the really funny part is the laughter after.

What really generates “virality?”

1. Of course humor. Be careful here though. Humor’s a fine line. Get a lot of eyes and ears on the thing before you ‘Go Live.’ Funny
2. Lot’s of faces so people can say, “Hey, that’s me! I remember that! Hey Chris, look at this!” Share-able. Common sense – if you’re using public events and real people, places, and times, make sure your content positions the people in the video in a positive light. And again, get their approval all along the way. Critical.
3. Makes or proves a point so that people can use the vid to reinforce or support their efforts. “Dude, I told you you shuda come. Check out this vid of the event. Make sure you plan to come next year…” Useful.
4. Speed is everything with something like this. It’s either got to be released right away or wait until the selling season for the next event. Proximity to Event.
5. Short and sweet – Nuf said … even at 3:45 this is a tad long, but the intro and outro are key ingredients and added a minute.

Do you have anything to add? What have you seen that works? What’s your favorite B2B viral video? Key word: B2B (as opposed to B2C – tons of those..)

Thanks for reading and Sharing. Appreciate any Shares on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin. Spread the word. The world needs more stuff like this happening – very powerful communication tool for all sorts of messages.

Let me know if you want to do one for your business. I’m working on couple others as we speak. Don’t want to be the “viral video guy”, but want to help insurance folks get started.

“Thrive with Social”

Additional resources:

3 Examples of Awesome B2B Marketing Viral Videos

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