21 Oct

Trend Spotting

What’s the value of an On-Demand Content Sharing Platform? If you’re IDG, Around $40K. IDG Enterprise, the prominent publisher of business-to-business technology media such as Network World and major events owner, has caught on. The company announced earlier this month a new platform that allows their clients to deliver content – videos, case studies, white papers, decks, etc. – in one, easy to manage and totally on-demand system. It’s called Knowledge Vault. It’s a shift from the traditional webcast the company, as well as many others, relied on as a lead generation tool for clients.

The platform was created when IDG realized that the traditional live webcast was no longer efficient. According to reviews of the platform, Knowledge Vault was created as a tool for customers to group meaningful content in one place, provide an on-demand interface, and have analytics build in to measure the effectiveness and reach.

We call this validation.

IDG is an incredible brand and their enterprise customers, such as Dell, have shared that they like using such a platform and it’s generating leads.  We, of course, think this is brilliant. And if you don’t have $35,000 to $52,000 lying around, you could take advantage of NextSlide’s free platform.

Here are three ideas for getting started on a similar program using NextSlide. Testing the meaningfulness of your content is a lot less stressful when there’s no price tag.

1)   In the spirit of Halloween, resurrect content you thought was dead. Most businesses have pieces of content stashed away that they didn’t do anything with, or only saw the light of day once. Those decks, white papers, videos and microsites might have legs after all. Take a look at what’s in your stash and choose two or three to update. Then upload the refreshed content to your NextSlide channel.

2)   Record video or audio over the pieces of content. Pretend you’re giving a live webinar using the zombie content as your visual material.

3)   Post one link to your social sites, email another with a short explanation of the video, and embed the third to your website. Then measure.

You can play with where you place each piece of content, measure the viewership and engagement of each placement, and then make decisions on how you’d like to tweak that piece or develop your next piece.

14 Oct

Turn it up: Strategic ways to amplify and monetize events through social platforms

 

Event planners can benefit from leaning on multiple social platforms that amplify their content and increase visibility before and after any event they are planning. With such social strategies in place, such marketers are poised to increase the value of and identify new ways to monetize their content.

Here are some examples of unique and highly strategic ways such organizers can increase the success of events with the use of some well-known social platforms:

Goal: Make Events Viral in Real Time

  • Twitter: Hashtags  (You know, those funny looking keywords with the pound sign in front of ‘em?) can help attendees find one another and increase sharing of event-related information. Not your event and there isn’t a well-documented hashtag being used? Create your own. This is the beauty of social media: The power lies in the user.
  •  Facebook: With all the constant changes Facebook is making, it is easy to feel left behind in the dust. But there is one rule that stays a constant with Facebook: rich media is valuable content. Ever feel like you’re only seeing posts from a select few people? This is because, like search, Facebook has its own algorithm for its newsfeed. In order for your posts to show up on follower’s newsfeeds, it is important to utilize rich media, like photographs, to cut through the clutter. For event marketers, creating an in-depth album of an event is a no-brainer. But what many don’t know is that these albums will increase the viral nature of an event because it is much more likely to be prominently displayed on real-time tickers and newsfeeds.
  •  Presentation platforms: Many times these platforms get overlooked as ways for speakers to increase thought leadership. But speakers and presentations are an important part of a conference or tradeshow experience, so including these items in a well-packaged presentation makes perfect sense.                                                                                                                                                                        LoopLogic, for example, allows you to splice audio/video and slides to offer greater context of an event- as opposed to sharing a simple slide deck from presentations and a few photos on Facebook. Potential future sponsors, clients and attendees can enjoy a rich media experience, on-demand viewing and easy share ability.

Goal: Opportunities for Follow-Up and Monetize Post-Event 

  •  Twitter: Hashtags aren’t just for real-time trends. They can help event marketers keep conversations going on around post-event by utilizing the hashtag post-event for relevant and timely discussions. One of the best ways to capture the buzz is to create a Twitter list of those attending, those utilizing the hashtag in conversations and event influencers. This will allow you, as an organizer, to listen closely to these groups, know needs and expectations, and build relationships with those that will likely be attending your events in the future and can make it increasingly beneficial for both parties.
  •  Facebook: If an event is gaining momentum, it is important to use the platforms, like Facebook, to create a sense of connectiveness — to help past and future attendees feel a part of something. Potential sponsors and clients will take note. Creating and overseeing a Facebook page to carry the message behind the event on and use the collective intelligence for future improvements and planning. And not to mention, showing up in someone’s newsfeed is a much less intrusive reminder of upcoming events and way to stay top-of-mind.
  •  Presentation platforms: Tradeshow and event coordinators are always looking for the best way to share event presentations after the event has passed. NextSlide gives coordinators the ability to invite select people to view a live event, if not able to attend, or view a presentation after attending. With such walls comes the ability to monetize events online with the option of paid viewing.

 

30 Sep

Necessary Measures: How to know if your content is working

Throwing content against the wall to see if it will stick is never a good strategy. To know for sure if your media and messaging is effective, you must have some sort of measurement.

Now, creating one metric for every social channel out there is next to impossible.

Every social medium is different. For Twitter, you may measure by how many times your content was amplified by influencers in your space. For Facebook, you might decide to measure success by how many fans you have in a certain demographic. For that video presentation you just uploaded, you might measure by the number of downloads.

There are many different benchmarks you can create depending on the audience you are aiming to target, but the overall idea is to know how your content was consumed and shared on social channels.

You are already creating content that is targeted to your audience, but the only way to know if it is truly reaching them is to drill down:

Who is your current viewer?

What do they watch?

When do they watch?

How long do they watch? Not to mention, how many people watched?

Where did the viewer tune in (and when did they tune out)?

So where do you find the answers to these questions? There are many social media tracking tools out there, but overall these answers can be found by simply taking a deep dive into your analytics.

The level of engagement with content lies in tracking such items as unique views and downloads in real time. This will create a larger picture of whether your content marketing strategy is effective. Is your audience engaging more with that 30-second video you created or the 10-minute presentation with spliced video and narrated slides? By creating benchmarks and keeping a close eye on your analytics, you arm yourself with the knowledge needed to tweak your content strategy moving forward.

But remember, don’t stop at creating content and tracking your results. You’re not a content creator for content creating’s sake. You want to these consumers of your media to turn into actual customers. The next step after capturing such real-time information is to use it to follow up with potential leads in a much more effective way…

26 Sep

Content Marketing – Call It What It Is

From thought leaders to small businesses to enterprises, everyone is in the business of creating content. It’s not always because they’ve dreamed of having their own blog one day, but rather they know that they simply have to be in the conversation in one way or another.

Tweets, video, photos and, of course, presentations are all included under the umbrella of content. So if you’ve never thought about it in this sense as you queue up messaging on social networks, it’s important to label it what it is: content marketing. Once you view your messaging — including tweets — and the different platforms this way, it only makes good business sense to place a strategy around your effort.

So instead of pushing out something rather than nothing at all, you may want to think a little more carefully about your content—especially if you’re new to the content-game scene.

  • Post on a consistent basis: This is typically one of the hardest parts of being an effective publisher. Ever heard the saying “90 percent of success is showing up”? Well, this couldn’t be truer in the social world. Audiences rally around content creators that they can rely on consistent messaging from.
  • Be relevant: High-quality content placed on the right online venues is essential to eliciting a response from your intended audience. To be sure you’re focusing your efforts and messaging, listen to different online channels. What are the conversations going on in your space? Would your message be relevant here?
  • Consider keywords carefully: A simple way to create strategic content is to consider all topics that surround your brand. These topics will become the keywords that you wrap around your content. Keywords are just as important when publishing on Twitter or uploading a presentation on a platform like NextSlide. As you’re considering keywords, be sure to also approach them from the perspective of your audience. In what context would they be searching for this information, and are there other ways they may come across it? What are their needs and how does your content answer them?

Still not quite sure what an effective content marketing strategy looks like? Here’s three companies who’ve done it well: http://mashable.com/2011/05/01/content-marketing-tips/

9 Sep

Five Dos and Don’ts for Quality Presentations

You’re only as good as your last presentation, and in today’s connected world, presentations don’t always mean just a standard deck, and they have a much longer shelf life than before.

So we’ve put together for you five dos and don’ts to make the most out of your content:

Five Dos for Quality Presentations:

1. Be a storyteller, not a presenter: Your message, and the content you use to convey the message, is heightened when used within the context of a story. A story of you, your product, or your company can provide meaning that slides alone cannot hold by themselves.  

2. Advise your audience NOT to take notes: Because you will be posting the content online, viewers can direct their full attention to you instead to their notes. What’s more, you’ll make the biggest impression on those your speaking to, whether it’s co-workers or attendees of an international conference, the days directly following your presentation. Be sure to post your slides and audio/video online immediately and communicate exactly where your audience can find it. (Also, don’t forget to check your analytics to see how many people have viewed and/or downloaded your presentation.)

3. Focus on the number three: You should focus on wrapping content around three main points, because experts agree that viewers will walk away remembering, at most, three things. Be sure they are walking away with your top takeaways in mind.

4. Show your personality: Think of the best TED talks you’ve ever seen. You likely cannot remember the exact words and info presented, but you can probably remember the point of the presentations and how they were delivered. Did the presenter use gestures? Was there excitement in his/her voice? Infusing your personality into presentations not only makes you memorable in the moment, but also makes for a popular post wrap-up video presentation.

5. Consider the 10-20-30 rule: Created by presentation pro Guy Kawasaki, this rule-of-thumb states that there is never a reason to have more than 10 slides, to last longer than 20 minutes or to include text less than 30-point font. 

Here’s the classic presentation:

Five Don’ts

1. Cram TMI: Don’t cram as much information as possible on the piece of content, thinking that the audience will only be able to get the whole picture this way. Overdoing it can actually detract from your message, as the audience will become distracted. Not to mention, if you’re adding audio/video to the slide deck before placing online later, you will be giving context to each slide anyways.

2. Give a history lesson: The meat of the presentation shouldn’t go into deep detail on the history and structure of your organization. The final slide is a great place to add detailed information or when you repurpose it on an online platform later.

3. Forget the visuals:  When offering tactical steps, such as recommending a specific website, don’t forget visuals like screenshots and the URL that will offer a clear picture of what viewers are in store to find.

4. Go over time: Being given an allotted time makes one initially feel that the presentation must fill every minute. This is not the case. It is actually recommended to finish as early as five minutes before time to leave viewers wanting more and to allow for a quality Q&A. Remember you can always add more on to your presentations when you go to post it after.

5. Talk at your audience: Avoid being so focused on what you prepared that your not engaging with your audience in the moment. Take note of their non-verbal cues. Take note of externalities that might be affecting them: Are they clearly distracted because it is right before lunchtime? Make a relevant quip that will grab their attention and hook them back into the presentation. Having a good rapport with the audience will come through on video presentation later on, too, and make online viewers feel more connected to what you’re saying as well.

26 Aug

Put Your Stamp On It: The Importance of a Branded Experience

You wouldn’t send out a business proposal without your company’s letterhead, right? So why would you upload your presentations on a platform without your brand’s official stamp on it?

A brand is a company’s face to the world. It is the company’s name, how that name is visually expressed through a logo, and how that name and logo are extended throughout an organization’s communications. A brand is also how the company is perceived by its customers — the associations and inherent value they place on your business.

A brand is also a kind of promise. It is a set of fundamental principles as understood by anyone who comes into contact with a company, such as customers, shareholders, employees and analysts.

So it’s a missed opportunity to get thousands of hits on your presentation without prominently displaying your brand, helping to make the connection between your message and your brand’s identity. You need to give them a branded experience.

And according to bestselling author Dan Schawbel in a Forbes interview, such branding is especially important when you are an entrepreneur:

“Aside from establishing your company’s identity, you need to create your own online presence as an entrepreneur. I recommend that entrepreneurs brand themselves as expert sources in something that relates to their company idea. For instance, if you own a bakery whose customers are students at a nearby college, then you’re the ‘bakery expert for students’ and you can talk about what baked goods students purchase the most, and your favorite recipes. When entrepreneurs become experts, they are able to get media attention, and use those opportunities to promote their companies.”

And, of course, branding isn’t just about design. It includes you—the person behind the presentation, making it more than just a deck. Your overall brand is key for connecting with your audience, and it is especially important when it is a viewer’s first interaction with your company. In this sense, the presentation acts as your company’s calling card. What do you want it to say?

How to put your stamp on your LoopLogic channel:

-Upload your logo

-Create a vanity domain

-Change page background color and background image to match your brand

-Add a header image

-Change the color of text, links and the player

-Add a promotional blurb about you and/or your company

-Add a teaser or summary for each presentation to send your message home


19 Aug

Presentations: The Next Chapter

The average adult’s attention span is about 15-20 minutes. Our rule of thumb is that for presentations more than 10 minutes, add chapters. Segmenting your content into digestible bits keeps your audience engaged and allows them to navigate through the presentation with ease. Chapters offer the ability to revisit sections or skip directly to the content they’re after.

Here’s how to add chapters to a LoopLogic video presentation:

*Please take note that you do not need to sign up or sign in to create a presentation and/or add chapters to a presentation. There is also no software to download, and we offer the features shown 100% free of charge.

Chapters are also a great way to be an effective visual communicator, a term you’ll hear used quite often by presentation expert Nancy Duarte.

Here, a few other tips to make your presentation easily digestible and visually effective from Duarte:

Help them see what you’re saying: Half the people in your audience are verbal thinkers and the other half are visual. Combining minimal text with meaningful visuals means you will reach everyone.

Main points: Have one main point? Consider putting one word on the slide by itself.

Takeaways: You want your audience to remember a few items? Don’t show everything at once. Show one item at a time.

Consistency: Apply a consistent treatment to your graphics to give your entire presentation a unified look. Your audience will be attracted to, rather than distracted from, your message.

Practice design, not decoration: As tempting as it is to fill your slides with stuff, de-decorating is often the best policy.


12 Aug

Privacy in a Social World

Remember the uproar among users when Facebook changed its privacy policies a few months back?

“Facebook will be moving forward with a controversial plan to give third-party developers and external websites the ability to access users’ home addresses and cellphone numbers in the face of criticism from privacy experts, users, and even congressmen.” (Huffington Post, January 2011)

Well, it seems the privacy saga with our personal pages continues. Just this week, Forbes came out with a piece titled, Facebook’s Privacy Issues Are Even Deeper Than We Knew.

“Questions about what social networks mean for personal privacy and security have been brought to a head by research at Carnegie Mellon University that shows that Facebook has essentially become a worldwide photo identification database.”

The piece went on to describe how we not only need to worry about what Facebook and other social sites do with our personal information, but what these public platforms enable others to do as well. Combined with such personal information as birthdays and hometowns, the facial recognition software could make it easier for hackers to crack the code on Social Security numbers.

Yea, that nine-digit code that is supposed to be the most private and secure piece of personal property? That’s the one.

Writer Chunka Mui ended the piece with this: “Will [social tools like Facebook] step up to address the larger risks to which their customers are being exposed?”

Chunka asks a very important question.  And, in addition to personal risk, what about business risk?  Brands are following the crowds to their social networking sites, and many such platforms do not allow businesses complete control over their content. Who is viewing the content and whether it is secure are common concerns.

So is there such thing as privacy in a social world?

We like to think there is.

Having privacy and security doesn’t mean you can’t be social, too. It is possible to have both, but it’s simply not what we’re used to seeing in the marketplace.  Most social tools offer privacy as an add-on feature—or in other words, they place privacy second in the list of priorities.

And second just doesn’t cut it when it comes to our customer’s information and business identity. Whether it’s our phone number or start-up’s investor presentation, the ability to protect and secure our content should be the expectation, not the add-on feature.

4 Aug

Four Ways to Use LoopLogic

We love when we get asked where the idea for NextSlide came from, because it’s a very simple answer: We created a tool to fulfill our own business needs. We wanted to amp up our videos and keynote presentations without having to upload in a public space. We wanted to store our corporate presentations on a platform we could be proud of and so on…

So, here, four ways you can use our tool to answer a few of your own:

1. Investor Presentations. Explaining your vision clearly to investors is key, but that doesn’t have to mean a lackluster slide deck, and it doesn’t have to mean you’re both at the mercy of each other’s schedules. You want to be memorable. The investor wants to see your pitch when it’s convenient for them.

Expert Tip: Making it a private presentation allows you to cover everything investors may need to know, without sharing it with the masses. Plus, LoopLogic analytics help you see which investors actually viewed it and for how long.

2. On-demand Webinars. Never heard of one these before? You’ll likely be seeing these used more and more, as on-demand is becoming the norm and the expectation.

Let us explain.

The first—and many times, most important—advantage of this kind of webinar is that it doesn’t have a $500 price tag attached to it like your typical webinar software.

What’s more, you have complete control over your product. Turning on the privacy setting allows you to easily monetize the event. Recording your video beforehand minimizes those um’s and ah’s, and the branded channel reinforces your messaging to conference-goers. Also, integrating video and audio allows for more content to be shared at once.

All you have to do is set a date and time for everyone to meet and it becomes a pretty turnkey solution.

Expert Tip: Allowing attendees to add questions underneath the presentation makes it interactive and gives you, the host, time to create a well-crafted answer.

3. Tradeshows and Events. There is a lot of time and work that goes into preparing for events—not to mention the money spent on tickets, parking, personnel and on and on… Then there’s the buzz from events—sometimes you get it and sometimes you don’t. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could guarantee getting some extra eyeballs on your business by sharing your event presentation after it’s all said and done?

Expert Tip: Using sophisticated analytics lets you see how your presentation is performing and drill down to the nitty-gritty about who’s showing interest, and what topics are most attractive for subsequent event planning.

4. Inform New Recruits. Taking a peek into corporate presentations of the past used to require time travel. And a lot of new-employee instruction requires an HR person present and yet another meeting on the calendar. Now all you need is a NextSlide channel.

Expert Tip: Adding chapters updates presentations without having to completely redo important material.