Tag Archives: Austin

Interview with Russ Somers of Invodo

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Russ Somers of InvodoHeading into 2011, I decided to shake things up a little bit here on Return On Now. Most of my topics have been national or global in nature. However, living in Austin, I’ve been rather active among the social media and marketing communities. So I decided to highlight some of the more interesting companies and people in town for others to get a little insight into what makes us “weirdos” tick.

My first taker was Russ Somers, the Director of Marketing for local video commerce startup Invodo. First, to familiarize you with the value proposition that Invodo offers, here is an excerpt from their What We Do page:

Invodo helps businesses sell more online through the power of video. We improve the way online retailers sell, brands communicate product value, and consumers shop.

This excerpt is very much in line with how Russ described the company to me (guess who managed website messaging?). During our discussion, however, Russ elaborated, “Our goal is to bring the visuals and the experience of a live retail environment to you via eCommerce. Since visuals are an an important component of that experience, video is the natural answer.”

Based on those two statements alone, you can start to imagine the possibilities of how the company’s services and technologies can really impact online sales. If you can’t see the product firsthand, how about a 3-D treatment that allows you to view from any angle? Or maybe a quick overview of the benefits and key features of the product? What if the speaker on the video just so happens to be part of the target demographic? I guess you can tell I think they are onto something here.

With a clear understanding of the offering, I was interested in hearing why Russ enjoys working at Invodo so much.

Cultural Intangibles

Russ outlined the company’s cultural mantras, and I must say, they were great! The leadership team is focused on creating careers for the employees, evangelizing the idea that this not merely a “stop” on your path to greatness. Specifically, he shared several key operating principles that the company stands for (paraphrased in my own words):

  • Customers First
  • Our Team Rocks
  • Humans Not Resources
  • Build an Amazing Company

My initial thought was, “What a company!” Of course, every great company finds a way to keep the customers happy. If that’s not part of the mission, the risk of failure is much higher, right? The rest of the concepts, though, are excellent. “Our Team Rocks” is about establishing pride and camaraderie among the employees. Some companies use the family analogy, but Invodo cuts straight to the point. Russ shared some nice stories about the whole team pitching in on all sorts of things in the early days (e.g. moving several large appliances over a weekend, where nearly everyone showed up to help).

I must say, though, “Humans, not resources” really piqued my interest. You see, I’ve always taken issue with the phrase “Human Resources”. The term is rather dehumanizing, grouping you and me together with things like computers, machinery, and materials used for manufacturing products. Invodo got it right…we’re all people who deserve equal respect regardless of position, experience, etc.

Cover of "Good to Great: Why Some Compani...

Cover via Amazon

Building a Great Company is something that all leadership teams want, but not all are able to sell properly to the entire company. The above mantras surely help set them

up for success with this objective, as does the fact that they encourage their employees to read the classic business book Good to Great. If you haven’t read it yourself, I strongly encourage you to do so.

Finally, Russ made it clear that the whole company embraces Austin as a city. “Quirky” was a word he used for something they consider a part of the company as well as the city. I must say, I’m in complete agreement!

After a nice walk through of Invodo, we delved into some other topics of interest.

Online vs. Offline vs. Mobile

I have very strong opinions about where I think the various mediums should interplay. When I asked Russ about his take, we generally agreed. Online will continue to be online, albeit with improvements such as the Invodo offering to help improve the experience. On the other hand, offline and mobile are due to merge in the future, at least partially if not completely. Geo-based social media services have opened a lot of doors that we are only beginning to peek through, and with the growing popularity of QR codes, you can now integrate all three touchpoints in new and different ways.

Social Media: Where Is It Heading?

In digging into one of my favorite topics, social media, I learned that Russ is truly “old school”. He was getting social on usenet groups before many of today’s adults were even exposed to the Internet! Heck, I’ve been online for years and he even beat me to it. Impressive, to say the least.

We both agreed that we are already in a period focused on content. The phrase “content economy” came up at least a couple of times. What does that mean? Ask Demand Media if you’re unsure of what to think. They’ve just lined up 151M reasons to believe in the content economy.

We discussed newcomer Quora briefly, and both agreed that it really needs some structure introduced into the experience. While it is great to get answers to questions from heavy hitters like Evan Williams of Twitter, finding it can be a challenge. I asked Russ if he thought a service like Quora might threaten blogging, and he didn’t buy it. His great analogy was that a blog is like your “home base”, while all the other social sites are great ways to extend the conversation. I must say, we were in complete agreement.

Conclusion

I really enjoyed the visit with Russ Somers. He had great insights and is a generally interesting guy. I wish both Russ and Invodo the best of luck in their ongoing endeavors.

Now a question for you – Who in Austin do you think would make a good interviewee for Return On Now? I already have quite a few folks in mind, but I want to hear from my readers directly. Thanks for reading!

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Social Media Success With Events

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Francisco Garcia IIIThis week I offer you the first of a series of guest posts, this one focused on using social media to drive successful events IRL. Thanks to my good friend Francisco Garcia (no, not the one who plays for the Sacramento Kings) for taking time to share his experiences here on the blog.

But don’t just read his work, chime in! Please share your own experiences in this capacity so we can all learn from each other!

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In the past, I’ve had the privilege of being asked to aid in the social media efforts of a few conferences, festivals and other events in Austin and the central Texas area. Naturally, it was important with each event to keep attendees informed and engaged, and while some tactics worked better than others, for the majority of the events mentioned herein it was the first time doing anything with social media. This post is meant to show what it was like doing live social media promotion with events and organizations new to the world of social networking.

Social Media for Music and Art Events

This October, I was asked by organizers of Art Outside to help them keep their Twitter account updated. With so much going on at the 3-day camping festival involving musical acts, performance artists, multiple stages, hundreds of volunteers and thousands of attendees, it’s understandable there would be a challenge to keeping up with the online community. There were plenty of people following @ArtOutside’s account and tweeting about what artists they planned to see when they got to the festival. While going through the #ArtOutside tweet stream, I knew I needed a way to keep the Twitter audience’s attention.

Enter CoTweet. Utilizing CoTweet’s tweet scheduling function was a great way to give followers a quick reminder about what kind of performer was going on (musical, painter, visual, performance, etc.), which stage that performer would be on, and what time the performance would occur. Tweets were scheduled for release 15-20 minutes before a performance, giving festival attendees plenty of time to get from their tent, another stage, or from any one point to another within the festival grounds at Apache Pass.

Of course, we took advantage of snapping pics of art installations and music acts whenever the opportunity presented itself. If ever there were a sudden change in schedule due to an artist gone MIA or the onset of unexpected technical problems, that was easily updated. Plus, it helped to be out in the middle of the woods [literally] and still have a great wifi connection.

But with Art Outside, your audience is a good mix of modern and traditional, so it’s important to take the same approach when promoting an event like this. An online platform is great for spreading the word, but having smaller events leading up to the big one is helpful for building that excitement. Giveaways for things such as promotional items or free passes to your event are always a nice way to keep attention.

Social Media for Nonprofit’s Annual Conference

Take the Texas Veterinary Medical Association’s Annual Conference. My former employer had me manage all the social media efforts for their 3-day conference in College Station during March of 2010. The conference is geared strictly toward TVMA members and focuses on opportunities in continuing education. Various members of the veterinary industry set up booths in the exhibit hall to display their products and services, and students from the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine were also in attendance, acting as moderators for various speaking engagements.

Now, like many other industries, the veterinary profession in Texas hasn’t totally caught on to social media. There are a few tweeting veterinarians out there like @SnoopyDoc in Houston or @AllanDaleVet in Austin, but the majority of the Texas veterinary industry is still figuring out that tweeting has become more than just “for the birds”. (Sorry, I had to.)

So, before the TVMA annual conference, I had to think of a way to get attending TVMA members to realize @TVMA was on Twitter and Facebook in the first place. Once we had a steady following on these sites, I started with the giveaways. The most successful was a giveaway for 2 pairs of tickets to the conference’s Casino Night.

The rules were simple, be the first to complete this sentence: “A legacy of ___.” TVMA’s slogan is “A legacy of service,” so this was a quick and easy one to win. The incomplete phrase was posted on Twitter and Facebook and both received responses quickly. One TAMU veterinary student responded on Twitter in less than a minute from the original tweet, and another student responded on Facebook within five minutes of the status update. Each winner came to the TVMA booth at the conference to pick up their tickets and take a photo with the prize, which was to be posted on the social networking sites. The contest actually led to a steady rise in followers on Facebook and Twitter during the first few weeks after the conference. Also, members of the veterinary industry started to follow in the footsteps of TVMA.

Social Media for Industry Association Symposium

Finally, there is the Southwest Veterinary Symposium (SWVS), who hired me to do some social media work for their September 2010 event in Fort Worth. There, I monitored both of TVMA’s social networking accounts, since the association is a partner in the conference, with updates on times and room numbers to continuing education opportunities for members. I also updated SWVS’s Twitter account with information on the day’s scheduled events.

The biggest draw here was SWVS’s collaboration with Rumr Marketing. The Rumr reps wandered the exhibit hall at SWVS with t-shirts promoting SWVS’s social networking presence: http://twitpic.com/2risvu. There was a contest giving away a free shirt to attendees who followed SWVS on Facebook or Twitter after spotting the reps. Once again, the freebies are what drew the conference attendees to social media. That, and it helped a bit that a 50” plasma television was placed at my social media station to display real-time tweets and status updates.

When passers-by saw the screen with a Facebook page or Twitter stream, it was a chance to approach them and ask how familiar they were with social networking and how they thought it might help their business in the veterinary profession. Some admitted to hardly ever being active online, some only used Facebook, and very few were familiar with Twitter.  This all gave me and the people at Rumr Marketing a better understanding of who and what was working in terms of active online users.

Conclusion

Like the veterinary profession, there are plenty of industries out there that are trying to get a handle on how social media can benefit them. What challenges have you come across when doing social media marketing and promotion for a small business or event? How did you overcome those challenges? How might you handle working social media for an event or industry new to the platform?

Read more posts from Return On Now about Social Media.

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Social Media: It CAN be measured too!

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If you keep up with the local Austin startup scene or even with new social media services as they pop up, then surely you saw the announcement from Spredfast about their Social Media Campaign Management Dashboard product. It would easy to dismiss this as just another hype-laden announcement about a new social media tool, but that would be rather short-sighted in this case.

Ken Cho headshotI recently had the opportunity to spend upward of two hours on the phone with co-founder Kenneth Cho (virtual high-five to another UT-Austin MBA Alum!), first to learn the philosophy and history behind the product, and then to take a guided tour through it firsthand. What I learned is that these guys “get it”, and the best is yet to come.

You see, this product is an evolution of Ken and his partner, Scott McCaskill’s, previous venture, Social Agency. The previous organization was focused on actually managing the social media campaigns themselves on behalf of their large business clients. Given the slow adoption of social media to date in the enterprise space, Social Agency was able to do very well in that capacity. Almost too well; they found themselves overwhelmed with managing a variety of disparate tools and services on behalf of their clientele.

So the SpredFast concept was borne. SpredFast is intended to be a tool for social media campaign execution and engagement. What does that mean? They built it to help with getting messages out, scheduling them, tying in the multiple channels, and publishing to those channels (channels in this product are the multiple SocMed “tools” out there such as Twitter, Facebook, etc.). But they didn’t stop there, because there are free tools for many of these activities  (e.g. HootSuite, my personal favorite), and their intent was to monetize the product to create a real business (novel, huh?).

I must say, for a first release of the product, what I saw holds a great deal of promise.

SpredFast GUIThe first impressive thing you notice is the intuitive GUI and seamless integration across the various tools that are included on the first release (more to be added in the future) – most notably Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr.  You can manage all tweets, status updates, video postings, and photographs from right within the SpredFast product, including RTs and the like.

Even more importantly, they listened to what we’ve all been screaming about and built a measurement system right into the product. The model, while not yet a full ROI calculation, should prove helpful for measuring the impact of your efforts on the conversation and the marketplace. And all statistics should be fully accurate, since the product uses APIs to collect the data directly from each channel.

The model as it stands today includes three key areas as follows:

  1. Engagement - A measurement of what actions result from your ongoing social media activities. This metric includes number of replies, comments, Re-Tweets, bit.ly clicks, Facebook “likes”, and many other affinity-related behaviors.
  2. Reach – A straightforward count of how many people your social media campaign is, well, reaching. Metrics include number of followers, Youtube subscribers, Facebook fans, and other standard counting numbers associated with “direct reach” (i.e. being connected to you or your brand directly). In the next revision of the product, they are even considering adding extended reach indicators such as friends-of-friends or followers-of-followers.
  3. Activity – Quite literally, this is a measure of how many things you are doing on the various channels, including things like number of messages, tweets, and links that are published through a particular campaign.

SpredFast Three Metrics

For now, these indicators are most useful in telling you how influential your activities are (Reach), and then helping you benchmark whether your level of Activity is generating the appropriate level of Engagement. If your Activity/Engagement ratio is too high or too low, you either need to change the level of activity or change the actual approach, because something is not working as intended. Return-on-investment? That would be a stretch in this iteration, but what it can do it show a return-on-activity in the form of engagement.

In our extensive conversation, we dug pretty deeply into philosophies about social media, where it fits, how important it was, and some key areas where this product can be built out to truly reach the vision that Ken and Scott have in mind. Of course, I won’t steal their thunder by going into too much of that detail here, but I do recommend that you give this product a look. Particularly for those of you in larger or mid-sized companies where social media is still a work-in-progress, it can offer a starting point for measuring and justifying your efforts.

What other tools have you seen out there that may rival this approach? Some of the established players do have similar models (as indicated in Aaron Strout’s guest post from last week), but who do you think is best poised to get this right? And most importantly, what do you want to see measured to better gauge whether your SocMed efforts are working or not? Let’s discuss, because the power of social comes from free sharing and discussion among us.

Social Media for B2B: It CAN be done

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Aaron Strout

This week, Return On Now has the privilege of sharing with you a guest post by Aaron Strout, CMO of Powered Inc. right here in Austin, TX. In addition to running marketing, he also serves as a key “social voice” for the company.  In that capacity, Aaron continues with his speaking, blogging, podcasting, and social networking activities with an eye toward creating awareness and lead generation for the company. Aaron co-hosts the Quick-n-Dirty weekly podcast with Jennifer Leggio, he maintains a social media blog titled Citizen Marketer 2.1, and he is well-known as a thought leader in online and social media marketing.

For today’s post, Aaron has agreed to give his overview on B2B and how social media can actually be used to benefit the business. With all of the discussion surrounding concerns about measuring impact to the bottom line, I felt that this would be an important topic for all to hear.

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Why is it that, when it comes to conversation about social media, business-to-business (B2B) seems to get the short end of the stick every single time? As someone who does a lot of webcasts, blog posts, and speaking gigs, the question/comment that always comes up is, “what about B2B examples.” Fortunately for me, I’m able to mention companies like BreakingPoint Systems and Hubspot that do a great job tapping into the power of social media, but I often wish there were more examples (with public results) that I could discuss.

BuildingsIn thinking about this topic, one of the main reasons that B2B has taken a little longer to adopt social media into its marketing mix is that it’s harder to do effectively. It’s also feels risky because there is less control then  in other channels. With that said, I personally believe that B2B companies stand to benefit the most from social media because they live and die based on the strength of their customer relationships. On top of that, many B2B companies actually know exactly who their prospective customers are, so seeking those folks out in a meaningful way and creating relationships with them can have a huge impact on the bottom line.

Given that I’m a prescriptive kind of guy, I’d feel remiss if I didn’t offer up some tips about how companies can start thinking about putting social media into practice. There are obviously tons of ways, but here are a few (including a diagram that provides more color commentary on item number three):

  1. Start listening. This is easier to do than you think. Set up a Google alert for your company’s name, your competitors’ names, and keywords for your industry. If you’re already doing this, consider hiring a “listening” service like Techrigy, Radian6, or Meltwater Buzz. This will help you find where all the relevant conversations in your space are happening.
  2. Create a Twitter account for your business. However, resist the urge to put up links to press releases, product specs, and links to press that are singing your business’s praises (at least out of the gate). Instead, talk about things that people in your industry care about. For instance, if you create bill payment software, talk about the needs of small-to-medium sized businesses across the financial spectrum (payroll, credit, vendor management, etc.) Link to reports and industry analysis. Point out other peoples’ blog posts and magazine articles.
  3. Set up a blog. Before you do this, though, make sure you have someone (ideally internal) who is willing to commit to posting at least 5-6 times/month. This can be someone on your marketing, product, or PR teams, or even better, one of your executives. Think about creating an editorial calendar to help guide your topics. Most importantly, spend time looking at other industry related blogs — in fact, you should spend at least a month doing this before you set up your own blog. Be sure to comment on those blogs (talk about the topic, not your company). This will help with getting to know the relevant “social” people in the space.
  4. Create an online community. Once you’ve gotten comfortable with items 1-3, start thinking about an online community. Ideally, this is for both current and prospective customers. Some businesses feel more comfortable about creating private communities where customers can talk to one another. The key in either case is to hire a great community manager and let them help you create relevant content via webinars, blog posts, and conference calls (see diagram below). A community manager will also help you draw out your customers and ensure that conversations stay relevant and productive.
  5. Measure, measure, measure. This is less difficult than you might imagine. This really should start with looking at your current goals — i.e. new customers, greater retention, larger share of wallet, referrals, etc. Then make sure you benchmark (i.e. look at your webstats and current KPI’s) before you launch your social efforts. Then, look at how you’re moving the bar over time. A key place to look is your web analytics, to see what kind of traffic and engagement your Twitter feed and/or blog efforts are driving. Also, it doesn’t hurt to survey customers and ask them if your efforts are impacting their loyalty to your company.
B2B Community Model
B2B Community Model

I won’t lie to you; everything I mentioned above takes effort. But it’s worth trying, especially when it’s done right, because it will yield results. One thing that I failed to mention is the importance of integrating the recommendations above with your existing marketing/channel activity. Social media doesn’t live in a vacuum, and if nobody can find the fruit of your efforts, you may as well not have exerted the time and resources.

Am I missing anything? You bet I am. But that’s where you come in. What types of social media have you tried? What’s worked? Please feel free to share in the comments section below.

Texas Social Media Awards: Gratitude

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Don’t ask me how I missed this, but I was just made aware that I have been nominated for a Texas Social Media Award! The Texas Social Media Awards kicked off last year under the guidance of the Austin American-Statesman, the largest newspaper in central Texas. Take a look at the whole list of nominees and you will find some impressive social media minds, so it is an honor to be included with such a reputable list of professionals.

Texas Social Media Awards

First, many thanks to the folks who submitted me as a potential award candidate, particularly my good friends @FranciscoG3 and @KurtMW. They both not only nominated me, but shared their kind words with their followers on Twitter.

Second, please take a moment to add a comment on my nomination page. Whether I win or not, it sure would be nice to make the upcoming top 25 list. Feel free to share specific blog posts, tweets, or anything you think would be helpful to the judges. Or just say what you think of my work. Whatever you do, be genuine and honest and all will be best in the end.

I’m not one to spend much time patting myself on the back, so I’ll leave it at that. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on topics or commentary you’d like to see included here on Return On Now. Please add a comment below with your thoughts and I’ll consider it for inclusion in the coming weeks and months.

Thanks for your gracious time and attention.