Business Video Breaks the Record By Breaking the Rules

What company wouldn’t want its brand to get over 12.6 million global views on YouTube?

The popular video sharing site is well known for promoting consumer brands with movie star pitchpersons, cute babies tearing paper or rappers with “Dr.” in their first names.

When most of us think YouTube we think Young. Hip. Cool. Viral. We don’t usually add the word “corporate” to the list. But now, that has changed.      

Doremus very recently created a corporate video for Corning called “A Day Made Of Glass.” It became an overnight success story. 

Originally meant for Corning’s shareholders meeting, it was also posted it on YouTube to stimulate broader awareness. Within a month, it became the most watched corporate video ever.

First launched on February 7^th, at four weeks it garnered over 7 million views. By five weeks it had gone global and had well over 10 million views, with an extra million views coming from two sites in China (ToDou and YouKu). 

How did this happen?

The video doesn’t follow any of the so-called rules that are supposed to turn something into a viral success story. The film is:  

•     Not short (but in six minutes it tells an intriguing story)
•     Not funny (but it connects on a whole other level)
•     Not on the Super Bowl, Oscars or Saturday Night Live (but it taps a global nerve)

So what did we do right?

We had a relentless determination to find the essence of the brand, and were able to leverage distinctive insights into an irresistible story.

As all of us who create effective communications know, you cannot grab your audience’s attention and hold it long enough to get your message across if it doesn’t tell an engaging story. That story can be thirty seconds long or thirty minutes.

But that story must be based on a deep, rich knowledge of the brand as well as knowledge and understanding of what resonates with key audiences. This deep understanding allows the story to rise above the noise of competitive clutter.

With the video, Corning asked us to take a complex subject (how glass will be applied in future technologies) and turn it into something that was compelling to watch.

What resulted was a visually beautiful, technologically evocative look at the glass innovations that will affect all of our lives in the not-too-distant future.

It depicts a family (dad, mom, two school-aged daughters and grandma) as they go through their day using the most innovative technologies made from various forms of glass.

Reading through comments, the film appeals to viewers on the scientific, rational level, as well as on  humanistic and emotional levels. It satisfies a basic human curiosity about future technologies, but depicts those technologies in a very warm and likeable way. Over 97% of the viewers gave it a thumbs up.

A promise that the future will be fascinating, and contribute to our quality of life.

The video resonates with how people choose to see themselves or their children in the future. As one older woman wrote, “I wish I were my granddaughter’s age so I could live to see this way of life.” Someone else added, “It’s amazing what they can do with glass!!! Wouldn’t that be so cool?” But the comment that might have best reflected the film on every level was, “The world would be so peaceful if it could be like this.”

It’s not a gimmick. It’s real.

Creating a successful viral video might be formulaic for some, but if you are creating a corporate video that will resonate with an expanded audience, that will go viral, you have to break those so-called rules and make your own, reaching people at the two most important places: their imaginations and their hearts. 

Do this well and your corporate video might even become a YouTube success story.

-- Garrett Lawrence, Managing Director, Doremus SF

The Importance of Real-Time Data to Marketing and Journalism

Part 3: Never has the Internet seemed so relevant to so many

But only social media hipsters in East London share this much information, right? Wrong. It’s surprising how quickly people get engaged when it’s about their real lives. We are programmed to engage in these ways, and the technological barrier is falling. Only two years ago, my dad thought I was crazy. Now he is connecting with long-lost colleagues on LinkedIn and tweeting about the media, Covent Garden and QPR, and telling other people to do the same. Never has the Internet seemed so relevant to so many.

Social media marketing can be traced back to the origins of Web 2.0 in 2004. Marketers were quick to see the potential of social media: self-organising brand advocates; viral video hits etc. There were also high-profile brand casualties, most notably Kryptonite’s bike lock that was unlocked with a biro pen and became an internet sensation. Despite these opportunities and risks, most brands carried on largely as before, while dipping their toes in the social media water. It was additive, still often used as a broadcast channel, but by no means a new model for marketing.

There is a simple reason that most brands got away with the status quo and why now really is an inflection point: the connection between our offline and online lives was not yet strong enough. Most of our lives occurred offline and few people cast a big enough “digital shadow.” The more people share, however, the more marketing is going to have to change, and the more journalism will also have to adapt to this new order. People will clearly argue this point, and also the demographic and regional variation in data sharing, but given that by 2020 the mobile phone will be the primary global internet connection device, smart marketers are investing in tools and new techniques now.

We are witnessing a rise in massive, passive datasets

The future of marketing is in monitoring and analysing “massive, passive” real-time data – i.e., listening to what the masses are saying and sharing. This form of market research has never before been possible. It has already impacted on journalism more than marketing – citizen journalism – but has significant potential for all of the media. Increased data is enabling us to construct detailed network maps – topologies – of people in relation to brands and industries, and hence understand how ideas, perceptions and behaviours spread.

If marketing in the past was about broadcasting to individuals and looking for signs that brand ideas were taking hold, it is fast becoming about understanding the multitude of networks a brand is part of, and prioritising and targeting key individuals within these networks. Using network science to map networks of influence is helping us answer pertinent marketing questions. As marketing is concerned with the spread of brand perception and behaviour, this has relevance for the spread of ideas in general, and thus journalism.

Network science may be about to revolutionise marketing, but what has this got to do with journalism? Many would see journalism as the antithesis of marketing: the reporting on real events vs the creation of ideas to change real world events. If this ever was the case (doubtful), the rise of a more personally relevant, social internet will force marketing to change. It will simply be too difficult, and costly, to spread ideas that are not true or not relevant. Marketers will focus more on the reality of their products and services, and getting these experiences to be more contagious. As such, they will be investigating a multitude of brand experiences and aggregating and promoting them. In short, they will become brand journalists.

So what can we learn about the future of journalism and the new tools that will be required? Journalism has already been severely disrupted by the Internet. The business model has been undermined, with a whole host of knock-on effects on media businesses and journalists alike. Citizen journalism has also forced journalists to justify their very existence. At the same time, micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter have been both a useful tool and a competitor in breaking news coverage. However, the same growth in “massive, passive” data can plot a path ahead for journalism. Information is all good and well, but journalism is and always has been about perspective. “Massive, passive” real-time data is helping to answer a number of key questions for both marketing and journalism. 

– Oliver Snoddy, Director of Digital Services, Doremus NY

The Importance of Real-Time Data to Marketing and Journalism

Part 2: The Key To Facebook's Success

Facebook didn’t invent real-world online profiles but it has been instrumental in driving a shift from an internet of imagined personas to one that directly reflects our real lives. This simple insight has been key to Facebook’s success and central to the development of the Internet over the past five years. Contrast the Facebook’s, Twitter’s and Foursquare’s of today with the MySpace’s and Second Life’s of recent history. The Internet is less and less a place to escape to – social networking only recently overtook porn as the key internet activity – and increasingly a very real part of our lives. 

I remember being in a job interview, aged 23 or 24, and being asked what my favourite website was. As an aspiring digital marketer, this should have been a simple enough question. I used more websites than most back then, but most performed a particular function. Few held the integral place Twitter or Facebook currently do. I made a hash of the question, much to my embarrassment, but that moment stuck with me and left me wondering what the Internet really was.

The Internet is no longer simply a place we go, or something we use, but a massive real-time connection of people and things, a “digital shadow” on reality if you will. And privacy concerns aside, this development path shows no sign of abating. We are sharing more and more information about ourselves and our experiences. At last count, Facebook delivers 60 million status updates each day, roughly one for every eight of its 500 million members. Add to that the more in-depth blog posts, and the quasi-active data sharing from applications such as Nike+, WiFi-enabled scales and Google’s PowerMeter data explosion. 

CES 2011 was awash with connected devices from GE, LG and Samsung. 2011 will likely see the first persistent-location mobile apps, tracking our location continuously rather than prompting us to “check in” to specific locations. All of these actions are generating an exponential rise in the amount of data sharing and the existence of “massive, passive” data sets: data created from everyday, low involvement actions. Although some way off, we are converging on a situation where our every waking hour is captured and analysed, and we all become sensors in a hugely developed internet. 

– Oliver Snoddy, Director of Digital Services, Doremus NY

 

A snapshot of the "massive passive" from the GlobelWebIndex, which shows media consumption habits by geographic location. 

The Importance of Real-Time Data to Marketing and Journalism

Part 1: The Rise of "Massive, Passive" 

People often think that Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, is joking when he says that being a statistician will be the sexy job to have in the next ten years. He goes on to predict that “the ability to take data – to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualise it, to communicate it – that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decade.”

Nowhere is this more relevant than in journalism, and mainstream news organisations have already taken note. From the Guardian's Data Store, to excellent infographics and data visualisations from The New York Times and the BBC, “data journalism” is a hot topic. The Wikileaks saga may be the best current example of data journalism in action, but journalists are increasingly gaining access to a wide variety of large data sets, from governments, NGOs and whistleblowers alike. They are using this “new” data to create compelling visualisations about military casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan (such as in the BBC’s reports on UK military deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq), local incidents of swine flu (the Guardian’s swine flu data in the UK) and the unemployment rate according to demographics (The New York Times’s Jobless Rate For People Like You), to name but a few.

Image from the Guardian's Data Blog

New publishers such as Flowing Data and Visual Complexity are also developing this space. Journalists are both responding to, and helping to shape, an era of unprecedented data availability. We are, however, still at the very early stages of data journalism. Most data journalists would admit that they need to get better at telling compelling stories with data, rather than simply producing innovative and arresting visualisations that may or may not help their audiences understand a subject better. More fundamentally, the rise of “massive, passive” real-time data from almost 2 billion connected individuals around the world points to a new type of data journalism.

Journalists will increasingly gather and process data, in addition to making sense of data made available to them – investigative data journalism if you will. They will also need to be able to predict and represent the mood of the world at a variety of scales. In addition, they will need to leverage tactics for getting their stories distributed across the internet. Journalists will, thus, need to develop many skills. They will need to be entrepreneurial, multi-media storytellers, community builders, bloggers and curators. Some programming skills will also come in handy. Above all else, however, they will need two core capabilities: great editorial and storytelling skills – as they always have – and a new fluency in how real-time data can capture what is really happening in the world. Data journalism is going to be core to the future of journalism as a whole, and real-time data an increasingly important driving force. 

-- Oliver Snoddy, Director of Digital Services, Doremus NY

Domesticating the Cheshire Cat

The digital cat is out of the bag. We are all enamored with this cat because it does new and magical things. It can measure faster and more deeply. It can easily morph. It can travel at light speed. It can share. It can create ongoing engagements. It can be whatever we want it to be wherever and whenever we want. And that’s the problem. How do we harness it to our best advantage?

To wit, I just returned from a vacation that required lots of air travel. When you looked around the terminal, all faces were buried in some sort of screen (myself included). To complicate matters further, today’s B2B target audiences are time-constrained, multi-tasking, sound biters without fixed and dependable habits. We jump from email to text to online to smart phone to iPod/Phone/Pad/Shuffle/Touch behind an ever-expanding assortment of apps and distractions. Couple that with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, WordPress, and a myriad of other viable and emerging technologies and a wonderful conundrum of opportunity without rules now exists.

Digital is indeed a smiling, morphing herd of Cheshire cats many don’t yet know how to properly wrangle or leverage. So what does that mean for business?

To start, companies must be extremely good at what they do – even better than before. They must set the vision for where their company is heading and do a darn good job of meeting those expectations. If not, business media outlets, disgruntled employees, analysts, and others will quickly expose those not fulfilling expectations (right or wrong). Those committed to meeting and surpassing expectations will be well positioned to survive and thrive. 

Larger companies have much to lose because they are most tied to the success or failure of that industry. Companies must actively engage in category conversation and digital communications allows them to do that. Those consistently and effectively communicating with relevancy and leadership are well positioned to secure their right to lead – and for the broader market to follow. 

Given all that can be done, where and how should companies effectively wade into this digital sea? 

First. Isolate your core business objectives and determine which channels of communication will provide the highest ROI (digital, traditional, both?). What is your firm trying to accomplish? What are the sources of information used by customers and prospects? Who are the core influencers? Knowing this will help isolate the right combination of channels that allows you to participate in the conversation and engage with your key stakeholders, including employees.

Second. Make the commitment. Digital is no longer optional. It’s your online storefront and the #1 source of information about your firm. To get repeat visitors, which increases the likelihood of purchase, relevant and updated information must be available. This is a full-time endeavor that requires constant upkeep and proactive outreach.

Third. Invest in the basics. Search engine optimization (SEO) and linking strategies help prospects find you. If you cannot be found, your time-constrained target will find someone else. Also, show your thinking by setting up a corporate blog. Discuss the larger issues that surround your industry to provide context to the true value of your offering beyond price. 

Fourth. Get more involved in B2B trade organizations. Author articles or studies, speak or panel at shows, post a few comments to their site. This shows you believe in the broader category and, more than likely, your participation and leadership will be captured on their site.

Fifth. Keep advertising. Traditional marketing greatly helps build brands, particularly in the B2B space, while digital marketing provides the detail many seek to fully understand your product or service. Both are critical to drawing warm leads to your doorstep. 

Don’t get smitten or distracted by all the new whiz-bang applications and technologies as they may be irrelevant to your B2B needs. Make a smart and strategic assessment of what you need to accomplish, and then leverage an integrated solution of digital and traditional channels to deliver against your communications objectives. The more we eliminate the complexities and confusion of digital marketing, the more we domesticate the Cheshire cat.

-- Doremus