Last week we had the opportunity to travel to Seattle, WA, to work on a video project for the Finish Line Youth Foundation. We visited Camp Eyabsut (“to rise above anything”), a week-long camp for burn victims between the ages of five and 17 sponsored by the Northwest Burn Foundation. We also spent a day at Neighborhood Bike Works before returning to Indianapolis to talk with folks at Windsor Village Park.

Each of these programs benefits underserved children by providing education, activities and resources designed to increase self-esteem and teach leadership. On the trip were director and content architect Matt Chandler, producer Kindari O’Connor, and director of photography Larry Ladig. Joining us in Seattle was local sound engineer Matt Sheldon.

It was a fantastic trip to say the least. All of the kids were smart and fantastic, and really left an impression on us. Hopefully the work we did–and the final project–will serve to increase the donations to the client’s charitable arm so they can continue to fund great organizations like the ones we talked with.

We managed to shoot some behind-the-scenes footage at Camp Eyabsut.

And then here are some random photos from all three days of shooting.

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Every so often I’ll have a client approach me about buying followers on Twitter, or advertising on Facebook. I’m sure there are a few organizations that would benefit from these tactics, but I’ve never been a part of one.

Content draws interest, not the number of subscribers.

It truly does not matter if you have 100 or one million followers. The only thing that matters is that you are creating and communicating your message in a unique way to those who are paying attention. The better the content, the more traffic you are going to generate. Building a huge base with no content just leads to a bunch of people who do not care about what you are saying.

One million followers who do not care about you is worth nothing; 100 followers who will actively advocate for you is priceless.

How do you generate this content? Well, that’s another post. If you are new to the social media business world, start with researching what your competitors are doing. Learn what is working and what is not.

Social media platforms are the ultimate capitalistic form of marketing: open competition for any and all to see what kind of tactics are being used by the competition. The key is understanding what is working and what is not. The one fail-safe in all of this chaos is content.

In this business it is just as important to learn about what others are doing as it is to be working on your own projects. Therefore I am constantly searching platforms and watching how others are developing content.

One of my favorite quotes is from the TV show The West Wing, in which a speech writer says that “good writers borrow from other writers, and great writers just flat out steal from them.”

This could not be more true with social media marketing. Learn what content works, create it, and watch your numbers grow.

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I am not a hacker, nor have I ever been. I don’t like to tinker with anything. Not cars, not my computer, nothing. I didn’t care much for Legos or Erector sets. I’ve always been more interested in having neat things that worked as they were intended rather than taking those things apart, figuring them out, and making them do different things.

In the course of some recent client work, I’ve been doing a lot of content curation about information security. This required me to delve into many news stories each week about the latest hacking, malware, identity theft, and other technological malfeasance. The stories receiving the most attention were about nefarious coders hacking Facebook, Windows, and now Android-based smartphones.

I’m actually really glad there are hackers out there. Hackers are innate tinkerers with an insatiable urge to go as far as they can, figure out how systems work and make them do their bidding. Sometimes it’s just for the thrill of doing so, sometimes it’s just to introduce a little entropy into the works.

Every time a loophole is discovered with some platform, it’s someone’s job to fix it. Over time, those systems become more and more secure, requiring end users to do less and less to diagnose their own technical problems.

This is not to say I’m advocating for people to refuse any and all responsibility for themselves and their activities. You don’t go walking down a crowded city street waving a wad of hundred dollar bills around, and you don’t get to be careless with your information.

But the online world can and should be a safe place. Everyone should feel secure online, they should feel comfortable letting their kids online, my mom should feel safe paying her bills online.

From the corporate side, companies should (and do) dedicate great sums of money to keeping their systems and your information secure. If there were no threats, I’m not confident most private companies would do much to prevent them without some motivation.

As long as there are those who will attempt to thwart the system, the system will be forced to improve.

What do you think? Am I an idiot thinking such things? Let me know in the comments.

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George Benson Gets Doggy Treats

George Benson, Raidious office assistant, is a very popular fellow. Not only is he on our website, but he’s got his own email address. And he’s a social media maven with his profile on Dogster.

Thanks for our friends at Partnership Community Bancshares for sending along a gift of homemade dried liver doggy treats. He kind of went a little wild digging on the snacks.

This past Saturday, June 26, we at Raidious celebrated our first anniversary as a company.

The folks at Hirons & Company were kind enough to donate their suite at Victory Field so we could enjoy food, drinks, and some fine baseball courtesy of the Indianapolis Indians.

A good time was had by all. Just watch the video for proof.

If I read one more time how “content is king” I think I’m going to throw up.

The problem? That statement is absolutely correct.

Engagement and interaction with customers is all about content. That’s the concept upon which Raidious was conceived and built, so of course we’re going to tell you that. And of course we can back it up with data and case studies.

But don’t take our word for it: ask Starbucks; ask Apple; ask Volkswagen. Ask all the most widely recognized, most beloved, most valuable brands with the most passionate customers and they’ll tell you the same thing.

Starbucks

What started as a humble little seafront coffee house has turned into a global lifestyle enterprise. Visit their website and you’ll do more than learn about coffee: you’re immersed in a culture that includes music, home appliances, gifts, charity and more.

They have scads of custom-generated content, all written by and for Starbucks and operating much more like a lifestyle magazine than a corporate website. The front page of their website changes daily, with new videos highlighting Starbucks-supported community programs–much of it user-submitted. The music section even includes free downloadable mixes.

All this is just the tip of the mocha freeze, providing a completely immersive experience with a consistent tone and relevant content designed to appeal to their customer base. The bulk of the site has no real concrete relation to coffee products. As the old saying goes, they’re selling the sizzle, not the steak.

(In an act of true synergy, there’s even a Starbucks iPhone app.)

Apple

Who doesn’t know about the Apple experience? Love it or hate it, it’s more than just computers and iPods: it’s a lifestyle. Everything about Apple’s site is designed to emphasize this fact. They don’t need to deliver a hard sell on their products to the in-crowd.

Their well of content runs deep and wide, especially in the Pro section, which is dedicated to musicians, videographers, photographers, designers and artists. From magazine-style profiles of creators and innovators to sections like “Insights and Ideas” and “Techniques,” Apple is emphasizing the individual user’s connection with a greater universe of creativity and exploration.

Volkswagen

A car is a mode of transportation. A VW is a lifestyle object. By driving one you are instantly part of a community, and you’re displaying your aesthetics and politics to the world. VW’s site takes a slightly more direct tone with the “Experience VW” section, which includes VW events around the world, the VW Club, and online accessory shopping.

Can you think of another mass-market consumer product that mere ownership entitles you to membership of an exclusive and enthusiastic club? It suggests that driving a VW is more than just a purchasing decision: it’s a voluntary act of solidarity with those who share your point of view. They’ve moved from customers to fans to an audience of advocates, and those are the people who will do your marketing for you.

Summary

Once is a rumor, twice is a trend, three times is a fact. But don’t let that stop you from finding out more. Check out this list of the top 100 most valuable brands in the world. Pick 10 or 20 that have maniacally passionate customers and you’ll find the same things outlined above:

• Deep content
• High levels of engagement

Now that we’ve let the results speak for themselves, ask yourself:

• What are my company’s content needs?

• How can we produce this content?

• How do we integrate it into our existing marketing and communications efforts?

Then drop us a line or call us. We’d be glad to help. Because we figured all these things out and built a company around it.

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How to Use Google Apps to Improve Your Business - Inc. Magazine

In the hullabaloo and hubbub of making our business go, we neglected to mention that Raidious was recently featured in an article in Inc. Magazine.

Brian Wyrick, VP of Operations, was among those interviewed for “How to use Google Apps to Improve Your Business,” published June 10, 2010.

At Raidious we have a “no software” rule, which we enforce as strictly as possible. We use Google Apps for document collaboration, Google Voice for our phones, Basecamp for project management and time reporting, and Freshbooks for invoicing and billing. We even accept client payments via PayPal.

We’re thrilled to serve as an example of the way things are getting done in today’s cloud computing environment.

Read the article online to find out more.

Embedded Brand News Team

Business and brands large and small are discovering the wonders of becoming social. Social efforts can be implemented on a small or large scale, either all at once or phased in over time. Either way, there are innumerable blog posts, books and articles describing the “[Insert Number Here] Most Important” or “[Insert Number Here] Key Things” and what-have-you.

Every social media and marketing guru has an opinion and a chosen number of things you need to do to be successful. I’m going to do them all one better and recommend one single thing to keep in mind when taking your business social, and it’s one of the core foundational elements of our business at Raidious:

Cover your brand like an embedded news team.

When we looked for ways to explain to people exactly what it is we do, we came up with the idea of the embedded brand news team. The metaphor goes like this:

What if CNN covered your company?

CNN is deservedly recognized for being a world leader in delivering in-depth news coverage. They span broadcast and the internet, reporting news across multiple channels–on TV, on their website, via RSS, web video, smartphone apps–and manage to successfully integrate all this coverage while maintaining consistent brand identity.

They accomplish this by assigning departments of writers, editors and producers to respective content areas or beats. Each department is responsible for a particular beat, and these areas are covered with respect to every media channel in the CNN empire.

Breaking news or crises are built into the news reporting model. Resources are reallocated or new resources are assigned to cover breaking news, all the while maintaining production of the day-to-day, prescheduled content.

Now imagine being able to hire such a team that would be dedicated to covering all aspects of your brand. That team would establish strategy, a content plan, and crisis communications with all outgoing and incoming communications monitored 24 hours a day–just like CNN.

That is the essence of what we do here at Raidious. Sure, you could hire one full time employee and tell them to “do social media.” Or for about that same cost, you can get a team of embedded reporters and producers who are well-versed in all the appropriate digital media channels, and whose job is to know everything there is to know about your company and report it.

What do you think? Does our metaphor hold water? Sound like it might be effective for your business? Let us know.

Mission Control for Digital Media

As a digital media agency, it can be difficult to put into layman’s terms exactly what it is we do. Whether we’re out pitching a potential client, going for an upsell with an existing client, or engaging in networking or friendly conversations, to tell people we’re a “digital marketing company,” that we “do social media,” or we’re an “internet marketing agency” doesn’t quite tell the story.

We’ve come up with some analogies that we think help explain not only what it is we do, but what we can bring to a company or brand in need of online help. So we start with the long version:

Raidious is an interactive marketing and communications company purpose-built to produce content and manage dialog for brands.

And then there’s the short version:

We are Mission Control for digital media.

Not only does this analogy totally out us as the nerds we are (Space Camp, anyone?) but it boils down what we do into an easily understandable representation with which anyone who’s watched a Space Shuttle launch or seen Apollo 13 can identify.

Companies and brands are our little space capsules, each with their own unique mission and crew. Some want low Earth orbit, some want to land on Titan (that’s one of Jupiter’s moons, for the non-space geeks), some want to peer deep into the universe. Regardless of the mission’s scope, all of these need ground support: a group in charge of monitoring every piece of data, every blip on the radar, to help that spacecraft on its journey.

That’s where Mission Control for digital media comes in. In space flight, mission control monitors telemetry, guidance, life support, fuel, and all the other crucial elements that go into keeping that capsule speeding toward its goal.

In digital media, mission control monitors trends, sentiment, impact, and conversions.

All of this monitoring is in service of engaging with customers and ensuring that a company’s marketing staff or agency can concentrate on what they do best. Mission control for digital media makes sure everything runs smoothly and no detail is overlooked. An overseeing body monitoring and measuring every aspect of a mission ensures your flight to the moon doesn’t end up on Pluto.

How do you explain internet marketing? What’s your best analogy to explain online dialog management? Let us know what you think.

Visa Branded Facebook Page

Lost in the Facebook privacy and security hooha was another change the popular social networking site made to its operations. Companies and advertisers can no longer create custom landing pages that force visitors of their Facebook pages to view them first. Companies can still create custom pages, but they must be added as a tab that users click to visit.

Companies with official pages can still add custom HTML to the left-hand sidebar via an application that asks or urges users to visit their custom tab. But no one can be dumped to a custom page straight away.

There was some outcry from advertisers and corporate entities following this move, as there is with any change the site enacts. Any platform with so many users can expect some level of discontent whenever the familiar is eschewed and new tactics are put in place. But in this case, I’m inclined to side with the “Tough cookies” crowd.

I’ll leave the arguments about how Facebook’s privacy policy affects the relationship between producers, advertisers and consumers to MoveOn.org and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Being on Facebook is voluntary, and there is no reasonable expectation for privacy beyond that which you would find anywhere else on the public internet.

Facebook wasn’t build for brands to use as their personal playground. It was created, much as the internet as a whole, as a tool for communication and collaboration. After beta testing on Mark Zuckerberg carried his Utopian dreams of sharing everything, all the time, to the masses when he opened the castle walls to allow anyone to join.

Once the site could be used by brands to engage however they pleased, Facebook was thrust into the business of giving away free websites. Giving brands the ability to create custom landing pages, complete with Flash and HTML elements, took away the brand control Facebook had already well established. Suddenly, brands could engage consumers, run promotions, and just plain make money from the site with no recompense back to the mothership.

Now branded and official pages default to displaying the Wall, where the contributions from visitors and fans (Likers?) take center stage–just as Facebook was initially built. This enforced structure is in keeping with Zuckerberg’s publicly declared (and lately decried) philosophy of openness.

Yes, perhaps it makes it tougher for a brand. Yes, perhaps it’s bad form to reel out the rope only to yank it back in, as Facebook seems to be fond of doing.

But advertisers need to remember that it’s not our world, we just live in it. A hammer wasn’t invented for us to slap a logo sticker on, it was invented to be more efficient than a rock at driving a small spike into wood. Facebook wasn’t invented for us to shout our message at people, it was invented for those very people to talk with each other.

Want to make the most out of Facebook? Use it in conjunction with your own website, vanity URLs, Foursquare, Twitter and the like to deliver a clear, consistent message and enable your visitors to engage with you however they see fit. Give your loyal fans special deals and promotions to reward them for advocating on your behalf. Augment your traditional media by giving consumers a place to go where they can actually do something rather than be passive receivers of your message.

But don’t expect Facebook–or any other communication tool–to be modified or re-purposed to cater to your needs. Facebook isn’t for you, and neither will the next big thing be so. Play along or take your ball and go home.

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