SmartMarket Media Blog

Ken George, new media production manager for Boston-based public radio station WBUR, 90.9 F.M., (one of the largest NPR-affiliated stations in the country) was bitten by the social media bug early last year.

Prior to 90.9, Ken  was production editor for Masslive.com, a regional web portal based in Western Massachusetts.

After reading Ken’s blog, a chronicle of 90.9’s “web 2.0″ initiatives, and following his “Tweets,” I got a chance to finally meet him at the station’s first “Tweet-Up” held in July 2008. Since then Ken has taken to organizing and hosting these events on an almost monthly basis.

WBUR is embarking on some really cool experimentation in the social media space, demonstrating a level of engagement and transparency pretty unusual for a major market broadcaster. As Ken is the mover and shaker behind this, I asked him to share his perspectives on what he is trying to accomplish for the station.

Without further ado, here is our conversation:

Ken George: We had been marginally tooling around with various social media sites like Flickr, YouTube for a number of years now. While great channels to port our new media content into, we never used those spaces to “converse” with users or listeners.

My eureka moment is a direct result of my attending one of the social media breakfasts last May. What I heard blew my mind. I left with a steely resolve to engage far more transparently and consistently with listeners via social media tools.

Twitter proved instrumental to this end. Why? I think the way it enabled almost real-time conversations. The more I Tweeted, the more followers I accrued and the more I would Tweet.  A real self-reinforcing positive feedback loop.

EG: According to the most recent statistics I heard for public radio, the average age of an NPR listener is 47 and continues to trend older year after year. How does this age demographic of WBUR listeners, affect your approach to social media engagement?

KG: You’ve identified a huge problem with that question. For the most part, the “traditional listeners” are not the ones responding to our social media outreach. And frankly, I am unconvinced there is much I can do to reach those listeners via social media.

I see my efforts as helping the station to reach new markets and position itself for the future characterized by a limitless supply of on-demand content.  Community will be the one trump card we can play to distinguish us from all the other guys.

EG: What are the biggest challenges WBUR faces as the way people receive news is changing?

KG: The unparalleled access to information, content, news on demand presents a huge challenge. Public radio operates best in an environment of information scarcity. When locked in your car you choices are 90.9, some innovative college programming or boatloads of crap.

This completely breaks down on the Web, where you can get all kinds of radio programs and other compelling content ad infinitium.

And of course there is the issue of money, specifically the amount advertisers (underwriters in public broadcaster parlance) will fork over to get mentioned over the airwaves. That revenue helps cover the considerable costs associated with radio production. On the web, those analog advertising dollars become digital pennies.

EG: You’ve started a monthly “TweetUp” at your studios where anyone can show up, get a tour and engage in a round table discussion about many different topics. How did you come up with the idea for this and what was the driving force behind it?

KG: The “Tweet-Ups” where a natural outgrowth of our social media experimentation. NPR resident social media evangelist (oh that term again!)  It was from Andy Carvin, who among other things is tasked with getting National Public Radio affiliated stations onto the social media bandwagon, that I learned about “Tweet-Ups.”

So I thought “What the hay, let’s give it a go and see what happens.” I was dubious folks would attend, and was very gratified to see my misgivings were unwarranted. And these events have been of tremendous value to the station. The core attendees (yourself included of course) serve as a brain trust of sorts that have in no small way helped guide 90.9’s digital media efforts.

I think my strong feelings about empowering the “public” in “public radio” is what has made me a fanatic about hosting these events monthly.  You folks have supported us through thick and thin. It is only fair play that you be invited in to tell us what you think (even if at times it is not necessary something we want to hear). I think that is incredibly empowering for listeners.

Speaking of events, the next WBUR Social Media Meet-Up is February 5th at 7pm and at the end of February we are hosting an “Eat Up at WBUR” – making a concerted effort to reach out to local food bloggers as part of the station’s new community-based “Public Radio Kitchen.”

EG: Being public radio you need to do fund-raising to stay on the air, how have you used your social media connections to help promote and donate to your pledge drive?

KG: We are in the embryonic phrase of tying social media to pledging. The end of the year fund drive last December represented the first time we tried using social media to solicit pledges. I would remind folks (mostly via Twitter) that the fund drive was on and direct them to a specific landing page so we can quantify the results. Our overall take via social media was small, but then the initiative was rather last minute and haphazard.

The plan is that the next time we try this we are a little more organized and consistent. We may (”may” being the operative word) even deploy “micro-pledging” applications across the social media space.

EG: Thanks for taking the time Ken!

According to a new survey by PermissionTV and reported on eMarketer, Marketers will increase their use of online video in 2009 (read their full article here). Here are some of the interesting statistics and trends they are predicting from this survey:

In the online survey of 400 senior marketing executives, nearly 2/3 identified online video as a primary focus of their 2009 digital marketing campaigns and budgets.  More than half are planning the launch of an online video campaign by the second quarter of 2009.

Brand awareness was listed by 71% of survey respondents as the biggest value of online video, followed by lead generation (47%), customer retention (44%), and customer conversion (41%).

Interesting to me was that e-mail was missing from the ad tactics respondents were asked about. Matt Kaplan, vice president at PermissionTV, told eMarketer that survey participants were not asked specifically about their e-mail budget plans. Although I believe e-mail marketing is a standard tactic for nearly all digital marketing campaigns and is especially effective when deploying an online video campaign. Who better to deploy an online video to and ask to forward it on to friends that a permission based e-mail list of contacts you already have a relationship with? The reason it was omitted was because spending on e-mail is far lower than for many other formats.This does make sense as E-Mail Service Provider (ESP) services are relatively inexpensive in the grand scheme of an online marketing campaign.

It will be interesting to see how 2009 pans out according to these predictions. It’s refreshing to see that brand awareness was the top reason for doing an online video marketing campaign as that is one of the strengths of online video. Those who put down lead generation, customer retention, and customer conversion will hopefully have some sort of statistics aggregation tracking in place as well as some sort of call-to-action either built into the video or somewhere around the video as this is critical to the success of any online video campaign.

How many views make a viral video a success?

How much of a typical online video is actually watched?

This is a question that was recently asked by Feed Company in a survey of 40 executives at top U.S. creative ad agencies and media buying firms. Almost 28% considered it a success if a viral video got more than 1 million views followed closely by about 22% each evenly saying it was successful if it was viewed 100,000, 250,000, or 500,000 times. A meager 2.8% each considered it successful if it was viewed 25,000 or 50,000 each. I’m telling you that of all these numbers the 2.8% were the closest to being correct. It’s not about the cumulative total of those views, it’s about getting that video in front of the right eyeballs.

This was a quote I pulled from the Feed Company’s Viral Video Marketing Survey “The Agency Perspective” The last part about the quality of engagement and conversation — that’s the real key to the success of a viral campaign.

Here’s an example that we utilized for ourselves using word of mouth or viral marketing as a self-promotional piece in a B2B environment with measurable results. Last September I was named by the Worcester Business Journal to their 40 Under Forty list. So to celebrate this we created a funny movie poking fun at myself. We set very clear goals to:

1. Increase our brand recognition within the Central Massachusetts region served by Worcester Business Journal.
2. To open a discussion which would hopefully lead to a working relationship with Worcester Business Journal.

First, we sent it to our contact at Worcester Business Journal to get their “blessing” before sending it out to our e-newsletter subscribers. The Business Journal’s editor-in-chief called us within 15 minutes to say that it had already been forwarded around their entire office and they wanted to show it at the awards banquet the next night with over 500 attendees. At the event the owner of the Business Journal (and several other regional business newspapers) came up to me and asked if they could send it out on their e-newsletter to their list of over 5,000 subscribers.

Within about two weeks after the event our e-newsletter subscriber list doubled and from that event we have created videos for two of the event attendees, we produced videos for all three business journals owned by the parent company of Worcester Business Journal and have all three business journals set up to resell our online marketing video product. As with any word of mouth marketing campaign, it needs to grab people’s attention and be easily passed on.

Based upon our website views of this video and the video views on sharing sites such as YouTube, we had a little over 12,000 total views. That’s it. But we were able to target our demographic specifically to decision makers in businesses in a select region. So all the right people were viewing the video that we wanted to engage with it.

So what’s the moral to this story? You can have 50 million views of a video but if it ultimately doesn’t lead to the desired brand interaction you were looking for how effective was it really? Be more targeted in your distribution and don’t worry about cumulative views if it is engaging the right people.

How Much of a Typical Online Video Is Actually Watched?

5 Questions Interview: Mike Langford of Tweetworks