Matthew: Hello and welcome everybody.  Today is October 15, 2009 and you are watching VisibleGains Live.  My name is Matt Mamet.  I’m the Director of Product Marketing at VisibleGains.  With me is Matt Kaplan, VP of Marketing and Strategy Officer at VisibleGains.

Just want to let everyone know that we’re expecting to hear some questions from you today, so please talk to us on Twitter by using the hash tag which has changed from the last time you’ve done that.  We are now VisibleGains so tweets that are including the #VisibleGains hash tag will show up in the player that’s on the page and we’ll get to those questions live as I monitor them in my trusty laptop.

So for those of you who may have heard over the past couple of weeks, we have relaunched our company from permissionTV to VisibleGains.  So in honor of that momentous event, we have Matt Kaplan back on who was with us when we launched the PTV Live program back in January.

[01:07]
So it seemed fitting to bring him back to explain what the heck is going on here at VisibleGains, Matt?

Matt: I’m glad you asked that question, Matthew.  Thank you for prompting me.  Well for those of you who didn’t see the news, as Matthew said, we are now Visible Gains.  We have changed not only our company name, but also the key focus of our company.  We have a new product offering as well; a new target market for us as well.

Going back, if you look at what permissionTV really was the pioneer of just four years ago, really pioneered the concept of interactive video; and really what that meant was being able to combine interactive technologies with the video experience to do things like overlays over top of the video to link out to other websites and web properties.

But also to create a personalized sort of video experience; a non-linear experience.  In other words, instead of just sitting back and passively watching a video, we were able to  stitch together various video segments to create a more personalized video experience.

So what we found out when we brought that product to market as the permissionTV platform…we brought it to media companies, entertainment companies, publishers; and really what we found out was that while there was a great interest in being able to use these kinds of things, a lot of the media companies and entertainment companies really wanted to repurpose a lot of the video they had already shot — and that was linear video.

Matthew: It was shot for the broadcasts.

Matt: Right, it was shot for the broadcasts and so making the transition into this sort of interactive format was difficult for them to sort of grasp I think.  So as a result we needed to look at ourselves as we had a certain technology great experience here; great resources.  What types of companies were best suited to take advantage of this technology and this capability that we had.

So we went through a whole strategy process to figure out where there were opportunities to use this sort of core technologies of ours and that’s how we landed at where we are today.

Matthew: So that’s where you’ve been the last six months.

Matt: I have.  I’ve been under the rock doing this sort of…  We went through a whole  what’s called a Blue Ocean strategy framework to identify areas of opportunity for us.  We went through a process of research; we did a lot of research.  We talked to I would say hundreds of people, both people that we knew were not in our industry and really tried to find out what types of organizations could best utilize this capability.

What we found out was marketers, specifically B2B marketers, there was a whole transformation going on in that world that lent itself to using this technology.

Matthew: Yeah, I think that it’s no secret that the entire online video industry is going through a bit of a change.  We had Scott Kirstner on our webinar maybe a month or two ago; and we were reflecting back on one of his earlier books, The Future Of Web Video, and we were kind of…obviously hindsight is 20/20 and the benefit of the past couple of years…the idea that all of these big media companies that had all these videos in the tank from their broadcast years were just gonna slap that online and make tons of money by selling ads to Coca-Cola on top of Simpson episodes, it just didn’t turn out to be true.

Matt: That’s right.

Matthew: And you have to react to that.  But at the same time there were a couple of trends occurring at the same time.  You mentioned how B2B marketers are going through a trend, but also the cost of producing videos…

Matt: Ah sure.

[4:49]
Matthew: …also started to come down in a big way.  Talk a little about you know, as someone who’s been with permissionTV from the beginning, and now up to VisibleGains.  What have you seen in that area?

Matt: So regarding that, we’ve seen the proliferation of devices, sort of hand held devices that can give HD quality video.  You know when we started this show I don’t think the flip was really that…

Matthew: Well, it was out.

Matt: It was out, but it wasn’t that popular.  iPhone also now obviously has the ability to capture video.  So the devices, the cost of devices, the cost of production has plummeted and with that comes the proliferation of just video content.

Matthew: Right.

Matt: We think that when looking at — actually Cisco has a report that says that 90% of internet traffic by 2013 will be video based.  So there’s a bunch of research that’s come out to say video will be pervasive across the industry and it makes it much more affordable for businesses now to shoot video, produce it, edit it, distribute it; and it was impossible before.

Matthew: Right.

Matt: It was only available to large advertisers, large marketers who could afford to create, you know, million dollar campaigns to run on television.  We all know the success that video has had in the B2C context with television advertising…

M
atthew: Right, sure.

Matt: …but now because of the affordability of video, we can make that same sort of impact from the B2B perspective for fractions of the cost.

[6:19]
Matthew: So there’s kind of three forces coming together.  We talked about the changing kind of shape of online video software industry.  We talked about reduction of cost of video production and we hinted a little bit about what’s going on in B2B marketing.  Tell me a little bit about how those challenges kind of play into what we’re doing here at VisibleGains and let the folks know.

Matt: Sure.  When we looked at the business to business marketplace and we looked at the way buyers and sellers are interacting, we saw this huge change coming about.  It’s really been the last I’d say decade that it has changed.  And really what’s happened is businesses are…that buyers have 80% of what they need to research and to understand more about solutions at their fingertips with the internet and social media.

They rely a lot more on their social connections to understand a particular problem or what technologies are out there that may do that; and they do I’d say 80% of the research before they’re even engaging with a potential sales person on the other end.

So now you have this sort of shift we call a seller driven world to a buyer driven world with these sort of technologies.  So as a marketer and a seller now you have to figure out what do you have to do differently now to engage those buyers earlier in the process because they tend to wait now until I would say right before they need to purchase a solution before they have even if they’d made you aware they’re actively looking at your product.

So I think as marketers and sellers we have to shift from a mindset of prospecting and selling to one of thought leadership, education, and really helping buyers buy instead of trying to sell them something.

Matthew: So I want to talk a lot more about helping buyers buy, but I just remembered that we forgot to mention for those of you who have been expecting to see Larry Weber sitting next to me…

Matt: I am not Larry Weber.

Matthew: We had to reschedule.  Larry got called away at the last second, but we’ll get him on camera at some point in the near future, but I just wanted to let everyone know this is not Larry Weber, but he will be on the show.

Now you mentioned just now about helping buyers buy.  Last week this show was live at the Inbound Marketing Summit at Gillette Stadium.  You know, I was there and I’m hearing a lot about how marketers are using all forms of digital, but most notably social is sort of their focus, to engage people and develop a sort of trusted relationship around that.

Matt: Right.

Matthew: There was a great line from Mike Lewis at Awareness who spoke at one of the panels at the end of the second day that look, by the time I get an RFP that I need to respond to for his social media product, I can pretty much guarantee that is I haven’t written it then one of my competitors has.

Matt: Right.

Matthew: So you know, responding to RFPs is not…you’re too late at that point.  You have to get way, way ahead of folks.  Content creation was another thing that was just like through the roof at IMS and that’s really why I wanted to bring that up.  I went to the predecessor of IMS the year before which was the New Marketing Summit led by the same guy over there at New Marketing Labs.

It was really kind of like hey, everyone should be using Twitter and this is a cool thing we should be using.  Fast forward a year and now it’s like everyone gets it.  How do I used it to churn out content on a more regular basis?  And there was a lot of companies that were sponsors that were all kind of content creationists.  I see that what they’re struggling with is if you take a big step back, yes, everyone is now using these online tools like email marketing of course, and just your standard web marketing and blogging, but also micro-blogging and Twitter.

Matt: Right.

Matthew: …to get content out there; and now it has become very noisy.  You can’t get through anymore.

Matt: Right.

Matthew: And so for me, what I think is pretty special about what we’re doing here at VisibleGains is that we’re putting the face back to the name literally.

Matt: Right.  So what happens is so this huge shift is occurring in marketing, etc., but now everybody has access to the same tools.  It’s a level playing field for most people.  So if you don’t have something better to say in text then maybe you can raise the bar by providing more richer forms of communication like video.

So we started this program at the beginning of the year to do that.  We created a richer form of engagement for our audience to really talk about these things.  It’s a much easier way than you and I sitting down writing blog posts for a half an hour explaining what it is that we do.

Matthew: Right.

Matt: So it’s definitely…I think everything is sort of aligned here where cost of production has plummeted, it’s easier to create video content, buyers are wanting better information.  So we believe that engaging with video the key to creating a differentiator now in this sort of level playing field out there.

[11:38]
Matthew: So we talked about you know, where we came from.  We talked about some of the changes that are being affected in all of the industries; and we talked about how we sought to move into that.  Let’s talk about specifically what it is we do now.  What do we do to help people you know, cut through all the text based noise and reuse video.  How is it done?  If there’s someone out there who says you got me, I’m sold; you know, what can I expect next?  What do we do?

Matt: So there are three things that VisibleGains does and provides for our customers.  The first is a technology solution that allows you to create what we’re calling buyer-led video experiences, OK?  And we’re gonna talk a little more about that, but it’s a technology that allows you to create and deliver these sort of buyer-led experiences through video campaigns, through websites, through one on one email communications.  That’s number one.

Number two is we realize that in order to create more effective buyer-led video, we needed to produce video content to help our customers actually produce content in a different way.  It’s no longer about 20 minutes, 30 minutes of producing content.  It’s about creating shorter segments that can be stitched together on the fly.  So we help create a strategy and a roadmap, and do content creation for our customers.

And the third thing is to actually understand how buyers are using this application and so we’ve included analytics, measurement and analytics into our product offering.

So the three things are technology, content creation, and analytics.

[13:18]
Matthew: OK, so let’s talk first about the software piece.  What does the software do — I want to start there because that’s probably the easiest — for those of you who understand permissionTV, this could be a good segue, so what is the software do that makes it different?

Matt: So first of all with the software, when you look at the old world of the video player experience, you had your controls.  You had your fast forward, rewind, right?  Those are good controls for watching a linear video, but they’re not controls for marketers.  They’re not helping the buyer get to the next step in their process.  They’re not helping them personalize it.

So what the software does, it allows the marketer and the seller to actually construct wha
t we call a conversation out of these video segments.  I might be able to ask a question of the prospective buyer: what’s your role in the organization?  Are you a marketing officer or are you the head of sales?  And based upon their answer to that, the software branches the video to give them a personalized experience that they couldn’t get before.

So our software allows the construction of this non-linear or “choose your adventure” type of model and it also allows for the distribution of this onto a website.

[14:32}
Matthew: OK, and it also has all the cool interactive features that you’ve come to expect; the ability to put links onto of the video, the ability to put the person’s name into a name plate so you know who’s talking.

Matt: That’s right.

Matthew: And we’ve actually been using some beta versions for the past weeks, maybe as much as a month, here at PTV Live so if you’ve been reading the permissionTV blog, you’ve noticed that the interactive experience has changed a little bit.

Matt: Right.  I encourage you to check out on VisibleGains.com the video there of our CEO talking about name plates where you can actually click on the Twitter icon and follow Cliff.  You can click on his LinkedIn profile as well.  So what we’re trying to do with video is bring into the video experience -- because viewers are engage with video -- bring into that all the aspects of the interactivity that are relative at that time.

So you might know the person that’s speaking and now you’ll be able to click on that person on LinkedIn and see their profile.
[15:31]
Matthew: OK.  So lets move on to the video content creation piece.  What is so special about the way we do it other than the fact that we do it for you which I think is pretty special anyway.  There’s a secret sauce there and obviously I’m pretty excited about it
because we’ve been going through this process together, but explain to the audience why the way we do it makes sense?

Matt: Well first of all it’s done in a purposeful way, marketing and selling purposes.  In other words we start with the end in mind which is what do you want to achieve with this application and experience?

It’s not let’s tell our story because it isn’t about our story anymore, this whole shift is now  what is the story that the buyer wants to hear and how can we best relate to their own situation?

So the first thing we do is map out the sort of conversation, the potential conversation with that particular buyer that by drawing out — and we have some tools to do this with — but by drawing what we call a conversational map.

Matthew: Right.

Matt: And what this does is it informs us how to construct this experience, but it also creates a sheet list, right, with all the video clips that need to be created for the producer to go ahead and be able to do that.

[16:46]
Matthew: It’s very natural to me and yourself as well because we both have prior to our online video days at interactive agencies.  It seems very natural to me because of the time there spent where we were doing things like understanding audience personas online, building site maps online.  In many ways that’s similar to what we’re doing here.

Matt: Absolutely.  In marketing in general we’ve moved to a persona, a model where you need to talk specifically to the various personas you’re trying to reach.

Matthew: Right.

Matt: And differently, right?  And so video as a form was once a one size fits all form.  You told your story once.  Now it can be created in a way that talks more specifically to the various personas.  That’s the key element of that.

[17:33]
Matthew: Then the last thing that I’ll just throw in as well is about how we do video content creation a little bit differently because we’re not focused specifically on B2B companies; you know, specifically software and high-tech companies, we understand at a high level the messaging.  We understand a high level the challenges that you’re facing.  So getting from your buyers kind of informational needs to the moment when they need to convert, that’s a difference that you may not see with other video producers out there.

So we’ve been able to merge the best of how do create video and all the lights and camera action, all that fun stuff, with how do you tell your message in an online world?

Matt: That’s right.

[18:19]
Matthew: …persona based, etc., etc., etc.

Matt: One more thing and it has come up a lot on this show is how do you do it in an authentic, genuine way?  So in the past — let’s talk about B2C — what did they do?  They hired pitchmen, they hired athletes, they hired actors to tell their story for them whether it’s Coke or Buick or whatever brand you’re talking about.

Now with B2B, you can’t afford to hire Harrison Ford to be your pitchman.

Matthew: I would even go so far as to say that would hurt you, right.  I mean most buyers buy from people that they trust.

Matt: That they trust, exactly.  So, our philosophy is why not use your best storyteller, the people who know your products and services inside out, your employees; why not get them to be the spokespeople.

[19:06]
Matthew: So it’s instant scale right if you’ve got your…

Matt: Absolutely.

Matthew: Your cheap technologists that knows the guts of the software inside and out.

Matt: Exactly.  He’s done the white board talk millions of times right, thousands of times, so why not get him to do it for a client or for a prospect and use that as a way to explain in the words of the CTO to the sales or engineer exactly how you’re gonna solve a particular problem.

So we recommend highly using people in your organization that can tell your stories for you instead of hiring actors.

Matthew: Absolutely.  I actually have a question coming in from Steve Gogalak, our friend down at Cramer.

Matt: Hi, Steve.

[19:47]
Matthew: I say down because he’s really south of us just a few miles.  Realistically, could you create an entire website with your product, the VisibleGains product, if the only goal is lead generation?

Matt: I think you realistically you could.  You could.  I think there is still a reason for having text on websites.  I still think that while we are integrating the sort of SEO capabilities into our product, I still think having — Google likes having text on a page — so I think the question whether or not you want to have the experience be entirely video centric or video based, or you want to have somewhat of a blended experience, the fact is our initial product offering allows for a very seamless integration with any website by using sort of the light box treatment.

If you’ve seen on VisibleGains.com, you notice that any website doesn’t have to be redesigned in order to take advantage of our solution, our product.  So I think the first step is probably not to go through an entire redesign process on a B2B site, it’s to say OK, how can we start using video as a way to engage people in a dialogue.

Matthew: I would think that most digital marketers would agree that your message has to be multi-modal.  This is a phrase I picked up from the folks at the community roundtable.  You know, there are gonna be people who will flock to video who want to see it straight from the horses mouth; and there’s gonna be people who just prefer not to.

So you need to have your PDFs.  You need to have your images.  You need to have your blog posts.  You need to have all those things, but to the question of can we do it all through video, I think in micro sites and landing p
ages we’ve seen with our clients — we have been working with clients on our new product for six months or more — that it works very well.

Matt: Especially in email.  Email is a great example, and we’ve covered this before, but we’re talking about not email that is sort of a video that is embedded in your email because it wouldn’t pass spam filters, but it’s actually a link in an email to a landing page that contains a video.

Matthew: Right.

Matt: We’ve done it ourselves many times and experienced a much greater not only click-through rate, but view time rate on the landing page by having a video experience there.  So that’s a great example.  It’s easy to do.  It’s easier to get started doing something like that then it would be to redesign your website and make a video.

[22:14]
Matthew: That actually was the first real implementation of our product when it was in beta and we worked with an insurance provider over in the UK who launched our player on some of their landing pages.  Most of their lead gen part of their business is done online.  They have a heavy investment in pay per click pointing to a myriad of landing pages, but they spend a lot of time optimizing and fine tuning, and the main call to action is “request a quote.”

[22:39]
So we said hey, let’s put some video up on some of these landing pages and do an A-B test and what were the numbers that they saw?  Tell the audience.

Matt: Actually you can go to our website at VisibleGains.com, you’ll see there’s a case study there for this particular account we’re talking about.  They saw doubling not only of their quotes, but their purchases as well.  Increases over twice as much, 2.4 times as much.

Matthew: So I guess…that was the long answer to Steve’s question.  I guess the short answer is yes, you could, but we would probably recommend that you did it a little more focused.

Matt: And start with something you can measure.  You can test and you can do it pretty quickly.

[23:20]
Matthew: So thanks for the question, Steve, and that’s actually a great segue to the third part.  So we talked a lot about the video content creation piece.  The last piece is the analytics.

Matt: Right. So we have integrated into our offering an analytics solution that allows you to look at the entire conversation that’s happening.  So each video application that gets deployed has essentially an audit trail and you can see how many people have opened it, have tried it, and how they flowed through that experience.

And what it tells you is, it gives you some insight.  So if you have a question there about what role are you in the organization, you could actually see from that data even though it didn’t give you their email address or their name — we’re not coercing them into giving that kind of stuff — we can see who’s actively involved in your site.

Are they interested in this aspect of your product or are they interested in that aspect?  Are they a technology oriented person or are they a marketing oriented person?  So you can gain some insights into that.  Rather think of it as a video analytics tool which is measuring or showing you how long people have watched for, it does that, but it also then shows you exactly this kind of insight; how people are answering these particular questions and showing to the whole engagement of what they’ve had.

Matthew: So you talked a little bit about purposeful, effect driven video and that’s the kind of video we shoot and the kind of measurement that we capture.

Matt: Absolutely.

Matthew: We want to know do people click on the link?  Do they watch the video?  If they do, which video is getting more attention?  For the videos that aren’t getting a lot of attention, we know that.  We can swap out that one short piece for another rather than go back to the studio and reshoot every thing.

Then the final piece and we haven’t really touched upon really is the coup de gras is all that information gets integrated with your CRM.  So we’re currently integrated with Sales Force as well as HubSpot and as people go through this branched experience answering questions, “Oh, I’m the CFO” or I want to learn more about total cost of ownership, “Oh, yeah, here’s my email address because I want to sign up for more information”…all that information gets packaged up, dumped into your CRM and this is how we can help the sales team.

[25:39]
So lets take a few minutes to just kind of end the show by explaining how — I think we spent a lot of time on the market side of the house — the sales guys in the back are probably saying hey, what about the sales side which is as an equal portion of what we do.

Matt: Absolutely, and part of going back to the key strategy here was making sure that video can enable the entire sales funnel of the buying side, right?  So that means that when a sales person does get engaged in the process with the buyer directly, they now have much more insight into what the buyer was interested in.  They know what videos they’ve looked at.  They know how they’ve answered some questions, right?  So they can reach out being much better informed then they have in the past.  And in addition to that…

[26:22]
Matthew: The form of reach out…what is the form of reach out?

Matt: Right.  In addition they can reach out not only with phone calls and emails, but they can video enable communication.  So we have the capability now in our solution to be able to record a personalized video introduction by a sales person and send that to a buyer; and then be able to track that buyer or prospect that watched the video and if so, did they share it with people in the organization.

So we call this the sort of one to one video communications versus the one to many that’s being done on the marketing end.

Matthew: Right. So I think — you used the word personalized on the marketing side — and I think we’re going more for a persona base and that’s sort of a one to many persona level.  Then on the sales side it really is a one to one using that library of short, segmented videos we shot.

So from a sales side standpoint, if you want to explain your product in the very best way, you can grab some of the pieces from the library where you’ve done it way better, or “I was really on that day” so I can pull that.  Or you can kind of get a library of the most common objections and say “Hey, you know Matt I talked to you on the phone and you mentioned that you were concerned about our APIs or you were concerned about our service [unintelligible] agreement.  Here’s three videos that I pulled from our library that really do a good job of explaining that.

Matt: Exactly.  Not only that, imagine now the prospect, we’re now way down in the funnel, right?  Imagine the prospect getting the responses to the RFPs from all the other  vendors, but from you they get a video proposal with specific videos of how we’re solving their problem.  That’s gonna make a huge difference.

Matthew: Yeah, and several of the charter customers that we’ve been working with this summer have really sort of gravitated to that piece.

Matt: Yeah.

Matthew: I think the marketing piece is pretty well understood from the rise of digital marketing in general.  Video is seen as a new medium to achieve kind of that persona based communication.  Whereas on the sales side we can really break through the clutter; and we can really literally put a face to the name.

Matt: Right.

Matthew: And if people buy it from people they trust — and we all know this, this is not news — being able to have that genuine engagement throu
gh video that’s personalized, it’s pretty exciting.  We have the technology then to knit [?] it all together.

Matt: We’re excited.

Matthew: Cool.  Well I think that’s all the time we have for today although we could probably go on and on about how great we are for many more episodes.  We’d love to hear more from you.  Check us out VisibleGains.com.  As Matt mentioned there’s an example of our branching video right there on the home page.  Let us know what you thought about it.  We’d love to get any feedback.

Obviously, Matt and I have been working very hard on the content, so if there’s anything specific that you can share with us, feedback is always welcome.  And next week the VisibleGains Live show continues every Thursday at 3:00.

Matt: Yes it does.

Matthew: We’re gonna have C. C. Chapman who’s a partner at Campfire which is the company that recently acquired his agency, the Advanced Guard.  We’re really looking forward to having C. C. on the show.

I’m at MSMamet on Twitter.  I’d love to get feedback after the show.  Matt, how can people find you?

Matt: MPKaplan on Twitter.

Matthew: All right.  Thanks everybody.  Have a great week, and we’ll see you next Thursday at 3:00.  Bye, bye.

Matt: Bye now.