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.

[00:00]
Matthew: Hello and welcome everybody. Today is October 1st, 2009 and you’re watching PTV Live.

[applause]

Matthew: Awesome, awesome. My name is Matthew Mamet and I’m @msmamet on Twitter. With me is Mike Schneider.

[00:25]
Mike: Hi.

[00:26]
Matthew: Hi Mike. VP at Allen & Gerritsen and @schneidermike on Twitter. Glad to have you on the show today.

[00:31]
Mike: Thanks for having me on the show. I appreciate being here.

[00:33]
Matthew: I look forward to talking to you. I want to remind everyone that we want to hear from you. Talk to us on Twitter by using the PTV Live hash tag. I’ll be monitoring the Twitter stream here on my old trusty MacTop and I will get those questions answered live.

But before we begin talking to Mike and learning about technology marketing, big news for next week’s show: we will be broadcasting live.

[00:55]
Mike: Huge news.

[00:56]
Matthew: Big news. From the In-Bound marketing summit. Visit this page: permissiontv.com/live on Wednesday. Not Thursday, Wednesday October 7th, same time, at 3:00pm and you’ll see Chris Brogan, Paul Gillan, C.C. Chapman, Jason Falls and Dave Carter discussing social media, specifically separating hype from reality. So looking forward to a really, really big show next Wednesday the 7th at 3:00pm.

You can see it live here on permissiontv.com/live.

[01:25]
Mike: That’s going to be epic. I’ll be there to see it.

[01:29]
Matthew: I’ll be there too.

[01:29]
Mike: Awesome.

[01:31]
Matthew: So Mike, I’m not sure that my introduction really gave you enough credit so give us a little more background. Who are you? Why are you here? What is the Mike Schneider experience all about?

[01:43]
Mike: The Mike Schneider experience…Mike Schneider or Schneider Mike as I’m known on Twitter. People have actually started to call me that in real life, which is fun.

[01:53]
Matthew: So I should refer to you as Schneider Mike from now on?

[01:54]
Mike: If you want to call me Schneider Mike, you can call me Schneider Mike.

[01:57]
Matthew: Done.

[01:58]
Mike: I work for a company called Allen & Gerritsen. We are a marketing and communications agency in Watertown. I run a group called the “Contributions group”, which is a little bit of emerging technology, a little bit of measurement. My background is in consulting. I went to Miami University which is in Ohio, damn it.

[02:21]
Matthew: So you see those scores come by and it’s like Miami and they always have to put in the Ohio?

[02:26]
Mike: The OH, yeah. The OH is in there.

[02:27]
Matthew: Not the Miami in…

[02:29]
Mike: They lose a lot more than the actual Miami in Florida, except in hockey.

[02:32]
Matthew: Well that’s true. The Miami in Florida is a tough program.

[02:35]
Mike: They did lose to BU in the hockey championship and I lost a bet and had to do a rap for…

[02:43]
Matthew: Are you a big hockey fan?

[02:44]
Mike: I am a big hockey fan. I like hockey.

[02:46]
Matthew: Well it’s certainly a hockey town so you’re in the right spot for that.

[02:48]
Mike: It is good; it is good. Great college hockey around here. So the Contributions group is, like I said, a measurement in emergent technology. It’s part of a bigger methodology that we use, which is we start with conversations, which is audience intelligence moving into connections and then contributions on the back end. So it’s an ROIN, when it’s about your audience, ROIL model.

[03:06]
Matthew: Excellent. Well that’s a good segue into the next question that I have which is: in prepping for the show, you had said Allen & Gerritsen has really broken through the tradition of the agency model. And I wanted to probe on that a little bit more. I think if you’re kind of outside of the agency life, looking in you see that a lot of agency websites or agency spokespeople are claiming that “Oh, we’re different” or “We’re unique” or “We have something that’s our special sauce.”

What do you bring to the table? What’s your special sauce? By you, I mean the Allen and Gerrisen team as a whole. What makes you able to get free from that model?

[03:45]
Mike: Well, we’ve got a couple of things. One is this idea of the 3 C’s. We’ve got what truly is an integrated approach. You can come to Allen & Gerritsen and you can get any of the 3 C’s by themselves or you can get them all together. You can get a couple of them. But regardless of whether you’re getting audience intelligence or you’re learning about your audience or you’re getting connections, which is media. Or you’re getting contributions, which is measurement strategies, segmentation or web analytics and things of that nature.

The other groups are involved because they all feed each other, they all feed into each other. Another way is that we’ve got products and methodologies that we use. So we’re trying to make things as repeatable as possible but also customizable. So in order to do that, we’ve thought about specific things that we’ve actually productized.

And I think that’s a little bit different.

[04:41]
Matthew: Let’s talk a little bit more about that. I saw on the blog that you have kind of branded your line of products: A&G Savvy is the name. One of the things that it’s –

Oh, get that back. You’ll need that.

[04:57]
Mike: Failure. Sorry.

[05:00]
Matthew: It’s all good. We’ll take it out in post, don’t worry about it. Oh wait, we’re live.

The blog post that announces the products says that they’re designed to optimize business efforts. Specifically, we talked a little bit about productizing measurement. And that really struck a cord with me because I’ve talked to a lot of experts here on PTV Live or other webinars or even out just out and about at Tweet Ups.

I think everyone is continuing to focus on the importance of measurement but there’s relatively few operationalized products for that. I think at a higher level, every VP marketing, every director of marketing understands that “I have to measure so I know my ROI and I can repeat that process.” That’s kind of like Marketing 101.

But the next level would be: OK, how do I do that in a repeatable way that I can operationalize as part of my every day activities and I don’t just kind of lose sight of it. Or on the other extreme, I get lost in so much data that it doesn’t tell me any real insight.

I think a lot of – like Google Analytics. Everybody uses Google Analytics because it’s free, it’s easy. But how do I get actionable insights out of your products because I can’t get that out of Google Insights?

[06:14]
Mike: Let’s look at A&G Digital Savvy first. Digital Savvy is our tool that allows us to measure the effectiveness of display and search. And so what we start off with is talking about the actions that are important on the site. So basically it’s feeding into user experience or feeding out of user experience.

So you’ve got something that you want somebody to do on a site and we look at those as indicating behaviors for specific segments, OK? So what we’ll do is we’ll put together a metric and it’s usually a cost per something. So cost-per-action metric.

So we build dashboards around that cost-per-action and then we use websites to drive people to those actions, OK? What you see in your output is that this site is very good at getting a particular segment of people to do something. So if it’s financial services, for instance, it’s like this one is very good
at driving financial advisors to the site. This one is very good at driving customers to the site – or, sorry, investors to the site, things of that nature.

So what we can do is we can go back and we can optimize the buy based on that. Now the product piece of that is the actual reporting. So we’ve got three levels of service: one is a whole mess of information that we can put out there with a small summary. It’s basically giving them the KPI – the key performance indicators.

And then the second level of it takes that down and boils it into a dashboard that gives somebody the two or three or four key points that they need to run their business in a day. And the third level of that is a summary for the ages. It’s this idea that OK, we’ve made all of these optimizations and we probably – and the media team for us, the connections team, remembers what those optimizations are but over time some of that stuff gets lost.

So what we do is we put together a giant deck summary, if you will, that visualizes everything that you’ve done and shows you where you’ve made optimizations. And we question whether we’ve made the right optimizations or not because sometimes the metrics can change over time. Sometimes the audience changes, sometimes things evolve and we try to put things in terms of apples to apples so you can see over time what’s happening. So that’s the Digital Savvy product in a nutshell.

[08:30]
Matthew: That’s a lot. That’s huge.

[08:32]
Mike: It’s cool.

[08:33]
Matthew: So you mentioned a lot and I’m going to try and pull it out and maybe drive into a few of them. You mentioned a lot about different websites and driving traffic, I would assume, to kind of your main website. So are you building kind of community sites and other blogs and portals and using them as kind of – I don’t know. Is it link bait, or kind of driving traffic more into a branded site? Is that part of the model at the front end?

[09:01]
Mike: Yeah, I mean there are obviously places that we want to drive people to, to experience some kind of message. Sometimes it’s a brand level message and sometimes it’s a specific call to action so there’s something more direct.

But at the end of the day you want to try to get everything to feed into something that is a call to action that will drive a sale at the end of the day or something like a sale. Sometimes you get into situations where you’ve got to come up with proxies for that because you’re not always a company that sells something. Sometimes you’re a company who is trying to get people to go to somebody else who is actually going to buy your product. So we come up with proxies for that kind of thing.

Some of the things we’re thinking about being able to do are to put more touch points into place that allow you to capture data and then enable both the B2B and the B2C relationship, if you know what I’m saying.

So we’re driving in that direction too.

[09:58]
Matthew: How about measuring different personas and how they navigate a site? I think one of the ongoing battles with web marketing in general is trying to make good on the promise of web marketing back when the Internet first exploded. Which is: we’re going to be able to personalize every site or every experience based upon every buyer’s unique set of needs.

That’s hard to do. I’ve actually had Mike Troiano in a couple of weeks ago and I asked him this question. He said, “Well, never underestimate the challenge of hard.” Sometimes if it’s just hard then you just can’t do it or you choose not to do it or you move on to other things.

How are some of these management tools built to take advantage of the fact that the CFO who visits the B2B product or service site is going to be interested in something completely different than the CTO or the developer?

[10:51]
Mike: Yeah, I mean the audience intelligence team attempts to anticipate those needs so when we build out these brand experiences, which is something that Allen & Gerritsen does, we’re taking those things into consideration. We’re trying to figure out what those paths are going to be.

Now what we do from there – so you’ve got basically strategists who are putting together the overall content strategy and then people are creating the content. And that can be basic flat site stuff or we’re recommending a lot more videos these days.

So you come up with these paths. So you’ve got user experience experts who are building up the site architectures and those folks pair up with the analysts. Those folks are trying to figure out what are the 20% of the pages doing 80% of the work? So you’re making that a very lean experience for people. You’re taking out the things that are not working or you’re basically sending them down different paths that are test and learn.

So we’re pairing those people up so it’s this idea of the analysts are going in with a little bit of user experience bend. And the user experience people are sitting with them and saying what’s important. And it’s not this idea of: let’s put the analyst in a silo or let’s get an analyst that has a bit of a user experience bend to them so they understand exactly what they’re looking at.

[12:18]
Matthew: So multi-disciplinary teams with kind of rapid inspection cycles. I would imagine that. So we launched the site three weeks ago or this campaign two weeks ago. What’s the traffic? What are the analysts thinking? OK, let’s feed that back into the UI team. Change the website, change the pattern. Sounds interesting.

[12:37]
Mike: Right. It’s cool stuff. Our clients are taking advantage of it. You know, it’s again the idea that we’re driving them to the site with the connections plan. We’re trying to optimize those paths once they get there and we’re trying to use these indicating behaviors to say, at the end of the day, which sites are actually performing for us so that we can eliminate the ones that aren’t. Then we can put more money into the ones that are.

[13:03]
Matthew: Great. So you mentioned a few seconds ago that you’re seeing that people are looking for video or you’re trying to talk a little bit about video with clients. That’s a great segue into the next question which is: We’ve always seen marketing agencies and brand agencies and ad agencies and companies that are somewhat similar to A&G as being the best place to go for new and exciting stuff on innovating technologies or ideas.

What are you pitching to clients today? What kind of cool and interesting stuff can you talk about with me today? You mentioned video as one of them. How core is that? What’s new?

[13:40]
Mike: We can’t talk about anything. The show is over. No, just kidding. Wrap it up.

[13:46]
Matthew: Well that’s it for today.

[13:49]
Mike: You know, A&G is a full service agency. We’ve got a lot of things that are going on. We’re doing a lot with emerging technology, we’re doing a lot in social spaces. We’re talking a lot about brand personification right now and we’re doing that for a few of our clients.

We’re pushing the conversation in B2B spaces. So you see a lot of brand personification for companies that are B2C related, but we’re getting to B2B conversations. So we’re taking brands and we’ve got a whole “people act like brands, brands act like people”. And we’ve got a whole sitting down with the clients and talking to them about the purpose of why we’re doing it and taking it from a situation where it’s kind of at a meta level and thinking about: All right, well what does this brand mean? And what are the tenets of the brand? How do we personify that?

When it becomes a person – because you should feel like you’re talking to a person – what’s the tone, what
’s the rhythm? Things of that nature.

[14:49]
Matthew: So rather than – for people who might not be familiar with that kind of idea. I’ll be honest, I’m not. A little bit. But it sounds to me like what the core tenet here is it’s important to get beyond kind of the logo and the flat text on the page and try to understand more on a human level. Who are the people who represent this brand? What are the experiences that I should expect if I start to do business with this company?

Kind of getting the human element which is kind of lost in the digital world and making it more real. Is that a good way of explaining it? Did I do a good job?

[15:29]
Mike: That’s it. If a brand – Hannaford, for instance – is about “Easy, healthy and affordable”. OK, that’s great and let’s put them out there in that sort of space. But what is that personality like? And not only that but how often are they pushing out content and what kinds of content are they pushing? And what kinds of conversations do they want to be involved in?

It’s this idea, like I said before, we talk about and we have the measurement team involved up front. So we’re measuring things like: what are the easy, healthy and affordable conversations and the key words around those? How do we measure that piece first?

And then it’s this idea of: Who is interacting with us and what do they care about? We’re trying to get to a model that helps us to prioritize what those conversations are.

[16:19]
Matthew: Are B2B companies interested in this more or less than they have been? I mean you mentioned a few seconds ago that this is kind of more the B2C thing that you’re pushing into the B2B space. It sounds a little bit to me that some B2B companies might say, “Do I really need this? I’m not a touchy-feely brand. I’m IBM and I’m Big Blue and that’s who I am. People do business with us because we’re reliable and low cost.”

Are you seeing that B2B brands are saying, “Look, you’re right, Allen & Gerritsen team. Social media is demanding that I reveal more of my personality or more of our brand personality online.” Or are they resisting it still?

[17:01]
Mike: Our clients, they’ve come from both angles. So it’s been us going in to the clients and saying, “This is something that you should be doing.” But we’ve also – from clients that you might not expect it to come from – some of these being B2B clients. They’ve come to us like, “We just went to this conference and we saw so-and-so speak on – like Kit Baudner, Wayne Sutton – speak on B2B social media and we have to have it now. Allen & Gerritsen help us. How can we do that?”

[17:34]
Matthew: So more and more B2B companies are getting this message and thinking that they’re behind, it sounds like. There’s a little bit of fear there, a little bit of urgency around that?

[17:43]
Mike: There’s some urgency and fear and the first thing we tell them is: “You’re not behind.” B2B has been slower to the game. The conversations for B2B are smaller out there right now and you can’t expect to go into these spaces and become a Whole Foods overnight.

We don’t think you should be, by the way. We think you should be having the conversations that matter to you with a highly targeted audience. So we want to be specific about the people we’re getting to with that.

[18:19]
Matthew: So B2C, it’s all a numbers game. I want to sell more cans of Coke. I want to get as many followers as I can so push the message out: “Coke is it” “Coke is it” “Coke is it”.

B2B land it might be more like: Let’s focus on the subset of people who actually are good fits for our products or services, who will need them. Because not everyone is going to need the type of specialized thing that we have.

[18:43]
Mike: Right, well, yes. B2C, if it’s a specialized product, we don’t advocate them going out and trying to be a Whole Foods either. But for companies like Hannaford, that’s a grocery store, we want them to get the geographies where they exist to as many people as possible because everybody has to eat.

[19:01]
Matthew: Everybody has to eat. You heard it here.

[19:06]
Mike: We think the product is excellent and they’ve got a good message. But back to your point. It is this idea of it is a niche. One of the great things about social media is that we have this ability to find these crowds now. You want to get into a crowd-sourcing conversation, you can. It’s this idea of I don’t want to be a rocket shipped to the middle any more. I don’t necessarily need a representative sample of the United States to come up with my ideas.

I want to find that niche of scientists who care about this particular cell and I probably can find them through social media, whether that’s Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn or some other community that we’ve created.

[19:50]
Matthew: Right, sure, that makes sense. There’s some bazillion amount of unique communities that have been created so one of them, at least, has got to be specialized to whatever kind of target audience you’re looking for.

One thing I want to ask you is that you described yourself as a tech guy and you have a background in database technology and CRM technology. How do you see that as uniquely helping you in your role now, which is more marketing-services based, obviously. Doing things like brand personalization, which if you’re a developer, you’re like “What’s that?”

So how do you bring these two things together? Is it like you feel schizophrenic sometimes or do you feel like you’ve put them together?

[20:37]
Mike: I’m kind of a Renaissance guy. I can go deep on a lot of topics but I like to keep my options open. One day we can be talking about social media. Another day we can be talking about salesforce.com or we can be talking about burritos. Things of that nature.

[20:56]
Matthew: Or you can be talking about makeovers, right? Didn’t you just go through a makeover?

[21:03
Mike: I did just get a makeover at Ask Emmy. I had a social media makeover last night.

[21:05]
Matthew: How’d that go?

[21:07]
Mike: It was fun, I had a good time. My modeling debut. I had a little – I did Le Tigre from Zoolander. I gave my glasses a great trip.

[21:17]
Matthew: It sounds like you had a good time. I wish that I had an opportunity to get there but alas I did not.

[21:24]
Mike: We’ll see you at the next one. There will be a next one, I hope. Right Emmy?

[21:29]
Matthew: But anyway, we were talking about bringing these two left brain, right brain thinkings together.

[21:36]
Mike: I mean I’ve always had somewhat of a creative side to me. I like music and I like to create music and I’ve always liked to draw. When I was a kid I used to always hack around on computers. I went to Miami to get a business degree so it’s technology-focused but at the end of the day I’m more of a business guy.

I love solving problems. Come to me with a problem and I’ll try to come up with a solution for it. So that’s helped. Getting really deep into the technology – technology is making all this stuff happen right now so it’s really great to be able to understand some of the things that are happening right now so you can understand the limitations of a technology so you can propose a solution.

It helps me. Sometimes I can propose a solution on the fly and it can make sense.

[22:29]
Matthew: Marketing is definitely becoming more of a technologist’s game than kind of your art director’s game that it used to be.

[22:37]
Mike: That stuff still is super important though. But you’re seeing a convergence of that, where back in the day you wouldn’t hav
e seen your technology guys and your directors hanging out. But now you’ve got guys like Gary Greenberg and I who are paling around in the hall because he’s talking about this great idea for a community and I’m saying, “Well let’s use this technology to enable it.” So that’s pretty cool.

[23:01]
Matthew: I just want to remind everyone that next week PTV Live will be broadcasting live from the In-Bound marketing summit. You can visit this page that you’re watching right now, permissiontv.com/live on Wednesday October 7th, at 3:00pm. And yes, you’ll see Chris Brogan, Paul Gillan, C.C. Chapman, Jason Falls and Dave Carter. That’s going to be the biggest -

[23:20]
Mike: Epic!

[23:21]
Matthew: And Mike Lewis is going to be moderating. Mike Lewis also from Awareness, so…

[23:24]
Mike: Boston Mike?

[23:25]
Matthew: That’s right.

[23:26]
Mike: Bad Boston Mike will be there? I love that guy. 

[23:29]
Matthew: It’s going to be a lot of people on camera, first of all. A lot of people with pretty clear voices, pretty distinct voices.

[23:39]
Mike: Good ideas.

[23:40]
Matthew: And I’m interested to see –

[23:41]
Mike: “Thought leaders”.

[23:42]
Matthew: That’s right. They are thought leaders. I mean they’re not all Schneider Mike’s, but there’s a few that are, you know…

[23:47]
Mike: Only one. Thank goodness.

[23:51]
Matthew: After the show Mike, how can people find you? I’ve already mentioned that you’re @schneidermike on Twitter but how else can people connect with you?

[23:57]
Mike: Well, they can connect with me via Allen & Gerritsen. I also tweet for @allengerritsen with @gramnelson. So he and I are the voices behind that, and Christine Kaponak. You can connect with me via schneidermike.com as well. Or call the offices at Allen & Gerritsen. I’m always free for a conversation. Twitter, though, is the best way to get me.

[24:22]
Matthew: We actually planned most of this show, you and I, on Twitter.

[24:24]
Mike: We did.

[24:25]
Matthew: We had one maybe 15 minute, 10 minute phone call.

[24:28]
Mike: I’ve done business deals on Twitter.

[24:31]
Matthew: What was the most recent business that you did on Twitter. For the last couple of minutes that we have I want to hear about this.

[24:36]
Mike: The most recent business deal that I did on Twitter…Well, we’ve gotten inquiries on Twitter, which is great. We’ve gotten those sorts of things. But I did some value-added services community work with a person that I didn’t know at first and now I’ve become tight with.

So it’s really great. We got to know each other via Twitter and then I learned that we’re working with their organization. And then I was basically: “Let’s do some business.”

[25:06]
Matthew: So social media uncovered a connection that you didn’t know you had?

[25:10]
Mike: Exactly.

[25:11]
Matthew: That’s pretty cool. So, again, a reminder. We’re not live next Thursday so please don’t show up on Thursday, we won’t be here.

[25:18]
Mike: Watch this one again.

[25:19]
Matthew: We’re a day earlier, Wednesday the 7th. Thanks, and have a great week everybody. Please follow me, I’m @msmamet on Twitter and we’ll see you next Wednesday at 3:00pm. Bye bye everybody.

PTV Digital Marketing Survey Results