Recently Inside Facebook published some great commentary on the curiously titled “Gesundheit! Modeling Contagion through Facebook News Feed,” an April 2009 research article co-written by Facebook’s in-house sociologist Cameron A. Marlow.
The article explores some fascinating data on the patterns that drive Facebook Page growth. Working from a huge dataset of 262,985 Pages, Marlow and his team were able to uncover the following:
1) Facebook Pages grow significantly (in terms of new fans) because of the actions of a few identifiable Facebook networks (e.g., San Francisco residents or students at a small set of universities). Within these networks, 14% to 18% are “chain initiators” — i.e., those who, right from the get-go, share a given Page with their friends.
Continue reading ‘What can we learn from 262,985 Facebook Pages?’
There’s been some buzz going around about Fred Wilson‘s AdAge Digital 2009 Keynote, in which he outlined a future where “Earned Media” grew and stole market share from “Paid Media.” Essentially the idea that companies would engage more in conversational marketing and less in advertising.
We’re big fans of the rise of Earned Media, and how it can be used to maximize benefit when coupled with a Paid Media campaign, and we’ve written a great article about the convergence of Paid Media and Earned Media over on MediaPost’s Video Insider. Continue reading ‘Unified Media Theory’
A follow-up to our earlier post on email marketing — in this special guest article, Scott Jahnke, the Director of Student and Young Alumni Development at Stanford University, discusses some recent fundraising campaigns that his department has built and distributed through the Involver platform.
We’re glad that we’ve had the opportunity to help Stanford improve its fundraising ROI. As Scott mentions below, our platform helped Stanford achieve a 23% increase in gifts from a key target audience (2008 totals vs. 2007 totals) — a real testament to the power of effective video marketing.
If you’re in the nonprofit sector or higher education sector, we hope you’ll read and share Scott’s wonderful post!
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It has been a challenging fiscal year so far. Fundraising is always somewhat difficult, but the economic uncertainty and gloom that seem to come at us from every angle on a daily basis has made it even more difficult to get our message out effectively. The most important questions fundraisers need to answer are: Why are we asking you for a gift? What is going to change if you give? And how will our organization make that change happen? In the fundraising world, this is called a case for support. Continue reading ‘The View from Stanford: Why Video Marketing and Email Marketing Make a Perfect Match’
Josh Bernoff over at the Groundswell blog has defined email marketing as “…email that is sent to a carefully chosen group of people with the expectation of forming or extending a relationship.”
This is a general definition, but it’s a useful one. Relationship-building should be your first concern when promoting your brand identity and/or products through an email newsletter or blast-out.
Fortunately, there’s a veritable wealth of manuals out there about how to write better email outreach, as well as how to time and space out your send-outs for better open rates and more clickthroughs. That said, it’s clear that more research can and should be done about the separate issue of email design — i.e., the ways in which email marketing messages are best designed and packaged outside of brute content considerations. This is where video marketing can play an important role. Continue reading ‘Why you should incorporate video marketing into your email marketing’
When we work with clients to carry out their brand marketing strategies, we’ll of course always ask them the key question: What are your goals for your video campaign?
Because digital marketers are an intensely numbers-driven and numbers-oriented lot, we’ll often hear answers like:
- “I want to generate 200,000 views of my video content.”
- “I want to attract a lot more people to my video app compared to what we’re getting now through our brand’s Facebook group.”
- “I want my video to be shared within communities of young people — our company’s target audience.”
Definitely, we’re grateful to work with such clear mindsets and execute against such precise company goals. The Involver platform has been able to produce more than a few home run video campaigns — and we’ve been able to do this, in part, because our clients have been helpfully adamant about communicating their success benchmarks.
Now, after running thousands of campaigns, we just have one more substantive idea to add to this whole goal-setting topic. Continue reading ‘What kind of brand engagement do you want?’