Saturday, May 14, 2011

New talent available!

A message for you:

I'm open for a challenging job wherever there will be a position that will meet my passion and abilities. If you need an excited and educated person, who has an international approach to things, speaks English and Russian, and is learning Italian as well, don't hesitate to contact me.

Specialities I'm interested in:

Social Media planning
User Experience Strategy
Brand Strategy
Brand Engagement
Market research and analysis
Communication Strategy

If you want to find out more about the projects I have done, my experience and recommendations from people I have worked together, you are more than welcome to visit my Linkedin profile: Click here.

Thanks to everyone, who helped me and made this video go viral, the perfect job has been found!

Tongue named Morgan case study


Do you know what a tongue cleaner is? It's a gadget to clean tongue, preventing bad breath. Here's a super cool example how to make this weird gadget interactive, engaging and popular among social media users. 
The brand is called "Orabrush". The main channel this brand use to interact with funs, is their YouTube channel.  Every week the brand publishes video series (in a diary format) with the main character called Morgan. Oh, by the way, Morgan is a life-sized tongue and now it's already his 39 week on air.  

In most of the videos you will not even see the product, but what you find is Morgan in different adventures situations. Here, check them out!
Morgan in his diary talks about people he met in different situations, his observations, feelings and concerns. The language he speaks (both, verbal and nonverbal) is so good and funny, that you have an impression as you would listen your best friend talking. Morgan also interacts with watchers by asking them questions and funs with pleasure answer them in comments below the videos.

The other very good thing they do and I have no clue how they did it, is that on their website you can find plenty or reviews in a video format made by costumers. They are talking about their experience with tongue cleaner, they film how they received the package from Orabrush, they describe product features, show how to use it and why it's worth to get one. 
This whole communications seems so easy, that it's definitely the key factor of it's success. It's all about simplicity of the story told. This brand really understand the rules of social environment which are: listen, engage, be real and have fun! 
My dear friend, Morgan, I'm waiting your next diary spot!
P.S. Did I ordered tongue cleaner? No, well...not yet. 

The ugly true about viral videos

Or the new tactic to make videos stand out from the crowd. 
Not a long time ago Internet was full of articles about viral marketing tips. Most of them talked about how to go viral with your video and make it noticeable and attractive. To go viral seemed to be pretty easy; you just had to follow some rules which were and still are more or less the same: the video should be short, funny, compelling and entertaining. in some cases educational. But the most important tip was and still is that it's all about emotions. The creation of video was the key factor of its success. Time changes and now the creation of it is just a start to reach audience. Why? Because now the war about getting attention is growing enormously. Web has changed the way people communicate and now it's all about interactive dialogue. If there's a successful dialogue, you get clicks, raise brand awareness, increase traffic to your website and if you are really lucky- you increase sales. 
So, how to bring audience to your video, because most of the time the audience is not aware of it, so no dialogue can be started. The magic words are- you need to seed your video. You can hire agencies who are working to get traffic to videos. They will send your masterpiece to online influencers and publishers on the web. They build a strong relationship with a certain number of online distributors in a different range of areas. Agencies place your video on top blogs, social network and video sites etc. Video seeding is like a combination of Digital PR and word-of-mouth marketing. They are also taking care about titles, tags, descriptions and search engine optimization to get sure that your video gets the much organic traffic possible. 
most of the time agencies offer guaranteed number of views for your video and creativity in this case doesn't play an important role. You will get your guaranteed views anyway, but you might be loosing your brand credibility. So, in terms of budget it's important to find a balance between these 2 things- video creation and seeding. Now they are going hand in hand. 
Let's make an experiment with a stop motion video I just made. It's pretty much following the rules of engaging video; it has a good content and credibility (I hope). I'm a quite active social media channel user and I will place the video on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Blogspot and in the biggest social networking website in Latvia- draugiem.lv. Let's see and make an analyze how many views I will get in one week time and from which channel is coming the biggest traffic. In general, statistics is not inspiring; experts say that 95% of videos places on YouTube, doesn't reach 500 views. Let's hope for the best! Click here to see my masterpiece!