Found a great animated infographic on the role and impact of digital marketing in healthcare on Life Healthcare Agency’s YouTube Channel. This video does a great job of communicating the importance of digital communications in how we research and discover health information. It follows great storytelling practices by:
Creating a compelling argument for the role of digital communications and social networks using user and traffic statistics.
Establishing that healthcare as a topic is huge in volume: 2nd most search topic on google and 3rd largest web activity across generations.
The physician survey data displays how doctors are using digital media to research and learn about practices and medicine.
Consumer research shows how web research can lead to patient asking doctor for a branded drug.
The closing message “healthcare is digital…life is digital” shows how we are becoming a digital nation more every day. Plus I really like the use of Lego people!
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Last week during the first Monday Night Football game I watched the ad for The Johnny Cash Project on ESPN. I was blown away for two reasons.
I’m a huge Johnny Cash fan.
It’s the best use of crowdsourcing I’ve seen to date.
Now I will admit that I have not been a big fan of crowdsourcing for marketing purposes. But I don’t want to bash crowdsourcing for marketing and communications (that will come in a later post!).
What I want to do is focus on why The Johnny Cash Project is such a great use of crowdsourcing. It allows users to contribute to a single finished project that is a work of art. Not a shoe or a video download service, but one of the greatest songwriters and legends of country and Americana music. The Johnny Cash Project allows users to draw a single frame of what will be a music video for Cash’s final song, “Ain’t No Grave.” There is already music and archival footage that has been assembled for the project.
There are several drawing tools available to draw your frame. No fancy Photoshop tools here. There are brush shapes and sizes and the the choice of colors are white, black and shades of gray. You have to be very creative and several submissions demonstrate that. Once you feel comfortable with your drawing you can submit it for consideration in the finished video.
Another interesting part of the project is the documentary footage consisting of interviews with different artists and regular users that were moved by Cash and submitted frames. It’s simple and shows the emotion that Cash created in his fans, the feeling of despair, hope and life that comes through Cash’s baritone voice and life experiences. My favorite quote about Johnny was that he could read a matchbook cover and make it sound interesting.
The end result is that all the portrait frames are strung together and played in sequence over the song. The portraits will create a moving, ever evolving homage to Johnny. The other cool factor is that as new people discover and contribute to the project, their submissions will update the video playback, so it’s never the same video twice.
For my third episode I travelled to Chapel Hill and met with David Rose (@dbrose67) COO of Magent Video (@magnetvideo) to talk about how to shoot short corporate video. David and I talked about the challenges of producing a great 30-60 second video for your website that keeps your audience’s attention. Some of the interesting tactics I learned were:
Keeping your script down to 150 words and clearly communicating your core message.
How to use analytics to see how your customers are looking at videos and then interacting with your company.
How and where online to manage your video library.
David’s office had some great places to shoot. His partner has several motorcycles on display and we chose the sweet BMW in the front lobby to use as our shoot background. Thanks again to David and Magnet for participating!
Gregory Ng (@gregoryng) had one of the most awesome fundraising ideas for Movember. He sold 1 hour slots to his 24-hour Movember-thon where he did 24 straight hours of food reviews.
Beyond the Basics is a new video series where I am interviewing leading marketing and communication professionals to discuss advanced social media and interactive marketing strategies and tactics. Over the past few months I’ve attended many social media and interactive marketing presentations and I find myself and my peers saying, “getting tired of hearing the same basic presentation.”
For my first interview I chose Greg Ng (@gregoryng) Chief Experience Officer at Brooks Bell Interactive. I asked Greg about how he manages multiple Twitter accounts and personalities, both personal and corporate. Some of the interesting findings include:
Taking time to ensure you have the right account
Timing between sending out tweets and retweets
Identifying individual personalities on corporate accounts
Thanks to Greg for agreeing to be my first guest. Look for more interviews over the next several months as I explore SEO/SEM, conversion strategies, other social networks including Facebook and LinkedIn as well as writing tips, content strategies and design.
In my last post I talked about what makes a good storyteller and I thought this post would be a good follow up to talk about how to use the web and social networks to spread your story. Now we all love a good story and want to share with our friends. But if you are managing an online brand what’s the best method to spread your story via the web and social networks.
We all hear the experts say start with a blog or web site. While this is the starting point it’s important to look at channels that can help spread your story. Feedburner and RSS feed tools are one great way to allow users to subscribe to your content and stay abreast. But are there other avenues to help spread the word?
The answer is yes and to explain this point I’m going to use a recent example I came across. A few weeks ago my friend Greg Ng @gregoryng asked for volunteers for a Freezerburns episode on frozen hamburgers. I was excited to be chosen as one of the taste testers for his “frodown” where he had three fathers taste frozen hamburgers and choose their favorites. The episode was a big success for Greg and even made the front page of YouTube on Father’s Day.
Wow exciting right? But what really caught my interest was when I went to Freezerburns site and check out the subscribe page. I expected Greg to have the leading subscription options like YouTube and iTunes. But what I found was that he had that and much more. A total of 13 subscriber options are available for his content. The usual suspects like Feedburner and email options as well as Twitter and Facebook are present. But what impressed me were some of the lesser known, at least to me, video and podcasting options Greg managed his content through. Take a look below at his subscriber options listed on his page.
Now I know there are tools that allow content creators to autopost to multiple sites. But at the same time that’s only half the work. Setting up accounts, moderating comments and keeping up with all the necessary options, updates and other tasks on these networks is time consuming. What this impressive list tells me is that Greg is dedicated to his audience and wants to deliver content to audiences on sites that are relevant to his content type, video. I know that I’ve had to sometimes not use some social networks or distribution sites for some of the online brands that I manage because I’m not sure if it’s the right audience or if anyone is really going to the site. However in making that decision I may have missed some readers and opportunity to connect with potential customers and audience.
What channels are you evaluating when distributing your content on the web?
This video was from the Triangle AMA (@TriangleAMA) Social Media Training Camp. I shot and co-edited the footage with Jeremy Smith (@jeremysaid) for the chapter. The event was a great success and one of the best Raleigh Social Media workshops to date!
