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February 25, 2015

Day Two of Social Media Week: Buzzfeed, Vimeo + Tagboard

Jonathan Perelman BuzzFeed

Tuesday Morning: Jockeying For Position

Isel and I were a bit naive in thinking we’d easily get into every panel on our wishlist.  After five minutes fighting the crowds jockeying for a spot in line, we reexamined what we absolutely HAD to make it to. I’m most excited about what everyone seems to be calling video’s shining moment in social media and figuring out how we can elevate our great content studio to go beyond words and excellent visual content and break into video storytelling on social, so I made it my mission to get into as many of these video-focused sessions as possible. Isel is focused on tools and insights to make social media campaigns more efficient and more effective. Here’s what resonated with us:

Drew’s Tuesday: Vimeo, Buzzfeed and 2015: The Year of Social Video

I was lucky enoughto get into “Vimeo Video School,” which was hosted by Vimeo’s Andrea Allen and Mike Weissman (Director of Production and General Manager, Creator Platform, respectively), where they had some subtle plugs for Vimeo as a creative video platform and had some great insights for video creators and those employing video creators:

  • Videos are 53x more likely to appear on 1st SERP (Search Engine Results Page) versus text.
  • Figure out the goal of your video and make it achieve that single goal/message.
  • Vimeo knows their platforms. On Tumblr, instead of just video, they make a .gif set for each video they post. The .gifs are super successful on Tumblr and help promote videos.
  • Video thumbnails: Human faces (smiling!), and of course, puppies and cats do the best. All three and you’re going to break something.

The absolute best session of the day for me was from Jonathan Perelman, VP of BuzzFeed Motion Pictures. Jonathan’s team at BuzzFeed has done some increasingly impressive stuff with social video (even President Obama seems to think so), so I was excited to hear from him. Here are some quick clips:

  • Simplicity + Surprise = Sticky video content. Sticky video content is shared.
  • Think of video content in this context: What’s in it for your viewer? Resist what’s in it for YOU.
  • BuzzFeed has created a workplace where producers are enabled to make 1.5 videos a week. They put out 35-50 videos a week in total. That’s a ton of content. How? (next bullet)
  • Producers write, edit, shoot & act in their videos. Sets exist in-house. There’s no greenlighting ideas. Ideas are pitched sideways vs. up.

Isel’s Tuesday: Word-Of-Mouth, Tagboard

What a day! The first full day of SMW was slightly exhausting but fully informative. My notes are overflowing with stats and quotes, but let’s take a look at some of the best of the day. First up, WOMMA (the Word-of-mouth Marketing Association) hosted a session on the ROI of WOM. Word-of-mouth is a tricky thing to measure, but WOMMA has some great stats:

  • 92% of consumers believe recommendations from friends and family over ANY other form of rec.
  • WOM AMPLIFIES the effect of paid media by 15%.
  • If you design your other efforts to be shared (and therefore enabling more word-of-mouth activity), it could account for even more than 15%.
  • Influencers and advocates: perfect example of targeted word-of-mouth. You trust people you admire and follow!

Time for some bar trivia: Q: Who invented the modern day #hashtag? A: Chris Messina. Tagboard CEO Joshua Decker hosted my last session for the day, “Harnessing the Power of Hashtags, Driving Campaigns and Call-To-Actions,” and provided some great stats on when to use them and when you’ve gone too far:

  • Tweets with hashtags receive 2x more engagement than those without – but don’t use too many!
  • Tweets with one or two hashtags have 21% higher engagement than those with three or more hashtags.
  • More than 2 hashtags and you’ll get a 17% drop in engagement.

See you here tomorrow, and head here to learn how to follow Isel and Drew in real time!