Tag: Percolate

Full Circle: An SMW Wrap-Up

Posted on by Gary J. Nix

This is a guest post by Gary J. Nix.

Contrary to the belief of some, digital marketing conferences are not merely another chance for people to showoff how awesome they are, learn new autocorrect facts, such as the word Livestream converts to Kirstie Aimee (don’t ask), and come up with new-fangled buzzwords like screenagers and platblishers. These conferences are an opportunity to reinforce the fact that, no matter what adjective you use, it’s all marketing. This is something we must all remember, especially once you see the tag #MarketingMarketing on Twitter. And here’s why:

Games People Play

The IAB conducted a discussion on the relationship of today’s gaming and social experiences, both on and offline. Besides the fact that data tells us that two billion people are playing games digitally and about 900 million of those are doing so on mobile devices, the huge point is that people enjoy competition, collaboration, and sharing. These three levers are used in digital gaming now and have always been used in marketing.

Adding these elements in your marketing mix at the right time and in the right way will give consumers another reason to be involved with your brand. Plus, there’s a reason “Shall we play a game” is one of the most popular movie lines from the 80’s.

The Revolution won’t be Televised, but it May be Streamed

As expected, there was plenty of talk about content at Social Media Week. The most poignant from a marketer’s general point of view was presented by Percolate in a discussion that was really about content delivery has been revolutionized. While it is important to understand the seven core components of content marketing — audience, trigger, brand element, topic, campaign, business objective and platform — along with the importance of context, content has been delivered way before we’ve done so digitally. I only mention this to clearly state that content marketing is not a magic bullet. It is important for discovery and delivery in the world as we know it today; however, it is nothing new. We’ve been doing this for many moons and will continue to do so. It’s marketing. #NODISRESPECTOTPERCOLATE #ALLDISRESPECTTOJIMMYKIMMEL. That last hashtag was clearly a joke.

Millennials are Humans

This is a direct quote from a fun-filled discussion about the millennial demographic. Many truths about millennials were examined, such as their actual loyalty coupled with the ability to adapt, their demands regarding innovation and entertainment, their level of thoughtfulness, their aversion to banner ads, and their respect for serious issues. However, we have been talking about them as if they were some new species. Many of us have gone through a period of life with these characteristics, and some of us, like me, are still going through it. It’s good to know what makes this age group tick, but please don’t confuse them with a flying machine that can make the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs. Please don’t confuse them with #GenerationSelfie either.

Culture and Behavior Trump All

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, marketing relied heavily on focus groups and surveys for the data needed to understand what people wanted. Yes, these are still important actions, but we can get a plethora of information from the social web by simply listening. The discussions that take place reveal so much psychographic information as to how people behave and people follow and create culture.

To me, this is the most important recurring theme of the conference. At times it seems that we forget that the most important part of marketing is figuring out to whom we will market our product or service. We’ve become so caught up in how we will deliver the message, we’ve forgotten to make sure it goes to the right people or that the message even makes sense. So, before you go off with a beautifully designed visual campaign with bells and whistles on the newest platform, make sure that you remember that the consumer retains control over our businesses and we need to go to them and show them value. They’ll appreciate you for it.

Just my two cents…

Gary J. Nix is known as many things: Your favorite brand’s de facto ambassador. Propagator of true brandwagoning. Zeitgeist Firestarter. [American] HYPE man. Digerati Deputy. Random comedian. Life observer. Founder of #bespokehashtaggery a/k/a Cobra Kai. Enigmatic wunderkind. Zen BRANDarchist. Keyser Söze. But most importantly, he’s all about marketing, identity, and branding in business. Strategy, Testing, Implementation — all of these things must be done in order to ensure success. Risk & Reward are his R&R. Learn more here.

“Games People Play” image courtesy of Joshua, WarGames, MGM.
“The Revolution won’t be Televised, but it May be Streamed” image courtesy of Web Solutions of America.
“Millennials are Humans” image courtesy of Disney/LucasFilms/The Corellian Engineering Company.
“Culture and Behavior Trump All” image courtesy of KeyChangeNow.com.

SMW NYC: You Made It, So Thank You!

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Thank you for playing your part in helping to make Social Media Week such a huge success. We were thrilled that you were able to contribute to the incredible energy at our new Campus experience last week.

Together, we saw some inspirational speakers, from Don Tapscott exploring how we can solve problems together to Seth Godin joining Robin Chase and Lisa Gansky to expound on the future of the sharing economy. Other highlights included:

  • + Fabien Cousteau announced the launch of Mission 31, his first attempt to live and work underwater.
  • + Jonah Peretti of BuzzFeed joined our founder for a keynote interview.
  • + Percolate showcasing the power content and distribution at scale.
  • + We held our first Wearable Tech Fashion Show, in partnership with Tech in Motion.
  • + Chipotle launched their new (unbranded) series, “Farmed and Dangerous.”
  • + 10 incredible social entrepreneurs competed for $10k with Yoxi.
  • + Our NOW Studio, powered by Nokia, was packed full of some of the world’s most prolific Vine artists, illustrating how to become a better content creator.
  • + Leica was at Campus shooting beautiful portraits of our attendees.
  • + 140 Proof brought to life your social profile with a caricature artist.
  • + Under Armour presented daily yoga.

While off Campus AOL threw a great bash, and SUXORZ returned to give out worst in social awards. Sociality Squared and Contra Studios explored how creatives can keep their creativity and sanity in our always on world. And this is just a handful of all the activities last week.

Most importantly, we were honored to have you join us. As our first year hosting all Official Events in our new Campus, we know we faced some challenges, but thanks to your real-time feedback, we adjusted our process, which we hoped improved your experience over the course of the week.

As we reflect and regroup, we are asking for you to tell us what you thought of the experience. How can we get better? What needs to improve? What was missing for you?

Please take 5 minutes to complete our survey here — and we’ll be giving away a prize pack, allowing you a chance to win either a Nokia Icon or Lumia 1520 plus, Purity Monster In-Ear Headphones and a FitBit.

Thank you again — for your time, for your participation, and for being a part of SMW14.

A very special thank you to our production partners MKG, our Global Headline Sponsor, Nokia, and supporting sponsors including, Spotify, Merck, Prodigy Network, Google+, Unmetric, and Percolate. We want to give credit where credit is due, and SMW wouldn’t be what it is without them.

Jonathan Basker of betaworks’ Guide to SMW NYC

Posted on by Sara Adam

betaworks is a network that builds new products to change the media landscape — some of their work includes Bitly and Tweetdeck. Additionally, they make seed investments in companies and products that they believe have the potential to be game changers. VP of People, Jonathan Basker, is responsible getting some of betaworks’ amazing talent on board. Jonathan is joining us at Social Media Week and took the time to share with us the events that he is most looking forward to and why.

  1. How To Build a Brand That People Don’t Buy, They Join
    This is an impressive panel of brand-forward companies. I’m excited to learn more about how these companies think about strengthening their businesses through brand identity and branded community.
  2. Using Social Technology to Galvanize Residents and Improve Neighborhoods
    With San Francisco, Detroit, Austin and dozens of other US cities in periods of transition, we’re facing a real challenge in bringing our local communities together in useful and meaningful ways. I’m excited to hear how these men and women are using technology as a tool to elicit social change.
  3. The Content Marketing Revolution, hosted by Percolate
    Percolate is awesome. Their branding and marketing work is awesome. I’m really excited to hear what they have to say.
  4. Is Social Killing Storytelling?
    Content is King? Content is Queen? Content is King, but he’s very short? Our communication tools have changed so quickly in the last 20 years…how has this affected what we’re choosing to communicate?
  5. Building Essential Products for the Social World, with John Borthwick, CEO of betaworks
    This is not to be missed. Having worked for John for over two years, I can tell you that he is one of the premier thinkers working with the Internet today. The betaworks team is cooking up some incredible stuff!

Social Media Week is just around the corner, but it isn’t too late to get your pass to see these awesome events and more! And definitely don’t forget about our VIP opening night party, Monday February 17th, hosted by our partner Nokia.

Rising To the Top: Percolate Reigning Content Marketing

Posted on by Nicky Yates

When one of your founders is labeled a Brand Genius in New York, you know you’re doing something right.

tumblr_m0kvc1VzZy1qln7vao1_500Percolate, a platform that publishes and measures brand content on social media sites, was founded by Noah Brier and James Gross. And both have business savvy and some serious tech knowledge. Only 3 years old, Percolate is a tool that many big brands rely upon, like Ford, Nickelodeon, and Jawbone. They’ve also seen some tremendous growth in that time, telling of their success. (Fun fact: the SMW offices took over their recent offices, in which we have NO idea how they fit their entire staff!)

They will be leading a special track focused on what will be a crucial skill for marketers in 2014: content marketing. To get you ready, we talked with James Gross a little more.

  1. James, can you tell us a bit about Percolate and what you do?
    At Percolate we have a vision to redefine marketing through technology and a mission to be every brand’s content marketing platform. We do this by providing technology to a brand across planning, inspiration, sourcing, creation, publishing, monitoring and analytics. If that sounds like a lot, it is. We are excited by the depth of our platform and our growing client base.
  2. Percolate is a New York tech darling. In only 3 years, your team has seen incredible growth. Can you explain how you’ve achieved such success and the foundation for Percolate?
    We believe in 2 things:

    Find the biggest challenge marketers have. We have found that with content, the atomic unit of marketing. Similar to how Salesforce built technology to help the sales department manage contacts, Percolate helps marketers create and manage content. When you solve the content challenge, you have the ability to work across the entire marketing department.

    Find the best people to come work with you. We believe NYC has some of the greatest people in the world across all the areas that we care about: engineering, design and business. We are proud to say nearly 100 people in NYC now work with us.

  3. Can you explain why content marketing should be integral to brands’ marketing?
    We believe in a social, mobile world your content is your ad. As marketing becomes more and more driven by platforms with billions of users and unlimited targeting capabilities, the challenge is not how are you going to reach people. The challenge is what are you going to say to them, and how are you going to scale and sustain it. Percolate is the full end-to-end solution for a marketer who is looking for a technology platform to scale their marketing efforts.

  4. User-generated content is often seen as a holy grail for brands. But it’s not often done right and there is a debate on how to properly use this content. Percolate has recently developed some tools to assist. Can you elaborate on why this was a focus and how brands can land on the right side of this powerful tool?
    Billions of people on social platforms capture branded moments every second of the day. The challenge for the brand is often times they can’t acquire the rights to UGC in a scalable, legal manner. Before Percolate, brands used all sorts of crazy techniques to try and secure the rights to images, videos and other UGC.

    Only with Percolate does a brand have the unique opportunity to reach out to anyone who has captured a brand moment and get the legal rights to re-use that content in any way they see fit. For the user, our experience is just better than anything they have ever seen before as it relates to how they can rights manage their content. We have seen both happy clients and happy users with our UGC product.

  5. A lot of Percolate’s tools focus on making content more visually appealing. What is the importance of a visual strategy and how can brands get started?
    At 1.2 billion images shared daily across the four largest social platforms, there is no question that brands have to have a visual strategy. Brands also naturally like to communicate visually whenever possible, as this aligns well to the type of storytelling they are used to in a medium like television.

    Brands can get started by reusing images from their archives, tapping into the enormous potential of UGC across platforms, and enabling their workforce to capture and share brand moments.

    At Percolate, we have built technology to help surface content from archives, manage and acquire UGC, and iOS/Android apps to activate the employee base. Our app Photographer that puts the power of creation in the hands of a brand’s entire workforce.

  6. What advice would you give to a startup or entrepreneurs in being more effective with their marketing?
    Buy Percolate as your first marketing investment. 🙂

    Also, take your brand seriously. There are two key components to a business as Peter Drucker once said – Innovation and Marketing. The rest are just costs. You live or die based on your brand, start building it from day one.

We’re honored to have Percolate join us this February. And we know you need to be in attendance when they’re on stage. Get in on the action here.