Scribble Chat: Michael De Monte on the five rules of real-time engagement
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What is real-time engagement management and why is it important for your brand and its stories? ScribbleLive co-founder and CEO Michael De Monte joins us for this special Scribble Chat, where he'll explain his five rules for real-time engagement management.
What is real-time engagement and how do you achieve it in today's always-on social era?
Since Michael De Monte co-founded ScribbleLive more than five years ago, the company has enabled media organizations, corporations, brands and individuals to create, publish and syndicate content in real time.
Communications is constantly changing, forcing brands to adapt, and during this special Scribble Chat, Michael will explain his five rules of real-time engagement that can help brands rise above the noise and differentiate themselves.
Join us for a live discussion with Michael on Wednesday, October 30 at 12 p.m. ET.
Please submit any questions you may have for Michael in the comment box below and we'll try to get to it during the course of the chat.
by Belinda Alzner on Oct 30, 2013 at 12:05 PM
This chat will include a live streaming video presentation and Q&A session with Michael, so be sure to enter your email address above to receive a reminder when this event goes live.
by Belinda Alzner 10/30/2013 1:40:33 PM
Keeping audiences engaged helps to overcome digital fragmentation and helps you tell a story over a longer period of time.
by Belinda Alzner on Oct 29, 2013 at 3:02 PM
Quality content producers are orchestrators. And by that, I mean they provide a platform for audiences to engage, and lead and guide audiences through a narrative as they immerse themselves into it
Build a community and immerse them in the conversation – participative audiences are more engaged and interested, and therefore more valuable to you and to spreading your story.
Leverage the power of the integration of social and combine technology and content marketing tools to bring your communities together
Doing this is what drives an immersive experience. And by doing this, you're able to provide the participation that the audience is looking for in order to captivate and keep them with your brand, on your site, and in the story you're trying to tell.
And on to the fifth rule...
Once you start building one content initiative on top of the other, you'll see your content marketing strategies come to life.
A final example:
Michael will take you through a recent example: The Apple 5C Product Launch
ScribbleLive is always quite involved with telling Apple's story during launches. During the 5S launch, we broke records for the number of people concurrently watching content provided using our platform.
We recently announced record breaking user engagement of the live coverage of the recent Apple product launch. For tech media, an Apple event is one of the biggest news days of the year. During the event, we partnered with leading tech media companies CNET and Fast Company to reach Apple's highly engaged audience. Following the progression of the story arc, these media companies were able to create and curate content during the event and provide real-time continuous coverage, from beginning to end.
As you can imagine, Apple's audience is equipped with the newest technology and platforms to engage in social communities. Technology enabled one million concurrent tech-savvy watchers to engage in the event narrative and tune in for the product announcements over the course of two hours.
The coverage was syndicated on our platform by CNET and Fast Company, yielding significant user engagement. This showcases the power of in-demand, real-time content. In fact, the average viewer stayed on the page/ScribbleLive feed for 22 minutes and the real-time coverage was picked up by nearly 20 media outlets in North and South America, Asia and Europe. At it's peak, we saw almost 1,000,000 concurrent viewers.
CNET and Fast Company partnered with us because it allowed them to cover the event in a way that appealed to their unique audience; the continuous news feed was a way for them to differentiate themselves from competitors. Users were fully engaged with the Apple event coverage – the product announcement saw a total of 120 million user engagement minutes over the two hour period.
During the Apple event CNET and Fast Company took different approaches to creating and curating content to create a single, continuous news feed. They were able to control the way they told the story, analyzing and recalibrating as the narrative progressed.
CNET and FastCompany used ScribbleLive because it gave them ability to connect with their respective audiences and connect with other brands around the world using our Scribble Market. They were able to amplify the message that they had, as well as their respective brands.
Another example is the Boston marathon bombings, of course.
The marathon bombings was something that started as a normal sporting event. Then the bombs went off, and everything changed.
There was so much information coming out in a matter of minutes and Boston.com journalists did a fantastic job of reaching out to social, verifying, and updating in real time. As the story progressed over the course of a few days, the story changed -- from a sporting event to a manhunt, to a shootout, to a capture.
All five of these rules of real-time engagement were in effect during the Boston marathon bombings.
And that wraps Michael's presentation. On to questions!
First question: The media is in the business of storytelling, but this is a new space for many brands. What do you suggest for brands to get started as storytellers? How do they ramp up to do this in real time?
Michael: I'm sure everyone has heard the idea that brands are becoming media companies. Whether they know it or not, brands are already in the real-time space--they're on social media and they're trying to be proactive and reactive to the conversations going on online.
What I would say to a brand: Start small and work on the things that are exceptionally obvious to this medium.
Brands go to events, they sponsor events, etc. When an event is taking place, there's a lot of content being produced. But often, all of that great content isn't being captured. Events are a great opportunity to capture this content and present it on your website and add context to it.
Another example of where brands can start is investor relations. If you're public, you're required to present your earnings results. These are perfect opportunities to use a medium such as this.
Back up. Look at what you're doing today, start small and find things that are easily translatable to real time.
Also, make sure you take a look at the Scribble Market -- our content producers make content that is available for syndication.
Next Q: How can brands in less-exciting industries create engaging real-time content? And how to they get this to audiences?
Michael: Every brand has an audience. Capture what's happening in whatever ecosystem you're in and bring it back on your site, share it with communities that are relevant to your industry. (He's using a boat manufacturer example here -- target boating blogs, or recreational sites.)
The audiences are out there, but you need to create content that is engaging to them.
Remember: the stories don't have to be about your brand. They can be about things that interest the audience that your brand is into. (Example: Boat manufacturer could produce content around the pleasure of boating.)
Next question from the audience:
Hi Michael, what are you're experiences about your own metric "engagement minutes". Is it accepted/understood by your customers and their ad-partners? As far as i understand this metric, it should establish some kind of new currency that underlines the higher user-engagement in comparison to regular articles/PI&Visits.
Bests from Germany
Arne flying_ahat 11:47 AM
First, some background. Two years ago, ScribbleLive switched its billing from bandwidth to engagement minutes.
Bandwidth wasn't speaking to what we were trying to do, because bandwidth was dependent on the content being produced (i.e. photos and video take more).
The idea of pageviews also didn't really apply -- after all, you're just sitting on the same page for an extended amount of time.
We needed a metric to show our clients what their audience was doing, and we settled on engagement minutes (also known as time spent).
There is still a disconnect on the advertising side, but it's moving toward this idea of time spent. Even Nielsen, etc. are trying to figure out how to measure how long eyeballs are watching something.
We do provide other metrics as well, including uniques, pageviews, the source of these, etc. To learn more about the types of metrics Scribble provides, check out this article.
Next question: What are some of your favourite examples of brands using content to interact with their respective audiences in real time?
Michael: Shell did an event around the environment ("Shell and the environment are like water and oil. I know.") But if you leave it up to social media, people are going to hijack the hashtag and take it over. Say what you will about Shell, they wanted to have a conversation around this.
They used ScribbleLive to tell the story they wanted to tell, engage the audience in real time as well as reach out to social when they felt it appropriate to add context to the story they were trying to tell.
Another example around financial institutions. We have some examples of financial institutions using ScribbleLive for real-time hiring practices.
Here's an example from RBC's Career Launch program
Q: What do these examples have in common?
Michael: all of these great examples have in common that they follow these five rules. They have a narrative and they're providing a conversation about something relevant at that time.
Question: Often, real-time is seen as adding another thing to someone's plate instead of further simplifying it. What do you say to that?
Michael: If you have a website where the content isn't always moving, you're probably not in the right spot.
If you look at a news site now and an hour from now, it would be vastly different. That's how news organizations engage their audiences.
But if you look at a brand's site today and a week from now, they'd probably be the same. But at the same time, you probably do have always-on elements. What we're saying is that you should be taking the next step and engaging your audience in real time, and having a live element to your site. If you're a sports brand, why aren't you presenting sports scores to your audience? Or information about the athletes that you're sponsoring.
There are conversations going on around your brand. The idea is to capture that.
Next question from Miles: You talked about the peaks and the valleys in always-on content. That's really interesting to me. What types of content make for the most valuable valleys for an audience?
You can have any sort of conversation. The story and the types of content depend on what's most important to the brand.
Let's look at something a brand like Ford could do. They have dealerships all over the country. There are so many stories that happen on those lots--the family who drives away in their minivan with their kids, or the 21-year-old who just bought his first car. These stories aren't being told right now, but they're constantly happening in the Ford community.
Then, when the auto show is on in Detroit, they go and cover it not as Ford, but almost as journalists in content marketing, providing full coverage of the event.
This leads into our next question fairly well. Miles just asked a question that brought us back to media organizations for a second. The journalists who work for them and who use ScribbleLive every day to tell real-time stories obviously understand this idea of real time and always-on. But these organizations are also massive brands. How can they tell the overarching story of the brand as well?
Michael: You probably have a favourite news site. You may flit away to Twitter or another site, but you probably have one or two that you always come back to.
But media organizations can amplify their own brands using our Scribble Market syndication marketplace.
Example, once again: Boston.com's coverage of the Boston marathon. They could have very easily kept that story on their own site, but they placed it into the Scribble Market and dozens of media properties around the world picked it up and hosted Boston.com's content on their sites.
This is one way that media brands can use our technology to go beyond their own site.
Another thing media brands could do (though, Michael says, he isn't sure they'd be into this...) is let them branch out from their organization. News organizations could let their writers do what they love -- for example, someone going and covering a music festival. This music festival content could end up on their organization's site, or it could not. But at the end of the day, the writer would still be seen as a member of that brand's organization, thereby expanding their reach.
I think we're starting to wrap things up here. Miles just asked: Do you have any tips on promoting our first event and getting as much attention as possible?
Michael gives a slight shameless plug of the services ScribbleLive offers (training, customer success managers, etc.)
But even beyond ScribbleLive, success won't happen overnight necessarily. What you have to do is get your audience used to the idea of always-on; Used to the idea that your audience will get new information each time they come to your site--that they won't be coming to a static, unchanging environment.
Audiences have to know you're there to engage them not only as a selling exercise, but with content that is relevant to their daily content consumption exercises.
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