Root House Studio

Part of Root House's presentation will include about 30 minutes where audience members can group together and film short videos about the outdoors. They will then post these videos to Twitter using the hashtag "#cosavid". 

By posting these videos online, we are giving a live demonstration of a viral social media campaign which can be monitored in real time and later evaluated using our hashtag. In addition to having listeners post videos, we've decided to live support this event using social media. 

Live social media support is a great technique for engaging with an audience in real time. We will detail some actions you can take below and will give you examples from our own event.

1) Live Tweeting

Live tweeting an event is the act of using Twitter as a real time message board to communicate with others attending the event or viewing the event remotely. Here's an example of someone live tweeting the Oscars:

As Matthew McConaughey is on stage giving a speech, @ClayMorganPA is making a joke about the both of them lacking a tan. If his tweet is noticed by other people, he might spark a conversation about celebrities, tanning, and appearance. For @ClayMorganPA this was mostly likely just a random live tweet for fun, but if used correctly it can lead to a lot of free press and marketing, especially for companies. 

For example, at the 2014 Grammy's, artist Pharrell wore a very unique hat, which Arby's social media team(who was live tweeting the event) recognized. Immediately, they shot out a funny tweet:

This one tweet received over 75,000 retweets and 40,000 favorites:

http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/arbys-slayed-grammys-tweet-about-pharrell-williams-hat-155237

Not only did it receive an enormous amount of free press and recognition publicly, it also gave Arby's image at little bit more of the ephemeral and undefinable "cool" quality it needed. Instead of just being a fast food company, it was now a fast food company with style and humor, which set it apart from competitors. 

Root House will use live tweeting at our COSA event to encourage people to post up their Vine or Coub videos. Anybody who posts a video will be retweeted, favorited, and sent a personal thank you.

2) Create an Easy to Access Information Database

The biggest problem we foresee with dozens of people trying to storyboard and film a video in 30 minutes is that they might not have enough inspiration or ideas to get started.

To help them out, we will be live tweeting a variety of short videos using the hashtag #cosavid so people can find them. These videos are well shot Coubs and Vines that hopefully will get people thinking about a video they can create. Here's a great example of a five shot Coub that is immediately engaging:

http://coub.com/view/2avrc

We'll be tweeting it out like this:

It's incredibly easy to tweet these out, plus people can access them from anywhere, including on their phones, which makes it a live database. 

3) Gain Followers

A great benefit to doing this live tweeting is that we will be in contact with so many people and can use this as an opportunity to connect. With a small conference or presentation it wouldn't be that difficult to search for anyone using a hashtag and then follow them. Following them will most likely lead to them following you, since you are literally in the room with them and they know who you are. 

The bigger the conference or the event is, the harder it will be to communicate with all of these people, let alone follow them. It's great to have someone on your team monitor social sites as you are presenting so all you have to focus on is your presentation, but even then, following all of those people would take an enormous amount of time.

Fortunately, someone created BlastFollow, an app that pulls in the Twitter handle of everyone who used a particular hashtag(such as #cosavid) and gives you the option to follow them all en masse. All you have to do is click "Blast!" and every ten seconds one them will be followed from your account. 

There's nothing super magical about what BlastFollow does, but it is a huge timesaver during or after an event.

Caveats:

Live support on social media is a great option during events or presentations, but it cannot detract from the real world. Just sitting in the middle of a conference tweeting everything that goes on will keep you from connecting face to face with others at the conference. Instead, having a social media manager or a partner who can manage your social sites leaves you free to network in person.

Article by: Jamie Binns, Social Media

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If you have any comments, reach out to us on Twitter @roothousestudio

This Coub is a repeating time lapse shot of a Tokyo subway station. It might appear to be a full length shot, but that's because I've reverse looped it, meaning the ten second track plays from 0:00 to 0:10, then reverses and plays from 0:10 to 0:00, and then reverses again. If you look closely at the people waiting for the train, you'll notice they come back again and again. Overlaid on top of this video is a song by Sui Zhen called Dekopon Dance, which plays all the way through before repeating. 

Coub is so exciting because it allows you to practice film in miniature. If you are interested in messing around with film, you could definitely make a short video and place it on YouTube, but chances are you will not receive any feedback since no one will watch it. According to YouTube itself, over 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Every minute! No way someone is going to find your video in there. 

On the other hand Coub only has about 400,000 videos uploaded and a very involved user base. My Dekopon Dance video received over 7500 views within a week and I didn't even share it on social sites. That traffic came entirely within Coub itself. 

Being limited to ten seconds of film forces you to focus on one shot and make that shot absolutely perfect. You pair that with an audio track and send it out into the wilds of Coub to see how it is received. If the one shot you composed is not so great, you won't get many views, but if the shot is well liked, you will know IMMEDIATELY. I got over 4000 views on my Dekopon video within twelve hours. Others, like another one of my videos below, did not do so well:

http://coub.com/view/2unyn

I liked this video and was really proud of it, but with only 35 views at the time of writing this post, you can tell no one else did. A Coub only takes five minutes to make, so if you have a few that fail, so what? The ones that succeed will teach you so much about film because you get to see what people are attracted to. I learned from Dekopon Dance that people love time lapse photography, especially ones that involve lots of moving color, lights, and people. I also feel viewers connect with that particular shot since so many probably take the subway each day and can relate to the characters quickly running up and down stairs and jumping into trains just so they can get home.

If you are interested in film and want to test out your artistic ability, consider giving Coub a shot. It's dead easy to make one, plus the speed of feedback is very exciting.

Besides, if you fail, just go outside and destroy the world like this anarchist:

http://coub.com/view/3a9gy

Just don't do it like this smooth criminal:

http://coub.com/view/3akf0

Article by: Jamie Binns, Social Media

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If you have any comments, reach out to us on Twitter @roothousestudio

In the description of the YouTube video, Ty Mattson states:

"The poster series that I created for Dexter was inspired by mid-century modern design and particularly the work of Saul Bass -- who developed both static graphics as well as animated title sequences. I collaborated with my friends at Fashion Buddha to create an alternative title sequence for Dexter using the artwork that I developed for the posters. This is what I imagine the Dexter title sequence might look like if the show had aired in the 60′s."

Ty runs a graphic design studio in Irvine, CA, where his team helps companies with product design, brand design, and style- basically anything graphic design related.

When I first encountered this poster series I assumed that Showtime had reached out to Ty's company, Mattson Creative, and asked him to create this poster series as a way to attract additional customers.

NOPE.

After watching the entire series, Ty was so inspired that he decided to create the posters using themes and images from each season of the show. For him it was just a fun art project. After posting the series to his blog in the following post, they went viral:

http://mattsoncreative.com/blog/2010/10/06/dexter-inspired-posters/

This success led Ty to collaborate with his friends at Fashion Buddha to create an animated version of the Season 1 poster, which I'll post again, just in case you didn't watch it. WATCH IT:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9adZ0HRuo4

This video went even more viral than his poster series and eventually Showtime discovered it. They contacted Ty and began to promote his art, even using it in their boxed DVD sets that went out to stores all over the world, including Target. It didn't stop there. Showtime also used his art to create an array of Dexter themed merchandise and even gave him a cameo role in the show!

You can read all about it on his blog here:

http://mattsoncreative.com/blog/category/dexter/

Because of this art, Ty and his studio received an enormous amount of press and exposure, which led to them gaining a huge amount of new business. No one could have designed a better piece of inbound marketing content than he created and the best part is, he probably didn't even think of it that way. For him, it was simply art.

As a marketer, this shows you the incredible potential of using art to drive traffic to your site, particularly if you are in an artistic field, like we here at Root House are. Instead of thinking up boring, mundane ways to create content and attract people to your site, consider courting your Muse.

Art can be inspired by whatever you want and doesn't have to have a purpose. Ty's art doesn't convey a particular message - it just shows his love of Dexter and of Saul Bass. 

Root House will soon be planning an artistic piece to use as inbound marketing content, so we'll make sure to update this article once it goes live.

Article by: Jamie Binns, Social Media

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If you have any comments, reach out to us on Twitter @roothousestudio

One problem with communicating via these small mouth noises is that you are limited by the volume your voice can create. Before the invention of megaphones or television, you could only communicate your thoughts to a few people in your general vicinity. Like the children's game "Telephone", any attempts to reiterate your message by another party led to the degradation of your original concept, thereby limiting it's spread.

Take another form of communication- writing. Until quite recently in our species' history, reading and writing was not a common skill set. Only the very wealthy or those part of organized religions had the money and the time to learn how to read and write. On top of this, paper, books, and ink were expensive, as was distributing your literary works. 

You would be right to say that before the internet, television was the behemoth of communication, and I would agree. I would argue, though, that before the Internet Age the cost of producing and distributing video made it a rare form of individual expression for our species.

Late in the 1960's a few brilliant minds dreamed up the internet, which within a few short decades undeniably revolutionized how our species communicates. With very little effort and money, one can use this "internet" to create a blog post, a video, a Vine, a podcast, or even a tweet, and potentially share this content with the entire world.

The problem with this new form of communication is that everyone with a computer and access to the internet has the same ability to share their ideas. Due to the massive amount of content created on a daily basis, it is highly likely your voice and your content will be lost adrift in a sea of digital works. 

In this digital landscape teeming with content, only the content that is most appealing will "survive" and be able to communicate the idea it represents. Look at cute cat videos as an example. Someone is sitting at home and sees their cat sleeping on a pillow and thinks, "That's so cute. Obviously, I must share this cuteness with the world." Like every single other crazy cat person in the world, this person records this cute cat event somehow and posts it on the internet.

Now here's the crux of my argument. Every single crazy cat person out there has the choice of how to share this banal experience with others. They can use written word(a blog post), spoken word(a podcast), images, or mixed media(video with sound and images).

The form of communication they chosse dictates how well their content "survives" on the internet and successfully presents an idea. Think about it from your own perspective. Which content would you find most appealing: a page long blog post about how cute kittens look when they wake up or a 1 minute video of someone waking up their kittens?

Chances are, like me, you want to see the kitten video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXLXhUJ6_Q8

Unless the kitten blog post was written by Shakespeare, you can bet that most people would choose to watch the video. In this example, the kitten video is a better fit and has a higher chance of "surviving" and fulfilling it's role of communicating the concept that kittens are adorable after a nap. If you apply this evolutionary survival model to all content on the internet, you can understand why certain forms of communication seem to be more popular than others. Poorly designed content "dies" and is rarely seen again, while engaging and well designed content thrives and is able to pass on a message.

All of this theorizing might seem like a fun intellectual pursuit, but it actually has a significant impact on the choices you make as a marketer. Take for example the spread of internet video. Cisco Systems recently released a report predicting that internet video will make up 84% of internet traffic in 2018:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/06/10/us-internet-consumers-cisco-systems-idUSKBN0EL15E20140610

Even if this report has been greatly exaggerated and video would only make up 60% of traffic, that's still a big slice of the pie. Don't get me wrong: video is not the perfect marketing solution by any means. I have chosen to communicate my "the internet as an evolutionary platform for content" theory with you via the written word because I felt this medium would communicate my idea most effectively. 

I'm not here to push you towards a particular form content- the point of this article is to get you thinking about how best to communicate your concepts and ideas with other humans. 

That being said, when in doubt, video is your best bet.

Article by: Jamie Binns, Social Media

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If you have any comments, reach out to us on Twitter @roothousestudio

You have to make it an everyday thing so that you demonstrate consistency to followers. You’re showing the public that you are active, you have a voice, and you are willing to connect. Once it’s become a daily routine to use social media, begin dripping content as soon as it’s made.

  In an ideal world you would be able to drip original content on a daily basis, but it’s rare for a company to have enough content to do this. BuzzFeed and Huffington Post are absolute giants, each with hundreds of employees and freelancers that fuel their business with new content on a daily basis. Be realistic. You don't have their business model. By retweeting, liking, and conversing with people at least once a day, you stay active on social media without having the need to constantly create new content.

  Besides that, all you have to worry about is manners. Don’t be rude and follow someone, get them to follow you back, then unfollow them, all to make your ratios look good. Don’t be a troll. Be respectful of others but be yourself.

  Don’t have any matters? Learn from this creepy 1950’s educational video: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNSZ5OfpQbY

  Also included in this educational series is how to properly identify a “homosexual”: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmqNiFJyI28

  …and the sexist guide to hiring women:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8LY25EAYYI 

Article by: Jamie Binns, Social Media 

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  If you have any comments, reach out to us on Twitter @roothousestudio

Influencer marketing is the act of reaching out to certain influencers and getting them engaged enough in your product or project that they choose to talk about it on their own social sites and platforms, thereby driving traffic to your site. Traditionally an influencer is someone with a large social media following that engages a niche audience. A great niche example would be mom bloggers who talk about their kids, school, food, and homemaking. Another niche could be DIY craft influencers who constantly post pictures and how-to articles of their new projects.

It’s tempting to hop on Twitter and start contacting the most popular people you can find, but you won’t get much of a response. Many of these large influencers are professionals who are paid or compensated in some way to post articles about a certain product or company, much in the same way a magazine or newspaper is incentivized to carry ads.

Instead, you should look for influencers within your own niche who might be interested in your campaign. To use our documentary Redefining Human as an example, we are constantly on the lookout to find influencers who might be interested in the microbiome. Luckily for us, the microbiome is pop science right now so we can connect with scientists, foodies, health bloggers, doctors, and many others.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time discussing how to actually contact these influencers since there are so many great how-to articles already on the web, like this one below:

http://traackr.com/blog/2013/11/how-to-discover-connect-build-trust-with- influencers/

Just google “influencer outreach” for many more articles. The number one tip I can give in regards to contacting influencers is to be yourself and to be authentic. For many of these influencers their blog or their social media sites are not their job, it’s their hobby.

Don’t simply send a message to them asking, “Hey, can you tweet out my new campaign? Thanks.” Spend the time to research their message, the subjects they are interested in, and start a real conversation. This is why it’s always better to find influencers within your niche. There’s no reason why we would waste the time to contact an influencer focused on politics with our microbiome documentary. They wouldn’t care enough to respond.

Certain influencers might expect some form of compensation while others are happy to promote you for free. Choosing which influencers to work with depends upon your budget and your campaign. Paying influencers is a quick, surefire way to gain some traffic, but it can cost upwards of a few hundred dollars. Finding niche influencers who just want to help promote you(and in return, get some free promotion) take time to find and start a relationship with, but are very effective. Root House personally prefers to work with influencers who help promote for free, since we pour all of our budget into developing great content. 

Along with standard social media building, we’ve decided to implement a new tactic by making certain influencers stakeholders in Redefining Human. We’re using the term “stakeholder” here to define a influencer that is incentivized to help spread the word about our documentary.

For example, we’ve begun networking with companies that have some sort of a connection with probiotics. While planning this documentary we realized that while watching, most people will want to know what steps they can take to affect their microbiome. Without delving too much into the science, just know that probiotics(food or medicine containing healthy bacteria) have been shown to have a positive affect upon the microbiome and overall health.

One popular type of probiotic is kombucha, an ancient fermented beverage that has long been known as “Immortal Tea”.

While it definitely does not make you immortal, kombucha is sweet(yet low sugar), carbonated, and a probiotic, making it a great alternative to diet sodas and other drinks sweetened with unnatural ingredients(aspartame).

We recently contacted a local kombucha brewery, Upstart Kombucha, and inquired about interviewing them as part of Redefining Human. We’ve asked them to discuss probiotic colonies (SCOBYs), the kombucha brew process, and kombucha’s affects upon the microbiome.

Check out their website here: www.drinkupstart.com

By including them in the documentary, Root House Studio and Upstart become shared stakeholders, since our goals are aligned. Both of us want the documentary to succeed, because both of us benefit from it succeeding. Root House gets free content(an interview) and Upstart gets to promote their brand for free through a unique channel(the documentary).

Win-win and everyone is happy.

Let’s sum the lessons we’ve learned so far:

Lesson 1: Create content

Lesson 2: Share on social media AND a website

Lesson 3: Connect with influencers and stakeholders

Understand that there is a difference between a stakeholder and an influencer. Influencers are people with whom you share links, retweet, and start conversations. A stakeholder is more like an ally: you promote and take care of each other.

Article by: Jamie Binns, Social Media

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Next time we’ll be discussing what I referred to earlier as “standard social media building”. Reach out to us on Twitter @roothousestudio if you have any comments.

There are an enormous amount of avenues to distribute your content. To be honest, you can’t really go wrong. Just pick whatever social media platform you feel most comfortable with and use it.

Sure, lots of social media gurus out there will tell you the values of using one social media platform over the other. “Facebook has over one billion users” or “Twitter is outgrowing Facebook” are quotes you will see time and time again but it truly doesn’t matter. We live in a world of interconnectivity that could hardly have been imagined even 20 years ago. Social media and the internet have allowed our species to communicate daily with people from all over the world instantaneously with minimal cost. Just because you post something to Facebook doesn’t mean someone isn’t allowed to share it on Twitter. It’s called “viral media” because it spreads like a virus, regardless of the platform.

It's much more important to focus on the quality of the content, not where you distribute it. If it's bad content, no one will like it and no one will share it. On the other hand, if the content is engaging, all people have to do is click one button and that content is shared with their entire social circle. Just one social media influencer(someone big on social media) sharing your content can generate a huge amount of traffic for you.

You are not constrained to using only one platform. Many companies can and do have a Twitter, a Facebook, a Vine, and an Instagram. Don’t overwhelm yourself though: pick what feels comfortable and start sharing your content.

At the very least I suggest using Facebook or Twitter since they are the biggest platforms with the most users. Here at Root House Studio we use Twitter the most. There’s no real rhyme or reason to it. I like Twitter since it feels very “alive”. It’s popular, posts appear every few seconds, and having a limit of only 140 characters per post forces me to be incredibly succinct with my messaging.

I also like Twitter since I’m a huge fan of Ricky Gervais bath selfies:

When dripping content try as best as you can to use an image or video. Many studies have been done regarding the relationship between social media engagement and images and almost all agree that using images leads to an increase in click-through rate.

In this blog post, Vero claims that images lead to 42% more click-throughs than campaigns without images:

http://blog.getvero.com/increase-email-click-through-rates/

While social media is wonderful, you cannot rely on it alone. For most campaigns it is imperative to have a normal website or at the very least, a blog. There are two main reasons for this.

First, a lot of people do not have a social media website or are not active on it. I, for example, no longer use social media in my personal life, which is almost unheard for a 24 year old, especially one who's job is based in social media. Now imagine all of the people older than me who could care less about social media. Yes, yes, I know you can throw stats at me to dispute this. Pew Internet Research says that 74% of all people in the US have at least one social media site, including 49% of the population aged 65+:

http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/social-networking-fact-sheet/

My rebuttal would be, “How many actually use those social sites?” Before I deleted my Facebook, for years I only used it as a secondary email to talk with friends and some family. 

The second reason to have a website is to lend a sense of authenticity to your campaign. Having a cleanly designed, informative, and fast website is another indication that you are on top of your game and create value.

Let’s take another look at the Redefining Human website:

www.redefininghuman.com

This landing page was put together by Johnny Mabie, one Root House’s amazingly talented designers. With just one glance you can tell that this website was a custom job by an artist with an eye for function and simplicity. There’s just a video, a background, a title, a Kickstarter countdown, and a few links. No bullshit, just high quality and simple content that drives you to our Kickstarter page and Root House’s website, www.roothousestudio.com. 

Make sure you don’t get caught up in social media and forget the overall point of inbound marketing. You want to create useful content that attracts people and funnels them back to your Kickstarter or website using calls to action and links.

Let’s do another summary, shall we?

Lesson 1: Create Content

Just a refresher to remind you the most important part of a campaign is to create content. No content = no buzz.

Lesson 2: Share on social media AND a website

Share your content on social media sites and on a website/blog. Social media is a viral form of marketing while a website lends authenticity to your campaign. Do NOT forget to add in links or calls to action when you post up content.

Article by: Jamie Binns, Social Media

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In the next post we will dive a little deeper into social media and investigate using influencers to multiply the viral spread of your content.

Comments? Please reach out to us on Twitter @roothousestudio.

Through our Creative Director, Ian Scott, we have a connection with the CU-Boulder/University of Chicago based American Gut Project. American Gut is currently mapping the human microbiome and providing open-access data so scientists all over the world can begin to study the microbiome. Slowly, scientists are beginning to make discoveries about the microbiome and how it affects our health, but unfortunately there is a lot of hype created by the media, which degrades the science. American Gut and its scientists have agreed to take part in our documentary so they can share their scientifically proven observations.

We’ve decided to crowdfund the first episode of the documentary by launching a Kickstarter campaign. For this Kickstarter to be successful we need buzz and a lot of it. We cannot simply expect people to randomly stumble upon our Kickstarter, feel compelled to open their wallets, and then throw fistfuls of cash at the screen.

Fortunately, we’re a design studio and a marketing agency, so it’s our job to create buzz for client campaigns. To get our campaign off the ground we’ve chosen to employ tactics similar to an inbound marketing campaign.

Inbound marketing is a technique that focuses on attracting people with useful, compelling content, and then giving them a “call to action”(the ability to act). A perfect example of inbound marketing is this blog post.

We’ve created this post to provide you with helpful tips on launching a Kickstarter campaign(or any campaign for that matter), all the while providing you with calls to action to visit our website. We’re hoping that you are so interested in what we’ve shared that you feel compelled to check out our campaign.

Check out our campaign: www.redefininghuman.com

See that? That was a link to our landing page for Redefining Human, which has yet another piece of content that might be helpful. In this case, the content is a video overview of the human microbiome and our project. These pieces of content leave a trail of crumbs back to our Kickstarter page, where we hope to inspire you enough to donate(or most desired "call to action").

I could go on and on about the beauty and how-to of inbound marketing, but instead I’ll let the masters show you how it’s done:

http://www.slideshare.net/HubSpot/jumpstart-inboundmarketingv2

This is a SlideShare created by Dharmesh Shah, the CTO and Founder of HubSpot. Using a simple and humorous voice paired with images, Dharmesh does a brilliant job of explaining inbound marketing and the steps to implement it for your business.

Get ready for this though: just like this blog post, Dharmesh’s amazing SlideShare is also a piece of inbound marketing content that drives people back to his company, HubSpot. Notice all the calls to action?

We just laid a LOT of knowledge on you, so we’ll quickly sum up the first lesson of a successful campaign in one easy bite:

Lesson #1: Create content

Without content, no one will care about your campaign. If you take Kickstarter as an example, any successfully funded campaign had a compelling video, some pictures, and a lot of copy about what their product has to offer. Don’t forget: when you have content, make sure to include a call to action and links back to your website or campaign website.

Article by: Jamie Binns, Social Media

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Our next installment of How We Do It will cover using social media sites and landing pages to share the content you have created. If you have any comments, please reach out to us on Twitter @roothousestudio.