#redefining human

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.