Mediaboss Marketing

You may have heard about Chiara Ferragni, who started a personal style blog as a 27-year-old that now generates $8 million per year. Or Johnny Ward, who started blogging about his travels as a budget backpacker and ended up with a successful media company. Or the food blogger who earns $150,000 per year.

The internet is overflowing with how-to guides on how to imitate their successes by becoming a full-time Instagrammer, blogger, and fashion guru.

But you have probably never heard of the women featured in (not) getting paid to do what you love, a book by Cornell researcher Brooke Erin Duffy that examines the myth that working hard on a personal brand will pay off in the long run.

She compares this premise to that of unpaid internships. The expectation is, if you invest yourself now, this will pay off in the future with this glamorous, fantastic job, Duffy says. But the reality is much less auspicious in terms of how often these actually do turn into full-time employment.

Just as not everyone can make it based on unpaid internships, which inherently favor those with connections and families who will pay for their living expenses, not everyone can build a huge online presence and find enough advertisers to make a living. You have to think about the investments theyre making upfront, the investments in the fashion or the makeup or the food, she says.

Social influencers with 1,000 to 100,000 followers can be paid between $50 to $1,000 to advertise for a brand, according to influencer marketing firm Hireinfluence, which works with brands such as Oreo and Microsoft to place products in the social feeds of popular personalities.

Most of the dozens of women who Duffy interviewed, despite many hours of unpaid work, have little to show for their efforts.

Meanwhile, companies are benefiting from the free labor, which Duffy calls aspirational work, by running influencer marketing campaigns that sometimes only pay in free swag.

Q: What is the myth that powers aspirational labor?

The myth is very much a meritocratic one: That if you are putting the most creative, unique content out there, and you have a special voice, you will rise to the top. And by rise to the top, I mean you will earn an income.

The reason that I call this a myth is that if you look at people who have actually risen to the topthe super bloggers, the super influencersI dont see them as people just like us. They have some sort of existing capital. They have the right connections. And so, the myth is one of digital meritocracy. If we work hard enough, if we have this creative vision that nobody else has provided, we can get our dream job and do what we love and get paid.

What is the difference between aspirational labor and posting on Facebook once in a while?

What is different with aspirational labor activities is that they are very much seen as something that will provide a return on investment. Theyll provide you access to the right people who will turn this into a job.

How much work did the people you interviewed put into their personal brands?

Lets take the case of someone uploading an image on Instagram. We see the final image and the cutesy caption, but we dont see the amount of thought and strategy that goes on before any of this happens.

You have them preparing the photo, staging the photo, doing the photo shoot, afterwards editing the photo and coming up with a caption. And then you have this self-promotion.

A lot of people who had been doing this for years were shocked at how a culture of self-promotion eclipsed the creative elements. They got into this because they really enjoyed styling or writing or photos. They would say, Im coming up with my creative product, and then Im spending hours promoting itsharing it on Instagram, sharing it on Facebook, sharing it on Twitter. It cant be the same content. They have to vary it depending on the audience for each platform. And after that, they would say, we have to go through and respond to all of our followers, and we have to engage this culture of reciprocal following. I follow a blogger because shell follow me.

It was just staggering to hear all of the work that goes into this.

Was anyone you interviewed successful?

A lot of people who were successful had worked for years moonlighting as a blogger while maintaining their full-time jobs. They were essentially doing two jobs in order to make enough to subsist on.

There was also a sense that they always had to be on. You cant just abandon your blog for a week, or you see a huge dip in your followers, which directly links to your advertising income. And so, theres this kind of, what is this doing to my personal life? But also, when is this going to pay off enough for me to leave my job? Or is it not?

How are companies benefiting from this myth that anyone can make it on social media?

Native advertising and influencer marketing is all predicated on this idea that real people are promoting their favorite brands and products. Its much cheaper for an advertiser to reach out to a young person with their own organic following than it is to place an ad in a magazine or on TV.

Brands kind of dangle this promise of hope. Youll see campaigns where brands will say, hey, hashtag your favorite jeans look and post on Instagram and maybe well feature your image for people to see. There are also more dubious promises of exposure. I talked with people who said the companies would not offer them any sort of financial compensation. In one case, this woman was a cosmetics blogger and she had a sizable following. She said companies would sometimes send her products unsolicited and say, hey, could you just do us a solid and blog about this?

You drew a parallel between aspirational labor and other types of traditional womens work. Can you explain?

Womens work is a form of invisible labor that goes unrecognized and uncompensated. Child care, domestic work are seen as activities that women inherently do and theyre naturally good at. Its invisible in that its unseen and also there are no economic rewards associated with it.

We now see the lineage of this devaluing of work in the social media economy. I see these investments of time and energy as a form of work, but theyre often seen as leisure, theyre seen as fun, and theyre seen as something that shouldnt be materially compensated.

After interviewing all of these women, did you come away with a conclusion about what you think should change?

I think the best place to call attention to that are in the very same places where this activity is happening, which is online, across social media.

I would love to see more attention to how few people are making it in this industry, how few businesses are willing to compensate influencers. They have this incredibly saturated market, its teeming with young people who are willing to work as so-called influencers. I think transparency about how lopsided the system is is what Id like to see as the first step.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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Becoming a social media influencer is the new unpaid internship, and just as exploitative - Quartz

First, fragmentation

"Brands need to streamline teams in order to eliminate inefficiencies and inaccuracies. This has become even more critical because the number of internal and external teams that touch a single campaign are at an all-time high. On average, we see more than six different companies touching a single social campaign, a number up 224 percent over the past 24 months," said Jason Beckerman, CEO and Co-founder at Unified. "Without a data management platform to deliver the right business intelligence to all the players involved-- there's been an uptick in lost learnings and data. It's more people, more problems right now."

Second, complexity of supply chains

"The demand for connectivity is at an all-time high as we watch social advertising continue to grow. To visualize this complexity, picture a global consumer-packaged goods brand with hundreds of sub-brands within its portfolio (along with multiple partners and agencies coordinating to advertise across several social channels...)," said Beckerman. "Brands must place a larger focus on staying organized as it's only going to get more and more complex."

Third, more customization

"The hyper-personalization of campaigns is also expanding. To be exact, 184% increase in average campaigns per client YOY. Social is unique in that it is more conducive to deploying one-to-one or extremely personalized targeting that is much more challenging to achieve in other forms of digital advertising-- allowing you to deliver the right message to the right people at the right time," said Beckerman.

Fourth, ownership concerns

"The number of teams, supply chains and campaigns are three times the amount they were just one year ago. The data produced (or rather, data exhaust) by these factors has followed suit. As a result, brands that do not have total control over their growing number of ad accounts do not actually own their own data," said Beckerman. "The scope of this challenge is daunting, making it mission-critical for marketers to get on centralizing and aggregating their data. As this trend is expected to continue, it is critical for marketers to confidently own their data and leverage business intelligence to take command of and optimize the fastest-growing piece of their paid media mix."

Tags: advertising, social marketing, social marketing tips, social marketing trends, Unified

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Top 4 trends to watch in social - BizReport

DH Vancouver Staff Aug 09, 2017 10:05 am 220

Digital agency 6S Marketing has acquired Vancouver-based social media company Motive Communications, the company announced today.

6S Marketing,a leading digital agency with offices in Vancouver, Toronto, and New York, will now offer broader social media services, as Motives client roster will be transitioning over to the company.

The deal is the beginning of 6S Marketings expansion plan in the social media division across their North American offices.

Were investing in an essential evolution of our services, Chris Breikss, 6S Marketing Co-founder and CEO, said in a statement. Social media and content-centric marketing are core components of a successful digital strategy. This unlocks an incredible opportunity to leverage Motives resources and capabilities to ensure 6S remains at the forefront of the industry.

Sheng Li Digital, 6S MarketingsChinese-language marketing division, is also hoping to grow its social media services withWeChat and Weibo.

Motives founder, Mitchell Fawcett will join the 6S Marketing team as VP Partnerships & Social Strategy.

Fawcetts new leadership role is expected to bring new and vital services to the companyincluding strategy development, content marketing, influencer marketing, community management, paid media, and training, as well as a full range of creative production services.

DH Vancouver Staff

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6S Marketing acquires Vancouver social media agency - Daily Hive (registration)

EXCLUSIVE: What does An Inconvenient Sequel, Fruitvale Station,The Zookeepers Wife, Leonardo DiCapriosdoc Before the Flood, Lion, The Hunting Ground andWhere to Invade Next all have in common? Its Picture Motion, a New York-based company that develops social impact and grassroots marketing campaigns for films. The company was founded in 2012 by Christie Marchese and joined one year later by Wendy Cohen. Both are former marketing executives from Jeff Skolls Participant Media.

Since opening their doors, they have shepherded through the grassroots efforts on scores of films documentaries and features with very specific social impact messages. I feel like I have activist ADD, joked Marchese. Weve done over 80 films now.

Ina Maria, Erin Mayhugh

The idea for Picture Motion started while both worked at Participant. Wendy and I always had this idea of this company and often talked about what our dream company would be. Marchese left Participant and began consulting for independent filmmakers and ended up helping Righteous Pictures with The Last Survivor about the survivors of genocides across the globe and then Web, a story about Peru getting the Internet for the first time.

I love documentary film because it is cinema as investigative journalism, said Marchese. Soon, she began getting more and more projects to work on and then Cohen came and joined. When they first started they had three films to work on: all three were documentary films Its A Girl, Speak and Bully.

Documentarians take note. There are two things that Picture Motion has found that works best in helping to promote these kinds of films (and what they have had great success with). Finding the rightnon-profit partnership and having a grassroots distribution network.

Cohen noted that they have helped market films that cover such a wide range of topics adoption in China, healthcare, climate change, education, homelessness, immigration, sexual assault, women in the military, the refugee crisis, gender politics, and economic, social and racial justice. They have covered such a gamut that it seems it would make them experts on these topics.

We stay away from calling ourselves experts in any area, but we are experts in finding the experts, said Marchese. We really pride ourselves on our relationships. We have great partnerships with the issuary leaders, non-profits and activists on all the campaigns.

How long do campaigns run? Some are one month and one campaign First Generation they worked on for two years. First Generation was about four high school students who strived to become the first ones in their families to go to college and thereby break the cycle of poverty. We came on for two months at the beginning and as we worked, we learned because the filmmakers themselves were experts, said Marchese. Eventually, Wells Fargo bought the digital distribution to the film and it was on the Wells Fargo website. It was funded by impact, driven by impact and Wells Fargo came in to have a recognizable brand and that gave it a distribution boost.

On another project, the eight-part, original docu-series from Epix,America Divided aboutinequality in education, housing, healthcare, labor, criminal justice and the political system, Kellogg came in and supported it. Norman Lear executive produced the film and Marchese previously worked for a time with Lear.

One of things that we pride ourselves most on is the number of filmmakers whom we have worked with, said Cohen. When they return to us, its a validation of our work and its so easy because you already know each other. Our company is all about relationships whether it be with filmmakers, producers or studios.

One of those filmmakers who has come back more than once is documentarian Matthew Heineman (Cartel Land) who worked with Picture Motion on his Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare and is working with them again on City of Ghosts, which documents Syrian rebel journalists who are risking their lives to make sure everyone knows about the atrocities committed by ISIS in their country.One of these men had his father and brother executed to get him to stop, but he will not back down, determined to lay pure evil bare to the world and to fight the ideology of ISIS to the death if need be.

One of the reasons that I worked with Picture Motion on both of these films is their understanding of the documentary landscape, and they understand in a way that a lot of people dont. Its so hard, as we all know, for people to get their films seen, to get people out of their homes and even to get the word out, said Heineman. They are able to tap into existing networks so that constituencies pertinent to the film are aware of the film and then are motivated to go. They use both traditional and non-traditional means to do so. They are constantly thinking and finding novel ways to mobilize audiences.

On City of Ghosts, they identified and found a number of non-profits that were interested in helping promote the film and engaged them to move the needle, he said.

Picture Motion has also worked on many Nat Geo projects, including Before the Flood, Gender Revolution, L.A. 92, Hell on Earth and the Earth Live series.

Over the past year, weve worked with Picture Motion on several issue driven films, including Leonardo DiCaprios climate change documentary Before the Flood, Katie Courics special Gender Revolution and Sebastian Jungers decent into Syrias unbridled chaos with the film Hell on Earth, said Chris Albert, EVP Global Communications at National Geographic. For us, its not always aboutdriving ratings,its aboutamplifying important conversations on subjects that truly matter, thoughas many platforms as possible. Through our collaboration with Picture Motion, weve organized over 750 grassroots screenings to date, built several strategic partnerships with brands that share our vision and developed impactful social campaigns that have helped to advance social change.

Picture Motion started working with National Geographic in 2015. They have been the most incredible partner. Weve organized over 1,000 college screenings for them across most of America. Each screening tour has a different goal, but its not just about raising awareness, it gives college students a discussion guide and give them very concrete ways to take action, said Cohen.

And the work is continuing, now with HBO on the documentaryAtomic Homefront abouta group of St. Louis moms who rose up to fight to keep their children safe after finding out that radioactive waste was dumped into their neighborhoods; Magnolias Whose Street? about the Ferguson uprising,and Blood Stripe about a female marine who returned her deployment and how to get back to civilian life. They are also continuing efforts onAn Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. Heres the trailer:

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Social Impact Marketer Picture Motion: The Secret Weapon Behind Some Of The Best Known Films - Deadline

Brands have long been able to search for company mentions on social media, but theyve lacked the ability to search for pictures of their logos or products in an easy way. Thats where Salesforces latest Einstein artificial intelligence feature comes into play.

Today the company introduced Einstein Vision for Social Studio, which provides a way for marketers to search for pictures related to their brands on social media in the same way they search for other mentions. The product takes advantage of a couple of Einstein artificial intelligence algorithms including Einstein Image Classification for image recognition. It uses visual search, brand detection and product identification. It also makes use of Einstein Object Detection to recognize objects within images including the type and quantity of object.

AI has gotten quite good at perception and cognition tasks in recent years. One result of this has been the ability to train an algorithm to recognize a picture. With cheap compute power widely available and loads of pictures being uploaded online, it provides a perfect technology combination for better image recognition.

Rob Begg, VP of product marketing for social and advertising products at Salesforce, says its about letting the machine loose on tasks for which its better suited. If you think of it from a company point of view, there is a huge volume of tweets and [social] posts. What AI does best is help surface and source the ones that are relevant, he says.

As an example, he says there could be thousands of posts about cars, but only a handful of those would be relevant to your campaign. AI can help find those much more easily.

Begg sees three possible use cases for this tool. First of all, it could provide better insight into how people are using your products. Secondly it could provide a way to track brand displays online hidden within pictures, and finally it could let you find out when influencers such as actors or athletes are using your products.

The product comes trained to recognize two million logos, 60 scenes (such as an airport), 200 foods and 1000 objects. That should be enough to get many companies started. Customizing isnt available in the first release, so if you have a logo or object not included out of the box, you will need to wait for a later version to be able to customize the content.

Begg says it should be fairly easy for marketers used to using Social Studio to figure out how to incorporate the visual recognition tools into their repertoire. The new functionality should be available immediately to Salesforce Social Studio users.

Link:
Salesforce AI helps brands track images on social media | TechCrunch - TechCrunch