As always, if you want to see everything I am writing about nextMEDIA, please check out BrandingDavid.com where I’ve placed an index for all of the posts I am doing around the Splashpress Media network.
This is the panel that I was most looking forward to at the event. Nadia Nascimento and Will Pate, but panels are difficult to write about in a blog post format. Hopefully, most of the best content from their answers translates well.
What is the model around the community you are trying to grow?
Diana – Cineplex.com is a website for entertainment that includes social tools to compliment and extend the experience that people are having with our site and in the theatre. We also introduced blogs with comments, and areas for photos and videos to be able to have competitions and contests.
They currently have 10,000+ members that is okay by them, but they want more engagement but are still learning what works and what doesn’t work in growing and advancing the community and their bottom line revenue.
Dave – MySpace.com is really a social media platform. They provide a tool for people to publish and interact with content. It has become a community for like-minded people to come together, and it is about how people interact with those tools.
MySpace has quickly realized that CPM’s are dropping, and banners are going to be worthless. MySpace integrates the advertiser into the product. Not just in an advertisement, but integrating them in the day to day use.
An example is how Home Depot is in the profile editor to match the ‘building’ aspect of your portfolio and Home Depot’s products.
Nadia – memelabs is branded contests. They are capitalizing on the fact that it is so easy to make video today, and that there is an emotional attachment to video. People are becoming citizen marketers for their content.
They create and support their involvement both from the user and brand perspective.
The monetization comes from the fact that it is branded content that the brands are able to collaborate and use. Some can even create a commercial at a tiny piece of the normal cost.
Will – Will is spending most of his time working on VenCorps as they want to monetize it in a different way. They are owned by a venture capital firm and want to help work on finding ways to connect VC’s to companies.
Can passionate people make better decisions than VC’s in a board room? They recently tested this and gave money to three start-ups out of the eighty that applied.
Between predictive analysis and a community, they feel that they will probably get a better return on investment with their funds.
Question To Diana – You, Cineplex, have built your own community rather than partnering, why is that?
Diana – We already had interaction, and so it was really about integrating social tools into the site.
Question to Diana – How have you tied the real world experience with the online experience?
Diana – Yes, we have theaters all over canada, but we also have the magazine, the pre-show before the trailers.
Question to Nadia – What kind of opportunities are you seeing when partnering with brands?
Nadia – The power of voting is a great way to interact and share content. People are becoming more involved and niche communities are becoming more active in creating the content and the communities around it.
Question to Dave – What has been the hardest part about shifting people’s expectations with regards to advertising on MySpace?
Dave – You have to offer them something beyond just the advertisement. A song, poster, or something, because they want something for the time they invest in your brand.
Originally posted on November 19, 2008 @ 2:37 pm