Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Jim Ackerman, Founder of Ackermania Creative (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Based on what you’ve studied of YouTube marketing, aside from PPC advertising, which is a very expensive form of advertising, what other types of marketing mechanisms are working when it comes to seeding the YouTube channel? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Jim Ackerman, Founder of Ackermania Creative (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: And that’s a classic consumer product situation. So, let’s continue. I think we’re in sync. The net of all this discussion is that there’s a certain barrier to entry based on the quality of the videos. The reason I probed a bit is because funny is not the only vector by which you can gain virality.

Jim Ackerman: Absolutely. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Jim Ackerman, Founder of Ackermania Creative (Part 2)

SM: What is the barrier?

JA: There are actually two barriers to entry in doing YouTube and doing it well. Number one is you must be creative enough to come up with something that will have an entertainment element to it. It’s not guaranteed that you always have to have that, but the likelihood is if you want to maximize views, there has to be an entertaining element to your YouTube videos. Frankly, not everybody can pull that off. We can all sit in front of our Web cams on top of our computers, and we can all post videos to YouTube. But there are 24-hours of content uploaded to YouTube every minute. So, the odds of your Web cam self-done video getting seen are somewhere between slim and none. The first barrier of entry is there needs to be a creative element to it, an entertainment element to it. Most people can’t pull that off without the help of somebody else, somebody who is a professional or somebody who is a good writer or somebody who has a great sense of humor and can translate that sense of humor into a script. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Jim Ackerman, Founder of Ackermania Creative (Part 1)

A good marketing campaign is essential to the success of any business. Whether you’re selling a product or a service, if you don’t market it properly, it could go completely unnoticed. Veteran marketer, Jim Ackerman, founder of Ackermania Creative, sat down to talk with me about how he used his skills and experience and the popularity of YouTube to generate buzz about one of the sexiest products on the market today: a tongue cleaner.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Jim. Let’s start with a little bit of background about what you do in your marketing agency. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: David Stone, CEO of CashStar (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: This has been an interesting conversation. Do you want to give me a range of how large a company you’ve built with CashStar and probing into the unmet needs of the gift card industry?

David Stone: We raised $28 million to date, which in the state of Maine is incredible. Most of the time when I’ve been out in Silicon Valley pitching for money over the years, they said, “You’re in Maine. Great idea. We don’t invest in Maine.” But we’re able to prove them wrong. >>>

The Next President Must Have an Integrated Social Media Strategy

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: David Stone, CEO of CashStar (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What about loyalty? We’ve talked a lot about the process of gift giving. Would you talk about loyalty? You said you’ve also worked quite a bit on the intersection of loyalty and payments.

David Stone: Yes, there are obviously a ton of players in the loyalty space, and a lot of interesting companies that are doing some cool innovations. For us, in our world, believe it or not gift cards – not really gift cards, their incentives – have become the number one or number two way for companies to build loyalty or change consumer behavior. [Health] insurance companies are giving them out so that people will lose weight or stop smoking. Large companies like AT&T, IBM, and Google use them to give incentives to employees and reward their sales organizations. It’s an incredibly fast-growing market. It’s somewhere around $15 billion or $20 billion today. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: David Stone, CEO of CashStar (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What about returns? In the previous use case, you said you were in a Gap, saw a pink sweater, and decided to give that as a gift to a friend. Let’s say the friend receives that pink sweater and decides she wants a different color. How is that handled in your system?

David Stone: If you were in the Gap and you wanted to give a pink sweater, but they had only red or you couldn’t find what you wanted, you would pull up the mobile gift website and send [your friend] an instant e-gift card from your mobile phone. So, she could buy whatever she wanted instead of its being out of stock or your being out of luck. >>>