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February 2014

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www.postmagazine.com Post • February 2014 27 Assimilate's VP of market- ing, Steve Bannerman, uses social media to find potential customers. Akhavan, whose background is in restau- rants and hospitality, says the company, like many others, had previously used social media as "something extra," but not some- thing to fully integrate into its core business. That began to change when mOcean became her client at the Viceroy Hotel Group and she began talking with company officials about how social media could be used to influence a creative company's cul- ture, clients, and recruiting efforts. For exam- ple, mOcean began using social media for recruiting — Akhavan says, in fact, that "Twit- ter is the easiest platform to make a connec- tion in the industry. Just 140 characters are so simple. If an editor or graphics designer wants to apply for a job, they just send us a Tweet. I can get back to them right away with instructions to get their resume and portfo- lio to our HR department. Millennials have embraced Twitter and others as reliable platforms for job hunting." But the company is now using social media for far more than recruiting — it is starting to build a client base out of its ability to build social media campaigns for clients, among other things. "We have a digital department at mOcean, and with that team, I was able to start acquir- ing clients [specifically for social media brand- ing services]," Akhavan says. "So in a year, we have full-time clients and have already done some social media work on movies that came out recently, social campaigns that pro- mote a movie with a hashtag contest or tie- ins with consumer brands, and so on." One client that mOcean is supporting in its capacity as a social media agency is Need Brands, a consumer company that sells prod- Social media SANTA CLARA, CA — Social Media is proving itself to be an effective new tool for some post production equipment manufacturers, particularly those whose business depends on small- and moderate-sized com- panies and individual clients. One example is Santa Clara-based Assimilate (www.assimilateinc.com), maker of the popular digital intermediate/color grad- ing workflow software, Scratch. Steve Bannerman, VP of marketing, says a company like Assimilate's core goal is, of course, customer acquisition — to find potential users, drive them to the company's site, have them download trial ver- sions of Scratch, and then, hopefully, buy or lease software seats. As a marketing professional, Banner- man talks about the "costs per lead" of doing this, and points to traditional channels, particularly the tried-and-true trade show route as no longer neces- sarily the most effective way, particularly now that social media and the Web offer such broad reach into people's lives. This reach extends beyond simply the customer and potential customer, and into the per- sonal and professional networks of those individuals. "There is also the click-through Google Ad word and banner ad campaign methods for generating leads, of course, but those have delivered a poor ROI for us," Bannerman says. "A less traditional, but more effective way is centered around Webinars and social media, and I have found those two things are inexo- rably tied together. One of our primary lead genera- tion programs involves partnering with industry thought leaders to promote content-based Webinars conducted by customers who have used our soft- ware on TV shows and feature film projects. Tradi- tionally, I would pay fees to bloggers or trades to get leads in order to find people to register for them. While that works well, we started thinking about other options to expand our reach even further. One thing that became clear was that Facebook is a great way to generate leads directly, because we can target the demography of the people I want to reach — I can get very specific. So we can use modest money to boost our Facebook posts to promote a Webinar or news that we want the world to know, and we can then have it ripple through the industry in con- centric circles if we do it efficiently. I can spend a hundred dollars to boost a Facebook post, and reach 50- to 75,000 people who may only have a few degrees of separation from people who are directly connected to our page." Bannerman cautions such techniques "can have a shelf life" because social media users "can tune them out." But, he says, if companies use social media stra- tegically, "they can get an amazing boost. And of course, today's marketing dashboards allow you to post to Facebook and automatically get Tweets out of it and so on. The tools are now sophisticated in terms of linking different social media platforms together. My experience has been that you end up with one dominant one, and that becomes an engine that feeds the others. For us, that place has been Facebook. But keep in mind, in our case, I'm using Facebook to drive traffic to our Website because my ultimate goal is always to get somebody to download a trial of our product." Other lessons he's learned are that companies promoting products in this industry need to be care- ful to differentiate between their corporate social media messaging and group messaging. He suggests that Facebook group pages can be used effectively in place of standalone online user groups to bring like- minded members of communities that would be interested in products like Scratch together. "I have found it can be easy to populate these groups from our main Facebook page, and allow cus- tomers to interact with each other," he says. "That is more effective than a user forum can be at this point. If you are strategic, you can build a critical mass from a very humble beginning." — M.G. Assimilate's social hunt mOcean's social strategist, Tadji Akhavan.

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