Why brands are embracing the influencer-investor

Get you someone who looks at your brand the way 50 Cent looked at Vitamin Water.

Social media has enabled the rise of the influencer—online stars with sway over the opinions of thousands or millions of fans. But while influencers have been a great way to reach audiences craving more authenticity from messengers, customers are becoming savvier about the people they follow in their feed. If Hailey Baldwin’s followers are skeptical that she really shops at H&M, what—other than the risk of a PewDiePie moment—makes her Instagram post any different from a print ad?

@hm shot by @cassblackbird

A post shared by Hailey Baldwin (@haileybaldwin) on

It’s tough to find an influencer who really cares about the product, someone fans recognize as a fellow fan. Someone invested in its success. So now, many brands are looking for more than an influencer. They want an investor.

“Without a doubt, the influencer-investor movement has never been bigger,” said Tom Buontempo, president of Attention, the social arm of KBS. Indeed, there are few spokespeople more committed to a company than a famous personality with a financial stake in it, and brands are finding that a celebrity entrepreneur can be a much better partner than a celebrity endorser.

Of course, celebrities who want more than just a taste of the action have been putting up their own money for years. 50 Cent famously made more than $100 million from his VitaminWater stake when Coca-Cola bought out Glaceau in 2007.

But these days, even influencers who aren’t global superstars want in. “Creators of all sizes are looking to convert both their credibility and owned reach into dollars and cents,” Buontempo said. “Influencers like the opportunity to monetize their audiences and lean into an entrepreneur-obsessed culture where everyone wants to have a side business.” And that puts them within reach of smaller companies with less cash to throw around.

When Ember Technologies CEO Clay Alexander wanted to begin marketing a temperature-controlled mug, his plan was unorthodox. “My goal for the year leading up to launch, 2016, was to parade the product around LA and New York,” Alexander said. A chance meeting with a neighbor in Los Angeles who produced music videos opened the door to the music industry. “Once he found out about the product, he shared it with his friends, and it started this snowball effect.”

Alexander began systematically approaching managers of celebrities, specifically targeting people who had expressed an interest in investing. “A lot of celebrities now are actually really interested in putting their money toward investment and building their business skills,” said Brooke Steininger, chief of staff at Ember. The pitch: Ember could be their first investment.

It worked. Philymack, which manages singers Demi Lovato and Nick Jonas, connected the brand, and both celebrities became investors and began leveraging their followings to promote the Ember mug. “As a new brand, we basically spent zero dollars on advertising,” Alexander said.

An invested influencer is always on the job. Paparazzi snapped photos of Lovato around town with her mug, even when she wasn’t actively promoting the brand. Traditional influencers limit their interactions to keep their options open. “Many campaigns with brands have a posting limitation, allowing for more deals to be made with future brands once the cycle or campaign they are promoting ends,” said Tiffany Au, director of communications and spokesperson for Collab, a digital agency that works directly with content creators.

At the same time, equity gives an influencer a louder voice in the organization and the messaging, and that can be a good thing. Certainly they know their followers better than the brand does. “They create content that resonates with their fans, and when promoting a product always strive to keep their audience in mind,” Au said. Equity also guarantees the celebrity is in it for long-term gain.

“It’s no longer a pay-to-play endorsement deal, but rather a real partnership. So when the advocacy and marketing begins, you can guarantee it’s authentic,” said Brian Salzman, founder & CEO of RQ, an agency that connects influencers and brands. “It also won’t stop when a particular campaign ends.”

If an influencer is always promoting a brand, though, the line between selfie and sales pitch becomes even more blurred, so brands must take precautions against running afoul of the law. The Federal Trade Commission guidelines for disclosing influencer marketing are vague, but the agency always suggests erring on the side of providing more information to customers. “Is using #ad enough for viewers to understand an influencer is being paid or has a financial stake in a company? For now, yes,” said a lawyer at the FTC. “But what about #paid or #promotion? If a significant minority of people don’t get it, it’s not enough. We’re always working on clarifying what needs to be disclosed.”

Working with influencer-investors changes the game in other ways, too. It’s much tougher to get rid of a celebrity who goes off the rails, or into rehab. A traditional influencer can be cut loose, but an investor must be bought out. When Kevin Hart approached Tommy John to invest, after stumbling across the underwear brand in a department store and loving the fit, he had to convince them to take his money.

“Brands should always protect themselves,” Salzman said. But they shouldn’t be scared away, he added. “It’s the risk that comes with anyone with an existing audience, isn’t it? Carefully crafted agreements created upfront are the most important part of any deal.”

This article originally appeared at: http://www.campaignlive.com/article/why-brands-embracing-influencer-investor/1429067?dcmp=emc-concampaignweekendfix&bulletin=the-campaign-weekend-fix&utm_medium=EMAIL&utm_campaign=eNews%20Bulletin&utm_source=20170402&utm_content=.

These 17 Social Media Power Players Agree On 1 Thing (And It’s a Must-Have For Your Business)

Honored to be included with good friends and smart people in the INC article about must-have for businesses. Today and for the future

These 17 Social Media Power Players Agree On 1 Thing (And It’s a Must-Have For Your Business)

Our technology-driven world is evolving at an exponential pace. According to IBM, 90 percent of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone–that’s how much noise we’re making online!

The (multi)million-dollar question is: How can we possibly predict what the future will look like, so we can better prepare today for the realities of tomorrow?

To help answer this question, I reached out to 17 of the world’s most prolific super-influencers to learn what they think about the future of marketing and technology. Each of these influencers reaches more people than the populations of the world’s small countries. Combined, they reach enough people to be in the top 100 nations.

These folks accurately predicted the future once before–investing in social media to become powerful, personal brands–which is why I reached out to see what they think is coming next.

The responses varied widely. For example, automation plays a major role in how a few influencers think about the future of marketing, and they highlight elements like mixed-reality and artificial intelligence as necessary tactics that we must all embrace.

However, other influencers highlighted old-school marketing strategies that will still resonate in the future, including elements like brand identity, authenticity and good old-fashioned advice like “deeply understand your audience.”

The question I asked them was: What does the future of marketing look like, and how should brands prepare themselves now to thrive in the future? Here are their responses:

1. Create a Winning Identity

The future of marketing will include a strong focus on digital identity, visibility, and credibility. Before you can market yourself appropriately, you need to first define who you are and where you stand as a brand. This is important to know when building your identity. If you’re unsure of what you do or who you are, you’ll find that your customers will also be confused as well.

–Juntae DeLane, Founder, Digital Branding Institute

2. Invest in the Millennial Method: Digital, Mobile, Social and Influencers

In order for brands to thrive, marketers and business owners need to think digital, mobile, and social media first. If your website does not provide a seamless experience for users, if your website is not mobile optimized and if you have not put a social strategy into place… YOU SHOULD!

Millennial consumers are doing most of their browsing and shopping on mobile devices and are more influenced by their peers than branded content or branded advertising. The time is now to start building relationships with Influencers in your space to activate for campaigns, product launches, event promotions, and to overall amplify brand awareness.

–Chelsea Krost, CEO & Millennial Mindset Marketing Strategist at Chelsea Productions

3. Map the Path to Purchase

Mobile phones, search, and social media have changed shopper paradigms forever. Today, shopper’s have unique paths to purchase tailored to their lifestyle. This has had a profound impact on how, when and where consumers engage with brands.

Marketing needs to win the new digital path to purchase by understanding, managing, and owning the key digital engagement points through content that delivers conversion. This will be done with shopper technology, shopper strategy experts, and content/influencer networks committed to generating authentic content to drive conversion.

–Ted Rubin, Social Marketing Strategist, Acting CMO of Brand Innovators, and Co-Founder of Prevailing Path

4. Listen and Engage

After a century of mass marketing, mass distribution and mass communication where brands learned to push out a message, consumers are now expecting two-way communication and an individualized experience. Take a moment to consider how much more engagement you could get if you listened to buyers.

In other words. STOP MAKING THE KIND OF MARKETING YOU HATE.

Connection fundamentally changes the nature of an item. The winners of the future will be the brands that move from a commodity to a full experience.

–Warren Whitlock, Director of Startup Grind Las Vegas

5. Use Strategy to Leverage Technology

Marketing has become about smart technology. CMOs are on track to spend as much as CIOs this year on technology, and most are very willing to invest big money to get the results that are being demanded from them. But, most are finding that there is a disconnect between the promise of results and the reality. While some of this failure is because CMOs have chosen the wrong tool for the job, most is due to a lack of strategy integration.

With the glut of money being poured into technology acquisitions, the focus has been on hiring technologists (tool-level specialists), not marketing strategists, to manage and implement. However, CMOs who bring in marketers who a) know strategy, b) can look for integration and usage opportunities, and c) can provide strategic technology acquisition recommendations, will ultimately gain the edge in the marketing-tech arms race.

–Steve Farnsworth, Chief Marketing Officer, The Steveology Group

6. Incorporate Mixed Reality

In the near future, nearly everything will be a marketing interface and “mixed reality” will be the only reality. Brands must invest now in agile talent that understands that disruption is opportunity. Marketing mavens must become part technologists and data scientists. As artificial intelligence delivers the holy grail of the “market of the one,” storytellers will need to know how to weave addictive branded experiences with the thread of mixed reality.

–Glen Gilmore, Strategist and Faculty member at the Rutgers School of Business, Executive Programs, Digital Marketing

7. Prepare for Artificial Intelligence

The increasing complexity of digital marketing is making technology a vital partner for the digital marketer. It is becoming a science and not just an art. In 2017 and beyond, expect to see marketing automation become mainstream and more sophisticated.

This also means that even artificial intelligence will become an integral part of marketing for even small to medium business. We can see the start of this with the rise of chatbots and other enhancements. The future will see the continuing rise of the marketing robots that all brands should be preparing for.

–Jeff Bullas, Founder at JeffBullas.com

8. Constantly Experiment with New Tech

Brands that are concerned about their long-term recognition, and being at the forefront of the next major computing platform (think mobile 10 years ago), will have a strong leg up on the competition. Experimentation and building early relationships with the platforms sure to dominate down the road will provide long-term advantages for any company, big or small.

If nothing else, designate a small internal team to understand the VR/AR landscape, where the opportunities are today, and where they’ll be in 12 months. When you are ready to put resources into a project, you won’t be starting from zero for an understanding. And it is a complicated ecosystem to understand.

–Robert Fine, Publisher, Cool Blue Media

9. Focus on the One-on-One Experience

The future of marketing will revolve around relevance. Whether it’s in your targeting for advertising (social or otherwise) or being present in search for relevant terms or leveraging A.I. to route customer inquiries to the right opportunities, we have to commit ourselves to stop talking to everyone and start talking to the one-on-one.

We’ve got to stop thinking of marketing as an end sum game and go after the relevant audiences that will be fulfilled and enriched by what we have to offer. The companies that do that will see long-term, lasting results.

–Jason Falls, Chief Instigator at the Conversation Research Institute

10. Embrace Voice Recognition

Marketing technology will make true 1:1 interaction with consumers possible at scale, and that hyper-targeted reality is perhaps not surprising. What will be even more disruptive, however, is the move to voice and audio as primary information retrieval and consumption modalities.

Amazon Echo and Google Home are just the first steps in an inexorable march toward a world where consumers use voice to research, interact, and buy. The movie “Her” may very well become largely reality, and the successful marketers of the near future will be those that create compartmentalized, structured content that is easily found via voice query, and easy on the ears, in every way.

–Jay Baer, President of Convince & Convert

11. Start Using Robots Now

Without a doubt, the future is automated. As artificial intelligence continues to advance by leaps and bounds, marketing’s future becomes more strategic and creative for the humans, while the machines take over any repetitive tasks. This does mean significant human capital dislocation; we won’t need people to copy and paste data from spreadsheet to slide, or to manually analyze reports.

Brands should be prepared by beginning now in their AI and Machine Learning experimentation, getting a feel for the landscape and what’s possible.

–Christopher S. Penn, VP Marketing Technology, SHIFT Communications

12. Invest in Location, Location, Location

It’s never been easier to target a market segment than it is today. The advent of Apple’s iBeacon and related technologies are leading location-optimized brands to take advantage of location-enabled devices for sending out push notifications to shoppers, leveraging social platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

Hence, brands that will thrive in the future are those that are able to hyper-target their messaging based on identifiable social and geo-locational triggers using immersive marketing campaigns and augmented reality scenarios to engage and influence buying decisions.

–Douglas Idugboe, Co-Founder, Smedemy

13. Broaden the Definition of Media

The future of marketing is its past. New communication channels have opened up, but the same paradigm of much competition and limited attention span means that brands need to consider social media more of a pay-to-play paradigm similar to traditional advertising. They also need to view influencer marketing as paid media and another form of advertising.

Most importantly, brands need to become more visual in their marketing, as if each brand was not only the media, but also the creator of their own TV programming.

–Neal Schaffer, President of Maximize Your Social

14. Give In to the Tech Giants

One of the most powerful mantras in this digital space is to never build your house on rented land. Meaning, keep all your content on your website. Today all content is moving to the cloud. It’s time to give up and surrender to Facebook. They want the content, you’ll have to give them the content. Seriously. It’s time to surrender.

People don’t want to visit your website any more. They don’t even want your app. They want all their information in their news stream. This means we will be optimizing for Facebook — as well as Google — instead of optimizing for people. Yuck. But that’s the world we live in, so let’s deal with it.

This trend is creating enormous problems for publishers. How do you monetize when Facebook and Apple own your audience?

–Mark Schaefer, Executive Director, Schaefer Marketing Solutions

15. Showcase Real People

Facebook is going all-in on mobile and all-in on video. Brands need to be focusing more than ever on highly engaging storytelling through live and recorded video content that draws their audience in emotionally.

Spotlight customer success stories, showcase real people using your product or service, introduce staff, conduct interviews, go behind-the-scenes, involve your audience on a personal level as much as possible. And, couple your video storytelling with exceptional social customer care–ideally that even includes personalized video content–and you’ll have a serious leg up on the competition.

–Mari Smith, Premier Facebook Marketing Expert

16. Be Authentic or Die

The future of marketing looks chaotic! The blur of art and science is mind-bending. Brands need talent on both sides plus a brilliant translator to survive. Social media will continue to grow and expose your brand. Be authentic or die!

–Eve Mayer, CEO/Owner of Social Media Delivered

17. Stay Focused, Humble and Open

Winning marketing teams and brands of the future will be agile, prepared and calculated. The road ahead is filled with distraction and redundancies across the social and digital web with conflicting voices of opinion and best practices.

Smart and savvy marketers will do their research to know where their ideal clients hang out online and how they can best serve them. They will avoid chasing shiny objects yet at the same time must be ready to embrace new trends as they come so that they can provide the best customer experience possible. They need to be aware, humble and open to a new world where the only certainty we have is change.

–Pam Moore, CEO of Marketing Nutz, Founder of Social Profit Factor Training Academy

Although their responses were all very different, all 17 influencers agreed on one truth: we must cater precisely to the consumer–wherever he or she is, and whatever he or she wants or needs. Wherever technology is going, we must go with it and keep experimenting or risk getting left behind.

In other words, the consumer has all the power, and we must cater to our audiences like never before if we want to survive in the future.

Although no one knows exactly what the future will look like, we do know this: In more ways than one, it’s already here.

Are you ready?

Within 4 feet, this rocket is doing 130 MPH – watch in slow mo

Gav and Dan send some rockets up into the Indiana sky with the help of Purdue students who built this rocket to simulate the real thing.

Super shoutout to Matthew Bolliger for nailing that wide phantom shot!

This article originally appeared at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myinpF0Nl30.

Bitcoin Scams Spread On Social Media

Bitcoin is the future of money, or maybe just a clever hedge against devaluation for rich people, depending on how you much kool-aid you’re drinking.

But one thing’s for sure: it won’t change human nature, and that means as soon as people start talking about money, scammers are bound to show up.

In fact the steady rise in Bitcoin’s price over the last year, from $415.69 in late March 2016 to $972.28 at the time of writing, has fueled an explosion in scams revolving around the blockchain-based “cryptocurrency,” according to a new study by ZeroFox, a social media security and monitoring firm.

In March of this year alone, ZeroFox identified 3,618 Bitcoin scam URLs, which were shared more than 126 million times on social media, including two that were shared over 40 million times each.

While Bitcoin fans tout the cryptocurrency’s blockchain system, including a publicly available log of all transactions, as guarantees of security and transparency, ZeroFox points out that Bitcoin is actually ideal for scamming purposes for several reasons.

The lack of a central controlling authority, meant to protect the currency from fiat devaluation or regulation, also makes it virtually impossible to police, as does the anonymity of users.

Furthermore, any Bitcoins lost to scammers can’t be recovered because all transactions in the blockchain are irreversible (which is the whole point).

ZeroFox has identified several categories of scam involving Bitcoin. The first simply uses the promise of (fake) Bitcoin wallet downloads to drive users to social media URLs that deliver a malware app to their computers, or to a survey about Bitcoin that does the same.

Another popular scam involves phishing impersonators posing as a Bitcoin database, inviting Bitcoin owners to enter their “key” to see if they’re in the database -in fact enabling the scammers to steal Bitcoins.

In another ruse, scammers pose as a “Bitcoin flipping” business, which offers to quickly double the victim’s Bitcoins through various investment schemes -again with the goal of getting their keys and stealing Bitcoins.

Last but not least, ZeroFox also identified a number of Bitcoin pyramid schemes, on a classic “Ponzi” model, as well as “cloud mining” scams promising new Bitcoins from powerful number-crunching computers.

ZeroFox noted that there are also plenty of legitimate Bitcoin cloud-mining schemes, making this scam particularly hard to detect.

This article originally appeared at: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/297835/bitcoin-scams-spread-on-social-media.html.

Instagram to Let Users Book With Businesses in Challenge to Yelp

Instagram, the photo-sharing application owned by Facebook Inc., will soon let people book appointments with businesses, part of an effort to expand the app’s consumer uses.

People will be able to set up a haircut, for example, by going to a salon’s Instagram profile and clicking on a button to schedule it. The move could challenge companies like Priceline Group Inc.’s OpenTable and Yelp Inc.

The new feature, set to roll out in the next couple months, will give Instagram’s more than 1 million active advertisers a more concrete way to measure the impact of their accounts, said James Quarles, the app’s head of business.

“When someone books an appointment, that’s not a ‘like’ or a ‘follow,’ that’s actual action,” he said. The company may eventually add more tools, like reviews.

About 8 million businesses currently use profiles on Instagram, which the app is working to link to Facebook business profiles, Quarles said. Eighty percent of Instagram’s users follow a business, he said.

This article originally appeared at: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-22/instagram-to-let-users-book-with-businesses-in-challenge-to-yelp.

The Fifth Element Diva Song Was Impossible To Sing Until Now!

I loved the movie the 5th Element and thought the diva song was epic! Always wondered if there was anyone out there who could sing it seeing on how parts of it were digitally created and not something that was sung by a live performer, at least not the crazy high parts. You can tell they are digitally tuned. Jane Zhang managed those parts quite nicely in this recent performance of the song.

In the original movie, “The Voice” Belongs to an Albanian opera singer named Inva Mula Tchako. The title of this aria or peace she is singing is called Il Dolce Suono. They ONLY edited the part where the pitches changes (towards the end, because a human voice can’t change pitches that fast). But those high notes you’re hearing are definitely reachable for soprano singers like Inva! Maïwenn the actress only lip synced it!

Upon further research though, there are quite a few people who have attempted the song. I’ve curated a few for your viewing pleasure. Let me know which one you like the best. I still like the original…

This video shows Inva performing in front of a greenscreen for the movie.

Here’s the original scene from the movie.

This incredible young talent sings the song for the Armenian TV version of “the Voice” blind editions!

Evgenia Laguna performing the Diva Song from Fifth Element