Client News: Involver Launches Video Campaign Platform

Another new Stage Two client has taken the wrapper off their product. Involver has announced the pilot program for their Video Marketing Platform with campaigns for Serena Software and Kiva.org. Involver’s platform is an end-to-end solution for marketers who want to manage video campaigns on Facebook and other social networks. Involver lets you build, publish, manage, change, update, and track video campaigns with a turnkey offering specifically designed to increase engagement, promote sharing, and speed viral distribution.

Involver’s unique vision is to provide more than just “video with a buy button”, creating a tool for marketers that does more than deliver millions of impressions with no way to capture the audience. The platform uses a rich set of video plug-ins to allow the campaign owner to capture email, offer quizes or surveys, even take orders or donations – all within the framework of the video, never forcing the viewer to browse to a new Web page.

Serena Software has garnered a lot of attention with their “Just Bleep It” video campaign, which saw nearly 1.2M views on YouTube. They moved to Involver to publish the second phase of the campaign on Facebook, using the Involver platform to provide a rich social experience and the means to convert viewers into leads. Kiva.org launched their campaign to tap into Facebook, and other social networks to attract a new audience to their person-to-person micro-lending website.

The launch of Involver’s pilot program is already receiving a good deal of attention, with articles from Kristen Nicole at Mashable, Eric Eldon at VentureBeat and Michelle Lentz at Bub.blicio.us (we’ll update this list throughout the day) – already pushing the news to Techmeme.

New Involver Articles:
Crowdsourcing.com
Ad Lab
ReadWriteWeb

Involver is off and running!

LOUD3R Launched Today

LOUD3R is a client based in Los Angeles, CA. They launched their network of vertical websites today, and it’s going off like a house a’fire.

LOUD3R uses a semantic publishing engine, combined with human editors, to create websites. The websites are each targeted at a different subject or niche, things like custom sneakers, motorcycles, wine and cricket. They launched today with 25 websites, covering a variety of topics. The goal is to create really great destination sites for all kinds of topics, including subjects that are often under-served online. The sites include:

One of the goals behind the technology is to help cut down on all the noise. For many of us, RSS readers daily become full of WAY too many stories, and often those feeds include duplications, spam, splogs, dead links, and other junk. LOUD3R uses semantic technology and natural language processing to find, filter, cluster, rank and display only the best, freshest stories about a particular topic. This way enthusiasts for a particular subject have a great destination to go, every day, to find the best new content for their topic of interest, be it mixed martial arts, custom sneakers, soccer or motorcycles (or anything else.)

Each of the sites shares the same 3R branding (SNEAK3R for custom sneakers, DECANT3R for wine, FAST3R for motorcycles, etc.) They own more than 550 URL’s that share the 3R brand umbrella. They will continue to publish new websites at a rate of 10-15 sites / month. The press release is up on PR Web here. If you have any questions about LOUD3R or want to chat with Lowell Goss (the founder and CEO) please contact me here: david@stagetwoconsulting.com.

Here are the first few articles to break today (we’ll be updating the list all day long).

• Louis Gray was the first I saw today.
• Mashable
• Webware
• Journalism.co.UK
• Download Squad
• BNET
• drob
• Social Media Club

Go LOUD3R go!

Under the Radar Getting Started

We’re here at Under the Radar, for a multitude of reasons. Lowell Goss, our friend, client and the CEO of LOUD3R is presenting in the Mercury room today around 11:15. Ellen McGirt from Fast Company is moderating. Should be a great presentation.

We are also here to help our friends from Dealmaker Media promote their show. We will be twittering on their behalf – you can follow us here: http://twitter.com/UTR08

We also have a Ustream up and running – you can follow it here: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/utr08

If you like, you can also watch it below, and chat as well.

.TV online : provided by Ustream

Client News: LOUD3R Speaking at Under the Radar

Tomorrow, Lowell Goss, CEO of LOUD3R, a new client here at Stage Two, is speaking at the Under the Radar Conference. LOUD3R offers a network of enthusiast-oriented Websites to help millions of people find great information about topics they love. It is difficult to find quality Web content for topics that aren’t mainstream – whether it’s just trying to find good sites, or sifting through junk (spam, splogs and dupes) on RSS feeds.

To solve this problem, LOUD3R is launching a network of sites created by a semantic content engine that gathers, ranks and publishes the best content (news, editorial, photos, video) for a given topic, while filtering out all the junk.

It’s an exciting time for the LOUD3R team as they begin wrapping up beta and prepare to launch the network later this month. We are currently setting up interviews and briefings to learn more about LOUD3R, so if you would like to speak with Lowell for a more in depth look at the powerful tools behind the network, give us a call, email, tweet, comment or whistle – whatever works for you.

Client News: Splashtop coming to ALL ASUS motherboards

DeviceVM is one of our valued clients; they make a software product called Splashtop.  Splashtop software enables users to browse the web, watch videos, check web-mail, chat with friends, share photos and more, just seconds after turning on their PC.  It’s an embedded Linux platform that integrates with the PC BIOS and runs in front of the operating system -you go from cold boot to browsing the web in seconds.  DeviceVM works with numerous manufacturers to incorporate Splashtop into computers.

The first manufacturer to incorporate Splashtop software is ASUS, the leading worldwide motherboard, components and notebook manufacturer.  On Wednesday morning DeviceVM issued a successful press release announcing that ASUS plans to deploy Splashtop across their entire motherboard portfolio. This is really exciting news for DeviceVM, as the motherboard volume is going to quickly ramp up to more than 1 million boards per month.

The story was picked up and covered by quite a few publications, which was exciting and drove a tremendous amount of traffic to the Splashtop website.  Sal at Geek.com wrote a nice article that has been Dugg more than 1000 times.  The story also got onto Slashdot; thank you to whoever submitted that.  Sol from DeviceVM also blogged about announcement on the excellent in-house Splashtop blog.   DeviceVM’s announcement got stories on Engadget, Webware, PC Magazine, Linux Today, Tech World, ZD Net, Tech Gage and others.

This was a great story to tell and a lot of fun to pitch.  Thanks to everyone who covered the news, and congratulations to DeviceVM for all their great work.  It’s clearly paying off.

How-to: Offering Client News Feeds

Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote a semi-controversial blog post today on the “wrong ways” to pitch news (to ReadWriteWeb specifically, but it probably applies to many other publications as well. BlogHerald chimes in here too.) and Mashable has a similar post. One of Marshall’s key insights was regarding how Voce Communications shares their updates with an OPML file. We thought it was a good idea, huddled up, did a little Yahoo! Pipes magic, and here we are: presenting Stage Two Consulting’s client news.

Here’s how we approached it, on a client-by-client basis, in no particular order (note that this only includes currently active clients and only those for whom we are doing outreach):

Bug Labs – the company has both a blog and a twitter feed. All blog posts end up in the twitter feed, and other miscellaneous news does as well. We chose to include the twitter feed only (although also considered doing both, and filtering out the duplicates).

DeviceVM – has a blog and issues press releases through PRWeb. We’ve included the blog feed, and also created a filter from PRWeb’s feed to find DeviceVM content.

TuneUp Media and Spleak – have no blog at present, so all news will come via PRWeb filters.

In addition to the PRWeb filters, we created Google News filters for each client. For each given filter, we added a prefix with the company name OR “Press Release”/”News item”, here’s a sample output:

Also, we’re including the Stage Two blog, but leaving out our personal blogs and Twitter feeds for now.

The process was fairly simple to accomplish using Yahoo! Pipes. We’ve never used it before, yet from start to finish took less than 45 minutes. It was pretty darn easy, well done Yahoo!

Client Update: Spleak Lands Hearst Deal

While the primary goal of our blog is to talk about marketing, social media, public relations, strategies, outreach, etc, we’ve decided it’s also a good way to give updates when our clients have interesting news to share. This is one of those times.

Spleak is one of our new and interesting clients. They’ve created a new kind of content delivery platform that enables highly interactive and engaging communication and publishing, combining user generated content (UGC) with mainstream media content across instant messaging, social networking, texting, and web-based widgets. Their first product is called CelebSpleak, you can check it out here. Today they announced a strategic partnership with Hearst Digital Media, owners of Seventeen, CosmoGirl, Teen Magazine, and the eSpin network (you can see the press release here).

What’s interesting here is that Spleak has created this cool network that reaches into places that content publishers have a hard time accessing. Hearst has great publications and high quality content, and this partnership with Spleak makes it easy for them to feed that content into AIM, Facebook, MySpace, MSN Messenger, and via SMS. This partnership represents a cool merging of old school publishing with new school technology. And it further serves to prove Spleak’s model of hybrid publishing, where they combine the best of UGC with high quality, professional content.

For some insight about our outreach strategy, we decided rather than to blast out a release to hundreds/thousands of writers, we instead chose to approach a select list of press, bloggers, and technology/media influencers who we felt would be most interested in the story. Some were technology blogs, others were personal “influencer” blogs. We also contacted folks in the media and magazine publishing space – many of them were interested in what this hybrid publishing model means for the future of web and print publishing. Finally, we contacted several newspapers, including some owned by Hearst itself.

Coverage so far this morning includes Kristen Nicole at Mashable, Joanna Pettas from FOLIO, and Ellen Lee at the San Francisco Chronicle wrote on SF Gate. We’ll add to the list as more articles appear over the course of the day.

Throughout the day more stories have continued to pop up across the blogosphere.  Anastasia Goodstein at Ypulse mentioned the Spleak / Hearst partnership in her Tuesday April 15th Essentials.  Dave Cohn wrote a great post on his blog DigiDave about Shifts in Journalism, and highlighted Spleak’s partnership as a great example of that shifting.  And Kira Bindrim at Crain’s New York featured Spleak’s announcement in a summary piece about several new items of social media news.  Keep ‘em coming!

Under The Radar: The Business of Web Apps

Being a PR and Marketing firm, we typically don’t “fly under the radar.” Our goal is to make a lot of noise (at the right time, and in the right way) and get the word out about our clients’ great products and services. However, today we did fly under the radar. By which I mean, we attended Dealmaker Media’s Under The Radar conference in Mountain View, CA.

The conference was great – the folks at DM have got it down to a science. Speakers, moderators, and judges showed up on time (unless their cars broke down) and all the presenting companies had interesting ideas to pitch. We had several different reasons for attending:

• Two of our clients (DeviceVM and kwiry) presented at UTR
• Jeremy moderated two of the panels (and treated the speakers kindly for the most part)
• networking, networking, networking

We are big advocates of industry networking, and conferences like this one are great for that purpose. Founders and employees from dozens of different startup and large companies were in attendance, all with something new to pitch. Some are great, some are terrible, but it’s good to know what’s new and who’s doing it. There’s a great opportunity for business development at these events, and also a great chance to play matchmaker and connect two people that really ought to talk to one another. We like to help out where we can.

In addition to the presenters and attendees, there were also a good swath of media folk in attendance. Rafe Needleman from Webware was there, though he had some car trouble on the way down (bummer Rafe, that really sucks.) Kara Swisher from the WSJ (and other pubs) was there, judging for Jeremy’s panel. And Brad Stone from the NY Times was there as well, helping to judge some of the other presenters.

Last night Dealmaker Media threw a little party in Palo Alto at a restaurant called Zibibbo. We snapped a couple of pics while we were there.

Here’s a picture of Sol from DeviceVM, Cliff from DocSyncer, and some of our friends from Dealmaker Media:

Here’s a self portrait of Sol and myself:

And this is a picture of Ron from kwiry, hanging out with the lovely ladies of Dealmaker Media:

Under The Radar was a great conference because it had just the right combination of factors.  There was a variety of interesting startups, a good supply of industry leaders and important members of the media in attendance.  The presentations were generally engaging, and fomented lively discussions with both the judges and the audience.

Events like this are both fun and educationall, and can represent a great opportunity for business networking and business development – especially if you pick the right conference.

Explaining why Bug Labs issued a press release today

Today, for the first time, Bug Labs issued a press release.  Simultaneously, a blog post went up, with virtually identical content. I’ve blogged in the past with my thoughts on the slow demise of the press release as a communications method, but I thought I’d go into more detail for this specific event.   First the WHY, then the WHAT/HOW.

Why?  Well, we really wanted to get the word out pre-CES that the company has news.  Not only is there a CES booth, but we’ve also got a table at the ShowStoppers event (still my favorite “tie-in” event with the big shows).  To-date, we’ve used the blog and emails as our only forms of communication.  I like blogs and emails because they are inherently two-way communications vehicles, as opposed to press releases, which are outbound only.  In fact, prior to this release Bug Labs had received 196 “major” pieces of coverage, not including TV and print publications.

However, our rolodex only goes so far, and word of mouth only gets you so many contacts.  Sooner or later, you want to be able to cross the marketing chasm of reaching out beyond your circle of influence.  We decided for the thousands of people coming to CES plus several hundred at ShowStoppers, it was important to use a communication method that would hit a wider audience.  Thus, the press release.

However, we didn’t do it in a vacuum.  In fact, I wrote the blog post first, then turned it into the press release.  We also didn’t use a very traditional format, instead kept it like a conversation.  If you open both the blog post and release, you can see just how similar they are. Again, in our attempt to have “open marketing” we chose to keep the same information we’d release via our blog as we would in the “official press release”.

Will this help?  Not sure.  Our news was picked up by Engadget, Gizmodo, Geek.com, and others, but they were all individually briefed anyway.  I will come back and report on the results once the show is behind us.  While I still don’t feel the press release is “dead”, I am certainly not convinced it’ll make a “huge” difference.  Then again, all it takes is one great piece of coverage!