Telling the story of the product

“And, action!” The director’s hand goes down. The talent speaks. The story begins. In the midst of bright lights, the whir of camera motors, and the smell of coffee, a tale of a new product is brought to life.

At Page One PR we tell stories about products. Today, Lonn Johnston, the founder of Page One, and I were using video to tell our product story. In the coming weeks, we’ll use a newsletter, web page, Twitter, and Facebook to distribute and amplify our story.

Lonn and I are about six months into a journey to extend the reach of public relations techniques using videos that are tightly integrated with social media campaigns. This was our first experience with a real studio, one that had all the gritty, hip flair of the San Francisco art scene. It was also our first attempt at making a video of our own product.

We’ve learned that techniques for product production and PR are different, joined together mainly by the story and the messages our clients want to communicate. The world of video production has traditionally been more expensive than the social media world of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube. Over the last six months, we’ve learned what it takes to merge the two worlds, taking the best elements of social media viral distribution and video production to create extremely effective marketing campaigns.

Video director and acting talent work together

Here are the top two lessons we’ve learned about video production:

1) You need a script. The script should follow a production movie format that your company customizes for its own style. Both the video production people and the marketing people need to understand the cues and direction of the script. Before writing the script, we prepare marketing guidelines that identify the target audience, goal of the video, and main messages that the campaign is trying to convey. The exact dialogue does not need to be in the script. We’ve tried making videos without scripts and with loose scripts. It is more efficient, and therefore cheaper to produce a video, if you create a script for your videos and enforce standard conventions.

2) Clarify roles and responsibilities. There are many roles that must be filled to create a video: video director, producer, audio manager, lighting manager, writer, set director, art department, acting talent, and many others. In order to reduce costs, we compress multiple roles into each person on the set. This works most efficiently when the roles and responsibilities are clear to each person. Efficiency on the set translates into lower video production costs and better marketing results per dollar.

—–

Craig Oda => http://twitter.com/codawork

Craig Oda, managing partner and product launch enthusiast

Do you know Hadoop? You know, the open source project named for a child’s stuffed elephant that is used to store and process large volumes of data? Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! sure do – they all use it. So, when Accel Partners funded startup Cloudera needed to make a make a splash for their commercial offering of Hadoop/MapReduce software and services, what did they do?

They turned to Page One PR and reached 1.5 million people within 24 hours of launch, pushing their website traffic up by more than 800 percent. In addition to a feature story in the print edition of the New York Times, Page One PR also secured 4,500 blog placements, including GigaOm, TechCrunch and the New York Times Bits blog. Google search keyword results on “Cloudera” jumped from 9,000 to 23,000 on launch day.

Big data had never been so cool. It was the talk of the town… and Twittersphere. The huge hype resulted from Page One PR’s integrated plan that meshed PR, marketing, and social media.

Twitter alone pushed the news to more than 250,000 people, whose viral impact is known to spread like wildfire. So when people such as Tim O’Reilly (with 100,000+ followers), Robert Scoble (90,000+ followers), James Governor (6,000 followers) from Redmonk, John Battelle (16,000 followers) and Matt Asay (2,600 followers) from CNET tweeted the news, it really took off.

Page One also used YouTube and Viddler videos to quickly give reporters an overview of the product and people prior to the launch. The first video depicted the CEO and founder explaining the technology and product vision. This video has been viewed more than 5,600 times to date. The second video demoed the product and highlighted key features. The videos were also used for viral distribution in Twitter, direct email, and blogs.

The messages and positioning statements that Page One built helped shape two traditional press releases, one focused on the company funding by Accel Partners, and the other focused on the general availability of the product. The messaging was also used to create the script for the video and served as the roadmap for video direction.

To complement the messages, the founder wrote a blog post highlighting the technical features of the product. He took a deeper dive on components of the release.

The entire process – from initial plans through last interview – was carefully crafted and organized. Developing and managing communications messages and a coordinated media effort truly proved to be the key to generating buzz.

Beta launches rarely attract much hype. But when a company shifts strategic direction and runs onto the competitive playing field with the big guys like Adobe, Sun and Microsoft, then you want some buzz. Okay, a lot of buzz! Would a 3,500% increase in website traffic on the day of the launch be nice? That’s what we did with Appcelerator.

Appcelerator wanted to make a big market splash with their launch of Titanium, an open source Adobe AIR killer. They wanted to reach traditional media publications, but also developers and social media communities. Most PR launches only target three communications channels – media, bloggers, and analysts. Our launch of Titanium targeted seven different communications channels in parallel, relying heavily on a coordinated social media campaign.

We started out securing a strong messaging platform, which allowed us to effectively position Titanium in each different communication channel we targeted and let us build a strong base to launch our social media activities. Following the messaging, we organized an intense media list and began outreach. Page One does media and blogger outreach different than most PR firms. First, we don’t spam. We begin conversations and relationships. We quickly lined up 12 media briefings in the weeks before the launch and we were asked for embargoed launch materials by every publication in our top 20 list. We also directed, produced and promoted a sophisticated vision video featuring the CEO and CTO, and promoted a series of screencasts that gave reporters a more technical look under the hood of the platform with demonstration applications. On announcement day, we coordinated a community email and a more technical blog post for the Appcelerator blog, manned the Appcelerator Twitter feeds, and monitored the blogosphere, directing the CEO when it was necessary to comment on specific blogs.

The results speak for themselves. Not only was there a 3,500 percent increase in website traffic on the day of the launch, but the coordinated PR and social media outreach drove qualified Web site traffic to ‘money’ pages for Appcelerator: 40 percent of all traffic hit the product demos, downloads, documentation, or product FAQ. There were more than 10,000 page views to the vision video in the first week, more than 10,000 product downloads, more than 44 unique stories placed in the media and a four-fold jump in Twitter followers.

That’s buzz for a beta launch that you can bank.

Plat’Home, in discussions with Page One, realized that they needed more specific differentiation in the U.S. market and re-positioned the product value proposition around the microservers’ hidden strengths – low power consumption and extreme temperature resistance. In our rollout strategy at Page One, we also offered review units to reporters. You have to see these things to believe them. Out of the box, the high quality Japanese engineering and small size – a fully functional server that fits in the palm of your hand – has a big impact.

Plat’Home has the advantage of having market-tested products. While they appear to be a startup here, the products they sell in the U.S. market are in their fifth generation, with many large satisfied Japanese customers such as KDDI (telecom), HitachiSoft (software), Yomiuri (news), and Shimizu (construction).

Page One, in media outreach and Web-based guerilla marketing, focused on “tiny, green and extreme toughness,” to re-launch Plat’Home products in the U.S.. Clips piled up quickly, with coverage in CNET, Wired, The Register, Slashdot (with 188 comments), E-Commerce Times, and many other important IT trade publications.

U.S. web site traffic, the main barometer of success and where all sales leads originate, jumped 20-fold and then 70-fold and finally 90-fold. It was like an online firehose. In-coming sales leads tracked a similar trajectory, overloading Plat’Home’s ability to respond, initially (they subsequently added “Buy Now” buttons on most of their Web pages). That’s a nice problem to have!

The U.S. market is large and noisy for foreign companies entering for the first time. Adjusting to the landscape of U.S. media can also be daunting. But Plat’Home now has increased interest in the U.S. market, both in the media and with customers. They still have work ahead of them but they have built a good foundation for long-term success by focusing their messages and playing to their strengths.

Plat’Home-At-A-Glance
Daily U.S. web site traffic before Page One PR: life support, almost flat line. Minimal inbound sales queries (see trend lines in graph below).

March 31, 2008, first press release with Page One PR (clips in CNET, others):

• Web traffic up 2,000%;
• In-bound sales queries up 500% over historic traffic level.

April 21, 2008, second press release with Page One PR (clips in Wired and Slashdot, others):

• Web traffic up 7,000%;
• In-bound sales queries up 1,000% over historic traffic level.

April 28, 2008, follow-up Page One pitching on second news release sparks second round of media coverage (clips in The Register, others):

• Web traffic up 9,000%;
• In-bound sales queries up 1,300% over historic traffic level.



(percentage increases in plathome.com website traffic)