by Jacqueline Koch | May 11, 2016 |
By Janinne Brunyee
HelloGiggles.com seems to have cracked the code on creating content for millennial women. After a flight from San Francisco, participants on the 2016 Digital Innovators’ Tour assembled in the beautiful conference room at HelloGiggles’ designer offices in downtown Los Angeles to meet general manager, Penelope Linge. She told the group that the site was started by actress Zooey Deschanel as a blog because she felt there was a lack of positive content and a safe place for young women to gather online. Today, the site whose audience’s median age is 26, reaches more than 30 million millennial women a month. HelloGiggles.com was acquired by Time Inc in October last year.
According to Linge, content is sourced from a contributor network of 1,000 millennial women from whom 50 to 60 pieces of content are sourced each day. The common differentiating thread across all of this content is a positive narrative. Traffic to the site comes from mobile and social channels. ‘Our audience is so young, we had to design for mobile and social first, because this is the engagement pattern for young people. They live their lives on the phone and on their social platforms,” said Linge. Fully embracing social channels, It may be surprising to know that Linge anticipates that in 24 to 36 months, most content will not live on hellogiggles.com. “We are embracing a distributed content model with most of our articles being hosted as Facebook Instant Articles via an RSS feed as well as the other channels our audience engages with. We will still be able to monetize this content,” she said.
Linge says the HelloGiggles team is seeing the same trend on Snapchat. “Facebook is our number platform and we are investing in creating original content for this channel. We are an official partner for Facebook Live and we are embracing Facebook Instance Articles because of the amazing user experience. Pages load instantly and we’ve seen a significant traffic increase. “According to Linge, the same level of engagement has not been possible on Twitter with this audience in spite a posting 40 tweets a day. “Snapchat is where we are the most bullish.” She said. This is because 14 to 20 year-olds are on Snapchat all day. Linge is hiring a Snapchat-focused team that will create content including video and invite advertisers to participate. She is quick to stress that the team is equally bullish about other social channels.
HelloGiggles Content strategy
HelloGiggle’s content strategy is not one-size-fits-all. Instead, the team creates content for each channel. With Facebook, for example, the audience doesn’t listen to sound – while they are at work or in line at the coffee shop – they want captioning. So the team focuses on creating videos every woman can relate to.
A recent example is a funny short video titled: ‘If you suck at putting on eyeliner’ which shows a young woman applying eyeliner to each eye and then returning over and over again to make corrections until she ends up putting sunglasses on over a wiped clean face.
“We are hoping we can create videos that we can take to advertisers, said Linge. The opportunity is to add a front card or tail card with the brand’s information. “We are also creating original videos for them because we are proving we know this space,” she said.
With recent Facebook Live Videos the team has created, there have been 20,000 – 30,000 people watching the live videostream and asking questions. ‘We have looked at what Buzzfeed is doing and recognized that Live Video is doing very well for them,’ she said.
Linge and her team are testing across platforms and trying to figure out what is next. ‘I think Snapchat is a greenfield opportunity for publishers and we are hoping to define what it means to be a publisher on Snapchat
Because HelloGigglees’ audience has not embraced paying for content, Linge said the team realized that heavily commercial sponsored content will not work on the site. ‘Millennials have never seen advertising and this generation does not see a quid pro quo for advertising. That is why we try to create a lot of organic video that doesn’t feel sponsored, but is brought to you by a brand’
Brands want content that will go viral and according to Linge, this audience is turned off if content feels too commercial. Instead, the team is creating premium video series and bringing in sponsors. This content is then distributed across multiple channels on the web including hellogiggles.com. This makes HelloGiggles both a content creator and a distribution channel.
Solutions for advertisers
A growing part of the business for HelloGiggles is creating premium branded content for advertisers.
“There are so many ways for young
women to find out who they are today. Kids can pick from thousands and thousands of identities. Zoe tapped into that zeitgeist. Our narrative, therefore, is find your freedom to explore who you are and embrace that. This is the messaging we are taking to advertisers,” she said.
HelloGiggles’ content creation team consists of 10 staff writers aged between 22 and 28 who edit contributor content. If something breaks and editors are looking for immediate coverage, this team also writes original content. Currently there are 4 video producers on staff, but this team will be ramping up fast.
by Jacqueline Koch | May 2, 2016 |
By Janinne Brunyee
How do medium-sized publishers take advantage of revenue opportunities offered by online video without taking on the prohibitive costs associated with building out their own video production capabilities? This is the problem that four-year old San Francisco startup, Tout, set out to solve.
Participants on the 2016 Digital Innovators’ Tour got a first-hand account of how Tout is changing online video distribution from CEO and founder, Michael Downing.
Downing pointed out that many publishers are having a hard time making the transition from a print paradigm to more of a television paradigm. That is because today, 125 websites are driving 95 per cent of the US$9bn of revenue that online video is generating. “We are trying to democratise continent distribution by providing technology, content and expertise to allow a larger group of publishers to participate in the online video revenue opportunity,” he said.
Tout: How does it work?
Tout works with large video content publishers like television stations who need to find new ways to distribute their content beyond their own web properties. “For large content creators, online advertising is the largest source of digital revenue but they have run out of space to carry more ads. Syndication is important for continued growth,’ he said.
Then Tout works with mid-tier publishers who do not have the in-house capabilities to create their own video content. These publishers make all the articles they publish available to the Tout platform where the text is scanned. The platform then identifies which videos are relevant for each targeted article and the video is seamlessly integrated into the story.
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by Jacqueline Koch | Apr 29, 2016 |
By Estelle Pin – Millennial-in-chief, Boost! Collective
Here at Boost! Collective, we are dedicated to telling the powerful stories that allow our clients to engage deeply and meaningfully with their audiences. For us, it’s all about human-to-human communications. Whether our clients sell software or soft drinks, we use narrative to connect an idea to an emotion which inspires audiences – customers, employees, investors etc. – to act.
Stories are as old as time
We already know that this works well to target pretty much every audience: stories are not only the most memorable and persuasive way to plant your product in the minds of your consumer in modern day, they’ve existed in society as a way to instill values and interests since the dawn of human communication. While the oral traditions that housed the epic poems of Homer served to fill nights lit only by firelight, they also served to covertly express the ideals of each time; then, an emphasis on strength of mind and body, a focus on exploration, and even an endorsement of certain political or national affiliations (Greeks were clearly superior to all others…).
Later, the stories of Dickens and Wilde instilled values of aestheticism and post-industrial morality. Today, the story tellers aren’t just vetted published authors—they’re the friends on your Facebook feed, the contributors at online magazines like xoJane and HelloGiggles, even the Instagram food bloggers and amateur Vine celebrities like Thomas Sanders, whose 7-second stories have over 5 billion views, with 7.5 million subscribed followers.
Everyone is a storyteller
So real quick, let’s talk about this. Every time your friend posts a picture of their favorite breakfast at the mom and pop shop in town, they’re not only providing free traditional advertising, they’re creating a story within the context of their life: their daily routine becomes a part of your narrative paradigm.
Take for example your foodie Instagram friend. When her picture shows up on your feed, subconsciously your mind fills in the whole story: ‘my Hindu friend Sara took Mark, the cute engineer at her work, out to breakfast here and it looked so delicious— especially since they got to sit outside on that gorgeous sunny day last week’. When it comes to marketing in general, that works much better than a random picture of (an admittedly beautiful) lunch in a place you’ve never been with traditional advertisement text underneath it, randomly generated on your Facebook feed.
Besides the fact that 84 percent of Millennials say user-generated content has at least some influence on what they buy, the previous statement also creates an image, an experience that the reader invests in. Because who doesn’t want that experience, the beautiful lunch with the object of your affection on a sunny day?
Storytelling for millennials
So, if stories are pervasive and an already well-established format for marketing—that we know works for everyone– why bother focusing especially on their effectiveness with millennials? Well, the truth is—because really, storytelling is the only thing that works here. Millennials are quickly outnumbering everyone else and while their purchasing power is an estimated 1.68 trillion dollars, conventional marketing not only fails to engage them—it alienates a generation that wants to feel involved and informed, not just marketed to. And let’s get something straight, storytelling as we’re using it here doesn’t mean your ‘once upon a time’, ‘beginning, middle, end’, ‘character growth’ model of storytelling. It means creating an image, a scene, a moment, that your customer sees, identifies with, and subconsciously pursues. While everyone wants the lunch scene with the friend, millennials are the generation that will look at your traditional advertising, the picture of lunch with advertising text underneath it, and think ‘that’s desperate, that’s cheap, that’s not me.”
While life-stage advertising has always worked for other generations, millennials don’t measure their lives or their success by life-stages. When you’re marketing to the first generation that doesn’t see owning a house or owning a car as a self-marketing accomplishment in and of itself, how do you convince them that the car has value, that the house has value? These aren’t things we had to do with other generations—baby boomers and gen-Xers already just knew that these things had value.
Persuading millennials
The answer is storytelling and catering to an emphasis on experience. If your audience won’t agree with the basic premise that owning a house will be an accomplishment for them, you’re going to be more successful painting an experience. ‘It’s raining outside, and you’re sitting at your kitchen table. This house smells like you, like the laundry detergent your mom always used, that you use out of habit, that reaches every corner of your home on laundry days. The walls are the same blue you fell in love with in college but could never paint your studio apartment walls because it wasn’t yours. Tonight, you’re having guests for dinner, because you have a dining room for the first time in your life and these are the experiences you’ve been looking forward to.” That is why a millennial buys a house.
The Coca-Cola Company is an example of a company that has understood the need to change its approach. Polar bears and Santa Clause don’t sell name recognition like they used to. But if you look at new advertising campaigns, like #shareacoke, or any of the ads that play before movies in your local movie theaters, animations of polar bears have been replaced with vignettes of beach-side bonfires and heartwarming moments of intimacy between father and son. Small relatable stories like these make Coca-Cola essential to an experience, and when your coke tells you to “share a coke with Emily”, you become not only invested in the product, but invested in an experience that’s been painted in your mind.
While we are excited to share the benefits of storytelling as an effective marketing tool, the truth is that with millennials especially, there really isn’t any other choice. Conventional marketing goes as far as to alienate a generation that’s become skeptical of commodity culture, and brand recognition doesn’t do the work that it used to for well-established companies.
by Jacqueline Koch | Apr 27, 2016 |
By Janinne Brunyee and Jacqueline Koch
At Boost!, we believe that storytelling is about getting to the core of an organization’s value proposition, and developing narratives that simply and compellingly relate “the story” to customers, prospects, investors, media, employees and others in a way that inspires them to action.
While storytelling is appropriate for organizations at all stages of their lifecycle, it can be a particularly powerful tool for new-to-the world organizations who need to create a compelling vision – a future memory – that people see themselves in and want to support. For these young organizations, a well-written storyline can be the foundation for attracting investors, engaging and vetting employees, and guiding all planning and development activities pre and post-launch.
The Boost! team recently completed a Collective Storytelling exercise for RIZE, a pre-startup in Seattle that aims to be a place where women ‘lead and learn.’ A key component of the final RIZE storyline is the future memory – starting with an article that describes what founder Erica Atnip hopes RIZE will be at launch. Then, a second article describes the vision for RIZE five years on. Both of these articles are a powerful illustration of how a narrative approach can be used to engage key audiences – investors, landlords, employees and clients – in a powerful and deeply personal way and invite then to join the RIZE movement.
Article 1: In the beginning
PUGET SOUND BUSINESS JOURNAL – SPECIAL EDITION, WOMEN IN BUSINESS
Dancing toward empowerment: teaching women to lead one step at a time
Presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were oil-and-water when the political discussion turned to the empowerment of women. And it was during the early stages of the 2016 campaign trail when the outlook on gender equality took an even more confusing turn not just in televised debates, but also in the news. A CNN report declared a “stunning” lack of women in corporate leadership roles worldwide. In a study of 22,000 companies in 91 countries, half had no female top executives. Within days, by contrast, the New York Times highlighted a study that found companies with women in at least 30 percent leadership positions adds 6 percent to a company’s net profit margin.
How does our society reconcile these two very divergent narratives of women’s roles in business? Exploring how women fare in the corporate landscape of the Puget Sound led this reporter to an unexpected destination: a dance studio.
Inside a brightly lit converted warehouse, a group of tween girls stake their claim on giant cushions stacked in the communal social area. They are busy giggling and chatting. Laptops littered about, they simply hang out as much as they work on getting ahead on school assignments while waiting for dance class to start. To look at them, gender issues in the workplace might not the first topic that comes to mind. That changes as soon as 12-year-old Alexandra Collins explains why she’s here.
“I’m learning tango,” she said, “but if you ask my mom, I’m learning to be a leader.”
Taking leadership from the dance floor and into the classroom, the sports team or the executive suite may be a leap for some. Not for Erica Atnip, who just opened RIZE where she is teaching girls and women to be lead tango dancers.
“I started as a follower just like everyone else,” explained Atnip, a professional dancer and instructor. “But when I started to lead, it changed everything.”
Atnip sees a direct link between women’s role in social dance and in society. The experience of leading in dance places girls and women in a decisive role, requiring them to move powerfully and solidly, readily translates to other aspects of their lives. She describes the transformation she observed repeatedly when teaching girls from different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds.
“When they begin referring to themselves as leaders, taking on the responsibility of making decisions, it is dramatic to see how quickly their confidence soars. Their ability to advocate for themselves and their emotional well-being grows stronger,” she noted.
Atnip points to a growing body of neuroscience research on the mind body connection, clearly indicating how much of our leadership behavior is actually embodied.
Parents noticed too. “My daughter discovered her voice, confidence in her ability and soon it was reflected in her attitude toward learning at school,” said Marine Nyugen, whose daughter, Natalie has been enrolled with Atnip for three years, following her from one teaching venue to another. “To learn to be fearless is the most valuable lesson my daughter will ever learn.”
RIZE was borne from Atnip’s rise through the world of professional dance which was brought to a suddenly halt when she was struck by a minivan.
“I was suddenly focused solely on healing from a traumatic brain injury, broken bones, and torn ligaments,” she recalled. “I glimpsed a path to make myself and others stronger – in body, mind and soul – through dance and the determination to pursue this model of teaching in a much bigger way.”
The model doesn’t end with dance. RIZE offers a range of classes that push girls and women beyond traditional roles. A play area is open to young tots while mom takes yoga. In the back of the space, the faint sound of tools clanking against concrete can be heard. It’s the auto shop where Atnip’s vision for the center evolved from teaching vocational skills to creating a small business opportunity. The idea has been well received by RIZE clients and shop customers.
Two teen girls and a middle-aged woman assist Mose Barrera, who owns her own auto repair shop in West Seattle but is spearheading the effort to teach car maintenance to RIZE members.
Whitney Dillon, 44, wears faded overalls and steps aside to grab a water bottle. She explains that she is learning how to change the oil on her own car at RIZE to save money after a financially devastating divorce. “My husband used to do it for us, and there’s no reason I can’t, I want to save money and there’s no reason to rely on other people to do it,” she said.
“My vision is to empower girls and women wherever they are in their lives,” Atnip added. “I want RIZE to show them that all paths are open to them and to reinforce their confidence to move forward in any direction they choose.”
ARTICLE TWO: RIZE – four years on
SEATTLE METROPOLITAN MAGAZINE
Leading on the dance floor to take the lead in the boardroom
Bright light streams through a large airy room in a South Lake Union collective workspace. It’s Saturday morning and a professional development workshop is about to begin. Hot coffee and snacks are on offer for two dozen participants who start to trickle in. Two women move about the room, organizing the space. But instead of lining up tables and chairs, placing pads and pens, and passing around projector handouts, they are moving furniture out of the way, to the edge of the room and clearing the floor. An iPod is plugged into the sound system and tango music fills the air.
“This is a fun, engaging and effective way to work with business women who want to sharpen their leadership skills,” says Erica Atnip. The founder of RIZE, a women’s empowerment hub in Georgetown will be spearheading the workshop, which boils down to an unconventional and intensive tango lesson. “We call it ‘Lead In,’ and it empowers women through movement and dance.”
It’s a time-worn adage: It takes two to tango. Building on this premise, Atnip believes leading in tango offers women a lot of important lessons that translate into other parts of their lives.
The Lead In workshop is an extension of dance classes offered at RIZE, launched in 2016. RIZE, hailing itself as a place “where women learn and lead,” provides an eclectic mix of training that goes beyond the dance floor and yoga studio to an adjoining auto shop and carpenter’s workshop.
“The entire project was borne of the idea that women are powerful, can take any direction they choose, but they also needed a safe space to explore their options,” Atnip explained. Tango, with an emphasis on putting women in the lead role, was a core offering when RIZE Center first opened its doors. “As a teacher, I discovered how powerful and natural it was to be in the role of the leader and I saw the way it transformed my students. And the research on neuroscience, movement and leadership was confirming what I was witnessing in my own studio.”
Social dance has been used in cities across the United States in the effort to address social issues. In LA’s most violent cities for example, ballroom dance classes are teaching troubled youth empathy. And the results are tangible. In a 2014-2015 survey of L.A.-area school principals, 66 percent reported an “increased acceptance of others” among their student bodies, while 81 percent of students said they treated others with more respect, following the program.
“[Dance] is incredibly effective in terms of social-emotional development and in terms of being able to incorporate kids from different backgrounds, different ethnicities, different social backgrounds and have them do something common,” said Rob Horowitz, the associate director of the Center for Arts Education Research at Columbia University’s Teachers College.
Tango lessons as a professional development model might raise eyebrows. Yet Seattle is a town that supports two trapeze arts schools, so it’s not surprising that the Lean In workshop has raised considerable interest.
“We’ve booked workshops across the city every weekend for the next eight months,” explains Atnip. She points to an additional benefit the workshop offers, not to the participants themselves, but to girls in underserved communities: 20 percent of all registration fees go toward scholarships at RIZE. “I tell everyone who signs up that Lead In comes with strings attached, in a positive way. We’ve raised enough money to date to help more than 200 middle school girls. It’s about women supporting women—of all ages— and it’s a great way to pay it forward.”
by Jacqueline Koch | Apr 7, 2016 |
By Christopher Ross
Content marketing has become a huge industry with many players including a vast number of service providers, proclaimed experts, trade journals and conferences. It really is the next big frontier in marketing.
Today there is not a marketer, brand or business who is not trying to advance some form of content marketing strategy. What they have all figured out is that content marketing is not merely about selling, but about telling a story, starting an actual dialogue and trying to develop a relationship that makes the consumer want to stay engaged, and better yet, want to come back.
While telling a story to engage the customer might be new to marketers, it is the cornerstone of what publishers have been doing for centuries. Greg Satell of the Harvard Business Review said “marketers do need to think more like publishers, but they also need to act more like publishers if they are ever going to be able to hold an audience’s attention”.
Wouldn’t it make more sense for publishers to wrap their heads around how they could sell their storytelling strength to businesses as a way to generate a new revenue stream? The argument can easily be made that the publishing industry has more legitimacy and qualification to participate in the delivery of content marketing and receive its share of the pie.
Currently many businesses are creating their own in-house capacity for content marketing while others are hiring outside agencies or even leveraging a burgeoning labor pool of virtual writers. However, in this mad dash to find the skills and resources to plan, create and sustain all the content needed, why wouldn’t these businesses consider turning to publishers? This is an industry with the proven strengths and successes in this area.
Publishers may see this trend as a logical next step to generate more revenue from an infrastructure already in place. From an opportunistic point of view, the publishing industry is extraordinarily well-suited to deliver content marketing services for three reasons:
by Jacqueline Koch | Apr 7, 2016 |
Boost! writer, Estelle Pin, recently visited our client, EcoBalanza’s Seattle-based workshop and captured her experience in this beautifully written piece that illustrates the power of words to connect more deeply to an audience.
It’s not a factory—that’s the first thing you need to understand about EcoBalanza. There are no machines, none of those loud repetitive industrial noises, there’s no chemical or metallic smell. When you walk into the space at EcoBalanza, there are five craftsmen and women, working together, laughing and smiling together, and creating beautiful works of art, quietly, by hand.
Some pieces are quite large: a bedframe for a king sized bed, fully upholstered, is one of the recently completed works, waiting for some finishing touches. It takes up a large corner of its own, and when it finally passes all of Aimee’s meticulous inspections, it will go to its new home, for some glamorous person in Europe, who likes their headboards 8 feet tall. The piece I fall for during my visit is also a headboard, more curved and romantic, also upholstered, but drastically different in style, and probably half the size. I imagine this client and I have a lot more in common.
Nearby, layers of wool are being stitched together with one long big needle, to make the cushion of a chaise. The fabric for this one is a rich cherry red. I run my hands over seams of finished pieces, awestruck knowing the hours of labor that go into each stage of construction—more so, when I feel the tension inside each frame. These pieces feel sturdy, solid, but soft, welcoming. I sit down in a completed loveseat that waits by the door for packaging, and Aimee raises an eyebrow at me, giving me a moment to soak it all in before asking for my opinion. My positive review leaves her glowing.
EcoBalanza is a labor of love
It’s clear that for her, it’s a labor of love. Aimee moves through the workshop with an excited hop in her step that keeps her more airborne than grounded, pulling me towards this piece of wool, or that piece of leather, or this fully finished couch. She has me touch everything, feeling the materials that never see the light of day once sandwiched into layers inside fabric. Her eyes catch every detail, and when I reach for a round of wool, she quickly redirects me to another, of higher quality—the one I originally saw has to be returned, it doesn’t meet her standards.
She explains every step of the process to me, showing various stages of construction, and answers every question I can think to ask. The whole time, she’s also switching back and forth to Spanish, as she watches over her crew, and makes minute adjustments to their work.
I excuse myself to explore a bit, though the space isn’t so huge that exploring takes me very far. There are shelves piled high with materials all the way to the ceiling, some 20 feet above us, and every inch of usable space is being put to work in some way or another. I find a pile of vegetable-treated leather in every color you can imagine. It’s softer than I can describe, like passing your hand through ethereal space, and the green is especially brilliant. I notice some frames for pullout couches, Aimee explains later that those come to her pre-made—metalwork is probably the only thing they don’t do here.
Before I leave, Aimee shows me one last thing. She brings it over cradled in two hands; the foot of a couch. It’s only about 4 inches long, hand tooled on a lathe and stained. She hands it to me, like a sacred artifact, and she’s beaming with pride. “Look at this, look at these colors, look how this stain has come out”. And she’s right, it’s beautiful. There are warm tones, cold tones, streaks of lights and darks, more complexities in this one tiny detail than in half of my apartment.
And it’s all like that. Every piece, every component, more varied and beautiful than you can ever really appreciate. What Aimee Robinson does, every day. In a small workshop in the heart of south Seattle, is create art in the form of furniture. At EcoBalanza, every choice is intentional, every detail attended to, and every need is considered.
Learn more about EcoBalanza
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