Involver wants to help companies market themselves to social network users

July 8, 2008 | Eric Eldon | Comments |

Hundreds of millions of people are using social networks. So, while traditional media weakens and goes through painful transitions, marketers are trying to figure out how to reach these newly-formed, massive and networked audiences. Involver is one of the companies trying to provide an answer. Today, it’s the pilot program of what it calls a “video marketing platform.”

The word “platform” is used by tech companies to mean any number of things. What Involver means by it is that marketers can stick marketing materials inside of online videos, distribute those videos to social network users, and get quantifiable data back about how the videos (and marketing materials) were received, that helps them continually improve their marketing tactics.

A marketer first takes a video they’ve created or gotten from somewhere else, that somehow pertains to whatever they’re trying to market. They load it into Involver’s software, then choose marketing features that will appear within the Involver video player — maybe a quiz, a survey or an email registration form. You watch a video, you take a quiz at the end of it before you decide to click away.

To reach social network users, Involver builds a social networking application around each video, such as this Facebook application for Serena Software, featuring a contrived but somewhat entertaining promotional video that also became popular on YouTube. (Serena is maybe a bit ahead of the corporate curve when it comes to using social networking tools — it also recently scored some nice press because it adopted Facebook for parts of its internal communication).

The application includes social features designed to create competition and community among its users. You can get points by getting your friends to do things like watch the videos. Those who get the most points are featured on a leaderboard in the application. This game-like feature can be seen in many Facebook applications. Involver also says it’s working with other Facebook application developers to get its videos into their applications.

Note: As with many point-driven Facebook applications, I’ve already been ratcheting up my score on Involver’s Serena application and I haven’t done a thing (I think?). See graphic.

Involver also provides an administrative section, so a marketer can track the video marketing application’s performance for things like how many users are watching the video the whole way through and then taking the entire quiz.

In sum, this is an early effort to create a way for marketers to track their effectiveness in reaching social networking users. Many large Facebook application developers are also experimenting with new forms of marketing and advertising through their applications, as is Facebook and its social networking rivals.

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About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • Hey Eric,

    Thanks for the comprehensive write-up, it was a great read! With regards to the Facebook applications, we've really focused on promoting community with our applications, and as such we reward many communal social interactions (like cheering on other members, or sending them stars as way of support) with points. While you do get a point bonus for signing up, it looks like the majority of your points came from the community -- I can't say it was all me, but I will claim responsibility for sending you one star -- which helped push you up towards 1000 points

    I also wanted to bring up one point, we felt really honored that a company like Serena, who is certainly ahead of the curve in corporate strategy on social networks, picked Involver to push their newest campaign (which is actually a sequel to the video that was popular on youtube). They did so because our plug-ins are built to convert views into actual results, which allowed them to use video marketing in a viral way and still keep strict measurement and results to judge ROI.

    I hope we can continue the discussion here, and I look forward to sharing new features and abilities with you as we continue to innovate our product.

    Thanks Again Eric,
    Tyler Willis
    Director of Marketing, Involver
    tyler@involver.com
  • Well, Tyler, thank you very much for the gold star! I look forward to hearing more from you guys.
  • jamalystic
    This is great news at a timw when enterprise are just confuse on how to monetize socil networks. Let's see how it unfolds in the coming days and then may be this will turn out to be the soution to this puzzling question: How to Monetize Social Media? Nobody Knows(http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=466&doc_id=155826&F_src=flftwo)
  • Thanks! We are really excited about the response we've gotten so far from our clients, and it's a big reason we are starting a Pilot program, so that we can help more companies find success in this landscape.

    Thanks for the nice comment!
  • Looks pretty cool to me, seems like a great way for companies to advertise their media content over the web without braking the bank.