Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Will Overstreet, CEO of Voices Heard Media (Part 1)

“Voices Heard Media released new data results demonstrating that its suite of social engagement applications (the EventBox) has increased unique visitors to clients’ sites by as much as 49%. The increased traffic was the result of social sharing of events, such as contests, polls and Q&As, to social media sites by participating users. In sharing the events, the participating users lured their friends from Facebook, Twitter, social bookmarks and other social sites to client sites to participate in the events.” So goes the first paragraph of a press release from the Voices Heard Media website. Anyone who’s ever doubted the power of the Internet and social media for promoting a product, a service or a personal brand might be inclined to change his mind after reading a paragraph like that. But, as my interview with Will Overstreet reveals, Voices Heard Media helps its clients promote themselves in a truly unique way.

Sramana Mitra: Hi Will. The audience would love to have some context about you. Personally, what has been your path, just to get to know you a bit?

Will Overstreet: First of all, thank you for having me. My background is I played college football at the University of Tennessee and then was drafted by the Atlanta Falcons and played in the NFL for three years. I had some injuries, left there, got my MBA and started doing TV and radio broadcasting. Basically, during my MBA program, I came up with the idea for the company, which was based on my background in athletics and also my background in TV and radio. It basically, came out of both of those groups. How do you deal with large groups of fans? What I realized was if I talked to somebody during a program or after a game or practice, I would spend 20 seconds with him answering a question or signing an autograph. I would see that individual come to other charity events, come support me at other events that they would go out of their way to come and see me at. Most times, that next time they would have seen me, they would have bought an item of mine, a jersey, a football card for me to sign. So, that was an interesting tie in. But not only that, I would hear off to the about how they would talk about me to other people in line or friends or family, and they would have done this research, and they would talk about our relationship, which for me was 20 seconds, they talked about it as if we had this deep, long friendship and been raised together, basically.

So, as a company, I realize, that’s great that you can have these one-on-one connections, but when you get to certain size or scale, either as a celebrity or company or show or whatever it might be, all of a sudden, you have thousands of people who want to communicate and connect with you. So, how do you scale to meet that demand? When you do broadcast radio or anything like that, you realize that people ask very similar questions. They use different words, but they have similar thoughts. So, we built a system to use natural language to take in people’s questions, group them together and then group them in order of – if 1,000 questions came in and 100 of them are asking this, be able to show our customers, if you have five minutes, answer this one question, and you’re going to be answer 100 people’s question and not just one individual.

SM: What you’re saying is using your system, somebody who has to manage large masses of fans and questions and so forth can create a Web self-service answering service, essentially, to all these questions.

WO: Yes. They can create that or, for instance, all of our customers use our platform to interview people. So, if they had a CEO or star or whoever it is who thousands of people want to connect with, they can easily say, send us in your question or type in your questions now and with our system, they can look at that and say, “Well, I’ve got five minutes with this individual, so I’m going to interview her with this question because that’s what best represents my audience.”

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Will Overstreet, CEO of Voices Heard Media
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