Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Will Overstreet, CEO of Voices Heard Media (Part 2)

SM: Interesting, very interesting. Now, what is it in your background that gives you the understanding of natural language processing and all this stuff?

WO: Ha,ha. Nothing. It was something, like I said, from my background, it was when I started the company – and even before I started the company – it was just something I noticed that happened and knew that people did. And basically, I went out and found programmers and people who knew that world to be able to see is this possible? And then to how do we build something to accomplish this goal?

SM: Where are you located? Where is Voices Heard?

WO: We have a couple different offices. Our headquarters right now is in Knoxville, TN where I played college ball and got my master’s. And then, we also have a smaller office in Scottsdale, AZ.

SM: You know, everybody today is kind of – not everybody, but lots of people – are dealing with being kind of mini Web celebrities, and some people are real big celebrities. In a way, what your describing could just as well be my life because I write a blog, and I’ve written for Forbes, and I run One Million by One Million. All these kind of make me a similar kind of persona whom a lot of people around the Web want to connect with, and they all want to talk to me a bit. So, I fully understand and empathize with the kind of problem that you’re describing of certain hubs of people trying to manage these relationships with large numbers of people who have – on their side, they know me really well because they read my articles. I don’t really know them. But they know me really well.

WO: Yes. You’re exactly right, and they sense that they have a relationship with you, especially if they sent you an email or asked you a question and you responded. They then … not only do they like you, what happens is they now have a psychological, we have a relationship. We have a friendship.

SM: Yes. They think of us as friends. And in fact, because of the commonality that is in social media right now, that you’re a Facebook friend, or you’re a Twitter friend, or you’re a LinkedIn connection, there’s all this relationship terminology that’s built into the social fabric. So, there’s more of at least an illusion of a deeper relationship than it actually is.

WO: Exactly. Exactly. And so as a company, that’s where we started. And then we even started expanding out with other kinds of products that [lead us to ask] how do we get the user to participate?

SM: No, no. Tell me more about the kinds of usage patterns that you’re seeing in your clientele. Give me three or four case studies of specific clients where people are using your capabilities in interesting ways.

WO: Okay. Well, there’s a client I can’t name just because they don’t allow us to release it, but when they had a movie march, they basically had on their TV, they said, “Hey, before this movie premieres, we’re going to have the characters, the actors, and we’re going to be taking questions for them from the audience. And, you know, because what they wanted to do, obviously, was build up momentum and build up that anticipation and get people to want to come talk to the celebrities and stars. And that would transfer into them wanting to go watch the movie. And … they actually opened it up two weeks ahead of time, and they collected several hundred thousand questions during that time. It’s a matter of people do want to interact. People do want to talk, and you have to give them the opportunity. And then you have to have a scalable solution to be able to handle all the information that’s coming in.

So, that was one of them. We also had, with one of our other products, a company … we have some contesting and multi-media polling applications, AOL Moviefone. The Harry Potter movie was coming out and they wanted to figure out how to get people to be creative with video in other places like YouTube, but instead of them just staying on YouTube, how do I get them to come to my website and participate with that video they created and then create a viral surge or traffic to my website? And so what we did was set up users to go create YouTube videos, and then they had to come back to the website AOL Moviefone to embed their videos into our application. And then the top vote winner was going to win number one Harry Potter fan. What happens in those contest types of things is people then, if you make it easy for them to share socially, they will go out and actively recruit anyone within their LinkedIn, within their Facebook, within Twitter, and they will drive those people back to collect votes. And so by doing something very simple like that, what you can do is tremendously drive up how much traffic you’re driving back from social networks and links. And also, because of Google counting that in their SEO, increase your search engine rank with a musician or a group doing something around Alicia Keys at a private concert. Then they use the application to tell us why you’re going to be a fan of Alicia Keys. Their website, because of those links going out and pulling traffic back, actually moved above Alicia Keys’ own website in the search engine analytics while that campaign was going on.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Will Overstreet, CEO of Voices Heard Media
1 2 3 4 5