Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Will Overstreet, CEO of Voices Heard Media (Part 3)

SM: Interesting. I’d like to ask you some mechanical questions now. Can you talk a bit about Google’s policy for search engine ranking, and how does it take into account these kinds of social media mentions and activities and links and so forth?

WO: Ah, you’re going to get me there because I don’t know all the technical ins and outs on that one. I just know from how it’s been used and those counting the links out. When someone shares something from our platform, it creates a link into those social networking pages that drives back, so it’s creating an increasing number of links that tie back to your page as well as the people mentioning you. And then in one instance an individual created a video, and it got virally picked up by about 50 of the top blogs. They were sitting there talking about why this person had created this video. All of those aspects together, I couldn’t tell you which one was the lynch pin that really did it. But it’s a combination of the links out with the increased traffic coming back and all of those things that have taken place. Sorry I couldn’t help you more with the technical part.

SM:  I understand. Are you familiar with WildFire?

WO: Yes.

SM: It seems like there’s a lot of overlap between the kinds of stuff that you are doing and the kinds of stuff that they are doing. Could you throw some light on how you differentiate? And the industry as a whole, this industry that’s been developing over the last few years of managing what’s come to be known as social media campaigns is actually moving along very nicely; can you talk about how you see that industry?

WO: I think one of the main ways that we differentiate ourselves is we do have competitors that we compete with, with different products, but within our platform, we have 12 to 13 different products. So, a customer can come to us, use the same admin and do where they may have to have three or four providers, they can use our admin and create it through all of that functionality.

SM: What kind of functionality are talking about here? WildFire also has a full spectrum.

WO: Yes. I mean contests, sweepstakes, trivia applications, polling, the Q&A applications, like I said, with that natural language which we own the patent on. There’re a few more. Those are the main ones. We have a Twitter ingest feed product, a Facebook one, basically, a lot of different products that use the same admin, the same setup, they can create on the fly, any one of these products and put it up live all across their websites and onto their Facebook tabs and their mobile apps, any of those things. But I think where the market is and how we position ourselves can fall into the same place. People understand and know that they want to do social campaigns, and they understand that they want to create engagement, but they don’t know after that, how does this benefit us? You know, how do we relate this back to ROI, or how do we relate this back to a goal or strategy?

And so, where we find ourselves to be a lot different from any of the other companies is we work with these large enterprise customers and our channel partners and other groups to work as a partner relationship. We’re trying to figure out what is your goal around this campaign? How does it fit into a larger strategy and try to work with them in terms of how we rollout different products, what features we cut on and off based on the goal that they’re trying to achieve, whether it’s lead generation capturing, increasing sharing, whatever it might be. We really take the time to understand and work with the customers because we’re not a transactional sales company. We’re not just trying to sell you one thing and move on.

Our companies, the companies that we work with, they help us build next, you know, the next product, the next part of our platform. So, we really work with their teams from marketing to sales to product to really go above beyond where maybe should stop. But our goal is to be a high-end service to these enterprise customers. We think that’s necessary because, at the end of the day, if somebody can’t relate back to how does this help us; what’s the strategy, then all we’re doing is cool, and cool doesn’t last very long. That gets cut out of the budget really quickly. Our goal with our customers, until this tool matures along the way, is how do we help them tie in social engagement and engaging applications and different events into their real-world goals and tie this together so we can understand why we’re there and why they’re executing that.

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