Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Will Overstreet, CEO of Voices Heard Media (Part 4)

SM: How do you charge? What’s the model for companies to work with you?

WO: Our products … basically, you can license one product, or you can license all 12. For some of our products, it’s $200 a month, and some of them are in the $2,000 range. We work with those customers usually on a yearly to 24-month contract. Then we might work with a company that has one contract with us for a product, and we might be within 10 different divisions or 10 different shows or 40 different divisions of that company with individual contracts working with those different groups. That’s what I mean by partnering. We’re not just selling into one division. We work with multiple partners and layers within a company, which gives us a better perspective — understanding of what they’re trying to do, how it fits into the strategy. And then we work with customers around doing customizations for branding purposes or for pulling in a sponsor, helping them to do that. And then we offer execution and strategy in service offering, too. We sit down with them, say, hey, what are you guys trying to do, and how can we help you execute that?

SM: How many customers do you have?

WO: It’s in the 20 to 40 area, counting big and small.

SM: You have 20 to 40 customers?

WO: Yes. I’m not counting up some of the small ones; that’s why I’m giving you a range. You know, 10 to 15 big ones and then some smaller groups along the way.

SM: OK. Got it. Anything else that you want to comment on in terms of trends you’re seeing in your industry?

WO: Yes. The big trend that I think, and our company is working on a lot of in R&D, is being able to understand the user by what he does. So, when users do talk to one of our customers, ask questions or participate, what does that say about them? Who are they? What are their profiles? What are their states of mind? There’s a lot of information that you can gather from very small pieces of information if the users participate and freely input it. You know, for us, it’s more and more not only how do we help the customer understand the audience as a group but also how can we help them isolate and focus on individuals or groups of individuals when they need to. They need to know, they need to be able to see the big picture and sometimes be able to narrow that picture down. They’ll see who are these individuals who are passionate about our products or are talking to us? What are their responses, and what kinds of responses are we giving by our options?

SM: So, you’re going in the direction more of the social media analytics area, which is, again, an extremely crowded field. There are tons of people, just like there are tons of people doing these social media campaign managements. There’s a lot of people trying to do analytics, trying to understand the audience. So, how do you see that landscape? Have you done any kind of segmentation or bucketing of that landscape? What is your interpretation of what’s happening in that world?

WO: Well, there are a couple things. Our interpretation of it is we’re not trying to reach out right now and survey all of social media, all of Facebook and all of Twitter, to see who mentions you. Our focus is on the people who want to interact with you directly? Who are those people? The reason we’re doing that is because we see an opportunity around how do you better target content? How do you better target messaging? How do you better target advertising back to those individuals on an automated basis based on computer generated analyses and profiling? We look at it still around the effort of the conversation. We don’t look to survey the world. We’re looking to perfect – or try to perfect – communication with the people who are talking to you and be able to harness that power of, like I said, take the big picture, see the audience participating but then also to be able to respond with a more customized approach that you may create 10 messages back to users from one question, and each one of those answers goes out to a different profile, and the answer’s worded slightly differently to appeal to a different age group or sex or part of the country so that you get the most receptive audience that you can when you have that moment to reply to them.

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