Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Ted Murphy, CEO of IZEA (Part 1)

Influencer marketing and Content marketing are both big pillars of new media marketing. This discussion delves into those fields.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to IZEA.

Ted Murphy: I’m the Founder and CEO of IZEA. IZEA operates an online marketplace that connects creators – everything from journalists to bloggers – with brands for both sponsorships and content opportunities. One half of our business is helping brands produce content that may live on their blog or YouTube channel. The other half is amplifying content through the use of influencers.

Sramana Mitra: This is a trend that we’ve already seen – the use of influencers in social media to amplify content. Tell us about how you recruit influencers and what are you seeing in terms of trends in different verticals on what kinds of business models are emerging for brands to work with influencers in this mode.

Ted Murphy: The primary way that we recruit people is through our website and through the referral program that we run. We have been doing this for about 10 years. We have been doing influencer marketing before it was called influencer marketing. I started doing this back with Myspace and message boards all the way back in 2005.

Then we launched our first platform in 2006 that allowed bloggers to get paid from brands. I think that a lot of the people that are making money online now as influencers are probably pretty aware of us. A lot of them come to us and sign up on the platform. The trends that we’re seeing are really dependent on the type of brand that we’re working with. A lot of people get really excited about Snapchat and Instagram. Those are great platforms.

We certainly have seen an uptick in the usage of those for influencers, but there’s still a lot of focus on long-form content. That’s primarily in the form of blog posts or long-form videos that might be on a platform like YouTube. The difference is the decay rate on that media. A tweet is really good if you’re trying to communicate a short message and drive quick traffic. An Instagram photo might be good for getting some brand exposure.

With an Instagram photo, you have no link. You have a challenge there. The long-form content is much different in that the average blog post will deliver traffic to a brand for about two years. That’s what we calculated the lifetime value to be. You have that content, typically, indexed on search engines. It’s the same with YouTube. It tends to provide a value over a longer period of time for a brand. Depending on what type of brand they are, that may or may not make sense.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Ted Murphy, CEO of IZEA
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