www.h2onewmedia.com

Social Media for the Middle East's Entertainments Industry

A Chief Marketing Officers introduction to increasing revenue's and reducing marketing costs using social media automation.

Forward

More kids watch You Tube than TV these days, I am 35 I watch more You Tube than TV these days. I have around 4000 original music artists on my IPOD many of whom I don't listen to. I am being constantly introduced to new ideas, videos, film and music through my network of friends on Facebook, it seems as though these days that I am spoilt for choice when it comes to my entertainment. Last week I discontinued my Television subscription and I am now in the process of hooking my TV screen up to the internet so I can watch online videos and films through my apple mac.

So why can I not download Middle Eastern artists, where is the Middle East going when it comes to social media and entertainment and what do they need? I pondered, I researched and I wrote this based on my experience of working with a number of entertainment companies in the Middle East. I hope it will serve as an introduction to social media for those that are considering what they need to do and how they need to do it.

Steven Vaile
CEO & Founder
H2O New Media

/ Get Social

 Table of contents

 

Forward 2
About H2O New Media 4
Online Communities for the Entertainments Industry 5
Getting the right consultant 6
Entertainment Enterprise Social Media 7
Definition of the application functionality 8
Using Social Media for artist promotion 10
Using Social Media to promote TV & Film 11
The ROI of Social Media in Entertainment 12

About H2O New Media

H2O New Media is a full service online media technology consultancy & professional services organisation. H2O are specialists in providing extendable PHP application development services for client's websites, web based applications and online publications. Simply put we are your partners for all things Web related. We provide a complete online solutions portfolio for our customers which include:

Online Strategy consulting
Web Development & Design Services
Social Media Software Applications
Content Development
Online Video Production
Online Marketing
Online Advertising with the H2O Tigerfish Network
Online Media Buying
Customer Relationship Management Software

H2O delivers creative online business solutions that drive client leads, enquires and position your company at the front of relevant search engines. We provide social media platforms for publishers, the television and the media industry that focus on search engine optimised PHP extendable applications.

As a business technology consulting company we provide assistance on every aspect of sales and marketing automation for your business including how best to generate revenue from your technology investments. Importantly we operate a quality assured business focused on delivering real value to our clients which includes the capability to consult, define, deliver and maintain the whole lifecycle of sales and marketing automation.

Online Communities for the Entertainments Industry

As an entertainment company developing an online community supporting your celebrities, content, and your entertainments events not only simply makes sense its going to be critical to your survival in the future. Despite slowing economic conditions and the challenges of fragmenting audiences from ‘platform surfing', the predicted industry growth is firmly rooted in social media. Sectors are responding strategically to the challenging conditions with collaborative ventures, new content, new business models and new delivery channels. The highest growth new delivery channel to provide online content is Social Media. Intertwining Shows, music and entertainment product with your own online community and integrating with other popular platforms that can aggregate that content to their user base delivers competitive advantage, cost reduction and improved profitability.

The challenge of converging distribution platforms is being met with new alliances, where content owners, distributors and marketers work together to find more compelling offers for consumers. Frequently, these alliances are between traditional competitors, collaborating because there is strength in numbers and because securing a part of something is better than getting all of nothing.

To survive in the online world you need to be able to generate money from content and that comes from advertising, downloads, fan club memberships, merchandising sales and of course subscriptions which need to be delivered to content hungry consumers whilst driving affinity for your brand and products. It is critical that you deliver this within the context of a social community, simply because the new media is social. A social community not only drives brand affinity it also builds equity into your business, as an online content provider you effectively become your own media distribution channel cutting out the traditional media platforms that have helped you generate money from content in the past. You increase your revenues, reduce your costs and time to market and can find new niche vertical markets quickly.

Entertainment and media businesses need to increase access to their products by creating content that works across a number of platforms and can be viewed when and how a consumer wants. For advertising-supported businesses, the goal is to provide richer data about consumers to advertisers while still protecting the consumers' privacy. Marketing messages need to be targeted and embedded to achieve greater traction with consumers and the best way to deliver this is online. Online social media is fragmenting, the fastest growth in the social media industry is in the smaller affinity based platforms that target a specific audience and command a higher price for more targeted and quantifiable and of course innovatively delivered advertising.

Getting the right consultant

When it comes to defining a social media strategy for your entertainments business in the Middle East it is important to work with consultants that really understand the needs and requirements of the industry, that have in depth experience in scoping out, defining and delivering the development lifecycle to the culmination of a finished and workable application.

Do not rely on in house IT staff that are focused on maintaining the existing infrastructure and don't have the first clue about what is really going on in your industry when it comes to social media as its not an IT issue. The issue is primarily one of business strategy; the steering board should contain your CEO, CMO and your CIO as a matter of course.

Just the application is really not enough, for a traditional entertainments company the revenue model supporting the business completely changes. The return on investment for Social Media within the entertainment industry that you operate within needs to be qualified and mapped out prior to your company embarking on an ambitious project.

Primarily significant thought should be given to how exactly your platform will make money in the brave new world and what capital investment is required not only in services and software but organisational and process change prior to launching your new medium.

Understanding entertainment trends in social media is a pre-requisite; your company should be adequately briefed on market, competitive and potential future trends from well educated and professional consultants with the right domain experience. When it comes to deploying social media solutions the entertainment industry really has the most to benefit. Read our ROI information.

With business models migrating away from paid downloads in the future we work with you to define a market leading revenue strategy that will not only improve your sales but will increase your costs dramatically when compared to traditional business models. If you are a record company, a film production company, an entertainments events company or even an independent artist we can show you exactly how to make money and improve your brand equity with our social media consulting team specialist in the Middle East Entertainments industry.

Entertainment Enterprise Social Media

Social media in Entertainment is no longer a nice to have, quite simply it's a mandatory requirement for any entertainments company wishing to improve their reach, sell more products including media, tickets and merchandise and generate additional revenue from affinity memberships to fan-clubs and premium services such as early ticketing. Social Media is the way that people communicate in this day and age, social applications, websites, podcasts and online video distribution is the New Media for the internet generation.

Social media allows an entertainments company to provide online downloads connected to a shopping cart platform, fan club and premium memberships and of course generate advertising supported models for content distribution. Our services deliver a complete holistic approach allowing an entertainments company not currently using social media applications to embrace the new media and drive revenue online. With a full compliment of consulting services to define your business model and map out risks and opportunities, community based products to quickly deploy a social media application for your brand and the required design and development services you will need to customise those products to your exact requirements. When the platform is operational we can provide you with online marketing strategies and execution and of course targeted online advertising services to ensure that you start to generate revenue and more importantly a significant return on your investment.

Social Media for the Entertainment industry helps to reduce your costs (see the Return on Investment for social media in the entertainment industry) mainly by cutting the slack from your distribution and marketing costs. Not only can we assist you in reducing your costs by automating much of your sales and marketing processes and your distribution, ticketing etc you can also further reduce costs and improve efficiency using cutting edge collaboration and project tools that will further reduce your manual process overhead.

With relationships with leading social media platforms including Google, Yahoo, Facebook, My Space and many others we understand just how important collaboration and collaborative competition is in securing a companies position as a market leading Entertainments company utilising social media.

Definition of the application functionality

When it comes to delivering the right application a shopping list is always good to have. The community application can be deployed quickly customised to your exact requirements and should include at least the basic required functionality out of the box. That should be at least:

Fan club registration & community

An online community of fans, manage your fans, communicate by private messaging system, collect your fans demographics to understand where they are from and what they do, the community application integrates with the other elements of your website so you can understand who commented on articles, posted to forums and responded to polls. Manage fans with an intuitive community management application.

Members Only Area

A member's only area is provided for you to allow only certain content items to your community members. By providing access to your privileged access area only to your fan club members you can ensure you build loyalty with your fan base and keep them coming back for more.

News Letter

Communicate to your members with your own branded news letter application; quickly write news letters to your community updating them on new performances, news and provide them with an opportunity to buy tickets and merchandise online.

Video Uploads

Upload videos from popular video applications from YouTube and Clipo.TV a professional account from www.clipo.tv is included with your subscription. Simply upload your video to Clipo with no time limit and no watermark to provide a professional look and feel to your website. Provide professional video content that will engage your viewers and delight your subscribers.

Photo Gallery (Community Owner)

Upload photos to your photo gallery instantly to automatically show on your website. Photos automatically scroll on the front page of your website. 3 Photo galleries are provided as standard. One of which can be limited to members only.

Content Pages & Blog

Create a limitless number of content pages using a simple to use WYSIWYG editor, insert photographs into the pages. Content can be split into five distinct categories to be shown on your website one of which is your blog. Write in your blog and use RSS out feeds for other companies to bring your blog into their website.

Events Calendar

Quickly post your events into your events calendar, your members can view the events calendar by day, month or year to find out where you are, when you are performing and where the best parties are.

Commenting on articles

Commenting on articles allows your members to provide feedback. You can approve or delete comments at any time based on your preferences.

Fans forums

Fans forums allow your fans to network in a standard forum setting, with up to 10 forum categories configured on your fans forums you have the ability to respond, comment and communicate with your fans. Forums can be set so that they are visible to all browsers of your site or just your fan members.

Polls and Votes

Allow your members to vote on any number of key questions, quickly get feedback and generate polls to show on the front page of your website.

Streaming Audio

Stream up to 30 audio tracks from your website that can not be downloaded, stream partial tracks or full tracks from your website with an online audio player

Ratings System

Allow users to rate the best audio tracks and show the most rated content items in your websites front page.

RSS Out / Social Media Links and Social Book Marks

RSS Links on your news pages that allow users to subscribe to your information through RSS readers and to bookmark pages on popular book marking sites such as Digg.

Reporting

See how many visitors viewed your website, view the popular searches that led them there, what countries are visiting and the IP addresses of visitors.

Plug In Options

These are optional items that can be configured to run on your entertainments community.

MP3 Downloads Store

Sell electronic downloads from your website using a shopping cart system, get reports on who purchased on a Dailey basis and consolidated revenue figures. You can provide film, TV or audio downloads when purchased, teasers can be used to drive a customer's interest. Sell mobile downloads from your website, make money by selling polyphonic ring tones, and allow direct download delivery to any mobile telephone.

Merchandising / Ticketing Store and Checkout

Integrate your store to PayPal, 2CO Checkout or your banks credit card payment system to allow users to purchase online instantly.

Using Social Media for artist promotion
Using social media to promote an artist is one of the most effective mass communication methods available to entertainment companies. Starting with the process of the artist's discovery, before social media the ways that people could discover new artists were very limited and generally confined to mass media channels such as the Radio, Television and Print Media. Prior to social media to be "Discover" a new artist you simply had to go to the right clubs to check out emerging artists or films, Social Media changes that. Now with the correct search engine optimisation and consultancy team behind you, a company can place you at the top of You Tube; ensure you are highly subscribed on popular bulletin boards and that your information is seeded into the right social media circles.
The way that we interact with music and film has also changed. Most social music sites are based on play lists that users can create and share with their friends. Mashups, collaboration and free downloads are changing the way that users interact with Music. By providing open licensed content you can be assured that your music will be heard and your reputation and profile will subsequently increase.
Online purchases are influenced by friends and peers more than anything else, what makes social media so important is that instant availability of digital downloads. If you only like one track on an album consumers can purchase that track where before they may have not purchased the album resulting in increased revenue for the company. Entertainment companies can also seed free songs in social media and promote them through uploads to face book and other popular platforms.

Using Social Media to promote TV & Film

Social Media is equally important when it comes to promoting video content. Companies can provide selective downloads to film critics, film lovers and film sites that allow them to view a snippet of a movie to catch their interest prior to its release. The resulting media feedback circulates around social media platforms culminating in a buzz for a movie prior to its release. Of course you need to be assured that the movie you are realising is of significant quality, the net result of a pre-release of a bad movie is that no one will pay to see it. However your test audiences should cover this base.
Television users can participate in social media by familiarising themselves with the characters of a TV show further building an affinity base for the show. Taken from the excellent article by By Scott Meldrum a case study of the "Heroes" TV show on NBC shows exactly how they are leveraging social media, and particularly social networking websites and applications, to drive awareness and tune-in.

"This show suffered the sophomore blues last season. There was a downturn in ratings and NBC is looking to this third season to re-ignite the fan base with faster-paced action, deeper character storylines and, something we all seem to be craving from our favorite suspense-tinged TV shows these days -- answers. Unlike the rest of the shows I researched for this article, "Heroes" has the largest assortment of social media and applications out there.
• The show's fans run a number of Face book Groups. MySpace features a highly immersive branded profile page. Each of these outlets offers up dozens, if not hundreds of pieces of content, most of which are embeddable and/or viral.
• What Heroes Character are you? is a Facebook application that lets fans step into the shoes of their favorite character by answering a survey. The application assigns a character to you based on your answers. You can then display the result on your profile page as well as share the app with your friends.
• The Heroes Countdown application is available on most social networks and has a timer, ticking away the seconds, minutes, hours and days to the season premiere as well as embedded photos and other content. The countdown is displayed on your social network profile page for all to see and share.
• Heroes VS is a MySpace application served up directly from NBC/Universal and has a very rich interface, loaded with content. You can create your own Heroes VS in just a few simple steps! Choose a category and select an item from the 2 dropdown menus for each side of your VS. Then, type a question for the VS (for example, "Who is stronger?") and choose media from the library below to represent each side. Once you're satisfied, click "create" -- you'll then be able to take a side on the VS you've just made, and campaign to get your friends on your side as well! "
http://www.imediaconnection.com/profiles/iMedia_PC_Overview.aspx?ID=3139

It's quite easy to see how by using social media marketing strategies a Film or Television company can promote its brand to drive significant revenue results.

 

The ROI of Social Media in Entertainment

There are many metrics to help an entertainments company quantify the return on investment available by using social media platforms. However it really comes down to a number of key factors that help to both reduce costs and increase sales.

Reduced packaging and distribution costs through the use of digital downloads direct to the consumer, distribution costs for any entertainment company producing DVD's or Audio CD's are huge, especially when you consider the supply chain from the production to the consumer in store. Using digital downloads entertainment companies can reduce their supply chain costs by as much as 80% especially companies that distributes audio files to be burned to CD in store.

Infrastructure costs are significantly less for a social media based content provider, where as prior to You Tube and the internet a vast investment in a broadcasting infrastructure was required now content providers can simply publish to the web for their content to be consumed as per the users preferences. No lost advertising revenue due to missing a show, shows on demand ensure advertisers and getting maximum bang for their buck when it comes to sponsoring a show.

Improved sales through social media are still being quantified by many entertainments companies; it is quite simple that the viral impact of a release when properly executed on a social media platform dramatically improves sales at a higher margin due to the reduced distribution costs.

Expansion of revenue opportunity due to building affinity groups around a brand, extra revenue opportunities include fan club subscription, premier memberships, early release opportunities and ticketing for live events not to mention partial sales through single track downloads, with social media the sales opportunity and the distribution and marketing channels for your products grow exponentially as a network picks up on a new trend.

It's a fact that social media now attracts more than one in twenty web visits; with this volume you can be assured that products will find their way to the right group. A company with a social media outlet for its content also becomes much more attractive to potential advertisers that are increasing required to show demonstrable metrics for their advertising budgets. Social media allows advertisers to get metrics and figures and tie them back to consumer demand which strengthens your position as a content provider competing for advertising revenue.

Increased ticketing sales can be driven using social media quite simply, using social media tools means that your events become well promoted to the right target audience resulting in higher volumes of sales with a reduced marketing cost. By targeting your existing fan base, you can ensure that the leading champions of your affinity group are satisfied first which further strengthens the bond between brand and consumer.

Reduced Marketing costs are derived from much more targeted and effective advertising for your content. Many chief marketing officers in entertainment companies do not realise that when running a traditional media campaign that they are paying for untargeted "slack" advertising. To quantity these consider running a print campaign in a popular magazine for a hip hop event or new CD release. The advertiser is paying in effect paying for the message to be conveyed to people that may have no interest in that genre of music. Consider the return on investment in comparison to running a direct email campaign to a Hip Hop social community where all users are specifically interested and passionate about Hip Hop music.

The reduced media costs don't have to simply relate to print, they can relate to Television, Radio or even internet advertising. By using social media to target specific a niche groups already interested by means of membership, keyword or members attributes you appeal to a much more qualified and targeted audience. Your campaign ROI is much higher, your media costs are reduced significantly by as much as 80% and your message is virally spread throughout the group member's immediate and extended network many of whom by nature will share the same interests in music, film and entertainment.

To explore how your entertainments business could take advantage of social media contact H2O New Media today and ask to speak with one of our Entertainment consultants.

www.h2onewmedia.com