A couple of interesting presentations @ the Social Media Breakfast
June 24th, 2008A couple of presentations from this morning’s Social Media Breakfast at Ryles in Inman Square are worth mentioning.
First, Overlay TV’s CEO, Rob Lane, presented his business. There are so many social media projects out there, especially video projects, that it is hard to make an impression on me, but Overlay TV has. Embedded overlaid links in videos enable viewers to not be passive anymore but start interacting and enriching the content.
Some of these links are tied to an affiliate program and that’s how Overlay TV makes some money. I think this business has a very bright future as marketing budgets are already shifting from advertising to product placement. This is very much a natural extension of this high margin high volume business.
The actual implementation of Overlay TV still has a lot to desire, especially the interaction design that can be quite invasive at times and remind me of popup ads. But this is a problem with a simple solution and the most important aspect is that they seem to be getting the business right.
The second presentation was from Emerson’s students. They shared a project they did with AOL to create a social campaign to revitalize their brand (good luck with that!). The approach is actually quite witty: they put up a site for people to share videos interacting with the AOL running man, where the running man acts as the AOL shrink. Some funny content out there (love the secret hand shake).
Two concerns with this though: 1- The content focuses on good ol’ memories people have with AOL and act as if they were talking about a dead person, how is that revitalizing the brand? (Mind you, I think it’s a close to impossible project) 2- The content is posted on its own proprietary website instead of leveraging existing platforms out there… Reminds you of something? Hmm? Yeah, I guess that would be the very reason why AOL went out of fashion…
With that said, and not withstanding the use by the 2 students of the terms “viral” and “user generated content” way too many times, it remains a very interesting project by promising marketing students.