It’s full-on summer, and festival and concert event marketing is a hot, sticky, fun way to engage your customers, create brand awareness, and generate tons of content at the same time.
The problem for most of us is the historically suboptimal process of shooting, uploading, editing and posting that content. The choices are: 1) quickly-produced, upload as-is content, 2) moving video and images to a laptop for re-sizing or, 3) huge files that need to be sent to your creative department for editing, approval and deployment.
Bet you never thought about using that DAM you’re sitting on for social media. What?
Imagine you’re a clothing retailer whose products are smoking hot with the festival crowds. You’ve paid for a booth at SXSW, and you’ve flown your team, your wares and your swag to Austin. The tent’s set up, water bottles iced, and you’re already gathering a crowd. Your three-person team is divvying up on-site sales and marketing tasks and they are busy.
Because she’s at the booth and doesn’t have to lug anything around, Lisa’s shooting customers, products and B-roll with a digital video camera. Leslie is in front of the stage using her iPhone for acts and crowd shots that will be used to engage off-site customers as well as draw festival attendees to the booth.
Those iPhone shots--intended for fast posts to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and SnapChat-- could be posted as is, but since the optimal image formats differ from channel to channel content that looks great on FB doesn’t look so great on Instagram.
Lisa’s video needs to be cut, tagged and captioned by the creative team at corporate for deployment to YouTube, your website, LinkedIn and the SXSW promotional team.
Because this is a team of cool kids, there is no way they are wasting time re-sizing video and images on a laptop or running to FedEx to overnight (at considerable weekend cost) a portable drive with 150 GB of video footage. Instead, from her iPhone, Leslie saves her stills and short videos to a folder that synchronizes content back to the DAM and engages an automated workflow that resizes and deploys to her chosen social media channels. (And if you’re worried about being the latest brand to have a personal post [oops] posted to the corporate twitter feed, you can always build in some approval steps.)
Lisa uploads to the DAM directly from her digital video camera. At corporate, your waiting creative team opens, edits, adds captions, and gets approval. The DAM, being all-knowing, understands that Flash will not play on iPhone or iPad, can encode video for optimal play across platforms with one click, and deploy correctly-formatted videos. Content that could have taken all weekend to process is uploaded, cut and deployed in an hour (and tagged with hotspots to product pages on your website and social sharing buttons for fast distribution by your fans).
Speaking of your fans, don’t forget user-generated content.
There’s no online Kiss Cam, but your customers are clamoring for exposure and inclusion in your efforts, and you have a never-ending need for brand ambassadors. Let them show their love and loyalty by providing them with access to upload and share their videos and stills while allowing your team content control to keep the walk off the wild side. DAM application program interfaces (APIs) can be configured to provide easy-to-use tools to keep them posting for you.
What’s your DAM doing this weekend?