Using CrowdEngage to Get User-Generated Videos for your Company

For any company who wants to use the web as a marketing and communications channel, listen up:

It’s no secret that you need fresh video content, and creating good video content consistently is no easy task.

It’s very time consuming, and most of the time it’s extremely expensive if you hire an advertising agency.

One tactic that some companies have embraced, are consumer generated content contests or campaigns.

That way, you can leverage the voice of your best customers while getting fresh content!

Consumer generated videos help companies scale, and promote original content in new and fun ways, that are benefiting both the company and the consumer.

The problems with running a contest on one of the other platforms?

You do not control the videos
Advertisements being placed on videos
No easy way to run contests or campaigns that aren’t stuck in a silo

You are at the mercy of their agenda. You’d have no control of the videos if you tried to run a contest on YouTube (not to mention they’d be littered with ads). There is no platform that allows you to collect videos that you can use, that don’t have advertisements, and are

CrowdEngage solves all of these problems with our simple platform.

You control all the videos your consumers upload
No advertisements, ever
Easily share a single campaign across all of your networks

We give you a dead-simple solution for making contests that garner awesome consumer videos.

But the best part about running engagement-driven campaigns on CrowdEngage, there are some major benefits. You create a fun, engaging experience for your customers by being innovative and new. It gives you the opportunity to strengthen your brand- and helps you build stronger, more meaningful relationships with your customers.

Word-of-mouth advertising weighs much heavier on people than seeing a generic ad, and studies show 90% of people believe brand recommendations from their friends. With the growing number of separate social networks, and tools/apps that are built upon them, there is no major shortage of ways to run contests or campaigns.

Here’s what you need to know to create a contest here on CrowdEngage, and get video content for your site:

Start by Determining the Goals

There are many different goals that your company can set for your contest, but it’s very important to identify what you want the end result to be. It’s best to use something that’s measurable so you can easily figure out which contests worked, and which didn’t. CrowdEngage is simple and flexible enough to help you focus your goals, no matter what industry you might be in. It can be one of, or a combination of, the following:

Aim at generating specific content If you are looking for a very specific video, then you want to focus the contest around giving the consumer’s explicit directions for the content (maybe a script).
Collect as many videos from consumers as possible Maybe you need a lot of content for testimonials, or feedback on a new idea, setting your goals to collecting as many videos as possible can be one way to go.
Generating brand awareness If you’re looking to tap into your sales funnel, then you should offer a reasonably substantial prize in exchange for your consumers efforts.

Fostering brand loyalty is the way to expand your brand equity, so it’s better to focus on the long term engagement. Try to view your contest as a way to create strong relationships with your community, who can ideally become loyal dedicated brand advocates. As opposed to making a some quick sales, your company is better served with an investment in growing your digital footprint and building a fan base.

Next, Fill out the Form

CrowdEngage has a simple one-page form to fill out, to get started.

Contest Information: Title, Description, and Rules

The name and description and rules are mostly self-explanatory. This is where you describe the task, mission, assignment, campaign etc.

Contest Details: Contest length, Maximum # of winners, and # of views required for prize

Here is where you chose how long you want to run your contest. The length of the campaign’s are up to you but, a word from the wise: longer contests can make it easier to procrastinate, which means you’ll get fewer entries, and a lot less public interest about it.

But on the other hand, shorter contests can produce lower quality entries because your customers will have less time to create their video. The best part about CrowdEngage is that you can run multiple campaigns (if you are on our Small Business account).

You can set up a sort of funnel, if you’d like. One big grandiose contest that’s 2 months long, and then short bursts of campaigns running weekly. It’s up to you- and it’s really going to open up your creative side for marketing.

Incentive: What the prize is, and how your customers obtain it.

Your prize, other than some kind of public recognition, is the main reason for your customers to submit a video. There are two parts: one for explaining what the prize is, and one for how to obtain it.

The second field is where you place the instructions, or the prize itself (ex: a discount code to a web store). If the prize is of substantial value, and there is verification needed- this field can simply be: “Please call (123) 345-6789 and please tell them you are a winner. We will send you the prize right away!”

This way, you can automatically reward those videos that reach the view goal- by making it very easy to communicate with your winners. Try to find ways to relate it to your product or service so that when you promote your contest you also, by extension, promote your product.

Finally, Promote Your Contest

CrowdEngage contests or campaigns are going to be a lot of fun for marketers. They allow the creative side to blossom, while not being tied down to any one single platform, channel, or social network.

The best way is to use your existing channels, the ones you are already are using. Go to where your customers are. If you have an active Facebook or Twitter, they are great places to start.E-mail lists are another, and this can even be used for brick-and-mortar locations- all they need is the website.

Just send them a link to your contest. They are able to see the details of the contest, see any videos already submitted, and submit their own (via webcam, mobile, or uploading an existing file). If it’s their first video for CrowdEngage, they will have to register very easily before submitting.

Automatic Winners

Winning videos are based off of unique views. This is to leverage word-of-mouth marketing, as a grading method. We have a secret (so it’s not easy to reverse engineer) algorithm to calculate each video’s view count. If there is any discrepancy in the view count, we can pull a detailed report of who watched the video. We can find out if a count has been tampered with.

This is a great way to have a big effect on your consumers, while not putting forth an incredible amount of effort. The only thing you have to do is approve or deny each video, before it gets placed in your campaign.

Then what? Promote the Videos You Get!

So now your contest is over. You will be receiving a receipt at the completion of it, and it has details that include:

How many videos were submitted
How many awards were sent out
How many views in total were generated from all videos
Who are the most influential users

Now you can use these videos however you’d like. They can be easily embedded into any other site. A blog post that outlines the best videos would be an awesome way to promote your favorite videos, and give even more recognition to your consumers.

Rinse and repeat- this is a strategic tool to help you grow your brand while generating video content. The campaigns stay available on your profile, and the videos are in your control (not the consumers who uploaded them).

Conclusion

All companies should be using the web to their advantages. Using a tool like CrowdEngage gives those companies a big advantage in content generation, as well as empowering the creative marketing minds to grow your brand.

Content driven contests give you a simple, scalable, and unique way to generate new content, and to empower your customers.

Over time, the brands who utilize CrowdEngage the best will have a library/database filled with video content from their customers.

We’re here to help you to engage your crowd (sign up here to be an early tester)

How brand loyalty turns into brand equity

If you asked any major organization, what their single ultimate asset in this competition heavy world, they would answer simply: “Our Brand”

Every business and organization puts major effort into asserting their brand image into society, trying to gain our acceptance and our money.

A brand is a name or symbol which is used to show the identity of your organization or product. The things that make your product stand out from the competition, typically help create a distinctive voice, or story to tell through branding.

How people act towards a particular brand is a proof of brand’s importance. There are certain factors that all contribute to creating a successful brand, with substantial brand equity.

Brand loyalty is the major factor that helps generate brand equity. Brand loyalty can be defined as:

“A customer’s unconditional dedication and a strong relationship with a brand, which under normal circumstances is hard to compromise.”

Brand loyalty itself is a created from several different facets:

The customer’s perceived value
Brand trust
The customer’s satisfaction
Their willingness to pay more prices
The repeat purchase behavior they show
Level of commitment

The most powerful of brands either command premium prices, or premium market share over the competition.

The brand can add significant value when it is well recognized and has a positive association in the consumer’s mind. This concept is called brand equity.Brand awareness, brand loyalty, brand perceived quality and brand association leads to brand equity.

Some perceive brand loyalty as ultimate goal and meaning of brand equity.

There definitely are other factors contributing to brand equity, though. Brand loyalty is the major one. It’s also the main factor that eventually embraces other relating ideas, all that start developing brand equity.

If you’re trying to build brand equity, you need to focus first on the factors creating/developing brand loyalty in order to create brand equity.

The customer’s loyalty is one of marketers main goals. But, building customer loyalty in flood of products and then sustaining that same rate is the topic in question for the marketers on the web.

It’s been known that frequent brand advertising helps customer in developing a high level of brand awareness and leads to a stronger association. It also imposes a better effect on perceived brand quality in mind of the customer. The positively perceived brand quality then leads to a higher level of brand equity.

So what does that mean? The more people see your (quality) ads, the higher perceived value you can have.

Another way to dissect the concept brand loyalty with two components: “Brand Intention” and “Brand Reliability”.

Both of these concepts develops brand trust, so that the customer purchases the brand again and again. This brand trust then in turn leads to brand loyalty, not the other way around.

To be clear, we’re defining the concept that brand loyalty is associated with customer behavior of the continued purchasing of the same brand.

Brand loyalty offer benefits, such as the customer willingness to pay more prices, they can cost less to serve, and it can increase the number of customers (by attracting new ones)! So focus on brand loyalty.

Brand equity is like evolved form of brand loyalty. This evolution can be seen in the way that a loyal attitude of the customer towards a particular brand:

When a loyal customer purchases the same brand frequently, a greater market share is the end result . A customer who’s loyal to a brand is willing to pay even more price for the brand. They are so used to your product, and have so much trust, so they show that willingness that you seek.

The benefits of brand loyalty include:

Lower cost of customer retention when compared with the cost of new customer acquisition
The lower costs linked with serving repeat purchasers
Increased revenues due to the willingness of loyal customers to pay premium prices, and purchase more.

All of these factors direct towards the improved profitability. Two pieces are directly associated with the concept of brand equity: “price premiums” and “market share”. The two pieces increase profitability of any brand and are dependent upon various components of brand loyalty.

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Brand equity is a multi-headed beast composed of these smaller pieces:

A customers willingness to pay more for the brand
Satisfaction with the experience with the brand
Create and foster loyalty towards the brand
Perceived quality of the brand
Self expression (identification) provides for the consumer .

Brand loyalty is the term associated with the behavior of consumer with the particular product, and it leads to the continuous purchase for that particular product.

Brand equity in general is the value associated with the brand.

Brand loyalty is strongly affected with the five elements which are performance, image, and trust in brand, value and feelings that are associated with the brand which makes it valuable for the customer who leads to brand equity. The strong quality perception results in brand loyalty and then brand equity.

By focusing on brand loyalty in more detail, you will contribute towards the brand equity.

This post is an attempt at explaining the relationship between the three dimensions underlying brand loyalty, which has direct effect on brand equity.

Results of studies done have mainly aligned with the experimenter’s expectations.

Findings suggest that willingness to pay more; perceived quality and brand awareness are the constructs that combine to figure brand loyalty, which in turn contributed significantly towards brand equity.

So it’s safe to assume that brand loyalty is viewed as a link in the chain of factors that indirectly connect the following: willingness to pay more; perceived quality and brand awareness with brand equity.

There is a close relationship between both brand loyalty and brand equity.

Any manager who wants to improve a firm’s brand equity should consider this factor and not focus only on customer-targeted marketing policies.

This result is a key finding; although BL has a direct positive effect on a firm’s brand equity.

To build loyalty is the aim of any organization because loyal customers are the most beneficial; they will buy more, and pay price premiums and so on. Willingness to pay more is found as an important antecedent of brand loyalty.

Brand-loyal customers may be ready to pay more for a brand because they perceive some distinctive value in the brand that is not being provided by any other alternative. Perceived quality is known to have a significant positive influence on brand loyalty.

Be trustworthy, be real. People like that, brands.

Interested in trying out a new video engagement tool that will help you look more trustworthy, open, and real? CrowdEngage is looking for more brands to test campaigns.
Please fill out this form

The True Drivers of Loyalty

A popular mistake is thinking that loyalty is all about improving your customer’s satisfaction

What makes customer loyalty such a mysterious creature?

I think customers are harder to reach and impress than they used to be. Many traditional marketing channels have been weakened as consumers pursue various “market of one” activities: ad-supported social networks, video games, movies on demand, and YouTube even allows skipping for some ads.

Brands go to extreme heights to engage and entertain

In the hyper-competitive Internet age, customers also have more pricing information and buying options than ever before.

But a number of misconceptions about loyalty have also led businesses, start-ups, and marketers down the wrong road.

The idea that loyalty is only about improving customer satisfaction is the most typical mistake. The frustrating truth is that what customers say about being satisfied turns out to be a poor indicator of loyalty. It’s about action.

Another misstep is thinking that a loyalty program is the only thing a company can do to improve customer loyalty.

Loyalty programs are one part of an overall loyalty strategy, but they lack the nuance that gives companies the ability to target the most profitable segments.

To attract and retain the most loyal and profitable customers, a firm must first understand the true drivers of loyalty—the customer attitudes that drive the different types of behaviors that must be understood and nurtured.

People deeply attach themselves to their favorite brands

1) Interaction/Engagement with the Product or service

How interested are your customers in the products and services you offer? Seek out the ones who deeply understand the pain your solving

Do they actively engage in loyalty programs? If your customer typically isn’t a fan of loyalty programs, think about alternatives.

Are they typically heavy users of the category? It’s best to focus on the bigger fish

And are they enthusiastic about the category in general? Brand enthusiasts are just that- enthusiastic.

2) Brand Devotion

Do you know how passionate your customers are about the brands they buy? If not, find out.

Do they identify themselves with your brand and start to self-identify with it? If not, find out why not.

Are your customers willing to pay a premium for a brand they love? If not, consider alternate ways to monetize.

Are they advocates for your brand within their family and social networks? If it solves their pain, they should be proud to help others with their pain.

3) Likelihood to Reevaluate

How likely are customers to re-evaluate their current buying choices? Look at things like churn rate.

What are the most important shopping triggers to your customers? Do your best to get inside their head, and understand what motivates them.

What hassles exist by switching brands? Make your customer love/use/need you so bad that it’s not easy to leave you.

By analyzing the behavior and attitude indicators of this framework, different loyalty segments emerge. Each with its own distinct loyalty drivers.

Brands that recognize their segments can improve their market focus and positioning, simply by identifying previously unseen “markets within markets”.

By taking this approach, you can help your business better understand what their customers are thinking and what motivates their purchasing decisions.

If you want more posts like this, I encourage you to sign up for the newsletter.

Let your customers tell the story of your brand

“A person can have the greatest idea in the world— completely different and novel—but if that person cannot convince enough other people, it doesn’t matter.”

Your brand is a promise you make to a customer. It’s a sworn pledge that the customer anticipates the community will keep based on the community’s reputation, the customer’s experience, and the experience shared by others.

And so, brands are built on trust and credibility. It’s all on your shoulders to provide what you promise – a quality product, service, and/or visitor experience.

A key to a great brand, is a great community. You can’t fake a great community. We’re looking to build a community around brand marketing.

I believe brand marketers are some of the most creative thinkers in the world, regardless of their specialty. Our professionals don’t just want to just look for a scheme, they want to foster their communities and who care deeply about them. They are creative tinkerers who have a need to be innovative, and be the ones in control of the innovation. That’s what our marketers are about. That’s the kind of brand we want in our society- ones that deeply care for their communities. That’s the kind of customer that we want related to our brand CrowdEngage.

Our challenge is as follows:

Foster our profound sense of mission.
Challenge each marketer at his or her own creative level.
Unleash one’s human potential to tinker, create, share, engage, grow, innovate, and more.
Capture consumers passion, turn it into your brand story, to help you achieve your vision.
Build a tool that is a yardstick of quality for all brands.

It starts with leaders

And brand creation begins with passionate leaders. Leaders like as Ray Kroc (of McDonalds), L.L. Bean (L.L. Bean), and Sam Walton (Walmart) all started small, but had vision, passion, and the leadership ability to build focused communities.

They were focused enough to create brands that became successful beyond what could be imagined. Building a brand is a lifetime commitment. A genuine brand is a “way of life.” It is understood and lived by every single person in the organization.

The power of video is undeniable, when were talking about things like conversions and engagement.

Videos from your consumers can help you form your brand, and help the community around your products/services thrive.

These questions will help you be a more effective brand creator:

What about our product is unique/distinctive?
Why can we offer a unique perspective?
Who are our customers?
What do we want people to think about us?
How will we achieve our desired perception?
How do we inform people about who we are?
How do we get people to believe and trust in our products and services?

Our Goals

For those of you who asked, here are the above questions filled out for CrowdEngage:

What about our product is unique/distinctive?
- We give you full control of your campaigns, and your videos.
- Can be used for promotions, marketing campaigns, live events, content generation.
Why can we offer a unique perspective?
- Were making “Brand Transparency as a Service”
- Were prepared for the video-revolution of the future
Who are our customers?
- Brands small and large
What do we want people to think about us?
- Hark work and persistent dedication
- Building for the future of things
- Constantly staying informed
- Extremely open, transparent, approachable
How will we achieve our desired perception?
- By steadily growing our own brand
- Design products for life-long customers
- Offer world-class customer service
How do we inform people about who we are?
- Fostering our own small (but growing!) community, and make it easy for new people to join
- Eat out own dog food (use our own product!)
How do we get people to believe and trust in our products and services?
- Provide excellent examples of how to grow your brand using our tool
- Deliver value consistently and increasingly
- Respected companies launching campaigns

We plan to build the perfect tool to grow your brand equity, by letting your customers tell the story of your brand.

Interested in trying it early?

Please fill out this form

The Crowd Engagement Platform is looking for early customers.

We’ve created a new tool that puts video-based brand engagement in your hands.

We’ve mixed the ideas behind social media marketing campaigns, with the crowd sourcing for videos offered from advertising agencies.

What types of people are we looking for?

CrowdEngage is for people who want to grow their brand using video.

You don’t need a necessarily large existing customer-base, you just need a loyal one. So we’re looking for the people who are awesome to their customers!

You can be any size. You can be any type of business.

If you have a brand, and you want to expand it using your very own customers engagement, then your going to be interested in the tool we’ve made just for you.

We can help you recycle the awesome feelings that happen when your customers fall in love with your product/service!

“Perception is Reality. What people think your brand is: that’s what your brand is.”

CrowdEngage is a simple social platform that allows you to create marketing campaigns or contests, that reward the videos you approve that reach a view count goal. The benefit of creating these campaigns is three fold:

You help create awesome brand transparency, by giving back to your best customers
Let your customers speak for you: you can embed videos anywhere on the web. That means you can craft campaigns for content that you want to see.
Spread brand awareness on a human level.

Is this a tool that you’d like to try?
Please fill out this form

We would love to talk to you, and to have you on board (for free) to try and launch a campaign that suits your brand!

Need to see how it works? Check out our first initial campaign here

The First Campaign ever Launched on CrowdEngage

Increase loyalty, acquire new customers, get existing customers to spend more, strengthen community, and other awesome stuff. Your campaigns are only limited by your imagination.

CrowdEngage is a video based platform, that can be used for consumer/brand engagement, as well as content creation engine.

We’re very excited to be slowly launching, and today marks the day the doors finally open (Wednesday, February 13th).

Ok, here’s the very first campaign to launch here on CrowdEngage (hopefully the first of many).

This short video clip might not be the most elegant or well rehearsed presentation ever, but that isn’t so important right now.

This is intended for family, friends, and early adopters who want to give feedback.

http://CrowdEngage.com/campaign/1

We are just testing the “consumer side” functionality, so if you were looking to create a campaign please leave your e-mail here to be notified the moment we’re ready for you.

And, not just everybody can join right now- we are only letting people who have a certain invite link sign up.

But, as a reward for reading this post, I’d like to reward you with an invite!

Your special invite link-http://crowdengage.com/signup/?invite=letmein

1) Sign up using the link above

2) Please leave a video of the feedback you have for us here: http://CrowdEngage.com/campaign/1. Let us know if anything is broken or confusing!

3) Once we finish processing the video, you will be sent (via e-mail) a link to your video.

Here is an example video that I left:

Here is one that my partner Tom left:

And here is one my sister + my niece left:

And you can view my consumer profile here: http://CrowdEngage.com/crowd/Jordan

Thank you everyone, and we hope to see a video from you soon!

How to tap directly into your sales funnel, while engaging on social media (using video)

On Facebook it’s not uncommon to see a company to say “Share/like this post to enter this sweepstakes, a winner will be chosen on Friday!”

They bore the hell out of me, as a consumer.

I either never trusted that my name was entered, thought that my chances were so slim it might not be worth it, or that the incentive to associate myself with that post just wasn’t big enough.

They sometimes seem like spam.

From the business’ perspective, these contests and giveaways are supposed to be driving whatever goal they want to achieve. Most times I’m confused as to what the business is trying to achieve, other than fishing for ‘likes’.

Fishing for likes doesn’t turn into money (at least not directly).

They might serve your business well, but I hate seeing that kind of engagement on my social networks. So do consumers.

Businesses using Facebook to try these tactics get “unliked” by me, or at least I trim down on the amount of updates I can see from them.

You know what doesn’t bother me?

When my friends send me a video of them on YouTube. I like seeing my friends content they create, and I probably trust their taste enough to watch. The power of video is undeniable, for marketing purposes.

Here is a pretty awesome video of a kid teaching us how to use a pogo stick.

Well, it turns out to be a extremely effective form of advertising for the pogo stick manufacturer. Word of mouth advertising is extremely powerful for brands.

Videos like this are all over YouTube. Just go search for “How to …” and if there are happy enough consumers, chances are there will be videos being uploaded and watched.

Can you use these concepts to engage with your consumers, and make money?

I think so.

As a business owner, a social media manager, an entrepreneur, or anyone who wants to grow their social media presence for their business- you just need to follow a very simple formula.

We want to not feel like spam, while utilizing word of mouth advertising.

Let’s allow your customers to do the talking, and the advertising.

1. Have proper expectations and goals

Every good marketing campaign has a clearly defined set of goals.

You should think about the aspect of your business, specifically identifying what metric you want to move.

For example, a good goal for a marketing campaign could be this:

I want to add 1,000 new e-mail subscribers to our e-mail list

But it can get better.. can’t it? Remember the name of this post is “How to tap directly into your sales funnel, while engaging on social media”. And yes, subscribers are nice, but it’s not going to affect our sales funnel directly.

So, let’s try to realign our goals so it’s related to our sales funnel. Let’s use an example

I want to run a campaign that generates $2,000 over a weekend.

Interesting. Now we’ve clearly set expectations that are directly tied to our sales funnel, and it even has a specific time-span.

Have an idea of how much product you need to sell to obtain that goal, and make sure it’s realistic.

2. Give them a good reason to engage

If you tell me to do something, or ask me to do something for you, it better be worth my time. And I better really like you.

I most likely don’t want to share your business status on my own wall. I look like a spam-robot.

Don’t waste your consumers time. You have to give them something they want.

The best way to do this is by playing it safe: give them something you know they love.

Do you sell a product? Do your consumers love it? Then make your existing customers an offer they can’t refuse. Give them 2 copies of your product, for something in return.

Let’s say you are a restaurant owner. Your customers love your food, and you know it. They rant and rave about the quality of the food and service all over social media, and on review sites.

Offer your most popular dish for free on 2 separate occasions, to customers who make you a good 30 second video and upload it to YouTube.

If the video is entertaining enough, or the customer is influential, That video could end up being seen by a lot people over-time. It’s well worth the 2 free plates of food!

3. Make that reason tie into your goals

Now, if we combine all three of these ideas into a single campaign, we have something special.

If we offer up a deal to our consumers, one that is so enticing they can’t say no, and we craft it right.. Something magic happens.

The incentive must tie back to your original goals, otherwise it’s not going to hit your own expectations.

So let’s stick with this restaurant example, and tie these three together:

“If you make us a 30 second video about how much you love our food, you + three guests eat for 50% this weekend!”

Now, to those customers who love your food, and were thinking about eating out this weekend, this might be a win-win for them. Thats great! It’s also a win-win for you because it’s generating revenue.

You get a great video to use for content, you make some money off the consumer.

Awesome! Rinse and repeat, and try to optimize for an even better campaign next time!

You can even have some fun with your campaign, and throw in a view requirement.

That would mean that your consumer wouldn’t be able to obtain the reward unless their video hit a certain number of views. This could be a nice fourth dimension to throw into the mix, but not something, but make sure your making the incentive worthy of your customer’s time.

The harder it is to obtain a reward, the more rewarding it should be.

There would definitely be some drawbacks of launching something like this on YouTube or Vimeo.

Sound like a lot of work, to go back and forth and have to check the videos? It would be.

What happens when all the videos get advertisements placed all over them? You’re videos turn into spam.

You can’t “collect” videos and use them at your whim. They get uploaded to the uploader’s channel, not your business’.

We’ve built a tool that solves all of these problems, and it’s called CrowdEngage.

You can launch a campaign very easily, with clearly defined goals and expectations.

You have full control of the incentive to entice your customers.

You have full control of the collection of these videos, as well as the free use of them as content.

There are no advertisements. There are no hidden fees.

At the completion of each campaign, you get a full report and statistics of how well you campaign did.

Sound like something you or your business would be interested in? Leave your e-mail below to be on the mailing list. You’ll be notified the moment it’s ready to unveil.

Why all businesses need to engage with customers using video

In the hyper connected world we now live in, it’s pretty much necessity for your business to be online.

If you have customers and you want to connect, it’s crucial you have a website.
I’m assuming if you are reading this, you understand the importance of a website to your business.

Oh yeah, social media too!

Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, Foursquare, are all staples of the future of the hyper connected world. They are tools for broadcasting, selling, advertising, branding, and more.

So, it’s not just a website anymore, its much more than that. You see “Like us!” or “Follow us!” everywhere you go in physical locations now. You’re going to want to use social media for maximum exposure, to grow your business.

These platforms are the powerhouses right now, but there could also be new ones over the next few years. They are products of the growth of technology, and the pace of technology is constantly evolving.

What some businesses do wrong

They focus way too much on the tools, instead of the engagement. Your focus should be on engagement, not likes or follows. Yeah they are nice, but 100 customers who love your business are much better than 1,000 who don’t care.

If you took notes from the behemoths on each network, it’s obvious that every business can’t follow an exact blueprint to get the results they desire. They do it all differently, but they each do it right.

But even with all the differences in their tactics and strategies, they have one thing in common: they are engagement focused. Each business has different metrics they are trying to drive, and engagement is the key to each one.

Google knows it, and a whole industry of SEO experts and guru’s will say it until they are blue in the face: content is king.

What does content do? It drives traffic, sales, satisfaction, and way more.

The power of a blog is no secret to big brands. It’s a relatively easy way to drive the above things, and ultimately grow the business.

But video has a special power. 85% of customers are more likely to make a purchase after watching a product video.

The power of YouTube is astounding, it allows you as a company to broadcast your story. You have full control of what content you upload, and it’s a very awesome opportunity for businesses to use this medium.

That is precisely why it’s necessity to use video to engage with your consumers. This is where we found a problem to solve.

Even though YouTube is so important for businesses, the potential of video is just being discovered.

There is a gap between these social media tools right now, when it comes to video.

None of them allow you to engage with your consumers well enough.

What if you want your customers to do the broadcasting, instead of putting lots of production money into creating your own videos?

Let your products and services get sold by the very people who buy them from you.

That’s why we built CrowdEngage. It’s going to allow you to launch video based engagement campaigns.

It works like this:

-You create a campaign (Create the task, explain the incentive, set the view requirement for incentive, length of campaign)

- Promote campaign link to your social media + website + in store (if you have a physical location)

- Your customers upload videos through a smartphone with a camera, or via webcam

- Approve / Deny the incoming videos.

What do you get?

- Videos straight from your consumers, about your products/services

- Powerful word-of-mouth advertising from your very own customers

- Automatically reward influential consumers

- Embed individual videos anywhere on the web

- Access into your sales funnel (depending on the incentive you created)

- Custom receipt with analytics of each campaign

- Ability to download raw video formats for high-res videos (only Enterprise level)

Here is a more in-depth explanation of what a campaign is like

So what is this CrowdEngage going to look like? You’ll have to wait a little longer..

We are currently talking to potential customers, getting feedback, and preparing it for the world to see.

If you leave your email below, you will be invited to the initial round of campaigns being launched.

If you have any feedback, please feel free to reach out to me personally on Facebook, Twitter, or e-mail.

How to: Log and tail with PHP without SSH

* works with shared hosting accounts and dedicated servers

Download Here: https://github.com/CrowdEngage/Easy-PHP-Tail-

Logging and tailing is a common method used for development. For example if you want to use ajax to send a POST or GET request to a PHP file, and you need to know what that file receives, or just want to log a non PHP error somewhere besides a database, this is the perfect tool for you.

Here’s what happening.

looks pretty simple and it is. If you need to do some quick development work, you can open the tail file and watch as the logger logs away, or you can have the log file there to catch any non php errors.

Upload the tail.php to your server, open it, tell it which file to tail then
open the tail.php in a browser and you will see the data in the log file and see changes to it in real time.

To log simply place this function on the files you want to log from, (examples coming soon)

log_data(‘test’);

function log_data($data){
$logFile = ‘log_file.log’;
$showDate = true;
$type = ‘NOTE’;

//append to log file
if($showDate){ $timestamp = date(“H:i:s – m/d/y”); }
$fh = fopen($logFile, ‘a’) or die(“can’t open file”);
$stringData = “\n” . $timestamp . ” – ” . $type . ” : ” . $data;
fwrite($fh, $stringData);
fclose($fh);
}

Download tail.php: https://github.com/CrowdEngage/Easy-PHP-Tail-

The over’s and under’s of starting a business from nothing.

I’ve never launched a business (..yet). This is a reflection on things I’ve learned since starting to build a business around our video marketing platform: CrowdEngage (12/2/2012)
Want to know what CrowdEngage is? Read this post

Over-thinking

I’m guilty of over-thinking most things. Can I do this? Am I smart enough? Are we using the right technologies? Do we have to be in Silicon Valley or NYC to be successful?

I waste a lot of time over-thinking. Progress is the only thing that matters. I try to just focus on getting things done, as best as my abilities allow me to.

I trust in my ability to differentiate between what I know- and I don’t know. That is a good thing, but spending too much time on anything without feedback I now consider to be over-thinking and it’s not very productive.

I definitely lost time overthinking about the importance of so many things. Hyper focusing on the wrong details is a major time drain. Keep your initial goals in the front of your mind.

I overthink about details upon details, always keeping in the back of my mind “This could fail.” It’s something I have to do to balance the insane amount of optimism I have, support I’ve gotten, and progress we’ve made since starting CrowdEngage.

I’ve learned how to curb my overthinking, and test my assumptions. Thanks lean startup movement!

Overwhelmed

Over-listening & Oversubscribing

When I first started off this journey, I knew I had no clue what to do. So I started by asking people who were willing to help. I started asking questions, and getting answers. I started to subscribe to people and ideas.

Then even more questions would come from those answers, but it took me longer to absorb the information and formulate my questions again. I kept doing this, and every round of questions I had, I started to see overlap. Ideas that were brand new to me just a few months earlier, were starting to become common sense- because I see the same gem of information in a different form.

There is definitely a point that I started to over-listen and oversubscribe to what people were telling me to do, or what they thought was possible. It morphed itself into this game, of trying to see through the noise of fantastic information that might not be exactly for us.

Topics on bootstrapping, fund raising, designing, developing a streaming video site, user experience, customer support, psychology of marketing, the technology trends, talking to advisers potential investors, etc…

If you literally sign up for things, you get your inbox filled up to your chin and it becomes unmanageable. If you emotionally subscribe to too many ideas from certain movements, they can also start to feel unmanageable.

All I know is I have to make progress. So oversubscribing to information was and still is one of my main faults. I’m getting better at picking what advice and mentalities are best for me to practice though.

Overload

Trying to do everything at once. Looking at the big scale of things when sometimes it’s best to focus on the medium or smaller scale, for psychological reasons.

Zoom in on details, zoom out for perspective on your progress. I’ve got a short attention span, so that I need to be jumping back and forth like that, which fortunately is helping us steer progress.

Trying to figure out the best way to do things is just overload on my brain sometimes. I’ve got a part-time job right now, but I’m emotionally distracted by CrowdEngage. I get stressed out when I mismanage my time for my job that I can’t make myself care about any more. Despite how much it bothers me that I don’t want to be a bad employee, I want to be a great boss even more.

I’ve learned there is no better cure for this feeling than progress on my dream. It’s as simple as that. When I feel like this, I look back and see what I’ve accomplished and it makes me think how much more I desire.

That is how I currently feel, in these “entrepreneurial-trenches”. I’m going to fight my way out of here or die trying. Overload is no excuse for failure. It’s only more motivation to concentrate on the plan.

Reconstructed Trenches

Over-promising

Deadlines are probably the worst when it comes to things I’ve learned in the over category. I’ve been so naive and misguided on so many levels, I just would spend so much effort trying to please the person I was talking to.. It started off with my parents, now it’s moved onto potential customers, investors, and advisers.

I’ve made mistakes, and have had some patient and understanding people to talk with. At this point in the life of our business, it’s so hard to timelines on some things.

I don’t focus on time nearly as much as I do concrete progress. As long as we work, and we have something to work with, we will start to discover our path. That is shaping out to be the case, which only drives us to work harder.

So be careful overpromising with things. I’ve realized that it’s much better to focus on specific progress as opposed to time, right now.

Under stress

Constantly. Emotional, psychological, financial.

I didn’t go the normal route after college. I had a part-time job that I knew I could carry over to post-graduation, and I started working hard enough on my idea to convince my fantastic parents to sign my lease for 1 more year. That means I don’t have to worry about my rent, and I could spend a lot more time on CrowdEngage.

That is like a win in itself, as I see my father as my first investor. He’s the one paying for my apartment, and the hosting fees over the past year while Tom and I figure out just what the hell we are doing. Well we’re getting really close to showing it off, that’s how I deal with the stress of doing- knowing that eventually our goal will be met.

Underwear (& socks!)

I don’t have the money to go out and buy the luxuries of life, which from my standpoint will be to upgrade some things in my life. I am an entrepreneur, not strictly because I’m chasing dollars. I am chasing a level of life where I can enable myself to give and do awesome things. I’m not money hungry, but I am money aware.

I don’t want to start a business selling snake oil. I want to provide a high level of value to my customers, so much value that they happily fork over cash.

This is intended to be an injection of a little humor, but I do also want to be clear: I keep the silly things (like underwear and socks) in my head. I still wear old lacrosse socks with holes with my Sponge-Bob boxers, and it’s not because they are lucky. It’s because I’ve made the life decision to not get a job, but to make my own job. Apparently that isn’t as easy.

I also think it’s extremely important to have fun while building a business

Under the wrong impression

Sometimes I think I fail at sending the right message to someone. It might be an e-mail, a Skype call, online chat, tweet, anything.. Often I end conversations feeling like I could have made a better impression. It’s a mix of perfectionism and competitiveness that drives me to feel that way.

Other times, I surprise myself. I get contacted by people who I never could have dreamed would even listen to me. A lot of people are surprised when I tell them about the progress we’ve made since starting.

It’s very vain, I admit, but here are a few cool things that always get me excited:

I have made some incredibly cool connections both online, and in the Philadelphia startup ecosystem. I even have legend Robert Scoble to friend me on Facebook + click Like on our CrowdEngage page. It dosen’t really matter truly, but it could. And it sure feels good.

Under budget

Everything is under budget when you have no budget. It affects our decision making process in basically every level of planning and implementation.

Bootstrapping with Daddy’s money keeps you very humble while spending.

We’re limited by our knowledge and experience, but also by what tools we can and should use. We’ve never build a streaming video site. We’ve got some education that helped, and some work that kind of helped.. But nothing can prepare you for the technical feat of making something you dreamed up with 0 clue how to actually create yourself.

That was well over a year ago, and I can say now, while being underbudget and making wrong decisions the whole way, we are finally in a position to launching a stable, scalable, streaming video platform.

I attribute that to optimism, being naive, and hard work.

Understanding

I understand my strengths and weaknesses. I understand it’s my job to turn problems into challenges we can conquer. I understand my life goals, my internal motivations, and how to create external motivations (hard work).

I understand how lucky and fortunate I am do have parents who are able and willing to help me make my dreams a reality.

I understand the power of honesty, optimism, and enthusiasm. I understand it’s a battle, a journey, and not easy by any means. I understand dome people wouldn’t do what Tom and I are doing right now. I’ve heard some people call us crazy.

But really, I think everyone who isn’t going full speed into their own dreams, are the crazy ones.

I’m not sitting around waiting to be the person I imagine I can be.

In Conclusion

Those are my over’s and under’s of launching a business from nothing. It’s my intention to share my experience to help tell the story of our company, as well as possibly help some other aspiring entrepreneurs to take the leap.

If you enjoyed reading this, I would encourage you to sign up for the newsletter. We won’t send out e-mails more than 1-4 times a month, and when we do, we’re going to make sure it’s as precise and helpful as possible.

Now it’s your turn to share your over’s and under’s for starting a business. I would also be very grateful for any type of critique, so leave your comments below!