First Burst Insights Blog Post. Boom.
So here we are then. Our platform has launched and we now have paid customers making the most of what we have to offer. As if by some magic marketing miracle, we now have a blog! I know, in 2016! To kick this off in a big way, I’ve managed to secure an exclusive interview. With myself. Here’s a bit about us and what you can expect from these pages.
Hello, who are you? Well hello there. Burst Insights is an experienced team of passionate content creators, social consultants and analytics coders. We are bonafide experts in social video and have been working with brands creating short-form video (typically 30 seconds or less) since 2013. Seeing as short-f0rm social video has been around since 2013, we know what we are talking about.
Okay but who are YOU? I’m one of the Co-founders, along with Mike, the company CEO. We’ve been buddies since 2008, when we both worked for Argos (in the marketing & PR department, not in a stock room). Mike went on to become a published author and one of the most recognised voices in social media and I worked up the ranks in PR, working with media marketing clients like the FT and Economist.
I learnt what makes for a solid newsworthy research story and discovered there was a lack of actionable social video insight to help marketers tell more engaging stories through videos.
The pair of us will be the main contributors to this blog; Mike has his finger on the pulse of social video newness and I have a soft spot for social analytics and data-driven news stories that pass the ‘so what’ test. Some ace guest blogging is being lined up too.
Sounds like a dream team. What made you go into business together? Mike was having some great success with his previous business, Brands On Vine, creating six second Vine videos for huge global brands as well as tracking over 1,000 brands on a curated showcase platform. The explosion in popularity of short-form social video on Instagram and Twitter meant that his business was rapidly growing beyond just Vine.
Meanwhile, I was increasingly using social video within client campaigns but struggling to effectively benchmark their performance or convince my clients to increase their video budgets. My role as an Account Director meant I was responsible for advising clients on which social analytics platforms they should invest in. It made me painfully aware that there was a lack of short form video insight in the ether. I was also bored of using identikit social analytics platforms that I felt had created a culture of monotonous success reporting without learnings. A decade of working in creative agencies had led me to believe that somewhere along the way, creativity had become a byproduct of focusing on unrealistic KPIs.
So we got together in late 2014 with a shared vision to deliver social media insight that inspired marketers to influence the mobile first generation. We knew marketers were struggling to figure out what good social video looked like and were determined to build a platform that was different to the sea of charts and excel export solutions. We wanted to let people ‘watch the data’ that mattered to them rather than drowning in more of the same.
Along the journey, we’ve come to understand that not every marketing team has the resource to use a social video discovery platform. This lead us to set up an internal research team here at Burst Insights, to complement the platform product. The objective of this new team is to produce research reports that provide deep sector insight, explore new ways to place a value on social video and provide actionable recommendations for brands.
A just and righteous cause indeed. What can we expect on this blog then? To be the first place you look to for sweet, sweet social video news, creative trends and strategic advice. No magic formula currently exists for creating engaging social video content (although our developers have started working on one), so we want to use this blog to share everything we know and think we know about the noble sport of social video marketing. The goal is to help us all become more effective and efficient content marketers.
We won’t just be curating and commenting on industry news, oh no. But if you want to subscribe to our weekly newsletter curation of news you can do so here. Over the past year we’ve been building our database and expanding the insight we can draw from it. We now have the most in demand influencers and biggest brands across 80+ sectors, making millions of short-form social videos we can draw insight and blog inspiration from, using our own platform.
Great, I’m looking forward to you talking about something other than yourself …we will also post product news and updates here too. Fair enough.
Last question, how can readers contribute to the cause? Awesome last question! Comments and contributions are most welcome and actively encouraged. For example, if you are reading this and would like a platform to showcase your videos, maybe talk about the creative process and the engagement results you are proud of, drop me an email simon@burstinsights.com and we would love to post it here.
I’ve discovered and watched some unbelievably well executed campaigns and videos during the last year while the platform was in beta. I know for a fact there is an industry of content creators out there who are more talented than we are. We hope over time, this blog can grow into a community that truly believes content is king and relentless creative experimentation is the best way marketers can influence the millennial generation of consumers and those that follow.
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