Greenfly CEO Daniel Kirschner recently appeared on the Technori podcast with Scott Kitun to talk about the rise of authentic content and shifts in social media content preferences, growth of emerging platforms, influence and power of authentic brand advocates, origins of Greenfly, and more.
Check out the full interview here.
Here are a few excerpts from Kirschner’s appearance:
How social media has changed over the years
The first wave of social for brands was brand pages…That’s been flipped into empowering all the advocates and the individual…It’s a fundamental shift in how people consume content…It’s really about connecting with individuals. So if you’re a brand, an organization, a sports team, a league…what you need to do is look at your advocates, and look at your authentic relationships and you need to figure out how to enable and empower them to help tell your story and to help be part of that story.
Why authenticity beats production value for content
“We were running around to everybody saying ‘Look at this awesome content you can get.’ One of the first videos that was done on our platform, (LeBron) did a tour of his shoe closet…He did it like at two in the morning…That content obviously crushed it and people loved it. But then we’d go and show to brands and they’d say…’Our audience wants more polished and that’s not quite the right style.’ I think what really shifted the landscape in our favor was the rise of Stories…with people realizing that this is the kind of content that really connects with an audience, really drives engagement, and that authentic connection can have an incredibly galvanizing effect on making people feel connected to a brand, to a team.”
“[One large brand we work with] did a whole analysis where they looked at produced content and the views created on Greenfly and relative performance. The Greenfly content — the content coming directly from the athletes, that they made themselves — consistently outperformed the produced content that they had to spend a lot of money making…I think now you don’t have to make that case anymore.”
Advocates are more effective than influencers
“I think a big shift that we’re also seeing right now when it comes to influencer marketing and promotion…It’s not ‘Hey I’m going to pay you money and you’re going to say something nice about a brand that you have no connection to.’ But ‘Hey you have an authentic existing relationship and we’re going to work together and tell that story together.’ People can smell BS a mile away, and if somebody is talking about something they genuinely love, it’s going to be much more resonant.”
Getting more value out of the reams of content organizations
“One of the problems that we’re solving for organizations is they have all this great content, but their own channels are limited – their own social channels. You can only put so many pieces of content out, you have to pace it. But when you look at the entire community…a piece of content that might not have great resonance on a team or league channel might have enormous resonance on an individual player channel…You really want to open up the bandwidth that you have to communicate outside of just your own channels…and make all those channels yours in the sense that you can get content into them and really connect with those audiences, as well.”
Advocates can help brands penetrate dark social channels
“We just opened up our platform to connect a lot of additional platforms…One thing that was fascinating for us when we looked at where a lot content was going out to those new social platforms that are private walled gardens. Dark social platforms are pervasive. We saw a ton of content going to WhatsApp…It’s interesting to think about (content going to) that kind of group chat. And that’s a community where whether you’re a brand or a team, you want to connect with that community of 150 people on a WhatsApp thread, that’s really important.”
Listen to the full interview here.
