What’s All This About IRMC?

Dude, check the KPIs that IRMC.

A catchy acronym is popping up among elite marketers. Stand in a room with marketing bigshots and power bloggers long enough, and you’ll likely hear it thrown around. The acronym is “IRMC,”* and up until recently we at the Web Video Marketing Council really didn’t have much of an idea as to what it meant. So we went searching.

As it happens, IRMC stands for “Intelligent Rich Media Collateral,” and it is a term that apparently describes a very small subset of rich media-based marketing materials. The term, which appears to have been coined by our friends at Flimp Media (at least theirs is the earliest occurrence of the phrase that we can find), has perked ears across business verticals not for its worthiness as a buzzword, but for the concept it describes.

According to a forthcoming white paper from Flimp (a portion of which we obtained by… well, begging incessantly), IRMC has several distinctive features which separate it from all other rich media collateral:

1. Interactivity – In order for rich media materials to become IRMC, they must encourage interaction. Note that this is different from engagement; rich media content (especially video) is demonstrably more engaging than static media – you already knew that – but when video content stands alone, it is rarely interactive. To be interactive, a video must have a call to action that can be acted out by the viewer in the surrounding content. In other words, IRMC must have buttons for video viewers to click either in-video à la YouTube, or outside the video if it is embedded in a website or landing page.
2. Web Distribution – IRMC must be distributed online. We at the WVMC don’t need to rehash the value of Web marketing (it’s in our name), but IRMC takes the concept one step further. In order for rich media content to become IRMC, it must be distributable through almost any online channel. This includes social media networks, email, RSS feeds, blogs and websites, among others. IRMC is not, therefore, simply an email message or a vlog post – it is a dynamic piece of collateral that can be either of those things (or both), but it can also be anything else you want it to be.
3. Individualized Measurability – In the near future, there may be hundreds of Web analytics programs available to businesses as the proliferation of Web marketing and advertising continues. The third IRMC requirement anticipates this need for detailed metrics such as viewer response rates, engagement, time spent on-site, specific data relating to video playback, etc. But IRMC requires one more thing of its rich media: that it identify viewers. This means that for every visitor to the site – not just visitors who fill out a form, but every visitor – the marketer who created the collateral will be able to discern not only the viewer statistics, but the viewer’s contact information, as well. As far as the WVMC can tell, this contact info will most likely come in the form of an email address. Then again, the minds who created the concept of IRMC seem to be a bit more prescient than we.

When all three of these items are present in a rich media campaign, it becomes Intelligent Rich Media Collateral.

This is fascinating stuff; no wonder IRMC has people buzzing. Imagine the implications of individualized measurability alone: if a video goes viral and reaches half a million views, you’ve got half a million sales leads. Granted, it’s not likely that half a million people really have any kind of purchase intent, but with analytics like those required by IRMC, a salesperson should have a relatively easy time combing out the leeches.

We at WVMC are excited by the concept of IRMC, and we love its implications for Web video marketing. We wait with bated breath for the release of Flimp’s white paper. And of course, as soon as it is released, we’ll let you know where to find it.

–WVMC

*Editor’s Note: The original text and title of this post referred to “IDC,” which stood for “Intelligent Digital Collateral.” We have since been informed by Flimp Media that this term is not the term that will be present in the final draft of the aforementioned white paper, and will be replaced by the term “IRMC” or “Intelligent Rich Media Collateral.”

Flimp’s Renée Mitson: The Secret to Viral Video? Shave Everywhere.

www.flimp.net

Today’s guest blogger is Renée Mitson of Flimp Media. Enjoy the following post, and be sure to visit flimp.net for more info.

We are often hearing about the benefits of using online video campaigns as a way to market a brand or company. But the question many of us are asking is “What exactly can online video marketing do for me? What kind of results can be generated?”

Earlier this year I stumbled upon a fabulous example of the power of Web video. The Shave Everywhere Campaign powered by Philips Norelco, announced the launch of their new body shaver. Before this ad, Philips had virtually no share of the electrical shaving industry. After the campaign, sales boomed to seventy percent. That’s right, a seventy percent capital on the electric shaving industry. They became the Nike of shaving, seemingly overnight.

So here is how the ad campaign went down: Philips started by creating a website — nothing too fancy — on which a man in a robe talks about the razor. This man, who has now been dubbed “Robe Guy” by Internet gossipers, speaks in provocative terms about how women prefer men who are well groomed… down there. The site includes a campy music video where a man rates his body as “4.8” on a scale of ten. The entire gimmick is hilarious and allows Philips to market in a way that would not be appropriate or effective in a television spot. During the first week of May, the Shave Everywhere campaign exploded. Thousands of blogs included postings of the new video. Hundreds of thousands of viral emails were sent among friends, all generating a buzz for this product.

Flimp has capitalized on this idea, and made it better. Flimp offers a platform for this kind of viral messaging and video marketing, but we deliver these capabilities to our clients in a user-friendly package. (Pun intended.) But instead of just placing it on the Internet and hoping people catch on, we go one better. We allow our clients to post these videos in a branded, trackable video microsite with built-in interactive calls to action. By incorporating viewer analytics which track traffic by email address, our clients know who is watching their videos and how to follow up from there. I like to look at it this way: Flimp is like the friend sending the Shave Everywhere video to another friend. A buffer, so to speak, of interactive communication. And all the recipient has to do is sit back and enjoy.

About Flimp Media

Flimp Media is a pioneer in the development of rich media analytics technology and video based marketing and messaging solutions for online direct marketing, communications and sales. FLIMP,  which stands for Flash Interactive Marketing Platform, enables non-technical users to quickly create, edit, distribute, track and analyze video based marketing and messaging campaigns without any programming or IT resources required. The Flimp platform offers users a simple and low cost solution for video email marketing with viewer analytics.  For more information, visit www.flimp.net.

Rumor: Video iPods Close, Good News for Marketers?

In the future, HD flip cams will be bought by the pallet.

Interesting article from Michael Arrington of TechCrunch today. Apparently a source close to Apple’s manufacturing infrastructure in Asia says that the company is ordering a whole lot of tiny digital eyeballs.

One of our sources in Asia say that Apple has placed an order for a massive number of camera modules of the type that they include in the iPhone. These are inexpensive cameras, in the $10 range. And the size of the order, our source says, means they can only be used for one thing – the iPods.

Hoo mama. As Arrington points out, this is really, really bad news for the bottom end of the digital camera market. If you could get a video iPod (ViPod? eyePod? Anyone?) for the same money as one of those inexpensive cameras that shoots in HD, and if that iPod let you edit your videos and post them to YouTube directly from the device, (oh yeah, and if it played music, too,) why on earth would you buy a camera?

Well,  you wouldn’t. But let’s look at this from a marketing perspective. (That’s why we’re here, after all.) Portable cameras are great at shooting spur-of-the-moment interviews and covering events, and we all know that these videos are great marketing collateral. But if you go to a trade show looking for an interview, you’re probably not going to bring your iPod. You will, however, bring a camera. For the purposes of video marketing, Apple didn’t cut down on the number of things in your pockets — they just made sure that the thing in your pocket that records video is Apple-branded.

Let’s look at the practicality of the eyePod (that’s what I’m calling it, I’ve decided) via hypothetical anecdote:

Jim is a marketer for a mid-sized business in the CRM sphere. (I don’t know why I picked CRM — it could be any sphere, I suppose.) Jim bought a new eyePod. He takes it with him to a trade show. There, Jim finds one of his clients. They get to talking, and eventually the client agrees to do a short video testimonial for Jim’s company. Jim whips out his eyePod (friendly gee-whiz banter briefly ensues) and shoots the video. Then he edits it up all nice, and posts it to YouTube. Great! But… now what? Jim’s eyePod can’t let people know about the video. His clients will have no idea it exists until he gets back to his hotel room, turns on his laptop, and tells them. If Jim had used a regular flip camera, he could have gone back to his hotel room, edited the video on a proper computer screen, posted it to YouTube, and alerted all of his customers to the video’s existence in short succession. That, to me, seems like the better alternative.

In the end, maybe the eyePod will crush the low-end video camera market. But before it does, count on camera prices dropping so ridiculously low that your company will be able to buy HD flip cams by the gross.