By Rob Voorhees Exertis Almo Way back in 1999, while working in consumer electronics retail, I caught the competition bug with my co-workers. It began innocently enough — making sure I was always on time for my shift, stayed slightly later to help unload a truck, made sure my sales were always at the top, […]
If you’re a true #AVtweep or if you’re someone who frequents LinkedIn somewhat often, you may have seen the screenshot below from an email from Aurora. According to the email, Aurora‘s VPX 1GBPS AV-over-IP solutions claim to be the “solution for Crestron NVX lead time issues.” The email also says Aurora’s solution can perform everything […]
AV marketing professionals spend countless hours pursuing more reader likes, more engagement, more content, more metrics and frankly more of the same in a never-ending hype cycle. Social media is merely another function where marketers are stuck in tactical due to feeling the pressure to produce something — anything — in order to somehow drive […]
Like so many industries, the AV industry has a robust and valuable community in the social media sphere. Many of us have dozens, if not hundreds of contacts and “friends” that we know only via social media. While we have opportunities to catch up and meet during industry events, including the always popular tweet-ups, the […]
AV companies have instant information about their product sales right at their fingertips. However, those same AV vendors have little to no visibility into the effect of marketing on tracking the reach, engagement or conversions on those same product purchases. The result is ironic for the AV industry: marketing technology obsolescence due to artificial intelligence […]
There’s no doubt that social media is a part of your marketing strategy, but are you measuring more than the so-called ‘vanity metrics’ of likes and impressions? To make your brand’s social media truly successful, your brand’s social accounts must have some personality and they must ‘listen’ even more than they ‘talk.’ When your brand […]
Customer acquisition is time-consuming and expensive, so it makes sense to treat prospects and customers as valued people when they’re looking for your brand on social media. As a person who has a great deal of understanding about the time, effort, and costs of new prospects earned through marketing, I am acutely aware of the […]
When does selling audiovisual technology shift away from the outdated features and benefits sales model and transform into something entirely different? Something so radically divergent that it actually makes sense to an AV industry in transition? 2018’s technology stack is here with the answer: when vendors leverage the social, marketing and sales technologies to go […]
By Ben Davis Futuresouce This week, Chinese online games company, NetDragon Websoft, announced its agreement to acquire US-based Edmodo, the global education network. The deal will likely present growth opportunities for NetDragon’s broader portfolio of education solutions and could have competitive ramifications for companies operating across the breadth of the education technology sector. NetDragon’s New Triple Threat In a deal […]
The future of reaching each vertical, including the House of Worship (HOW) market, has a big stake in social media advertising, engagement and user-generated stories. Like the social media landscape, the audiovisual space often looks like a nascent, promising industry on the verge of something significant. Unlike the social media brands, the audiovisual industry is […]
This is an open letter to the future church pastors who will have grown up with the Internet, mobile devices and real-time social media their entire lives so that they can leverage future technology to serve the local church effectively. The local church you’ll lead will not look much like the churches of today because […]
The industry’s only dedicated-AV LinkedIn Group needs you to join. It’s called the AV Industry Professionals and it’s free (to AV professionals and users) AND it’s ALL ABOUT AV services. And, the best part about it is that it’s a moderated discussion/posting group (that also includes a JOBS listing service) — that means it’s not filled with […]
Last month, we talked about the market’s trend toward collaborative meetings and how that will presumably affect the rental and staging company and its employees. I thought then, and I still do, that the most important aspect of this change was one of familiarizing our employees with the concepts and techniques of collaborative meetings. This […]
Visix has added a new Social Media Subscription service to their digital signage product line. The new modules are customized, responsive and offer a variety of features managed through an online portal. Social media feeds provide clients with auto-updating content that attracts viewers and increases participation on their social networks. It also allows them to […]
As I continue to discuss social media and application in the industry, when talking about social media and marketing, there’s a blending of the two that eventually takes place as conventional marketing methods eventually include social media reach and engagement. However, when I say engagement, I not only mean that you are engaging, but how […]
We’ve been blown away at how much engagement we have with our readers via the various social media outlets we have. We get hundreds of messages from you EVERY DAY – even on weekends! And, before Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, we barely ever heard from you! And, it’s even more interesting at how segmented […]
How do we define the proper way to do business in this era of rapid technological advancement? Where business was once all about the cold-call dials and networking events, with marketing materials present in his or her briefcase as one went out on the sales call, the new age of technology and media has added […]
Today, some well-known (and even some lesser known) systems integrators have made their mark in marketing and social media, however many are still looking for the proper strategies as well as the more enhanced ways to build the industry profile – especially to gain new customers. It seems that for any company to compete and advance […]
When we started using Twitter back at InfoComm 2008, only 80 or so people in the ProAV market were even on the social media platform. Same with Snapchat earlier this month. The day before we sent our eBlast out saying we’d be broadcasting via Snapchat at InfoComm, there were only 160-some AV ‘Snapchatters.’ Well, we […]
Did you realize that yesterday was Twitter’s 10th birthday? No other social media app has had as big of an influence on our market as Twitter — more AV’ers are on Twitter than on LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ and Instagram combined. So, we thought, since it was their tenth birthday, we’d take a look some of […]
When we look out at the landscape of the AV industry, we first and foremost see the manufacturers, integrators and consultants that comprise the space. When we talk about #AVTweeps, as there’s been so much discussion about in the last month especially, we are of course talking about what many of us like to refer to […]
As we look at future prospects of the AV/IT industry, we discuss technology, markets, manufacturer, integrator and consultant perspectives and more. The Millennial generation has become entrenched in the technology space for several years now and while there has been much conjecture as to what their standing really is (in certain consternation to some of […]
The InfoComm FlashTrack entitled Social Media Marketing for AV Pros, takes place on Wednesday, 10 Feb 2016 at 15:00-15:20 on Stand 12-N100 at Integrated Systems Europe 2016 – Europe’s largest tradeshow for the professional AV and electronic systems industry. Co-taught by rAVe founder Gary Kayye and Social Media Expert Kayla Blevins, the session is designed to help AV integrators and manufacturers, in […]
If your company is not using Snapchat yet, it needs to start doing so NOW. Snapchat is yet another social media tool that you can use to effectively (and easily) market your product, company and/or brand. What is Snapchat? Beginning as a classroom creation at Stanford University, the application developed by Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy officially launched […]
Trial and error, although time consuming, will be your friend in this part of the advertising process. Choosing an ad creative means determining the most effective visual to go along with the content you’re advertising. You have the opportunity to choose a few different visuals, or creatives, to go with your ad as long as the visuals abide […]
You’ve created your page and chosen your target audience. Now it’s time to set your budget. Before we begin, I want to give you a forewarning: I don’t have all the answers as to how much your particular advertisement is going to cost. It all depends. But, that being said, I do have the answers as […]
Months back, after I had fully developed my second show techXchange (AV Power Up being the other) – a show designed to be about technology, news and trends with a measure of opinion inserted as well – I began to come up with a concept for a new podcast show. The show would exist on the “Edge […]
You’ve decided on an objective, or call to action, for your Facebook advertisement. Now it’s time to actually set up the advertisement. Who are you targeting? What are are you trying to reach? How long will the advertisement run? Oh, and the big question: how much will it cost? This blog post is going to […]
Every advertisement has a call to action, or objective so to speak. Facebook helps its user create the right advertisement by guiding them step-by-step through building an effective advertising campaign, including indicating what the objective, or call to action, is. Below is a screenshot of the different options for what type of advertising campaign in which […]
Advertisements are everywhere. Flyers. Billboards. Mail. Email. Television. Broadcast. Radio. Brands and companies alike are trying to get the attention of their consumers in any way possible, and with the growth of social media, they’re finding yet another way to do this: social marketing. Facebook advertising is a great example of this. As mentioned in previous posts, it’s […]
Facebook is all about making connections — between friends, family, businesses, etc. Any business will include making a connection with its target audience as a priority in its marketing efforts. Whether it be through direct marketing, newspaper advertising, phone calls or even word-of-mouth, that connection is key to getting a message across. So back to […]
Founded in 2004 by Harvard drop-out Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook continues to remain a relevant social media powerhouse. Its mission is “...to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” The statistics for Facebook are incredible. 968 million daily active users on average for June 2015 844 million mobile daily active […]
