Their business model calls for iPPVs – shows offered over the Internet for a fee.
While I don’t know all the ins and outs, one can assume iPPV is much cheaper to produce than tradition Pay Per View.
On a recent iPPV show, “Border Wars,” there were serious technical errors which caused great inconvenience to viewers.
Gabe Sapolsky co-founded ROH back in 2002 and was it’s acclaimed creative leader for six years before being released by the company he founded.
Sapolsky, now with several new wrestling groups, posted the following on his Facebook page:
”When the ownership and management of a company doesn’t care or have enough respect for its employees and more importantly paying customers to spend enough money to have adequate equipment they can f— off.”
“When a company decides to go on the cheap and take a risk that something like a website will work instead of doing everything in their power to guarantee it will work they can f— off. If the ownership and management doesn’t care or respect it’s fans enough to do this they don’t deserve your support.”
According to ProWrestling.Net, Sapolsky signed an agreement in 2008 saying he would not publicly disparage the company.
So, you can imagine what happened next – Sapolsky was allegedly served with cease-and-desist orders from ROH, invoking said agreement.
The next step, which ROH is apparently considering, is a lawsuit.
And there is some recent legal precedent. Earlier this month, a Virginia judge ruled that liking a Facebook page does not constitute protected free speech under the First Amendment.
Sure, this may all sound like a joke – a war between “minor league” entities in a choreographed athletic soap opera – but it’s actually quite serious business.
Can a company sue you for what you say on Facebook?
The way ahead in marketing is to eradicate the truths we’ve lived by.
As Gini Dietrich and Geoff Livingston say in their new book (released this week), Marketing in the Round, “the only way to succeed in the future – to best serve your customers, to become an investment in the company’s growth – is to market in the round.”
The marketing/communications world is quite often siloed. Marketing, public relations, advertising, social media, web development, direct marketing, search all do their own thing, sometimes unaware of what the others are working on.
But like the Knights of the Round Table, these job functions need to join together to create something bigger and more powerful. (Come to think of it, this sounds like the plot for Voltron!)
Dietrich and Livingston help readers navigate obstacles – from getting leadership buy-in to identifying which tactics to deploy and when.
The book provides easy-to-understand charts – and also includes worksheets and exercises to complete. This is more than a book, it’s the first shots fired in a common-sense (yet sorely-needed) revolution.
I love that this book was written as a collaboration, because that’s what it’s all about: by working together, we can accomplish so much more.
When I heard that Gini and Geoff were teaming up to write a book, I had high expectations. They are two of the people in the PR/social industry I respect most.
Both were featured prominently in the Master’s in public communication course I taught this spring at American University. Spin Sucks, the blog for Gini’s agency Arment Dietrich, was required reading. Geoff’s tireless efforts in using social media for charitable causes was the basis of a research project for two of my students.
I don’t give ratings or anything like that, but I’ll say this about Marketing in the Round: I’m giving my advance copy to one of my students…and going to buy one for myself.
My wife, Marisa, went above and beyond to make the day special, sacrificing a lot of her first Mother’s Day. Perhaps, as a good couple working in media would, we shall time-shift Mother’s Day…hmmm…??
One of the most creative, awesome gifts she gave me was a homemade social media birthday cake!
Cake–in Tweet form!
(Inside, it was a double-layer cake – one chocolate, one white cake, separated by dark chocolate peanut butter and sliced strawberries. Unreal.)
Why am I blogging about it?
Because I need way more than 140 characters to appropriately express how awesome this cake was.
One of the major benefits of social media is that we can react to current events together.
There turnaround time is virtually nil.
When Beasite Boy co-founder Adam Yauch died last week, it didn’t take long for Coldplay to pay tribute to him at a live show. And that tribute was filmed by the band and placed on YouTube.
Coldplay performed a stirring version of “Fight For Your Right (To Party),” one of the Beastie’s mega-hits.
There are so many companies and brands that prop up a Facbeook page or a Twitter feed just to have one.
These accounts have little to no strategic purpose behind them.
And…I’l go out on a limb here…have a small following and minimal interaction.
And continuing the thread, they probably aren’t too popular among leadership, who see no return.
Thankfully, the path to success starts with one, simple step.
A Social Media Value Proposition.
Say what?
Social Media is clutter. Pages, feeds, columns, lists, circles, friends, photos, videos, texts, tweets, posts, statuses, shares, likes, comments, blogs, reblogs, filters, privacy settings, feeds, apps, tools, pins, bookmarks, check-ins, recommendations, tips, reviews, stars, ranks, hearts, thumbs, hashtags, mentions and, if you can believe it, more.
When you are asking people to spend even a few seconds (invest) in and around your social profiles, you HAVE to give them a reason to do so.
There are a few brands people will follow because they are online. But, spoiler alert, those brands already have millions of followers. You have to earn it.
And you do so by starting with a value proposition. Or, in plainer terms, what your audience will get out of it.
Decide internally what your purpose is for being online and what value you will provide for your followers/fans and you’re off to a great start.
Don’t underestimate the number of ways you can provide value to the world. Here are just a handful of excellent value statements:
- We want to educate people about the charitable work we do.
- We want to provide exclusive discounts for our most loyal customers.
- We want to become THE resource for information on a specific cause.
- We want to create a platform for our network of like-minded people.
Figure out the value you bring to the table and your social media presence will become stronger, focused and powerful.
The Washington Post recently published an article by Hayley Tsuakayama revealing how YouTube may be friendlier to minorities than other mass media sources.
Nearly 80 percent of minorities regularly watch online videos, compared with less than 70 percent of their white counterparts, the Pew Internet & American Life Project reveals. Moreover, among the 20 most-subscribed-to channels on YouTube, eight feature minorities, mostly Asian American. In addition, many more black and Latino shows populate the top 50. Finding an audience that has been largely neglected by Hollywood, producers are now finding personalities that reflect their diverse target audiences.
Take the case of Vietnamese American beauty Michelle Phan. As of April 18, 2012, Phan is the second-most popular TV personality on YouTube. This makeup maven has a huge following, which is largely from makeup tutorials; the “MichellePhan channel” has 1.9 million subscribers and about 567 million video views. Phan ranks 20th among YouTube’s most popular channels, and recently became a spokeswoman for Lancôme. Declining to reveal how much such producers earn, Lancôme does say that hundreds of them make at least six figures annually.
Maureen Guthman, the head of brand strategy and acquisitions for the African American-focused channel TV One finds that for minorities, YouTube offers a way to defy stereotypes prevalent on network television, said. Guthman stated that [Blacks can show themselves] “completely unfiltered and without [someone] telling us, ‘you’ve got to be more this.’”
With the increasingly diverse population prevalent in the United States today, it is important that companies have online figures that represent the target audiences they seek to persuade through marketing and advertising. Since they act as virtual envoys to ethnic populations, diverse audiences don’t feel pandered to, but feel more like stakeholders in the exchange of prospective commerce. The result is that more return on investment (ROI) for companies that seek to target these audiences, and a feeling of satisfaction through the audiences themselves.
