6 tips for making the Web Social content pop

With the increasing dynamic marketing content, many businesses get hung up on making investments in quality articles, white papers, videos and other media only to find that they aren’t getting much traction. I’ve heard it time and time again at conferences in discussions with brand marketers where has invested in creating great content and digital assets but are frustrated with the lack of agree.

Over the past 6 1/2 years of blogging, followed by contributing articles, posting videos, photos, PowerPoint slides, PDF reports, and other types of publishing content for our own Agency and customers, here are some guidelines that stand out for help content better reach.  

The purpose of a content object can be complex and multi dimensional or can be as simple as getting readers to click and visit a Web page. Anyway, some real thought should be put into be specific about the goals and possibly secondary.  

One of the biggest problems with companies publish content is that it tends not to be customer-centric. SEOs use keyword research to inspire their content recommendations.  Keywords are a reflection of the demand for customers topics they are interested.  Same goes for social keyword research and using personas to guide editorial.

 The message is obviously linked to the purpose for the content, so will vary the degree to which is unique, inspire or actionable.You should be able to summarize the essence of content in a simple sentence or two summary. think elevator pitch.  Should also be clear what you want the reader (or observer) do after you consume it.

It used to be that typos, errors and lack of design were the norm with blogs, but these blogs business days must be as a professional, although colloquial, company web sites. In today’s world of short attention, crap content with packaging snappy often will gain more quality content and normal appearance.

That doesn’t mean you need to adopt tactics tabloid, but this means that there must be a strong motivation to employ creative resources for designing a great experience for consumers. Readers should be able to tell the top-level concept (as well as search engines), it should be easy to consume or scan and definitely should be easy to share/save/post to social news and bookmarking sites.

Essentially, if the actual content is interesting, then make sure the project is interesting as well.

This is where I begin using the quote “Build it and they will come.” field of dreams, because this is the source of frustration for many marketers new content publishing with frustration about the effect. First, verify that the publishing system provides automated distribution, such as through email or RSS subscription. Cross posting updated content for a news scroll on the home page or redaction is also useful  

  Building social channels is the key to the “social web” pop in this post.Develop social networks in channels where conversations are happening relevant to people and companies that you’re trying to achieve. If they are on Facebook, for example, you may find that it makes sense to your fan page, accept the blog posts and blog posts on Twitter too. Then has post Twitter LinkedIn.

Pushing the content automatically must be designed carefully to avoid duplication and especially to avoid a high ratio of self-promotion.

In this case “Pull” means optimizing content with keywords people search for relevant to the content you are publishing.Do SEO part of the publishing process for content creators have keyword lists that can withdraw and guidelines to follow when writing the new text content or create other types of media.

Give readers something to do next, whether sharing, subscribe, join or even buy the plan of action is connected to the purpose of the content.Not all content must have an explicit result, but if you do not ask or even tell the readers what to do, is almost a certainty that won’t do what you want.The history of content should guide the reader to a conclusion that involves a next step.This can be as passive as read the next article in a series or proactively requesting a visit to a landing page.

It is also perfectly well in many cases to offer more than one thing to do then. additional options can be part of Web page design (White paper, Webinar, Newsletter, query) or included in the copy of the article/blog post/video or whatever is the content format.However, the plan of action should never distract attention from key message.

Verify that you have some kind of goals in place along with tools and processes for measuring performance, both short and long term.If you use Google Alerts, social media monitoring tools, Web Analytics, clipping services or something like PostRank, make sure that you control the scope of content that you’re promoting. Analyze where you’re getting traction and documenting what seems to be working or not.

Be free to test and understand that not everything you post and share, no matter how well-written, packaged or promoted, will gain traction. pay attention to the time of day, headlines, link sources, traffic sources, unlinked citations and anything else that could affect the scope and the results.

Be strategic and opportunistic. plan content outside, use compelling themes and metaphors to tie the message and action plan together. understands that the development and promotion of content to achieve a desired outcome are something very different social vs. Web marketing/direct response may also be aware of possible opportunities and you should be prepared to create and promote content on demand to take advantage. respond to breaking news or trend analysis, for example, social issues.

Bonus tip:Give recognition! people will work for money but die recognition. Give kudos deserving Commenters, those who share and help promote also give recognition internally to those that help create contents. positive reinforcement is a powerful tool for shaping desirable behavior.

I hope you found these tips helpful. If you have any content creation, packaging, promotion or analysis tips, please share in the comments.

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B2B online marketing Trifecta: Content, Social Media & SEO

B2B Marketing offers a variety of options to reach customers wherever they are in the buying cycle.  Don’t be fooled, buyer behaviors for information discovery, and sharing online were significantly affected by changes in social technology.

 At a Conference I spoke recently at a participant made a declaration that the social media works only for consumer marketing. The reality that many marketers forget, is that B2B buyers are people too.They have the same social needs and influences like anyone else. media, in my opinion and experience, is an excellent option for business marketing.

Marketing with content has been a core part of B2B marketing years and, while there are long sales cycles with the need for education, you will need content. content that attracts readers through search engine optimization and social media channels can do their job of educating, persuade and drive B2B buyers along the sales funnel. This is because, when it comes to online marketing, the combination of content, Social Media and SEO provide serious competitive advantage.

   Content-  Almost all B2B marketing starts with the content.White papers, newsletters, blogs, video, presentations and any other text or media types of content posted online. Without content, search engines don’t exist what social communities share with each other? Content! B2B Marketing often difficulty with continually generating new blog content ideas, thereby generating more traffic and social interaction to existing content is essential for inspiring conversations and new topics to write about.

SEO – Any digital content that can be crawled, indexed and ranked by a search engine is an opportunity for optimization of keywords that customers use when searching for new suppliers, partners and solutions. Each unique content object with its own URL or Web address, creates a target for other websites to link to and an entry point for the search engines and searchers. An amount of quality content that is easily and often socially shared creates a rich set of signals to search engines and B2B buyers.B2B SEO errors are fairly common, but can be overcome by specialty and experimentation.Based on a firm basis, SEO can provide substantial elevation, but especially in combination with a large social network and content.

 Social Media-Growing social networks, connecting with others through interactions and information sharing creates an audience that can support the promotion of content that can drive traffic and attract inbound links from other sites topically relevant links from other sites and blogs can serve as a signal to search engines to decide how to categorize your content in search results.Social networking Links or media sharing sites can send B2B buyers directly on specific pages, features, products or services; not every company B2B is ready for social media, but it is likely that your customers and competitors are already there.

There are a lot of sense to the experienced trader on this blog, but after a very long time in the consulting business, I found the common sense to be less common thing in online marketing strategies more .it’s easy to be aware of how individual tactics work best for a company, but it is useful to take a step back and look at marketing as highly effective, as content marketing, search engine optimization and social media outlets, better work together.

At TopRank Marketing, we’re working with B2B companies ranging from McKesson Marketo and recently, MarketTools and StrongMail, to develop coordinated online marketing programs that emphasize efficient combinations of SEO, social and content that can be proved in existing marketing strategy as part of our own Content Marketing, share exclusive case studies, tips and best practices through a client newsletter and pull selected features for sharing on our tips from top marketing Newsletter that you might find useful.

If you’re a B2B marketing professional, you are using content, SEO and social media outlets in an effort coordinated online marketing? as a buyer of business services, you have been influenced by content discovered two searching and social alternatives?

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Maintaining an affiliate website is a marketing and promotional method in which the website owner gets paid for referring prospective customers to a specific product …

If you have a website and would like to make some real money from ad revenue and other peoples products then affiliate links are the way to go. Follow these steps to be making money in no time.

This article was created by a professional writer and edited by experienced copy editors, both qualified members of the Demand Media Studios community. All articles go through an editorial process that includes subject matter guidelines, plagiarism review, fact-checking, and other steps in an effort to provide reliable information.

Start a blog and/or set up a forum to help the site become a full-fledged community, not just a store. The more useful and informative your site, the more you’ll retain visitors.

Affiliate marketing is a great way for people to make money online. With the availability of many kinds of tools and resources on the Internet, it is even possible to …

Get a memorable web address. Believe it or not, there are still a lot that haven’t been taken. It’s possible to buy out a web address that has already been purchased and parked (no website yet), but this is more expensive.

Set up your website, inserting the advertiser’s links in appropriate spots. Someone new to website development should use a straightforward service like WordPress, which has hundreds of templates to choose from and designated areas reserved for ad space.

You can have the best product in the world, but it’s just not going to sell if people don’t know about it. One of the most cost-effective ways to advertise your …

Entrepreneurs often make money by starting a home-based business. One of the most popular ways is by using various MLM (multilevel-marketing) programs. These programs …

An affiliate website offers an opportunity to sell products and services with the aid of other firms, businesses or companies, who become partners. Commissions are …

Blogs are free to start and test, and they only cost a few dollars per year to host. So test as many different layouts as you can think of and track which one draws the most traffic. Host the best one and place your articles with affiliate links in the web traffic world.

Publish SEO (Search Engine Optimized) content with affiliate links embedded in as many places as you are allowed. Do not spam message boards, forums or email accounts. Simply write as much information in article form and publish it online. Squidoo and Hubpages are both good places to start.

If you have a company or want to promote another organization’s message, include an ad banner on your Web page. This banner is a powerful online marketing tool …

Copy the HTML or JAVA script code by placing your cursor at the beginning of the code, left click and hold down the mouse button, and then drag the cursor across the entire piece of code. It will become highlighted in blue, right click, then select “copy” from the menu that appears on your screen.

You may want to place banners on your website for various reaons. Banners can offset information on your website so that it stands out. Banners can also be used for …

Affiliate marketing provides the opportunity for an extremely profitable venture considering the small amount of initial capital that is needed. Unfortunately, so …

Check back with your affiliate companies like Share-A-Sale once per week to find out if any of the campaigns you chose to promote have been deleted. You don’t want to leave a banner on your site that won’t earn you money when you can replace it with one that will.

22 Social Media Marketing Management Tools

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With every online marketing channel and discipline, there must be tools to make the task of marketing more efficient and effective. Social Media Marketing is no different. Over the past 6-9 months, I’ve been researching and reviewing a variety of social media management tools that help with everything from source network connections to campaign & social content management to monitoring & measurement. While there numerous tools that manage single platforms (like Twitter) this list includes services that manage multiple social network accounts, content and measurement.

At some point we’ll do more with individual reviews, but in the meantime, here is a list of 22 different social media marketing management tools, platforms and services to help manage and scale your online marketing efforts on the social web:

Shoutlet – Manages social media marketing communications with one platform for building, engaging and measuring social media. Includes multiple account and platform support, social CRM and ecommerce for Facebook, email marketing and mobile features.

Direct Message Lab – Provides consulting, implementation and a platform (REACH) for centralized management of social media promotions & contests, advertising and measurement.

Objective Marketer - Offers social media marketing and analytics with integrated campaign management (Twitter, Blogs, Facebook, YouTube), multi-channel execution, engagement reports and user management.

Wildfire Interactive - Platform for easy creation, implementation and management of branded interactive campaigns including: sweepstakes, contests and give-aways.

StrongMail Social Studio – Comprehensive social media marketing platform with a referral marketing platform, social sharing tool and campaign management application. (Disclosure: StrongMail is a TopRank client)

Sprout - Cloud-based visual authoring software used to build interactive Engage Ads and Engage Apps that deliver rich, interactive, and social content across the web and mobile devices.

Spredfast – Enterprise social media management system that allows an organization to manage, monitor, and measure its voices across multiple social media channels. Also offers a white label option for agencies.

socialTALK – allows brands to create (text, photos, videos), manage (customize workflow & approval process), publish (single source, scheduled publishing to multiple platforms) and measure (aggregated analytics dashboard) their content strategy and posting schedule.

Crowd Factory – Suite of social media marketing tools include Social Campaign, that enables marketers to acquire new customers through simple social gestures and custom social marketing campaigns while easily tracking ROI.

Awareness – Social marketing hub that centralizes social media content publishing, management, measurement and engagement. Also includes access to 7 white-labeled, best practice social networking applications.

@this moment – Built on the @this moment platform, DEC is a system for managing a brand’s presence across multiple online environments combining multimedia UGC, and a variety of real-time inputs which are distributed across social platforms including YouTube Brand Channels, Facebook Fan Pages, MySpace Brand Communities & the iPhone.

MediaFunnel – Offers a Business Social Media platform for Facebook and Twitter supporting multiple users per profile and editorial review. Includes monitoring and integrates with Salesforce.com.

Virtue – Works with clients and agencies through a Social Relationship Management (SEM) platform offering Facebook tabs & applications, a publishing feature for Facebook & Twitter and mobile solutions.

Sprinklr – Social media marketing platform and consulting services for consumer & B2B marketers as well as agencies. Provides social media audience research, acquisition, content promotion and measurement tools.

Janrain – Web based platform of tools including: Engage to make it easy for users to connect a site with their social networks, Federate to facilitate navigation across multiple web properties & partner sites with a single log-in (currently supports 16 networks), Capture to leverage user data for personalized experiences.

Sprout Social – Affordable social media dashboard, monitoring, team workflow, influencer and contact management, performance metrics and daily or weekly email summaries. Supports Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp and Foursquare.

Sendible – Social media marketing platform that supports 30+ networks & services offering management of: accounts/profiles, messages & content, social contacts, content discovery, engagement, blog content & promotion, monitoring and analytics. Also offers a white label version for agencies.

KickApps – Self service social media web site authoring and social content management system system supporting video, social networking, social graph & activity streams, apps & analytics. Enables web publishers and marketers to develop branded communities, social applications and interactive widgets on their websites and across the social web. Solutions for small and large business.

Postling – Local business social media marketing platform to create content, stay organized and reach customers. Currently free for small business or personal use.

pop.to Social Marketing –  A social marketing suite, including feed-enabled social gestures and widgets, social dashboard, segmentation tools, influencer identification, conversion tracking and built-in friend casting.

HootSuite – Social media dashboard for managing social content and engagement on multiple networks with team workflow and statistics.

Seesmic – Web and desktop tools to manage social marketing activity on Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, Google Buzz and Linkedin plus a plug-in marketplace for more social management options.

This list of social media marketing platforms & services “ad hoc” was compiled by bookmarking various services as they were discovered or pitched to us (we don’t reply to pitches).  Here’s another useful list of SMMS was compiled in March 2010 by Jeremiah Owyang.

What social media marketing dashboards, software and management tools from the list above have you tested or use? Reviews, observations, insights and questions are greatly appreciated!

Obviously, tools are only as good as the expertise of the people using them, so TopRank Marketing is always interested in helping companies develop their social media roadmap and recommend the right supporting software for implementation.

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Can Geotagging Blog Posts increased Local Search Marketing Performance?

This post is one of a series of liveblogs MIMA Summit 2010.

When you think of geotagging, or check-in, what do you think of?Probably, GPS, FourSquare, places of Facebook or leaving a photo site like Flickr knows where the photo was taken, but it can also be done for the blog.

Geotagging in blog posts is still relatively new, but he’s well on its way.

Pt.wordpress.com already supports geotagging in profiles and posts so that you can let others know where you are posting to. Also soon they will release a Geo search feature that will allow people to find messages based on your location.

If you have a WordPress blog hosted, this functionally internal not yet, but there are some plugins that can enable it.GEOTag, OSM and Geolocation all claim to add geospatial information to blog posts and worth checking out.

So how does this tie in local search marketing?Easy. local search is all about Finding the right corresponds to a user based on your location.So when I search for “Audi dealers in Minneapolis”, it filters out any results in Los Angeles, Seattle or New York.

Now imagine that even the regular search.Search engines will still put local results at the top, but then list what he believes are the best games based on their algorithm.If you have installation geotagging, which can be another indicator for search engines that your post is better targeting (or most relevant) researchers Minneapolis and it can then be included for that particular survey.

Search engines are all about giving the best search results for your researchers and location is increasingly important. not all users know to search for Google Maps to get local results, so that search engines have to interpret local intent and the location of the researcher in regular search results too. If you’re geotagging on your blog, this can be an indicator that your content is a good match for a search query geographically specific search engines.

Geotagging continues to evolve, chances are that the search engines that will scroll on your algorithm, as well as other geolocation signs at that time also is very possible that search engines will begin appearing location specific and show results based solely on geotagging. Getting geotagging Setup now can help get your blog content before the game.

This idea of post was sparked by I <3 wordpress=""> with Peter Fleck and Toby Cryns Mima Summit in 2010.

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Interview: Mel Carson of Microsoft Advertising on social media

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Spotlight on Search Interview: Mel Carson of Microsoft Advertising on How Microsoft Does Social Media and the Yahoo Bing Search Alliance

If you attend Search Marketing industry conferences, you’ve no doubt run into the ever optimistic and charming Mel Carson from Microsoft.  When I was last in London, Mel connected me with an excellent Fish n Chips that the pubs around Trafalgar Square couldn’t get close to.  Mel is active as an advocate of Microsoft Advertising , especially via social media channels and at conferences to the Webmaster and search marketing community. His work is global and very interesting. With the Bing and Yahoo convergence, I thought it was time we did an interview – and he agreed.

Mel has accomplished amazing things with Microsoft’s use of social media and other large companies could learn a lot from this interview where he talks about Microsoft’s use of social media and what impact the Yahoo Bing Search Alliance will have on search and search advertising.

Welcome Mel, it’s exciting times as usual in the search engine world. Please tell us, what has changed about your job at Microsoft since you were last here?

My role at Microsoft Advertising evolved about 18 months ago as a result of the work our team had been doing in social media for adCenter. We had been building up an engaged audience on the adCenter Blog and forums for 3 years and started the adCenter Twitter account and Facebook page.  Our engagement with our customers was such a success, it made sense for someone to start using social to tell marketers about all our other digital assets. So I started the Microsoft Advertising Blog which brings our readers news and insight in what we’re up to in display, mobile, games advertising and research.

I also head up our events calendar. Last year we covered nearly 40 digital conferences all over the world, and it’s my job to ensure we have people trained to blog and tweet from @MSAdvertising at those events and really bring them alive.

Sometimes we go the full monty and come armed with a film crew and interview folks. Perhaps my highlight was Twitter founder Biz Stone at Cannes 2009 , but this year was awesome as we got backstage access to the TED@Cannes conference we’d partnered with them and the Starcom Mediavest Group on.

We featured Microsoft Advertising in a post about B2B Social Media Winners, earlier this year and I’m wondering if you can share how your group developed their approach to the social web?

In February this year we published a white paper (pdf) which outlined our story and approach. We’ve been listening to our customers since the start of 2006, way before Twitter and Facebook hit the mainstream. We got involved because it made perfect sense to use the web to communicate in a two-way dialogue with adCenter customers who were expecting best practices, tips, tricks and news to be at their fingertips.

We started slowly with a blog and forum, and built the strategy through common sense and by reacting swiftly to the needs of our advertisers. Social media isn’t the proverbial “rocket science”. It’s an awesome extension of traditional marketing and research methods which enable you to glean feedback in real-time, and help people in ways that never existed before.

What guides your social media strategy and participation?

Microsoft Advertising is an intensely customer-centric organization. It’s our advertisers, and potential advertisers, that guide us through where they go for news and information and what they tell us they need in order to be better marketers.

By investing in a team to monitor and engage with our paying customers, we hope we’re demonstrating that we’re open to feedback, want to build the best products and services we can, and are excited to provide insight through research and case studies that resonate with marketers all around the world.

What are your social media goals and how do you measure them? Or is it more accurate to say, what are your business goals that involve social media and how do you measure them?

Bit of both really. We look at growth as an indicator. Be it number of followers or fans, visitors to the site, number of answers to forum questions by other forum members, links from other blogs and news sites. The more reach we have, the more people we can tell our story to and let folks know we’re here and willing to help.

The other big ROI metric is how far we help lower support costs. It’s not cheap to have a call center, so if we can answer questions online through a carefully crafted blog post or tweeted link to the best information, we’re not incurring costs and we’re reaching more people with that information. A happy and informed advertiser is likely to spend more, so the two together increase the bottom line.

Return on In-action is another. What would people think if we weren’t operating in the social space? What would be the business implications of not having an early warning system in place?

How do you structure and manage listening and engagement?

We cover about 16 hours a day as I’m based in London and we have a team in Seattle. I’ll look after things from 9am GMT until about 6pm when it’s 10am PST and the US team takes over. We have various alerts set up on Twitter clients and monitoring tools and pretty much know within minutes if we have a problem or someone needs help.

We have rules of engagement which are pretty straightforward. We ask for actionable insight if an advertiser has an issue and have escalation paths internally to get things fixed.

Again, it’s common sense. You need a plan, you need outcomes and you need a team that can be flexible and personable.

A virtual smile goes a long way in this industry!

What listening or social media management tools do you recommend?

We recommend using lots. We trial, test and use a number of platforms, widgets and gizmos that all do different things with varying degrees of accuracy and success. The important thing is to find tools that are enablers and build a picture from the data they expose.

What challenges have you had gaining buy-in to social media projects and how did you overcome them?

To be honest, we’ve not had too much difficulty getting buy-in because we’ve always kept a step ahead by demonstrating the value of what we’re doing. I think many businesses dive into social media marketing with no plan around measurements of success.

Because we set out with the commitment to measure everything and tell compelling stories as we went, the business knows and relies on our data and successes now to be successful in itself.

Microsoft was called out recently as being one of the most, if not THE most social brands out there.  We get it and will continue to invest because it works well for us.

What is one great example of a social media success that like to share the most? It can be Microsoft or anyone else.

My favorite story that I’ve used in countless presentations is about how my old headmaster, who is a Benedictine monk, called me up many years ago to advise him on a search campaign to promote his website through which he wanted to recruit monks.

We set it up and 3 years later he actually did sign up one chap who found his site while searching for inspiration on the web. You can read the full story here.

Just goes to show how search and social are intertwined.

A story more close to home is obviously the Windows 7 Launch where Marty Collins and her team managed to garner 221 million impression of earned media running up to and post launch of the biggest selling piece of software ever. Check out the case study here.

If you were to give advice to a friend starting a small business on how they should get involved with social media, what would that checklist look like? What would the essentials be?

Figure out some goals and work back. Don’t think “social media” as in the tools. Think “social media marketing” as in the discipline. Research your market, find out who’s using what platform and build your value exchange around it. Make sure there are social elements in all your marketing endeavors. Have everything built for discovery and sharing. Measure as much as you can and use the data to inform decisions in other part of the business.

Oh….and don’t ever stop. Getting off the social train is not an option now it’s gathered so much pace under so much steam.

Enough of this social media, let’s talk about Microsoft and Yahoo. I know there’s the Search Alliance website and this clever little video, but can you sum up a few things for our readers who might not read Search Marketing publications?  Without any corporatePRspeak, what does the integration of Microsoft and Yahoo search mean to marketers?

It’s all on the www.searchalliance.com website. More volume with less effort. Now you’re optimizing for two marketplaces instead of three so you should see a return on time investment. More volume means we can make quicker decisions on which innovations will work best for marketers in the future.

What will it mean to consumers?

Having scale will mean speedier innovating of search results, which means those decisions consumers are looking to make get made quicker. More satisfied customers means a more loyal fan base, and as a result, we could increase share making our advertisers happy too!

What innovations in search technology (from a user perspective) are you excited about?

Bing Maps without a doubt – check out this Ted Talk with Blaise on some of the incredible innovation going on in his team.

How important is social media to the future of traditional search?

What’s traditional search these days? Ten blue links? It’s all moving so quickly but there’s no doubt that social media marketing is having an effect on search results. When you have algos associated with consumers liking content – YouTube, Facebook and others – when they’re added into the traditional mix, it makes for interesting times with optimization.

If you just take a look at what Bing has released lately in terms of social it’s obvious we feel it’ll be an integral part of how we all interact and make decisions going forward.

How do you stay current with search and social media and all the marketing, technology and communication channels that follow?

I subscribe to loads of newsletters, watch my Twitter feed and travel to many conferences around the world. We have a great ecosystem of learning and notifying here at Microsoft as well, so I pick up a lot of knowledge here internally.

Thanks Mel!

Post Script: Both Mel and I will be speaking at a new Search Engine Strategies conference being held in Hong Kong next week. Mel will be on a keynote panel, “Keynote Panel: Increasing ROI through B2B Lead Generation” and I will be on a panel about “The Business Value of Social Media”.  Here’s a video on this new event from Matt McGowan and Mike Grehan of Incisive Media.

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