Full Transcript of the Interview with Adam Wallace and Brian Simpson from The Roger Smith Hotel
Recorded in person in the 16th floor penthouse at The Roger Smith Hotel, Manhattan, New York
November, 2009
Jim Hopkinson, Wired’s Marketing Guy
Adam Wallace, New Media Director
Brian Simpson, Director of Social Hospitality
Sarah Prevette and Elizabeth King (Giggling in background)
Hi, this is Jim Hopkinson, Wired’s Marketing Guy, bringing you the marketing trends that matter. Welcome!
My guests today are Adam Wallace and Brian Simpson of the Roger Smith Hotel - two of the leaders using social media to build community, grow revenue, and truly create world-wide awareness for their business.
Jim Hopkinson: Hey everybody, today we have Adam Wallace and Brian Simpson of the Roger Smith Hotel, New York’s hip social media hotel. Adam’s the new media marketing manager while his partner in crime, Brian, is the assistant food and beverage director. They are marketing masterminds behind a hotel that promotes brand by personally connecting with its fans on all the major social networking platforms. So, welcome guys.
Adam Wallace and Brian Simpson: Thanks so much, Jim.
JH: So, why don’t we tell your background; how did you get here? Adam, why don’t you start out?
AW: Sure, I’ve been at the Roger Smith Hotel for three years now. I started out doing a video-based website for the hotel, working with John Knowles, my cousin who’s a filmmaker, and has a small production company called, “Panman Productions.” We did a video-based interactive site called, “Roger Smith News” for the hotel. And my position has evolved over the years, and our online presence has evolved, still doing a lot with video; that’s evolved to a blog now which is, “Rogersmithlife.com.
If there’s one buzzword that resonated in 2009, it has to be Twitter, so it’s fitting that I’m ending the year with a podcast about Tweets.
The week of December 14th I was in charge of Wired’s massive 325,000 follower account (@Wired), so I want to tell you the 10 lessons learned, and break down writing the perfect tweet.
Download the podcast from iTunes, or play it below:
In the podcast I give a background on how the @wired twitter account came to be, but here are the key points:
- At the end of 2008, Twitter really started gaining a lot of buzz and I knew Wired had to look at this up-and-coming platform
- I organized meetings with key decision makers and presented the pros and cons, with the data to back it up
- We decided to make @wired an interactive account (not just a feed of top stories), and that editors familiar with Twitter would rotate on a weekly basis overseeing the account
- This enabled us to give a unique voice each week (using editors from gadgets, science, transportation, programming) without burdening one individual with all the responsibility
- We started the year with only 8,000 followers, and Twitter was #49 on the list of traffic-drivers to Wired
- Three key things happened in early October… we passed 100,000 followers, we threw a party to celebrate that fact, and we were added to Twitter’s recommended follow list
- On 11/6 we passed 200,000 followers
- On 12/11 we passed 300,000 followers, and on more than one occasion Twitter was a top 10 referrer of monthly traffic
Please take a few minutes to answer my short,
10-question
Hopkinson Report survey. Why?
- Have a 2-way conversation
- Give me honest feedback
- Shape future direction of the podcast
- Vote for guest of the year
- Chance for Free THR t-shirt
Hopkinson Report Guest of the Year candidates: (Top guest receives a t-shirt too)
- Alexa Von Tobel, Learnvest.com
- Andy McLoughlin, Huddle.net
- Anthony Casalena & Tyler Thompson, SquareSpace
- Brian Simpson & Adam Wallace, Roger Smith Hotel
- Daniel Odio, PointAbout
- David Veneski, Intel
- Elizabeth King, Outsmarting the SAT
- Helen Todd, The Kbuzz
- Jana Eggers, Spreadshirt.com
- Jason Sadler, IWearYourShirt.com
- Josh Baer, Other Inbox
- Mike Barash, Blurb.com
- Mitch Joel, Twist Image / Six Pixels of Separation
- Nikki Martinez & Mike Dang, Unigo.com
- Peter LaMotte, Genius Rocket
- Rana Sobhany, Medialets
- Ryan Holmes, Hootsuite
- Sarah Prevette, RedWire (now Sprouter)
- Saul Colt, Freshbooks (now Thoora)
- The Gregory Brothers, Auto-Tune the News
- Tyler Peterson & Olivier Peyre, PleaseFixTheiPhone.com
Do you set goals at the end of every year? Not cliched, forgettable “I need to lose 5 pounds” goals. But real, tangible, goals? Do you write them down? And do they matter? Let’s find out.
This week I did things a little differently. Rather than interview a guest, and rather than meticulously write out a blog post, I ranted for a bit unscripted. And I liked it. So until I post the full transcript, the best way to hear this week’s topic is to listen to the podcast:
Download the podcast from iTunes, or play it below:
In the meantime, I’ll expand just a bit on the outline that I followed:
To existing fans of The Hopkinson Report, I’m excited to be manning the @Wired Twitter account for the week of 12/14.
If you arrived at this page by asking “Who is this @HopkinsonReport guy?” after seeing my name on the @Wired bio, glad you’re here! A quick intro: I’ve been at Conde Nast Digital for 3 years and work in the New York City office on Wired’s online marketing and social media, and sometimes write for Wired’s Epicenter blog.
If it’s your first time hearing about my blog/podcast, may I suggest some of my popular posts:
My predictionswere: we’d see growth with the iPhone, Twitter, Online Video, Facebook, and Green Technology, as well as the continued Mac vs. PC war and recession issues — while not so bold — were pretty spot-on. And I swear, I wasn’t endorsing any kind of growth in MySpace, I was just shocked to see that chart.
So what’s in store for 2010? I have to say that I’m sticking with all the topics I just listed. The one thing I would add is that this will be a huge year for the e-reader, although I don’t think there will be any kind of widespread adoption until 2011.
However, I know not to bet against Steve Jobs. Remember that the first iPhone sold a million units in 76 days, and the iPhone 3G sold a million units in the first weekend. The fanboys are frothing… we’ll see if he can deliver.
But for now, as online video continues to explode on the web, I see more of it in 2010. Here are
4 IMPORTANT VIDEO TRENDS WORTH WATCHING
Download the podcast from iTunes, or play it below:
First, lets get to the numbers, because they are quite ridiculous. We’ll look at the month of October 2009, according to Comscore.
“Scary WalMart Security Guards In Black Hoodies Prevent Black Friday Deaths” was a headline I read over the Thanksgiving break on The Business Insider, referring to the sad death of a temporary worker that died last year when early bird customers rushed the doors. Oh, and they forgot to mention the bullhorns. (Photo credit: NY Times slideshow).
But it never should have come to that.
Download the podcast from iTunes, or play it below:
As a self-proclaimed “hyper-influencer” and in layman’s terms “the guy everyone asks for tech and shopping advice,” there’s no way I would ever recommend forsaking time with family during the holidays, getting out of a warm bed at 5am, and elbowing other like-minded, bad-at-math, so-called bargain hunters for the lowest possible quality flat-screen TV available at retail.
Before I even get to my rules, I can tell you they violate good shopping logic on so many levels.
Hi, this is Jim Hopkinson, Wired’s Marketing Guy, bringing you the marketing trends that matter. Welcome!
Today’s topic is Auto-Tune, an interview with the Gregory Brothers from ‘Auto-Tune the News.’
Jim Hopkinson: Oh, yeah! [Auto-Tune] Hey everyone, this is Jim. Today’s episode is a fun one. I’ll keep the intro fairly short - there are three main points you need to know:
“Nobody teaches you this stuff” is a pretty good platform to build a business on.
Like a car mechanic or farmer or entrepreneur that creates an invention because they weren’t able to buy the item they needed to get the job done in a store (example: Daniel Odio’s Phone2Projector), many websites and blogs are founded because someone realized there wasn’t a great resource out there that was providing quality information about a topic that was important to the user.
Download the podcast from iTunes, or play it below:
That’s how Alexa Von Tobel, founder and CEO of LearnVest.com got started. Well-educated and coming off a stint at Morgan Stanley and tech company Drop.io, she didn’t feel there was a website filling the need of relevant financial life-planning information aimed at women aged 20-35.
So she did something unconventional (perhaps the one thing they wouldn’t recommend on LearnVest), dropping out of Harvard Business School to launch a startup during a recession.
But the timing could end up just right, as we talk about the major shakeups in the financial world, from the bad (Wall Street) to the good (Mint.com being acquired for $170 million).
It’s sort of like your TV news as you always wished to receive it… with a poppin’ beat and a happenin’ bass line .”
That’s how The Gregory Brothers describe their series of videos, Auto-Tune the News. I’ve been following the series for months now, and tweeting and forwarding them to anyone looking for funny entertainment at the intersection of pop culture, music, and technology.
Download the podcast from iTunes, or play it below:
For those unfamiliar, there are 3 main points you need to know:
# 1) There’s a digital process in music called Auto-Tune. Think of it as photoshop for your voice. Almost every artist makes small touches to enhance the product, while others use it liberally to radically alter the original recording. You might originally know the effect from Cher’s 1998 Grammy-award winning, multi-platinum dance song “Believe.”
# 2) Modern artists like T-Pain have brought it back big time, not only with award-winning songs, but also collaborating with Saturday Night Live for their popular digital short “I’m on a boat,” with Jimmy Kimmel for skits on his show, and he has an iPhone app called “I am T-Pain.” More on that in a second.
# 3) A Brooklyn-based band called The Gregory Brothers have made a hilarious string of viral videos called “Auto-Tune the News,” which mix political and pop culture news footage with a poppin beat and a happenin’ bass line, all set to Auto-Tune. I interviewed Andrew, Michael, and Evan on the podcast.
Auto-Tune the News #2 is one of my favorites, and the original where Katie Couric utters the now-famous line “Very Thin Ice.” As you’ll see, the brothers superimpose themselves into the newscasts, wearing outfits ranging from hip hop garb to an angry gorilla.
As a service (torture) to my readers, I show how Auto-Tune can take a hopelessly horrible singer like myself, and at least give you a laugh. Play the podcast to see how my opening intro sounds after running it through T-Pain’s Auto-Tune iPhone app.
Do you set goals at the end of every year? Not cliched, forgettable “I need to lose 5 pounds” goals. But real, tangible, goals? Do you write them down? And do they matter? Let’s find out.
