Daphne Kwon, ExpoTV (Podcast and Interview Transcript)

Here they are, they are brave, they are out there, they are showing their face, they are putting their words behind the money that they spent in your product reach out to them, acknowledge them, ask them questions and so it’s not just the positives that you need to embrace but also the people whose expectations were not met, just reach out to them and get a stand maybe not of the product but of your brand and of your company. And that’s something that they haven’t been able to do before because there was not a personal platform the way the web is now shaping up to be which to me allows this one-to-many conversation or even one-to-one conversation kind of be broadcasted to everybody. And that’s I think how we would love brands to come in and we would love to help shepherd them so that they do it well, they do it authentically, that they do it respectfully. And I think because the community trusts us to treat them well, we think it would be great to have a brand involved in the discussion that’s happening. So we love that question and we would love to get really great at doing that, introducing brands to the conversation.

Lisa Padilla: And you know another related question to that is so 85% are positive, 5% are negative; how do you classify the other 10%?

Daphne Kwon: That’s funny, no, let me see if I can add. But the 10% rate the product at 3 which is an average product; it did what it said it was going to do, not totally in love.

Lisa Padilla: Okay, you can give or take, okay. And is there an incentive for reviewers to do more reviews and how do you deal with people who work for that company? Is there a rule about, like I can go on and say BlogTalkRadio is the greatest, even though it is, because that may be seen as biased right or can I talk about whatever I want?

Daphne Kwon: You know we do have. So there are the rules which are in quotes because you know what rules are there really on the Internet. The rules that we have are that you can’t be associated with the product or you can’t be somehow enriched by your review. So if you work for Hasbro and you are ditching on feature, price, product, like that’s not okay but that’s the rule part which is really hard. I will get to the other things that we do. But we do compensate for the videos, we feel like these people are working for us, we feel like we need to own the video so that we can create a library; it’s really not about one superstar, it’s really about the collective opinion that we are getting. And so we used to compensate upfront like $25 per and as we dropped it down, it’s now between $2 and $10 depending on the quality, depending on the category we got exponentially more. And so these people are clearly not doing it for the money but the money is a great excuse to participate and feel like they are creating value and that they are getting respectfully a part of this community that we are creating. So with that we are able to create a relationship with the person, we are able to take the videos and use them in different ways and then what we expect from the community itself because you really start getting tied into the community is we do expect the community to monitor itself. It’s pretty hard when you are putting your face on a video to make one video and just totally ranting about a competitor product or just talking about your own product and not appearing like you are biased, you know you do one video that’s kind of suspect; you didn’t do 20 videos because everybody owns more than one thing. And so those are kind of the tip-offs, the community notices it. If it’s not a good video because it seemed so biased and wasn’t helpful at all, people just start pushing it down and it just doesn’t get viewed and the ones that are helpful they start getting ferreted up. So Expo actually exists to ferret out the great ones, the unbiased ones, that’s why we created a brand to that and actually we take our videos and we syndicate them to http://www.buy.com, to http://www.smarter.com, to Yahoo Shopping so that you can see them and all of those partners use the Expo brand you know it’s logo in the corner because we are supposed to be the ones who are trying to ferret up that by creating a relationship, by creating a membership, by being able to find out more about that member. And so on YouTube that’s not what they do, they don’t want to know anymore about you if they don’t have to, and that’s great, that’s what they do it’s not what Expo does and so we are actually investing and trying to make this a very helpful video.

Lisa Padilla: That’s great Daphne, I really love what you are doing. You started this company in 2004?

Daphne Kwon: Yeah we started in 2004 and it was funny because in 2004 believe it or not that’s pre YouTube, pre Google video so we started principally on on-demand television, on video on-demand. So we actually have a pipeline in many cable operators, we are on 90% of all VOD homes that are out there. But what happened was we were so constrained by needing to get advertiser video and that’s when the user gen blew up in 2005 and we realized well why don’t we go unlimited in all the categories and all the products and ask our community to actually create them for us and that’s when we really started hitting our stride.

Lisa Padilla: Great, okay. We also have a caller question from 650 area code and he has got a question about corporate culture and social media. Is the caller there 650?