Out of the best business programs will emerge the new faces of the great products we will all use and companies we will strive to emulate in our own work as entrepreneurs.
Babson College has generated some of the most successful entrepreneurs and companies that the world has to offer. Entrepreneur Magazine and The Princeton Review have both named Babson as the No. 1 Undergraduate and Graduate Programs with the Entrepreneurial Edge. Alexander Debelov is one of these innovative forces to watch in the 2010 graduating class.
Debelov is the brain behind Crelligance Media, holding company of Viralskool. Crelligance Media is a social media marketing company specializing in compensated consumer-generated media. The first tool or service offering to come from Crelligance Media is Viralskool. Viralskool is a creative community employing user-generated video to help companies of all sizes build better brands and better products through the use of online video campaigns.
Debelov is a force all by himself — an early member and now part of the Executive Board of the esteemed Kairos Society would be enough recognition for most college students — but with Crelligence, he’s chasing even bigger things.
Entrepreneur of 2010 Contest
This week, Entrepreneur Magazine announced the Entrepreneur of 2010 Contest nominees — a list that included Debelov and Crelligence Media.
The idea behind Viralskool was born in 2008 when Debelov became impressed with a startup that was allowing people to create their own iPod accessories and giving their community the ability to vote on the winning accessory, which would be sold on the Apple iTunes store. The best ideas are bound to come at odd times; Viralskool was born in the middle of the night. Debelov realized that the same thing — namely, crowd sourcing ideas — could be done for the advertising world.
After attending the Harvard Entrepreneurship Idol business plan competition in 2008, Debelov decided to go with this idea. “It became less of an idea and became more of a serious business venture. The initial idea has morphed a lot and the name has changed along the way. The core idea is to make advertising fun and make it more engaging. We are helping companies to spend their money more wisely,” says Debelov
Debelov says he and his business partner started to work more seriously on the business after that. There were bumps along the way — especially in figuring out the development end of Viralskool. “We threw the end product out. If you are launching a web project, you can’t outsource it. You need to have the expertise in-house to improve the project and build something of high quality. One of our first early mistakes was hiring the developers,” he says.
Alexander Debelov, CEO and Founder of Crelligance Media
Crelligance Media aims to be the go-to social media marketing agency offering a set of tools that companies can use to promote their brands on social media sites. Viralskool claim that their online video campaigns are 10 times more effective than other advertising methods.
The belief behind Viralskool is that online video campaigns are the most effective concept of marketing today and for the future of marketing. There has been a shift in the way advertising is done over the past
200 years. Crelligance Media’s value for the companies that they work with is that they can engage with consumers and creators in a viral and groundbreaking way. Consumers are sharing information with their friends and social circles, and it does not matter how the information is created either. Crowd sourcing simply works in the eyes of Debelov and his team.
Viralskool is changing the way the industry views video and marketing. “People are creating their own viral videos. This has changed the way the industry works. We have changed from professionally produced content to user generated content. User generated online video content will become one of the most prevalent forms of online marketing,” says Debelov.
Viralskool’s value proposition for all sized businesses lies with four main areas of customer attention:
First, the quality of the video campaigns must be evident to the customer. The Viralskool community is comprised of 3,000+ film makers — independent professionals who are building their portfolios by working on Viralskool campaigns. Crelligance has built a large enough community of engaged film makers so that when the video campaign contests are announced there is plenty of quality content made to meet the demand. The Viralskool community was built through inbound marketing methods using Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.
Second, there has to always be the ability to control the message. Viralskool’s customers need to be able to gauge the videos for distribution to make sure they are in line with their overall mission and strategies.
Third, exposure is key. The exposure that these videos generate can be up to 300,000 hits per campaign running over a two month time period. With the ability to reach the end consumer through blogs and forums that they have partnered with, Viralskool can attract the customer’s targeted demographic. The business is all about using a tribe to create great content and building partnerships to make sure that content gets distributed all over the web.
The last part of Viralskool’s commitment to their customers is to analyze the data and compute the return on their investment. One of the key differentiators lies here. They have tools to analyze demographics and effectiveness through location based buying and viewing of video. Companies will be able to compute the increase in sales.
The neat thing about Viralskool is that they put their mission to work in their beta, a case study approach to their service offering. Viralskool decided to test their theory that user generated video campaigns do create virality and do make sense investment wise for companies to engage in. Viralskool created their own video campaign contest with the simple task of creating a contest to see who could make the most viral video using the punch line, “Come on! Spread Me!” The simplicity of this contest was genius. This video campaign is used as a case study when presenting to potential customers today. The “Come On! Spread Me!” campaign generated many video submissions and found national and international TV coverage. The contest cost $3,000 and generated over 2 million views.VIralskool Beta Test Video: Crazy Basketball Tricks
Debelov and his holding company, Crelligance Media are on BostInnovation’s radar. Viralskool is currently growing their customer base and working on raising venture funds.
