Why You Should Rethink Success Metrics for Social Media Content

@njh287; www.dsmsports.net
On episode 304 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, Neil
chatted with Nick Cicero, Founder and CEO of Mondo Metrics.
What follows is a collection of snippets from the podcast. To hear the
full interview and more, check out the podcast on all podcast
platforms and at www.dsmsports.net.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

Nick’s Career Path
“When I first went to college, I went to school for music, so I have a
degree in music. I played jazz trumpet. I thought I was going to be a
music teacher. And I went to school basically the first year of
Facebook. When I went to college, for the first I had 24-hour access to
the internet, and obviously social media was like, not really a thing,
but this thing was happening where people were connecting,
Myspace, Facebook, things like that.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“To speed things up a little bit, all throughout college I experimented
with being an entrepreneur. So I would make beats and sell those
beats online, meeting people through Myspace or forums. I got some
commercial jingles and I have some really cool stories, like I made
music with Dog the Bounty Hunter that went on TV. There was an
A&E show called The Squad: Prison Police, it still gets some plays. So,
like, I have my music where they talk about the different shanks that
the prisoners make and all that fun.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“So I was always chasing kind of trying to be a music producer, in that
sense, but at the same time using social media. When I finished
undergrad, I went to Syracuse for advertising because I was really
entrenched in using the world of Facebook, and then Twitter when it
first came out, I was on that, so that was kind of an emerging field.
Digital marketing was still pretty new in a sense of people would just
buy banner ads. There might have been some cool viral videos here
and there that were just starting to come out; you know, like Burger
King, viral chicken, that type, like all these really interesting types of
advertising and marketing were starting to grow. And I was also
working with all these artists and musicians who would just upload
their music onto SoundCloud or YouTube early on, live mixtapes…
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“Through my time at Syracuse, I got a master's in advertising, and
really saw this opportunity that social media was really starting to be
used for brands, obviously for musicians in my world. So I was
working with creators and entertainers, and when I left Syracuse, I
spent a few years working in different ad agencies, kind of as a social
media manager or digital strategist, working on creating content,
pushing it out there. I was always kind of one foot into the work I was
doing, but then I also was always doing lots of side gigs or
opportunities, and things like that.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“So as I worked my way through the ad agency world of social media,
I was also doing things on the side, still working with artists, but now
helping them with their social media. One of my cool stories is I met
this music blogger out of Miami, when I lived in Daytona Beach, and
she found me from my Twitter presence and speaking at South by
Southwest, which I had done at this point just a couple years in,
because social media was still fairly new in like the traditional
advertising marketing world that we're in today. So she reached out
and she's like, ‘Hey, I'm working with this new artist, his name is
Kendrick Lamar, and I need some help. I'm his digital manager and I
need some help. We're getting ready to launch his major label debut.’
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“So we worked together, we came up with a bunch of ideas for how he might
launch his Instagram account. I didn't get paid for it, but I just said, you know,
forever and ever, I'm going to tell everybody that I helped launch Kendrick
Lamar's Instagram and she was like, You got it, no problem, and I posted about it
earlier this year, too. We were chatting about it, and this is 15+ years ago now. It's
crazy, right? So I had my day job and I was kind of moonlighting with different
projects on the side, then somebody said to me, you know, you're so social media,
tech savvy, right? A lot of my job there was strategy, but I was always involved
with the data, the analytics. And it wasn't just social media early, because early
social media analytics were very nascent, but I was doing a lot of web analytics
and being able to measure like, Hey, we're going to drive people from Facebook
to our website to do something, to buy something, how do we go and say, like, If
we make more posts on social media, do more people come into the grocery
store?
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“Especially early on, when we didn't have nearly the public metrics, the
data, that we had today, we were always looking to find that direct link as
much as possible, or prove that doing a bunch of stuff in social media
resulted in a positive action somewhere else. So kind of sitting in between
that data, technology, and social media lens, somebody suggested that I
move to San Francisco because that's where all the social media companies
and everybody were. So I moved out to San Francisco and worked at a
company called Livefyre, and they were doing a lot of really early social
media curation, comments, live chat. They had started off building like
comments, live chats, live blogs, for a lot of publishers. Then, as comments
kind of went away and moved into more of the social media realm, we
expanded and were doing really cool things, like putting tweets on TV,
which was a brand new thing at the time.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“It's funny because, I know the Tagboard folks really well, it was like
three companies that were really leaning into it. It was like Livefyre,
Tagboard, Mass Relevance, and everybody was kind of circling
around how to do [it]. We did really fun projects, like I went on tour
with Oprah and got to work on Oprah's social-driven television show.
We ended up, when Instagram video came out, we worked with her, it
literally was in the middle of her big social TV series that she was
doing. So we said, Let’s let people record their own videos on
Instagram and post them and submit them. So we ended up putting
some of the first curated Instagram video clips on TV. Fun stuff like
that.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“But throughout that whole experience, one of the biggest things that
I felt like I was always helping to solve was how do we measure how
successful this is? And especially when we started to move into the
world of curation or bringing in tweets, sticking hashtags on a
television show to try to measure how many people were engaging
with that, I always found myself leaning in a little bit more to like,
Okay, great, we made this cool thing, but how many people are seeing
it? Who's interacting with it? What did they actually do? Did they
listen to this or watch this part? Did they click on this or that? So I've
always been kind of interested in that stuff.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“And right around that time as video was starting to become much
more prevalent, I was living in San Francisco, I had exposure to
Snapchat, saw how Snapchat started to grow, bubbling up from LA
and then kind of spreading across the country. When I started to
move from San Francisco back to New York City, Snapchat was really
just starting to make its push. After I worked for a couple of years in
San Francisco, I moved back to New York, worked with a couple
different companies, Expion and Percolate. So once again, similar in
that content management, social media management, starting to get
closer to analytics.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“What really dawned on me was that video, which I saw when I was
working at Livefyre in particular, was becoming more accessible.
People were starting to watch less content on television or watch more
content on YouTube or Vine was really big, Snapchat was just starting
to come out, and none of the other kind of analytics tools that were out
there were doing any video measurement. So that's what I was like,
listen, we won. We have a great idea of how to bring together unique
ideas to create video that people are going to want to watch online and
on social media, but you're going to need to measure all that stuff, and
you're not just going to, like, measure it the same way that you
measure a photo that you put up on Instagram. Like, we need to start
measuring how long or how deep they engage with the content.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“So we saw this opportunity and I started Delmondo, my first
analytics business back in 2014. When we launched Delmondo, we
started off by building a lot of Snapchat campaigns for brands and
agencies. We worked with Lowe's and helped Lowe's launch their
Snapchat account. You know, 20th Century Fox, Jolly Rancher, a lot
of really cool brands, Marriott Hotels. NBC Sports was one of my first
clients, helping them measure the Snapchat that they were creating,
because now people were starting to lean into more video on YouTube
and Vine and Snapchat, and they had no real solution to measure
that. What Delmondo did was we basically found the way, and kind of
wrote the standard for how people should measure Stories.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“Because there's this new format that was mixed, was it photo, was it
video, do we treat it all as one? Do we treat them separately? And
while I know that there's always still some discussion, I would say
that when you think about the Story as a 24 hour living piece of
content, that's it, right? Like it's here today and it's gone tomorrow.
So whatever you do within that 24 hour window is going to impact
because something's going to expire at the end.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“You know, lots of people can just put up a thing, a thing, at thing
that's one way, like one point in time, and it's just this non-sequitur
roll of content. But the most effective brands tell stories, right? And
the teams and leagues and people that have fandoms, they don't want
to just see one or two random shots of access, they really want a story.
They want to dig into it. So Delmondo launched, we launched the first
analytics for Snapchat back in 2015, and then grew that and expanded
to not just Snapchat, but then we rolled out the first analytics for
Instagram Stories. We partnered with Facebook really early on and
became one of Facebook's first official measurement partners for
video, which was really cool because it was like Delmondo and
Nielsen and a couple others.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“One company ended up getting acquired by comScore, Facebook
bought one of the other companies, so it was really cool to kind of
take this and be in that early discussion around video. We grew that
business and were working with all sorts of sports, media and
entertainment companies. Everyone from MTV and Paramount to
TED Talks to Barstool Sports to UEFA, ESPN, most of the major
leagues at some point we've worked with. We grew that business and
continued to kind of evolve as this really awesome social video
analytics platform.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“Then we ended up getting acquired by Conviva in 2018. The whole impetus
of that was just that video was continuing to grow, and around 2018, if you
remember the streaming race basically was starting. So Netflix had been
crushing everybody, Hulu was ahead of its time, of course, and obviously
there were some pockets of people that were going to direct to consumers,
but not the major players. In 2018, the dominoes all fell. It was like
Discovery, Peacock, Disney Plus. When you go to streaming — social video
is really the third leg of that video measurement stool, right? You have
linear television. You have streaming, direct to TV linear cable, you have
this digital video, and then you have social, and those are pretty much the
only three ways that we're watching video, because it all takes the shape of
one of those three forms, even if it's in the back of a cab, it's still digital
video delivered over pipes.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“So after we got acquired, which was exciting, we stayed on and we
basically rebranded Delmondo as Conviva Social Insights. I spent four
years at Conviva working with streaming platforms like Hulu and
Disney and Peacock and others and really continuing to do work in
social media, but then also started to explore more around this
intersection of streaming video, social video, and really the
convergence of attention. Then after that, I took a break for two years.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“Everything went well, you know, things happen when you're the
founder, and most founders don't stay forever at the company that
buys them, sometimes [they do], but in my instance, we decided that
they were going in one direction, and I was excited to do other things.
So I took the time to step away at that point, and took a break.
Between then I [taught], and I still teach at Syracuse and the
Newhouse School. I started teaching a digital analytics class in the
master's program there, which was exciting. I was able to spend more
time advising and investing in companies like Gondola and SQWAD
and a number of others, and being able to spend a lot of time working
with them.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“But then, after a few years away, I got the itch, and I started to realize
that social video was now becoming more than just this third leg of
the measurement stool. In fact, it's probably the number one leg in
the measurement stool, right? You know, I've been saying that
YouTube is the new TV since 2018, since we were acquired. We've
seen the shift. Mike Metzler from my team [at Delmondo and
Conviva], Mike published research that we found in 2018-2019 that
showed, Hey, there's a ton more people watching YouTube on smart
TVs and connected TVs. This is something people need to look at. So
kind of pulling at that thread a little bit more and seeing the growth of
podcasting, which I'm just like, I love podcasts. I listen to a ton of
podcasts.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“It's always been something that I really like, probably because I'm a
music and audio guy. I saw that same problem that was happening
where they had all these different platforms measuring a video view
differently and had to get all that data the way that we did the first
time. Well, now you have all of that problem on social media on top of
the fact that, you know, YouTube is still oftentimes grouped in a
similar bucket as the other channels, where it's now, as you can see
from Nielsen stats, it is the number one place that people are
streaming content. It's ahead of Netflix. It's ahead of Disney+. It's
ahead of Hulu. It's ahead of Roku. Like, YouTube is the place. And
we're not talking about your mobile phones too, we're talking about
on television, on the sit down and watch it on a television screen.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“So this to me, is like what my life has been waiting for. Like, that was
the impetus of what we started [with] Delmondo was we believed that
video was going to take over a lot of the content that we consume on
the internet, and one day it would take over TV and now it's
happening. Nielsen just came out this week and said that they're
struggling, and they have more delays on combining streaming data,
television data, and what are we going to see tonight? We're going to
see, on September 5th, we're going to see a full length NFL game
broadcast on YouTube, like, not YouTube TV. I'm sure it'll be there,
but we're talking YouTube proper. They're loading it up, they got all of
the celebrities attached to it, and YouTube is looking at this as a big
time moment.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“So with all that happening, there's still the same measurement
problems, right? Social media companies live in the world of social
media, video companies live in the world of streaming. But there's
really this whole other area in between that includes podcasts, video
podcasts, audio content, newsletters that have now emerged, lower
barrier to entry for making your own digital video and putting it up on
your own app, for example, and just building your own app and
getting people to sign up and watch your video. Substack’s got video,
Patreon's got video. So all of these are different places, but there's no
measurement tool that connects them all together.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“What they do is they rely on you to hire somebody or to bring
somebody in in-house or just sit on their own platform, and not
connect the dots. So that was the whole idea around Mondo Metrics is
really: how do we democratize all of this data for the new type of
content creator and the new type of media company? Because the
people who started off as the smallest creators are now the biggest
media brands in the world. Barstool Sports, MrBeast, pick a
newsletter, Dude Perfect. Like, Dude Perfect is worth $500 million
and bought a ginormous facility in Dallas to do studio content with.
So these folks that are starting off as what might be like a cute video
or a silly video that your kid's watching on their phone is actually the
next Oprah. I think that that's the crazy part around all of this.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“Look at the viewership on the Taylor Swift [on New Heights]
podcast, right? You know, we have a client we're working with, who I
won't name right now, but we just started working with this really
exciting client, and they're doing video podcasts as well. They did a
couple episodes of their debut show this week. It's a channel that's got
millions of subscribers on it, and when we go and look at the analytics
on the back end, we're seeing 50% or more of the watch time
happening on these connected TVs.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“So now you're basically telling me that somebody is sitting down, or
maybe they're walking around their kitchen, maybe they're doing
other stuff, but they're basically saying, I'm not going to flip to ESPN,
I'm not going to flip to the news or whatever. I'm going to open up
YouTube and I'm going to watch a two hour series instead of flipping
through, like, I would flip through the TV guide. And, you know, for a
2 ½ hour show to see that much watch time, this is where I think
things get confused in a lot of ways. Because you have a lot of people
will say, Oh, but a YouTube view is different than a TikTok view or a
Twitter view, for example. And that's why I always talk about watch
time.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“When you see Mondo and we publish research, we have to use the public
data to kind of give us the temperature check, right? It's kind of like a
trending thermometer that's going to give us a baseline signal. But when you
peel below the surface, that Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce episode of New Heights
is a great example. It's a 2-3 hour long episode, however long it is, longer than
any of your average television shows and maybe even longer than a movie.
Like, we're not talking a 20 minute interview here. 20 million views. But, you
know, every one of those views, probably, I would say, 10 to 15 [of the 20
million], they're probably watching for an hour or more. And I think that's the
one thing that now people, because Nielsen says that people are really seeing
that, and that Nielsen number is not coming from when you look at the view
counts on a video on YouTube, it's really coming from the amount of time
that people are spending with all that content and watching it.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“That's the thing that is so exciting today is oftentimes, like when I'm
going in and when we're working with folks, we jump right in and say
Alright, let's talk about what your living room picture is like, because
we work with all these podcasters, sports teams, leagues, they all want
to capture attention, they want to measure the most attention. They
want to take the biggest share of your attention from somebody else at
the end of the day, and that's why what we really try to preach is that
we need to prioritize for watch time and quality time spent on these
platforms, the amount of total consumption that might occur in a day,
for example. Because those are the numbers that add up.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

On Nick’s view of the evolution of analytics and the industry adopting or
resisting new paradigms
“I would say that when we first started off, a lot of it was really just
keeping track of things. It was one of those things where it's like, I know
I need to be here, I know I need to be making the content, and I don't
know exactly what form it's going to take, what's going to work really
well, and I need to just start to try things and stick. Whereas today, even
when a new platform like TikTok, which has totally changed everything,
when a platform like TikTok came out, they basically had the unfair
advantage of kind of the market already being primed for understanding
videos and clips. And sure, they added that other level into it.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“So as we have evolved, I think that, one, it's been better to have more
people understand the concept of time spent. So like I said, when we
first started, the fact that Reels on Instagram today will tell you the
minutes consumed, and average watch time that somebody will watch
on a Reel. When they rolled that out, it was like my prayers were
answered, because, once again, I had no way to know if you were
rewatching or whatnot, right? So essentially, if you think about the
depth, I keep going back to that word of depth of engagement, and it's
like when I go into a viewing experience, and this is what we thought
with Stories as well, like when I go into this experience of consumption,
what am I doing? What are the other options that I have? What are the
different paths that I take to continue on and move through that?
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“So, once again, the biggest challenge that we always had was we
would have to use engagements as a proxy for interest, right? But we
know that only like the 1% of people are really engaging, for example,
relative to everybody. That's why whenever we look at things like
engagement rate and we use followers as the denominator, which a lot
of people do, that is outdated and old, right? That’s a metric that now
has evolved because, one, you can game it, but two, it's not really
relevant if all of your followers don't have the chance to see all your
content, and that's changing. So we were using all of these proxy
metrics to help us understand that. Once we moved past a text post
and a photo post, there is no reason for us to not be able to measure
time, right?
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“I remember, even before I started Delmondo, when I was working at
Expion and we were doing a lot of analytics, and I had clients like
SyFy and Univision and iHeartRadio, and we were helping them
measure their social content and everything, and I always came up
with this like, what's a better scoring system, or a way to convey the
amount of time that people spent on stuff where it's like, Oh wow, if
this post has got a lot more comments, well, it's going to take you time
to write a comment. It's going to take you two or three seconds, it
might take you five seconds if it's longer.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

"So I've always had these ideas of is there a better way to express the
amount of time that people spend with stuff? Because we only have
the same 24 hours in a day, no matter how many devices we have
around us. And sure, we can pull up devices across a lot of different
screens. I have 3 or 4 of them right in front of me right now. But
regardless, as a human, I can only spend 24 hours doing something.
And sure, I could see that it might be on 4 or 5 different screens, but
still, if I pull up an Instagram post and it's looping in the background
and I'm watching it still, or I walk away and it's still there, like there's
a lot of tangible value to knowing that. Same thing in the living room
with YouTube right now.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

"How do we express the fact that people may or may not sit down and
watch every last second of a two hour podcast interview, but they
might pick up and walk over here or do something else, do something
different. So before we didn't have the time component. We just had
these top level metrics: the likes, the comments, the shares, the
impressions, the views. Which is fine in a display world, but that's the
old way. That's the way that we measured magazines. That's the way
that we measured display ads on the web. Like, how many
impressions did we get? Which is cool, but it's like we're not
refreshing through pages so often. We're spending time where, like, as
content changes and becomes longer. Same thing for video.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“How we got inspired to do the analytics for Stories was we looked at
YouTube, like, YouTube has been around for a long time and provided
completion rates and retention rates for people. So we said, Hey, what
is a Story but a compilation of videos that you're just playing back in a
row once again over a 24 hour window of time? So if the first frames
of the video and the day expire, and I'm missing the point of telling
the Story, my Story is incomplete. So that's where it gave us the
inspiration to say, Well, maybe we should be measuring completion
rate. But how do we do that? That's what caused us to start to blow
things apart and look at what are new metrics that we can combine
and relationships that haven't been there before.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“The second piece is evolving and getting people to see things that are
different. Time spent is a big one from the time that people are
spending. But my new big thing is the time spent that we are
producing this stuff. To feed the machine, it takes time. Other people
can pump out the AI clips, but the clients that we work with, the high
value IP holders, the sports teams, the media properties, these are
trusted fan brands, creators, that have invested a lot of time, and, for
that, it takes a lot of time to make good quality content. But then
there's other content that might take no time at all, and it blows up,
and you don't realize that it did so well.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“So that's one of the things that I'm thinking about now. At Mondo,
what we're thinking about a lot is, how do you take the time that
people spend with your content and combine it with the time that you
spend making the content, and find the happy medium that allows
you to make stuff to continue to drive your brand and enough eyeballs
to make enough money? And between those two points, you're going
to find the sweet spot of what metrics matter, what type of content
matters, and more specifically, like, what is most important for you as
an organization, because it's a little bit different for everybody.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

On putting metrics and audiences into context with who’s viewing
and who’s completing
“It definitely is something that we're thinking about every day. It's not
even just on a video. There's kind of two parts to this: one, the
audience and understanding how to segment my audience in different
buckets, and on each platform, obviously, there's going to be a little
bit of difference in variance and nuance. But then to your point, even
like within each type of video, you're going to find different segments.
I would say that there's two ways that we're thinking about it.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“First is let's talk about the video item itself, then we'll come back to
the audience and the segments. So like with the video itself, I have
this chart that I teach in my classes and I was working on a post for it
this week because I was like, Oh, that's pretty good, I should share
this. When you think about the anatomy of a video, pretend that
you're looking at a YouTube video and you're watching it on YouTube
right now. Well, you really need that first couple seconds, and
everybody kind of knows this at this point. It's the hook, right? It's so
important, and especially now on YouTube, on TikTok. It's the matter
of, like, do I keep watching or do I not? On YouTube, do I even start
watching or not? Sometimes it's not just the thumbnail, but like now
they show you a little preview clip and stuff like that, right?
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“So there's so much more with that first few seconds that you can do
now, and that's really important because, once again, that kind of
gives me the signal. This is where the public views [count] really help,
the way that it's like one second on TikTok and Twitter and some of
these other things because ultimately that tells me, you know, what
types of content get served up the most, that are either served up
because they're interesting to people, they're served up because the
algorithm thinks that they're interesting.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“So I need that little slice of the first half because, you know, people
aren't going to see the end. If people know about the end that's
coming from high value anyways, because how do you know what's at
the end unless you got there already? That's kind of like the teaser,
right? It's the ad. This is the ad that gets you interested. But not just
that, it also gives us the feedback of what each platform is signaling as
quote unquote ‘valuable’ in a lot of different ways, so that's helpful on
that side.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“Then you get to the middle, the meat of it. And when you get into the middle of
the video, now this is when I'm starting to dig in and look at the comments that
are happening, if it's what type of video. You know, a lot of times, with YouTube,
they even give you the timestamps on the comments and you can kind of see at
what point in the video do people engage the most, or if this is a live stream,
you'll see the peaks where it's like, you know, so and so commentator says
something inflammatory, and now all of a sudden, everybody jumps into the
chat. It's interesting to see like, Okay, cool, if this video is getting a lot more
comments or, you know, once again, this is where we start to kind of combine
metrics, because now I'm looking at things like a combination of comments and
the retention rate. So if I'm halfway through the video at this point, how many
comments have we gotten so far? How many people are still sticking around
here? And how can I look at the two of those together?
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“Then as I move through the end, once again, I'm looking at that completion
rate, the retention rate, the drop offs. Then I'm looking at the rewatchers
and the uniques. Right. So anywhere that I can see that somebody
rewatched something, or watched it again. And then finally I'm looking at
shares. If something was so good that somebody shared it, especially on a
video platform, on Instagram or on TikTok, it may be a little bit easier to
share, and I'm a big fan of the shareability for that. But when you're on
YouTube, if I see that a lot of people are sharing your YouTube video, or if
I'm going and seeing that people are clicking on it from text messages or
looking at some of the other data, then I know somebody is taking that link
and sending it to somebody too, so those people probably are getting to a
little bit closer to the end of the video or [users] are just so positively
inspired by that content that they had to go share it with somebody.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“So I like to think about it in like those three buckets of, like if you
look at a video, what metrics are at the beginning, middle and end?
And depending on what my goal is, I'm going to look at stuff
differently, right? Like if I'm struggling to get viewers on my channel,
I'm probably going to look at the first stuff, like what is it in the title?
What is it in the thumbnail, what is it in the hook that is working or
not working? Okay, cool, so what if I'm getting millions and millions
of views, but people are only sticking around and watching my
YouTube videos for like 7 or 8 seconds? Well, then I might look at the
middle to the end metrics; like, okay, well, how long is my video?
What's the retention?
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“It's so crazy sometimes that people will spend all this time and
energy to make a 20 minute video and get a million views and have an
average watch time of 10 seconds. It's like, what? YWhat you're
basically telling me is that probably 90% of the people left and you
just had a few people that were really invested into it. You got to try
something different, right? So it's cool, it might have gotten a million
views because it might have been like a viral hook or viral something
else, but there's no substance to it. So depending on what your goal is,
you almost need to look at a different slice of the video in that sense.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

Where the industry is at in general today in properly assessing and
measuring video success
“I think that it's going to depend on what type of company you are,
obviously. For example, consumer brand marketers, if they're not so
heavily invested in the strategy of video as storytelling and more of
the medium of video, as, like, we have to make a bunch of Reels and
clips and things like that. Then, if we have to do a bunch of Reels and
clips and things like that, then you may not be looking at the depth of
engagement inside of those videos, and you're going to probably tie
that back to the campaigns that you're running.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“So it's like, I'm looking at X, Y and Z campaigns, I'm maybe looking at
impressions or views or the amount that I spent on that, and I'm also trying
to tie that back to like those other actions that are happening. I have content
that's about products and team hires and all these other things. So a lot of
the time I’m looking at the top level views to help me with that barometer of
how people are consuming my different types of content. So it's like, Okay,
well, people are engaging more with talent based content, so that means
that maybe we should lean in and talk more about our people and things
like that, and they'll use that to make content recommendations or
additional investments to tie that back to, Hey, we had this big surge of stuff
that was happening because we got a bunch of views on all of these product
posts. You know, are we getting a lot more traffic on our website even if we
don't put a direct link into there?
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“So I think that we still use views as a proxy for a wavelength. Think of it as
a wavelength. It's like okay, every week or every month, this is kind of the
level that we're getting, and if something goes big, like we hope that
something is going to go big somewhere or increase the plateau that we're
moving on to. A lot of that is still happening with the brand side. But I will
say that all of the folks that we work with that are more in what we call high
volume content publishers. So people like sports teams, leagues, media
companies, publishers, podcasters, content creators. These are the folks
that really do understand the need to go deeper and understand the depth
of the content with their audience. Because that watch time is, like I said,
one of the strongest signals on all these other different platforms. The
problem is that most people don't make the type of content that people want
to sit around and watch.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“Like, I'm sure that I think you read both Rachel [Karten and her Link
In Bio newsletter) and Lia Haberman [and her ICYMI newsletter]
have both covered it, but there's that [brand with the short-form
show], Bilt. They're also sponsoring a ton of podcasts right now. It’s
really interesting, right? Because obviously they're just creating
episodic content, and that's the stuff that people, even on an
Instagram video they'll sit around for, right? Same thing with TikTok
videos. That's one of the things I think that you're starting to see.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“What I would say, though, is that when you get into that world, there are
two tiers of need. So certain people, if you're like a true media executive,
you're going to look at your time spent on YouTube and try to think
comparably to television, right? Because if you're ESPN or whomever,
you're like, Okay, these many people spend this much time on television,
but then they're going and watching Pat McAfee live every day, they're going
and watching this. So we can't not look at the depth. We can't not look at the
total consumption time that they spend with our brand. And so executives
see that. But then content teams see that now too, because they realize that,
for the most part, it's helpful to tell executives big numbers, vanity metrics,
once again with the barometer angle. But as you start to dig in to look at
what's really effective and what's not, that's when you have to really dig into
the details once again.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“I think an interesting example is I had a conversation this week with
a client, and this client, like a lot of the sports teams or media
companies, they have rights to clips of content. Just like every team in
the NFL or every team in the NBA, they're always posting up clips of
the games here and there, with exception. And everybody knows that
rights are a very delicate thing in the world of sports, and especially as
they go on YouTube, for example. But as we were talking, kind of
going and reviewing some of their YouTube content and strategy, you
know, you kind of paused for a second because they were like, well,
how do we get better in the living room?
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“You know, we see all these news about YouTube on TV being the
best, blah, blah, blah, and I was like, Yeah, well, let's take a look and
let's pull up your channel here. As we look through, they, like a lot of
the teams, and a lot of the league or a lot of the media companies have
highlights for every game. It's like here's a highlight, here's a
highlight, here's a highlight. Well, that's great. But that highlight is
probably only going to be good for 24 to 48 hours if that. No different
than the 10th time that you watch SportsCenter. You're over it, right?
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“So the last thing that I need to do is see ten accounts in that first
window that the game is over, all trying to give me and feed me
highlights. Sure, I'll go to like 1 or 2 of those, but everybody is trying
to compete on that same short-term window. Think about this. Now
we're getting ready to go into the NBA season…So Memphis Grizzlies
[for example]. We're getting ready to start the NBA season, what are
you going to do to get ready as a sports fan? Well you can maybe turn
on ESPN and hope that they talk about the Grizzlies, but they're
probably not unfortunately right. You could go to the team website.
Maybe you get some news articles.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“You get some videos, you get some other stuff. That's all fine. What do you
do? You probably go to YouTube and you start like, Okay, let me see what
other videos are out there about the Memphis Grizzlies. Because I'm
hungry, I'm a fan, I want to get juiced up for my team. I want to learn about
my team, I want to see stuff. I would say none of us, there's not a single
person out here that I really, truly believe is going to go back six months ago
and look at a game highlight of the Memphis Grizzlies versus the Lakers.
Unless it was a record breaking game. Unless it was a monster dunk by
LeBron. Like, there's no reason that a highlight is ever going to last six
months. So what are you going to do, you're going to look at compilations.
You're going to go look at podcasts, or more recent shows or more regular
individuals that are going to talk about new stuff and have opinions and
things like that.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“We were talking with this, this company, and I just happened to be looking
on the Eagles YouTube, and I saw what they were doing and it was just a
great idea. And it dawned on me, it's like, instead of taking all these
highlights, why aren't we clipping them all together? So for the Memphis
Grizzlies, Ja Morant… So what if instead of you going back and looking at all
the random game highlights last year from the Grizzlies; instead, what if
they had a whole set of videos that was like every Ja Morant dunk of the
2025 season, every Ja Morant three pointer. And I'm sure if you go and
search this now, you're going to find people who don't have rights to any of
that content still doing it anyway. And you are the source as the Memphis
Grizzlies in this instance. So that's one of the things where it's like, Okay,
well sure, you're going to pump out some highlights. And definitely that
works for TikTok and Instagram and those short half life platforms.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“But now as we move into YouTube, well, we need to start thinking about
the same way like that. Is that piece of content going to have staying
power, years from now? Serial and the podcast world, for example, there's
lots of podcasts that turn and burn every single day. But Serial that was
made years ago now, so many years ago, it's still like new people all of a
sudden that decide that they want to start listening to podcasts or they
meet somebody else, like, what do they do? That's this awesome piece of
IP. Just the same way that you're going to go back and watch Game of
Thrones, you're going to go back and watch all this other stuff, like you
would go back every year to the Memphis Grizzlies YouTube channel and
watch compilations of every player. You don't need the single game. So
that's the big thing that we're thinking about as we evolve all this stuff.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“When you go back to the evolution of measurement, I think now
people are starting to realize that where it's like, yes, I have the churn
and burn of the algorithm that I have to fight every single day, that
kind of rolls with the flow of the world, the way that the media cycle
works, the way that we're hyper short, attention driven in that sense,
because we're in this rat race of the world that we live in. But then at
the end of the week, we are here on a Friday afternoon, if you really
take a step back when you have some free time to breathe and think of
a piece of content that you want to watch, then that's where people
are starting to think about this more.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“That's when people really care about average watch time, and the
minutes consumed, the quality of the content that's going out there.
And I'm excited by that. Because it means that people that would
typically have been making a lot of social content, or maybe never got
the chance to get on TV, are bringing really quality storytelling into
these platforms and spending more time. So I see this as a really
strong evolution. And I think that this time next year we're going to be
talking again about, everybody's rolling out time spent because there's
really only like 1 or 2 platforms that have really held off being able to
give you a meaningful time spent. So that's what we're building, is,
essentially, we can pull in your time spent from every one of these
different places, and now you really see a true picture.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

On building for for frequent short-form views vs. long-form single touch
consumption
“It’s a cop-out, but it’s true. When you quantify that, it really comes down to
like, what's your goal as a brand? You know, when you see those viral videos
about, I watch a lot of these — [shows off a couple products] this is my
TikTok or Shorts addiction, is like ‘10 Amazon products for your Home’,
and it's like some person who just speed reviews the Amazon products.
Does that creator care about watch time in that instance, or does that brand,
if they want to tell you what your product does maybe a little bit more. As
you get deeper, you get more consideration, right? So I have this whole
metrics that matter. Like, what's the type of content and where does
somebody sit in the journey?
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“I talk about this in class, like if I just want to have exposure or awareness to
something, then I'm doing the thing, like make a funny viral video where it's
showing your product used in a really interesting way that nobody expected
it to be used in. And it's just like that quick clip for two seconds, and it
might go viral; it might be you doing the same thing over and over and over
again on a single channel to get awareness and exposure, and if that's the
thing that now all of a sudden people know that, Hey, you have this weird
tool to help you slice a banana into little pieces, then that is the point of
that. But, you know, oftentimes, you have that full customer journey,
whether you call it a funnel or a staircase, most of the brands want to think
about marketing and content, right? We should think about it
interchangeably as like steps in a staircase to get you down to do different
types of things.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“So when you talk about the Korean [micro] dramas, like with Bilt, I
honestly didn't know what Bilt was as a brand until a couple of weeks
ago when they started advertising on one of our client's podcasts, and
then I saw the Roomies thing that that everybody was talking about,
and I was like, what is this Bilt company? Boom. Mission
accomplished. They worked with a new person in a different audience
to reach their audience, and then they reinforced it with frequency by
showing up in another section of the world that I didn't anticipate
seeing.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“So, like, this interesting Roomies Instagram drama, and then I saw
Bilt sponsoring a podcaster. So what they're doing is, like, they're
hitting me in two ways, and in both ways, it's allowing me to do
something a little bit different. Ultimately, their goal was achieved of
me becoming aware of Bilt. Now I'm stuck on the top of the stage,
they'll have to figure out how to get me down to the next level. But the
next level is going to be like, okay, let me learn something…
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“Bilt does ‘earn rewards on rent’, so I'm not in the target market because I
don't rent. But once again, there's probably some really interesting
educational video, or they go partner with a podcaster or an influencer that
now is like, well, Hey, maybe we need to do a six minute series on fashion or
financial tips for young people, and really lean into the series. So they've
done this really fun drama series, but now to go to the next level, that drama
series doesn't help people [become customers]. When I watched a couple
episodes, that doesn't move you down the funnel as much as you would think
that, you know, a deeper series like that would. Now, why should I consider
Bilt? Like, what's that next thing? What is something that's a problem in my
life that I need to spend a little bit more time figuring out before I then
finally pull the trigger? That last trigger might be like the influencer that's
the closest to you, the biggest to you, or maybe even a direct promotion.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“So I think that what we need to do is, like, there's different lengths of
content for the different goals. Like, you don't need a Roomies skit for your
banana slicer. You need that guy who's doing 15 second ‘This is a crazy
product from your home on Amazon, look at what it does, it works.’ Done.
So I think that we're always going to be looking in between those elements.
But once again, the deeper relationship that you want to have with
someone, the more in-depth you dive into your video strategy and the more
places that you make it. I bet you with that Roomies series, it's not short,
but it's not a feature length film, it's not a television length episode. There's
still length to that. Could they just have easily done a lot of those six second,
seven second, ten second video clips themselves? They could have done
that, too. And they're probably doing that in promotion and collaboration
with it.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“So there's no right or wrong way. But what there is that you have to
think about, like, what do people want to see from you? Like, rewards
from your rent? Like the way that it's all listed. You know, I get a SoFi
thing every other day in the junk mail from SoFi to try to do
something. So people are constantly throwing financial offers and
things in your face, and what would it take to get you to be aware of
something? And I think that that Roomies show is an example of you
could do deeper immersive content to get the awareness that you
needed to get.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

On the strategic considerations for sports teams leaning more to
frequent touchpoints vs. deeper touchpoints through content
“That's a great question. I think that, and I'm trying to write this up as
well because I presented on this, the reason why I say that marketing
is a staircase, not a funnel, is because we have flexibility in how deep
our relationships go. And I think especially in the world of sports too,
like, I could be a really big fan of something, I want to watch every
piece of content from them, but that can also be a big fan of the
Knicks and not watch every Knicks game, every Knicks podcast, but
want to make sure that I go to the game, right? So this is where I
think you got to hit for different levels, too.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“Sports is a great example. Like, we can build fandoms and we can get
people to watch our stuff on YouTube, but ultimately if we don't put
butts in the seats, that's where we're going to always make the most
money is making sure that we have tons of attendance, making sure
that we sell out all of our games, that we are delivering the best
product and some of that. So, once again, if you just focus on pushing
people down the funnel and becoming die hard fans, well, not
everybody wants to even be like that, right? Like, especially in this
world of sports, it's a little different, maybe, in fast food or grocery,
there's some of these things, you just got to eat, we got to sleep, those
are the things that we have to deal with. But when there are hobbies,
we often move in different periods of engagement with them.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“If you think about marketing as a funnel, it's a very one way thing.
Like, have you ever thought about what happens when somebody
leaves the funnel? Well, there's no holes in the sides of the funnel.
You know what I mean? It's a very flawed methodology, in certain
instances, because maybe I decide, Hey, I got down to here and I was
really researching X, Y and Z, but then I moved to a different city, or I
spent a couple years away — does that get me down to the bottom
rung now? Well, no. Well, maybe I step back and maybe I'm on the
top of the staircase now. But if I'm a Bills fan or whatever fan, you still
should market to me because I still want you to invite me to a game. I
still want to be a part of the fandom…”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“I think that sports and media is generally more accepted, I think in
the brand world, it just seems more marketing. But in the world of
sports, it's really the life cycle of fandom. So to your point, what we
really need to be doing is it's not about duration at every stage of the
funnel. It's not how long this video is or how short it is. It is about the
engagement and depth and the checkboxes that they hit along the
way. And just like any good ad campaign, everybody knows it's all
about the four P's, right? It's all about having the right framework of
what to put together for people so that you can see them, and if you
have those areas covered, then you need to fit into their life.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“It's the same in sports. You have to create content that touches on all
of those. But once again, that doesn't mean that they can't overlap,
right? We know that the schedule release, for example, that's the type
of content that I love; the schedule release, for what it is, because it's
kind of like everybody wins, right? It's the biggest fans, the most
engaged fans, you can kind of talk to them, people who don't even
know at all, you also hit them because it's like, by the way, you could
come to a game, we have them. So that's why I like schedule release as
a format. You see ones that are really deep and long. You've also seen
ones that are really short, right?
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“That's a perfect example of content that if we were to ignore fans and
just put up a graphic of like, here's the new schedule; the moment t
that first schedule release video came out that was more creative than
an image was definitely a watershed moment because people were
starting to realize how we can hit both of our casual and and extreme
fans all at the same time, which, if we can find content that works at
every stage of the funnel that can do that, obviously that's nirvana.
But most of the time, we're adjusting to each one of these based on
the flow of our business at that point in time.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

On looking at frequency of engagement, depth of engagement, substance of
engagement/content, and the audience engaging
“We created and we launched a product called Mondo AQ back in June, and
that's exactly what we're trying to do with that. I spent my whole career kind of
trying to help you understand what content works. How long are people
watching it? But the next question is always, okay, but who are these people,
right? Like, are they bots or are they regular? I don't know who those people
are. Bringing this all the way back around to our very first question of the day
here, when we think about the evolution of measurement, well, the TV
companies, for all the things that the Nielsens, the Comcores, for all the things
that they were slow on in the world of digital measurement, the things that
they were right on were understanding how to identify people, I will say that.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“So when we launched Mondo AQ, that was exactly that. We have all
of these really big content creators, these sports teams, media
companies, podcasters like Men in Blazers, who have hundreds of
thousands or more people that are following them, millions of people
following on social media, hundreds of thousands of readers on
newsletters or podcasts or all these things; well, how do we know who
those people are? And to your point, not just who they are, but how
often they're engaging with us. So that's one of the cool things that
we're doing now is that we've built this product that basically takes in
all of your first party data from the places that you are distributing
your content to.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“So, your newsletter, for example, we could take in all of your
newsletter data, whether you use beehiiv or MailChimp or whatever,
and we match that data and enrich that data based on email address,
IP address, phone number, whatever, stuff that you have about the
subscriber, match that with data from providers like the Experians,
TransUnions of the world, those types of companies where we can
take and match and enrich all of that data, to take an email address
and now say that that email address is also a fan of Whole Foods, for
example. And while most of the companies stop there in a lot of this,
like data matching attribution, what we're doing is continuing the
loop and bringing that back in and bringing more attributes together.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“So what that means is out of 100,000 subscribers, sure, I could tell
you the makeup, age, gender, income, the audience, lifestyle segments
when they bought a car last, are they in the market for this, do they
like soccer? Do they like cigars? How many kids do they have in the
household? All of this stuff which you know is available. It's not new,
but what I can now do is, because we're also measuring all their
consumption platforms, their podcast channels, their newsletters,
their streaming apps, well, we can go back and pair that data with
your consumption. So what we've been doing is building; you know,
we have basically built these algorithms that we've partially written
and then partially leverage AI technologies to go and make
assumptions around things.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“So basically we can be looking dynamically, and no two companies
are ever going to be alike, even if you have 100,000 of the literally
exact same 100,000 people are on my list and on your list, because
you post one type of content and I post a different type of content, it's
going to be totally different. The top 10,000 people in my list are
going to probably read way more of mine, and there's going to be a
different 10,000 people that read the most of yours, even though
they're the exact same subscriber base. So that's kind of the next level
is we've been building these awesome algorithmic segments that
basically will cluster your audiences in different groups.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“So I could say like, Hey, I have bookworm empty nesters, let's say. So
people that love books, they read a lot. And then we also know,
because we're pulling in all of your newsletter data, that they have a
60% open rate, and they open your email every single week, and
there's 10,000 people that are just like that. It's not supposed to tell
you about that one particular person, it's supposed to be able to let
you know, like, Hey, look at this real trend, 10,000 of your 100,000
people that make over $200,000 that love food, wine and cigars.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“So instead of selling to Budweiser every week and having Budweiser
be your partner every single week across the year, well, what if like
four times a year, you went to Rolex and you said, Hey, Rolex, II have
10,000 subscribers that are reading literally almost every single week
and they make over $250,000 and have no kids. Well, now I go from
selling Bud, middle of the road, basically selling to everybody, to now
maybe only four times a year I'll sell the Rolex, but I probably will get
as much or more because I can prove that I can reach a different type
of segment or a highly desirable segment. That also means I can
personalize my content, maybe, by knowing all this stuff.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“So that's kind of the next level in what we're doing with a lot of these
content creators, because this type of stuff was typically reserved for
the companies that could afford it the most, the Nielsens, most of the
major TV networks, the biggest publisher networks in the world. But
now with the social side becoming more prevalent, with more identity
data being shared, and with the rise of newsletters and podcasts that
are giving us more signal, we can actually build much more reliable
audience graphs through other types of data. It's not just saying that,
Hey, this is Neil on YouTube and on TikTok, right? That is not worth
it.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“What it's interested in saying is that I have a bunch of people that are
active on TikTok and YouTube that also share these attributes, and
that is really what we want to see, because we can take that data and
use it anywhere that we want. We can go and buy out of home, even,
based off of that, if we're able to identify who those people are. I'm
never going to buy 1 to 1 out of home, I'm always going to buy a ton of
people. So there's a lot that you can do with understanding who your
audience is, and that's what we're trying to solve more. And once
again, going back to the democratization of data, bringing something
that used to be really expensive, more accessible to everybody.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

About Nick’s music skills (his undergrad degree is in music)
“Yeah, so I started playing trumpet when I was maybe seven years old. I
love music. So I play trumpet, piano, and a little bit of drums. Had I
pursued music full time after undergrad, you know, I wanted to be like a
music teacher and then a producer. So, like, writing jingles and writing fun
scores that people would put on TV and in commercials. That was kind of
what led me into Syracuse, into their advertising program, too, because, at
the time, social media was there, but I also was like, Wow, I found out that
you could get a full time job picking the music at an ad agency or picking the
music at a movie studio for the trailers, like all this stuff. So my goal was,
ultimately to, I would say I'll probably be a music supervisor or something
like that.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

Nick’s favorite all-time band or musician and the all-time GOAT ad jingle
“So the all time jingle that is just annoying is 1-877 Kars4Kids because
that is just like classic memorable to the point of bleeding your ears. But
there's so many great ones. I mean, I could spend all day. My favorite
musician of all time is definitely Miles Davis. Mainly because of, you
know, the trumpet, certainly being a trumpet player [myself]. But also,
when you really learn about Miles Davis and, you know, I've been
learning about him my entire life since I was a little kid, he's just
somebody that transformed himself so many different times and so many
different genres and was way ahead of the mainstream in terms of like,
culture and what was cool and, and was always unabashedly himself.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

Nick’s favorite social media or brand campaign he got to work on in
his pre Delmondo days
“I would say the Oprah campaign was pretty cool. We got to work
with Oprah, helped her put on this TV series with Brené Brown and
others that was a live show, but really social media focused. So she
was taking in questions from Twitter, from Instagram, from
Facebook, and featuring people on big screens inside of a workshop
arena. It was really fun, obviously, it was so cool to work with
somebody like Oprah and to see what that's like behind the scenes.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“It did really well. We got to make the first Instagram video on
television, and then they actually ended up winning a social Emmy for
that, as well. I don't have any Emmys or anything [myself], I don't
know if my name was listed, but we were a small part of that, and that
was really cool. I think it was the first social TV Emmy that they had,
which was really neat that we got to work on it.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“I would say the second, like a side one is, when I lived in Jacksonville, Florida,
and I lived in Jacksonville when Shad Khan bought the [Jaguars NFL team] and
came into Jacksonville and took over, and I made a fake Twitter account, and
that was cool to make, like fake viral Twitter accounts. I made a Shad Khan's
mustache fake Twitter account. And it got so viral in the area then because I
worked at an ad agency in Jacksonville [and] the agency owner thought it was so
funny that I did this and obviously wanted to then capitalize on some press for it
too, that we then printed out like thousands of fake mustaches for people and
handed them out before the Jags game on Monday Night Football. So now if you
ever search it up, it's definitely known as Mustache Night Football. So you can
definitely search up on like Google or YouTube and you'll see some clips of
Mustache Night Football, and all the fans in the stands are holding up their fake
mustaches and everything to welcome the new owner. And it really all started
with my fake Twitter account, so that was cool.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

If you got to put up a billboard in the middle of Times Square with either
professional advice or a rant or a guiding principle, what would it say?
“I use this all the time; so my dad told me when I was young, my dad is
in construction, so I grew up on job sites and things like that, very blue
collar, and he always said, ‘You're never too big to pick up a broom’. And
I remember him telling that to me when I was a kid, because, I would tag
around with him or he'd bring me to a job here and there, and then I
remember one day I saw him, like sweeping up the floor or whatever,
and I asked him, like, Isn't there somebody else to sweep that up? And
he's like, you know, You're never too big to pick up a broom. And I
always remember that.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“You know, my dad is, I think, a really great example of somebody
that can talk to executives and CEOs, but then go talk to the garbage
guys and the gas station attendants and the people at all walks of life.
And I think that's the other piece around that. So, yeah, you're never
too big to pick up a broom would be what I'd put on a billboard.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

What's it like having a company acquired? [Nick’s company Delmondo
was acquired by Conviva in 2018]
“I would say if you're making money, it's awesome and stressful. If you're
not making money, it's probably awful. How it came about, we were
growing our business, right? We were working with all of these really big
companies, WWE, Turner Sports, Disney, ESPN, the whole nine. And a
couple of the companies, they started to come to me and they said, I think
it was WWE; WWE was like, Hey, we love working with you guys. You
brought in hundreds of our social accounts and YouTube channels and
this and that. Did you guys ever think about bringing in our website video
data? We got all this video on our website. And I was like, I would love to.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“So as I started to kind of go down the rabbit hole of feature requests
of us building out social and streaming video measurement back in
like 2017, one of our investors, his company had been acquired by
Turner, and at the time we are also working with Turner Sports and
WWE, they started asking about bringing in digital video and then
when that happened, my investor, Jesse Redniss was like, you should
really talk to this company called Conviva that already works with
WWE and Turner Sports and these other companies, and they
actually do measure the video on those places. But that's not what
they use it for, they use it for other stuff. But if you were to use it for
your tools, the way that you build analytics, that would be a really
good pairing.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“So he made the recommendation and kind of saw the vision and said,
Don't bother trying to build that yourself. This is the time where you
should really partner with somebody. We were doing like seven
figures of revenue, we were profitable. I only raised $200,000 or so
from Jesse Redniss, Gary Vaynerchuk, Gary Vee, David Beck, all these
very strategic folks. We did a really good job just making money and
always being profitable. So all those things kind of came together and
then my bar was very low.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“One of my favorite books is the 48 Laws of Power, and it's like, know
when to stop, it's basically one of the key laws. So for me, being a very
blue collar kid from Syracuse, my bar was pretty low. I was like, if I
could just pay off my student loans and not have to look at this
$100,000+ student loan bill in my face for the rest of my life, because
I just thought, like, I'm never going to get out of this. It got me to to
being working in the industries that I'm enjoying myself.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“So all those things kind of came together. It was a long process, six
months of overturning, turning over every stone, not knowing if the
deal was going to fall apart that day, all of the things that happened
along the way. You find this happened and that happened, and, no,
that guy didn't really do this thing that you thought that he did. So it's
like you really scrutinize every last inch of your business and every
action that you've ever done since you started it. It's very interesting.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“I learned a lot about law and legal processes. And, you know, I'm
very good friends with my lawyer now as a result of it. But yeah, the
whole goal was that it was really to 1+1=3, right? That's the reason
why we did it. In all these video players, and they were doing
technical analysis of how to make the stream not buffer, but there
were all these business people that were using Delmondo that want to
know who do we sell this video to? How many people are watching it?
How do we make it better? How do we market it on social media?
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“So that was it, because we were already building and working with
those people. Conviva was not working with those people, or they had
just started to, and what they wanted to do is they really wanted to get
out of the technical measurement and move into the business
intelligence measurement and the advertising measurement. There's
a lot more money to be made in that sense when you get into
advertising and marketing and others than just being kind of like a
NOC or an infrastructure. So yeah, it was a long back and forth; every
Friday it was like, is this going to fall through? What can we do? Oh,
let's go talk to another company.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“So yeah, it was a lot of back and forth. It was a lot of figuring out who stays,
who goes, what do we build? What do we call it? Basically, like everything if you
were to start a new company all over again, plus all that. It's basically like
starting a new company that is the mix of two companies, while each company
is still doing the exact same thing that they're doing and you got to make sure
that nothing messes up throughout that period of time, because if you lose one
of your big clients between when you start and when you end because you were
too busy focusing on the deal, you're screwed. So it presents a whole bunch of
new types of problems for an entrepreneur, but in a fortunate sense, right? Like
I said, we were profitable. We were doing millions of revenue, and we didn't
have a ton of investors. So I didn't have a lot of other people to answer to. It
ultimately meant to like, am I getting the right deal? Do I believe that this is the
right thing for my business, or are my employees going to be well taken care of?
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“It was awesome, I mean, at the end of the day, it was awesome. It was
very exciting. I would totally do it again in a heartbeat. Even though
there's certainly lots of things that didn't go exactly the way that I
wanted, I don't have a negative taste in my mouth about any of that
stuff. It's just there's good things, there's bad things, and those are just
the realization of things that become a business. When you sell
something and you don't own it anymore, you sold it, so that's it. So it
was a lot, a lot of like how I'm talking about now is how I felt every
other day is what's the next thing we gotta do? What's the next thing
that's going to mess up? Don't lose that client. Don't get hacked. All
these things like in between that you're thinking about, it's like, can I
just get them to sign on this piece of paper and give me that cash?”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

Nick is made czar of all social media platforms for a day. What is one
existing public-facing metric Nick would eliminate or create?
“So I'm gonna just add, I guess I would eliminate one if I added
another. So I guess let's say, but I don't know if it's good to do that,
but I would say I would eliminate views if every platform offered time
spent or watch time for each piece of content…”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

The medium or social platform or even social platform that's being slept on
“Video podcasts. I love the video podcast. I think it's the ultimate format, because it
gives you a TV type experience to serve to people on big screens. It gives you an audio
feed for people like myself that like to multitask and do other things right, audio is
the only medium that we can consume in parallel with something else, like while
washing dishes or doing. You can't really watch a YouTube video and wash your
dishes and still be present. So I think that the video podcast is kind of like the perfect
piece of content for especially sports media and entertainment properties in general,
like for consistent content, because it gives you that appointment type viewing, it
gives you series episodic content, franchise development, and then it gives you all
these really fun, interesting nuggets and segments that you can chop up for all these
other different platforms as well. So I feel like it's got a lot of shelf life across the
board. Chop it up, slice it up, and put it across all those different platforms.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“What we're starting to do now [at Mondo] is show people [for
podcasts], you know, typically it's like the time spent or engagement
depth of engagement on, like the hero piece of content for a
particular, like the long form episode, the video, whatever that is. But
then we also want to show the reach of it, with those clips and how
much more they get to bring in. Like, I've been doing a lot of analysis
of the New Heights [show with Taylor Swift], we've been sharing data
points with a lot of articles. The YouTube video itself got 20 million
views, but then the Shorts that were clipped and little segments that
went out, got another 20 million views. And that's just on YouTube.
But then also there's these little clips that are on the other
[platforms]. And that's just one episode.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“But a lot of clients, they're trying to figure out, what are the guests
that have the best impact anywhere? Are there topics that resonate
more for the clippable or short form audience versus the meaty stuff
that people want to dig into? Or which episodes and which type of
content has a longer shelf life versus the ones that just die and fizzle
out really fast?
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

The 2-3 most memorable conference speakers or panelists that Nick
come across in his career
“I think that one of the best and smartest guys at creating and
speaking and presentations is Jay Baer. I was fortunate to have co-
hosted a podcast with Jay, before, when I was working at Experion. I
got to do some consulting for Jay and for his agency in the past. Even
before I worked with him, I was a fan of his because he spoke at
different events and conferences like Social Fresh that I helped to put
on. I just love the way that he takes ideas and turns them.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“So Jay Baer, Scott Monty, who used to be the Head of Social and Digital
Comms at Ford and many other things, but he's just like, I could listen to
him talk all day. He's got a very radio type voice. He loves Sherlock
Holmes, he's a thinking man's speaker. I like the way that his brain
works and how he thinks about stuff. And then when he presents it, it's
really good. And then, who's the third? Let's see. Suki Eleuterio, she was
the Head of Social Media at Geico. Suki spoke on a panel with me at
Social Fresh before she joined Geico, and then she actually spoke to my
class at Syracuse just earlier this year. She's done some really awesome
stuff and she's on an awesome trajectory and what she's been able to do.
I really enjoy how positive about things she is. She's always throwing
new ideas out there. So I'm going to give her a shout out as well.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

The best meal to get in New York and where to get it.
Bonus: About Nick’s apple orchard
“I'll go NYC and the rest are like Dinosaur Bar-B-Que. It's
a Syracuse thing, so the best place to get it is in Syracuse,
but if you have to they have a pretty sick location in
Harlem. So that's my go to New York place for barbecue.
Heids, In Syracuse, we're going way upstate for your
white hots or your goonies, as I call them. But for my wife
and I, it’s the must have meal. We live about 45 minutes
to an hour outside of the city by train, and every time we
go in the city for a date night or if I go into driving to do
work or whatever, and I'm going to bring stuff home. We
love to go to Dim Sum Palace, near all the theaters where
all the Broadway shows are over in Hell's Kitchen.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

About his apple orchard
“Well, you know, I'm a good Italian, grew up with Italian grandmas,
but also on my mom's [side], everybody in my family has been
gardening, my grandma on my mom's side was a fantastic flower
gardener. She had the most beautiful giant gardens. She got featured
on TV for her garden. She loved being out there. On my Italian side,
my grandma and grandpa always had a garlic bed in the back, always
were growing tomatoes every single year. When we were kids, we
always had a community garden or we had a little garden ourselves.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“So, yeah, where we live right now, my house, I have about a dozen
apple trees and one pear tree; that pear tree is pretty loaded right
now. The apple trees, it's an off year for them, so we're not really
getting as many apples as we would like. It's been a little bit of a tough
climate for that. So I have been a very amateur apple farmer for the
past 2 or 3 years now. The first year that we moved here, they were
plentiful, and then everybody got hit with a gypsy moth thing that's
going on right now, and that has hurt the crop of the apple trees as of
late. But yeah, we had a great time, loved learning about how to
protect them.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“Like, this house that I live in is a 125 year old farmhouse, and it was
one of the original farmhouses in the community that we live in. All
the people that are around us, they're like, Oh, yeah, we knew such
and such. In the 60s and 70s, this was a well-known orchard in the
community so much so that, like, we'll meet people and we'll be like,
Oh, we live in the blah, blah, blah, the former orchard and they're like,
Oh my God, it's so cool. We used to go pick apples as a kid there. So
yeah, I love to learn about that, try to keep them alive and growing as
heirloom apple trees and then making stuff with it. I pressed a bunch
of cider and I made my own hard cider. In fact, today's kind of a good
day, I might have a couple bottles left from last year, I might have to
crack one.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

The most memorable sports event Nick has ever attended
“I got some fun and interesting ones. I'll give you three. I'd say my
first hockey game that I went to as a kid, like my first pro hockey
game, I went with my dad and my little brother and my neighbor and
his dad, and we saw a goalie fight with Rick DiPietro and Dominik
Hasek, I think. We went to Buffalo and saw a Sabres game. That was
the first time that we got there, we loaded up, and we drove four
hours from Syracuse after school. They picked us up, we all jammed
in the car together, like middle schoolers, and we drove four hours
from Syracuse to Buffalo and then when we got there, it was a
freaking goalie fight. So, yeah, that was pretty exciting.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“I would say the second is when I went to San Francisco, the first
weekend that I lived in San Francisco, there was the Aaron Rodgers
versus Colin Kaepernick in a playoff game that was happening. And it
was one of the last games that Colin Kaepernick played before all the
stuff happened with the [kneeling] and him getting blackballed and
all that. So that was really cool. And you know, it was in Candlestick
Park, so I got to see the old school iconic 49ers stadium, and it was
my first week in San Francisco, so everything felt so new and exciting.
I was just like out there, none of my family lives out there, so I was
just out there by myself. I was way out there and it was just like, go to
this football game, because why not, you know? So that was cool.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

“Then I got to see Syracuse, although we lost, but I did get to see
Syracuse in 2016 go to the Final Four. So that was cool.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

About where the names of his companies, Delmondo and Mondo Metrics come from
“So when I first was coming up with companies, you know, I hate companies that
are too literal…I'm not going to throw any shade, but there's some companies that
really lean into [it]...But anyways, I wanted to have something that was interesting,
but also I didn't know that I was going to build a full blown analytics product when I
started the company. When we started the company, the whole idea was that we
wanted to tell the best stories around the world and like, this was 2014 content
creators. So Delmondo is Italian for ‘of the world’, and the concept is that we help
tell the stories of the world. However, once we started to get in there and realize
when you tell the best stories of the world, what you're actually doing is you're
measuring the pulse of the world. So that is what Mondo Metrics means. Whereas
Delmondo was helping tell the best stories of the world, Mondo Metrics measures
the pulse of the world.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

Nick’s Social Media All-Star to Follow
“I would say shout out to Paola Marinone. She's the founder of a company
called BuzzMyVideos. And she's got her own new podcast that is out now
where she's interviewing some really awesome people in the world of like,
sports and YouTube. (The Football Biz Formula) And they are putting out
so much great content on LinkedIn where they're analyzing different sports
leagues, what their presence is on YouTube, and they are just hyper-
focused on YouTube and success and growth, all things YouTube. And she's
just an awesome person, somebody that I'm fortunate to call a friend and
she makes great content. So if you really want to dig deeper into the world
of sports and YouTube, she's one of the people that is really on top of it.”
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

Where to find Nick and Mondo Metrics on digital/web/social
Find Nick @nickcicero across all platforms
Find Mondo Metrics at their website and across social
@mondometrics
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

@njh287; www.dsmsports.net
Thanks again to Nick for being so generous with his time to share his
knowledge, experience, and expertise with me!
For more content and episodes, subscribe to the podcast, follow me
on LinkedIn and on Twitter @njh287, and visit www.dsmsports.net.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 304: Nick Cicero

Why You Should Rethink Success Metrics for Social Media Content

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Why You Should Rethink Success Metrics for Social Media Content

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