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Want More Press Coverage? Free Your Video!

Filed Under: marketing, online video, public relations, social media, video sharing by admin
Mar.10, 2010

The goal of you are trying to accomplish with all of your internal meetings, rounds of press release drafts, and pitching to media outlets is positive exposure to your customers, partners and competitors.  Ideally you want to have your message conveyed in your own words and tone so why wouldn’t you just say it yourself?

Video is rapidly becoming the most popular media type online.  The immense success of YouTube and Hulu is a testament to our preference for the passive consumption of information, just sit back and let the pixels and sound stream into your brain.  It has a tendency to make us pause and stay on a page far longer than mere text and pictures. That’s why most of the top blogs and all of newspapers, magazines, and of course television outlets have expanded their repertoire to online video.

While video does take more work and a few more resources to produce than a text and photo press release, without it you are denying journalists a critical asset that could make their story more successful.  What better way to end a piece than to embed a video interview?  From their perspective it could be the difference between their story being viewed by tens of thousands of readers.  Considering many blog networks pay their writers based on the amount of traffic their posts receive, they really, really want your video!

However, when most companies and agencies invest in video assets they have a tendency to execute very poorly.  They are as precious about their media as a record label trying to prevent a new music single from being discovered on a peer-2-peer network.  Why?  Don’t you want coverage?  Don’t you want your story to get the most attention?

Andy Sernovitz posted a handy and convincing argument why you should just upload your video to YouTube:

http://www.damniwish.com/2010/03/how-to-instantly-get-more-press-coverage-a-cut-and-paste-memo-to-your-pr-team.html

Suggestion: Take every video the company has ever produced and get it on YouTube tomorrow. Link to the YouTube video from our sites instead of using our own player. If we do that:

  • Every prospect who watches a video will be able to share it with colleagues, increasing leads and sales
  • We’ll get more leads for free, because YouTube is the second largest search engine (bigger than Bing and Yahoo!)
  • We’ll get a ton of free coverage and a ton of web traffic
  • Our fans’ blog posts about us will be more interesting and accurate if they use our video instead of making up their own stuff
  • Our web hosting costs would go down…

Rivera PR, a boutique agency that services restaurants local to the San Francisco Bay area executes this strategy well.  They have a few self hosted videos on their own website, but they have a great YouTube channel full of their client’s assets, just ready for a reviewer to plug into an article.

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Comedy Central Yoinks Daily Show Off Hulu

Filed Under: newteevee, online video, trend spotting, video sharing by admin
Mar.03, 2010

http://newteevee.com/2010/03/02/no-moment-of-zen-viacom-takes-daily-show-off-hulu/

from newteevee:

Coming next week, Daily Show fans won’t be able to watch Jon Stewart’s show on Hulu anymore, according to a report from the New York Times Media Decoder blog. Comedy Central parent Viacom apparently wasn’t happy with the revenue Hulu was able to bring in for them, and it decided to exclusively distribute the show through its own web properties. Also affected by the move is The Colbert Report.

Hulu has brilliant intelligence in the design and user experience, but nothing that can’t be replicated by video hosting companies such as The Platform which enable sites like ComedyCentral.com to enable dynamic clip generation, autoplay, and quality streaming.. Hulu will see a mass exodus as networks reclaim content for their own website, but if their shows aren’t already popular, the removal from Hulu could injure their discovery.

Networks have longed for high traffic numbers that match popular Net sites like Hulu, but it remains to be seen if they can bring the audiences to their own home pages.  Historically they have not been very successful.

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The State of The Internet

Filed Under: humanmedium, new media, online video, social media, social networks, user generated content by admin
Mar.01, 2010

Much like “Did You Know? 4.0″  Jesse Thomas designed and animated this short, fun motion graphic infoporn video for stats junkies..

http://vimeo.com/9641036

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

related:

Did You Know 3.0 or Shift Happens 3.0

Did You Know 4.0

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Chatroulette: 71% Boys, 15% Girls, 14% Perverts

Filed Under: online video, trend spotting, ugc, user generated content, video sharing by admin
Feb.28, 2010

Chatroulette is one of few new web services to break through to the public consciousness since Twitter.  There are tons of interesting new sites, but for some reason, Chatroulette has captured the heart of the zeitgeist.  Here’s  little insight into the phenomena..

From NewTeeVee

Chatroulette has become all the rage among folks in the online video and social media scene, prompting coverage in the NY Times, CNN and other major national news outlets. Well if you’ve ever wanted to learn more about Chatroulette but were afraid to sign on yourself, a new mini documentary by New York-based filmmaker Casey Neistat has about all you’ll ever need to know about the experience.

To get a feel for who participates in Chatroulette, Neistat took a cross section of the site by clicking through 90 people and breaking them down into three categories: “boys,” “girls” and “perverts.” (While the boy and girl categories are pretty self-explanatory, Neistat acknowledged that it was difficult to describe the pervert category without getting into graphic detail.) In his relatively small sample, taken at 4 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon, he found the site to be about 71 percent male, 15 percent female and 14 percent pervert. He also found that Chatroulette skewed young, with 83 percent young people and 17 percent old people on the site (although Neistat didn’t explain how he differentiated between those two groups).

For a guy like me (or like Neistat), the Chatroulette experience isn’t just about meeting random strangers on the Internet. It’s also about being blatantly rejected by those strangers when they choose to hit the “Next” button. In a brilliant example of self-flagellation, Neistat decided to measure the average length of his interaction with those strangers before they “Nexted” him.

What he found was worse than you might expect (but not totally out of line with my own Chatroullette experience): Out of 20 random strangers, 19 of them clicked next, spending an average time of 2.9 seconds before making the decision. So Neistat invited his friend Genevieve — “a really pretty girl,” he says — to chat in his place and see if she has any better luck. The result? Nine out of 10 people talked to her, each for a minimum of 2 minutes, or until she nexted them.

Despite all this, Neistat sums things up nicely: “There is something magical about Chatroulette. If you can ignore all the masturbators…you’re left with this something that transports you around the world into a stranger’s life, and does it over and over and over again…I am glad that Chatroulette lives on my laptop. I don’t think I’d like a world where you could just click someone away.”

chat roulette from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.


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Postrank Provides Case Studies with Top Engaged Blogs

Filed Under: marketing, social networks, trend spotting, user generated content by admin
Feb.15, 2010

https://analytics.postrank.com/2009/badges/engagement

Blogs with the most engaged user participation

Postrank recently published a list of the most engaged blogs from 2009.  The group is full of wonderful case studies of companies and media sites that have built a rabid following through user investment, listening to their crowd, and tapping into their motivations to participate.

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Branding vs. Personality, Identity in the Social Networking Era

Filed Under: humanmedium by admin
Dec.16, 2009

identity

Tara Hunt weighs in on the great Identity debate on her blog:

http://www.horsepigcow.com/2009/12/who-am-i/

Much like not wanting to look like we stepped out of a GAP ad, I don’t believe any one of us wants to look like we stepped out of an episode of Leave it to Beaver, either. We also don’t want to look like we stepped out of an episode of Absolutely Fabulous, but real life represents all of these scenarios.
I don’t have a personal brand, I have a personality – complete with crazy moments and drunken nights, super highs and heartbreaking lows. And every single one of those moments define who I am. Now. Who are you? A personal brand or a personality?

Brands fail us all the time. They make mistakes with products and services. They fail us with customer service. Most brands spend inordinate amounts of money to squeaky clean their image instead of admitting that that their organization is full of very human beings. The result is usually resentment on our part as consumers.

Unconsciously we expect brands to be as human as we are. We are more forgiving if they shrug a little and show a little humility. One of the trailblazers in this strategy is Southwest Airlines who not only encourages their pilots and flight attendants to go off script and improvise humor with customers but actually allowed themselves to be incorporated into a very revealing reality television show. In every episode, Southwest employees cope with weather, deranged customers, and service flubs with humility and sarcasm.

In the day and age of Facebook, we’re all used to being tagged in embarrassing photos with unflattering labels and as Tara points out, our bad moods and flubs generate response, some wanted and unwanted. However, even this can be beneficial as a tactic to refine and tighten your following or customer base. In these tough economic times, many companies are discovering that focusing on the needs customers who are loyal is more financially rewarding than pandering to the lowest common denominator. So let your brand’s hair down a little. Be more human.

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