All Entries Tagged With: "youtube"

Some fresh Social Media Research from the field…

Some data hit the interwebs last week breaking down recent trends in corporate social media use. With the amount of time we spend working with and talking about social media, it’s easy to forget not everyone thinks these tehcniques are valuable and is willing to integrate them into a larger corporate strategy. The good news is, that according to Burson-Marsteller,  most Fortune Global 100 companies are using social media platforms.

It reported Twitter as the most popular, with 65% of the largest 100 international companies having active accounts, compared with 54% on Facebook, 50% on YouTube, and just 33% with corporate blogs. That pattern was reversed in Asia. More businesses there were likely to rely on corporate blogs than Facebook pages or Twitter. The study also showed that only 20% of these companies use a combination of these platforms together.

So, progress has been made: businesses have tried these tools and sticking with them long term. The remaining challenge, then, is for companies to find a comprehensive and definitive way of defining and measuring success. That’s where Paul Gillin comes in.

Since December, Paul Gillin has been conducting his own study on multi-channel social media strategies. His quick findings are that:

• The metrics companies are using are all over the map
• Few organizations are taking a disciplined approach to measuring ROI
• There is a consensus emerging on what’s important and that companies are starting to focus on the metrics

What the Burson-Marsteller study doesn’t show(as an article on ReadWriteWeb pointed out) is if social media marketing techniques are gaining “significant corporate acceptance”. There are people at these companies using these platforms, but we’re just not sure how integrated their tactics are with the company’s overall strategy.

What interests me is the gap between the industry interest in Twitter and the low number of young users, teens and college students. According to the New York Times, and my own experience with teenagers, they prefer texting to tweeting. Will they see the light when they get older, or will we have forgotten about Twitter 10 years from now? That’s something for another day….

7 Habits of Highly Effective Social Marketers – Laura Fitton

In Interview #11 of the “7 Habits of Highly Effective Social Marketers” series we interview Laura “Pistachio” Fitton- fresh from her first vacation in SIX years- welcome back Laura. If you haven’t already met Laura, it might make sense to listen to her tweets (disclosure, she tweets a lot) and read her book, Twitter for Dummies. Right now she’s in in the middle of her next entrepreneurial venture at One Forty.

About Laura
I am the CEO and founder of oneforty inc., which has been widely dubbed “Twitter’s AppStore.” We help people get more out of Twitter by discovering and sharing the most effective Twitter tools for their work and life.

1. What one trait or habit got you to where you are today?
ADD. No really, I am constantly scanning the horizon and that definitely contributes to my uncanny (you could even call it excessive) luck.

2. Your work day just started, what’s the FIRST thing you do and why?
Check email & Twitter, usually via CoTweet.  Habit. It’s just no good if I dive into the day not knowing something really important that we’re going to want to respond to.

3. What makes you efficient with your day?
I really struggle to feel efficient. It’s pretty hard. But I am also coming to some peace with some of my chaos because I recognize how powerful an engine serendipity is when it comes to being able to act on really big opportunities that would have been impossible to plan, predict & work towards.

4. Your Favorite Business book of all time?
Made to Stick definitely stands out in my mind because I am fascinated by which ideas catch on and which never do.

5. 3 things on your desk right now/3 things you can’t live without

A symbol of my daughters (in this case, their Christmas letters)

A smartphone (currently the iPhone, but I’m very open to trying others)

My MacBook. I brought it on vacation to Costa Rica and pretty much only used it for planning travel logistics and Skyping with my kids. I do have the self-discipline not to work when it’s not working time, but really my whole life is on this thing.

6. Habit you want to kick in 2010
Definitely fear. I can say with 99% certainty that fear has never led me to make a good decision. It’s really tempting to be fear-driven, but for me it’s always been counterproductive.

7. Habit you want to form for 2010
Getting more comfortable and facile with the GTD parts of my personality so I can grow professionally and strike a balance with the stochastic, opportunity-catching side.

The Buzz on Google Buzz

Unless you’ve been living under a rock these past few days, Google just entered the Social Media World- here are some quick initial thoughts. (and if you haven’t heard about Google Buzz, it’s ok, because being under a rock isn’t always a bad thing)

What is Google Buzz?
Combine Gmail and the status updates you find in Facebook. Throw in a photo and link sharing, and you have a real-time update of what your friends (who need gmail accounts of course) are doing.  There is obviously much more functionality here, but those are the basics for now, we’ll cover the nitty gritty in a later post.

The Pros
- Relatively easy customer interface that sits alongside your gmail inbox. For heavy users of gmail.com, this is a good thing. If you push your gmail to your phone or Outlook/Mac’s Mail, well you might not use it that much.
- No limits. Unlike Twitter, you aren’t limited to 140 characters. Who knows, people may begin to start blogging via Google Buzz?
- Mobile. Seamless integration with your mobile device with geo-location as well. So you can see what people are saying and where they are saying it.  Fairly similar to FourSquare and those who use Twitter with geo-location turned on.
-Content aggregation. Not surprisingly, Buzz allows you to integrate with other products, so when you add photos to Picasa, share something on Google Reader, watch something on YouTube or blog about something, your friends on Buzz, will get “buzzed”. Note that you can’t sync with Facebook…

The Cons
- The Buzz “stream” isn’t chronological. For those of us used to Twitter and Facebook, updates are chronological, but not exactly in Buzz. Google adds the latest comment on anything to the top of the Buzz stream. So, if one of your friends posted some great pictures on Buzz 10 minutes ago, But  if you have 13 people (and complete strangers mind you) commenting on someone else’s buzz, then your friend’s post gets slowly moved to the bottom. Google- pay attention here!
- Giving people so much room to say something and share  something may really clutter things up. That’s what makes Twitter so good….
- What makes a Google Buzz “friend”?  You may now get followed by other people using gmail/buzz. Does that mean you should follow them back? Twitter users probably will, but facebook-only users (vast majority of people) probably won’t. They’re comfortable with their Facebook friends because they share a common friendship around something. The only thing that connects fellow buzz users is a gmail account..

General Thoughts

-Nice early entry by Google. I think Google is still in the “test and learn” phase.
- Don’t jump on the bandwagon quite yet- Google will (should) probably tweak things in the next few months to make the user interface better. The lack of a chronological stream is quite confusing
-I think success of buzz will be directly related to not how many people use it, but simply how people use it. If people start adding all of their content to buzz, it will be a lot of content for the everyday user to digest- like drinking from a firehose.
-Don’t expect integration with Facebook- ever. I can’t imagine Facebook every letting them “in”. Remember that Facebook has 400 million users, and Google only has 176 million gmail users.

Video Description of Buzz
Still want to learn more? Here’s a quick video for you.

7 Habits of Highly Effective Social Marketers- Libby Delana

Ok, Interview #9 of the “7 Habits of Highly Effective Social Marketers” series. Today’s interview is with a new social media friend (and neighbor here on the North Shore of Boston) Libby Delana. Libby had the brilliant idea of answering these questions in the genre of the day- 140 characters or less (very Twitter-esque of you Libby)

About me
Founding Partner, in a Next Generation brand development firm named M E C H A N I C A.

1. What one trait or habit got you to where you are today?
A sunny disposition, a fierce belief that just about anything is possible and a touch of discipline

2. Your work day just started, what’s the FIRST thing you do?
I do a few things first…MAKE cup of tea, CHECK Twitter, HuffPo, NYT, FB, Mashable, Slate, GoogleReader,  WAKEUP teen children, RUN.

3. What makes you efficient with your day?
Old school.  Moleskine with graph paper and iced tea.

4. Your Favorite Business book of all time?
Not a book but an specific moment working with Paul Hawken in the early days of Smith and Hawken “Listen openly and very carefully to your angriest customers, they are giving you very clear direction on areas for improvement”

5. 3 things on your desk right now/ 3 things you can’t live without
Hot tea, iPhone, moleskine, favorite black pen, and a pile of optimism

6. Habit you want to kick in 2010
Taking too few photographs

7. Habit you’d like to form for 2010
To create an even more wildly open, experimental, brave, human, connected, collaborative, and optimistic environment.

BONUS: A picture of Libby’s office- very cool space.

Why You Won’t Need Cable TV…

Last week, how much time did you spend on the computer? How much time in front of the television? How does that compare to five years ago?

It’s my hunch that in the next five years, your internet bill will go up, and your cable television bill will go down.

More and more people are being entertained online, and the following statistics from  comScore paint a pretty interesting picture from November 2009.

• 84.8% of the total US internet audience viewed online video.
• The average online video viewer watched 12.2 hours of video.
• 128.1 million viewers watched more than 12 billion videos on YouTube.com (94.3 videos per viewer).
• The duration of the average online video was 4.0 minutes.

As online video continues to grow, you are going to spend less time in front of that television.  Why be beholden to cable/networking programming? Do it on YOUR schedule. Just head online your for news, weather, and sports highlights or head to hulu.com or netflix.com to stream some video.

It’s not just me thinking about it, the New York Times wrote a compelling argument last month in favor of “cable freedom”.

Think about it, why did Pepsi back out of its 23 year advertising relationship with the Super Bowl in favor of a year long CRM campaign.?

If you’re a sports fan, don’t worry, the networks are catching up to viewing games online. NBC’s Sunday night Football can be viewed in HD on your laptop (and you get SIX different camera angles) and just wait until the Olympics show up online…

So, before you go out and get that new flat screen TV, maybe wait a year or two. The next generation flat screen tv will just plug into the internet, not cable tv….

Can a TV Station be Social?

Here in Boston, a television station just went social- real social. They already had a good fan base on Facebook, some followers on Twitter and were actively promoting their “socialness” online.  But where it really shines through is in their newly redesigned website.

WHDH, whether you like it or not, is going to make you understand social by simply visiting their website. Check out the quick (2 minute video) below.

What I really like is that the entire team has bought into the concept. Their weather team hops online and blogs on a regular basis and really brings their news to life. Weather can be boring- for them it’s not. WHDH brings a bit of personality and context to the news they deliver and share online, which in this day and age, is a good thing…

YouTube goes “Direct”

Yesterday, YouTube announced the formation of YouTube direct- a new platform for news organizations that allows them to “request, review, and re-broadcast user-submitted videos with ease.” It’s a new idea already in use by the likes of NPR, ABC News, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post and more. I wonder what it does to:

A: the economics and structure of news organizations
B: The attitude and perspective of “citizen journalists”

This means lots of things, in no particular order….

1. I think it continues to set YouTube ahead of the smaller (and really smart, good ) competitiors like Vimeo, Viddler and more. They thought they had their work cut out for them before, look out now…

2. It will change the way news organization gather their information. The Channel 7  news truck won’t have to head to the fire on Main Street because videos are being uploaded already by citizen journalists. They can simply report back on the story from their cozy studios and get  the facts from interns and young reporters on their cell phones and laptops.

3. What’s in it for the citizen journalist? Nothing really. What’s the incentive of sending ABC news the exclusive (and only) video you caught of say, the plane landing in the Hudson river? It will get uploaded and viewed on ABC News and abcnews.com, not necessarily to your YouTube channel- if you are a new business owner trying to make a name for yourself with some video, forget about it.

4. What makes a “news organization” in this day and age? Dialogue just signed up  (applied) for this program last night. Am I an official news outlet? Why? Why not?

5. How is this going to sync with the existing YouTube channels created by News organizations? Will this simply complement the effort or begin to take traffic away from the channel.

So, these are some initial thoughts for the day. What do you think?