Digital Influence Mapping Project

How Brands Use YouTube: Cross Post

This is a post on the Ogilvy PR blog about how brands try to use YouTube. I try to make a distinction about two ways they get involved:

"Nike, Dove, Smirnoff, Nintendo - what do these brands all have in common? They each are producing video for the expressed purpose of publishing online and sharing via the mass video aggregator, YouTube. Many commercial brands want to get on YouTube without much understanding of what it might get them.

Brands like YouTube for five simple reasons:

1. It offers them a platform most like television wherein they can put to work the expensive creative teams from their advertising agencies. These teams are very good at telling stories and now, they can do so unfettered by the :30 or :60 artificial limits of commercial television.

2. The reach of You Tube seems like a mass media channel. 100m video streams daily representing 60% of all video served on the Web. Online audience growth from 5m to 25m+ over the first 6 months of this year. That certainly sounds like a mass media. Yet a runaway hit - Dove Evolution, for example (which Ogilvy in Toronto is responsible for) - is 620K "views." (and includes parodies like this pumpkin one) Most don't climb to that stratosphere. Like the Web, itself, You Tube hosts a vast variety of videos that appeal to different micro-audiences.

3. Video is canned and therefore reasonably controllable. Brands can report to internal executives that they are involved with 'social media' without having to actually enter a two-way conversation.

4. It allows brands to connect with consumers on some emotional level by using the emotive qualities of story and video.

5. "Viral Video" sounds sexy and makes their brands seem desireable"

There's more to the post here. 

AniBOOM Animation Aggregation

Via Techcrunch: Aniboom - a great short animation aggregator officially launches. Not everything should be hosted by YouTube and animation enthusiasts like me will prefer to find talent through specialty sites like Aniboom. (This may change once Google integrates serious serach and browse functionality into the YouTube universe. The Web is incresingly becoming a great platform to connect talent like these animators, with their fans. It is just another example of Chris Anderson's Long Tail at work.

Even if you don't dig/Digg animation - check out the clip above.

My Podcast Usage vs. PEW

There was some movement a while back (Scoble?) to try an lean away from the term "podcast" to describe audio or audio/video content. The term popularized by Apple's device is deceptive. When we say "podcast" are we referring only to audio or to both audio and video? Also, as per a previous Pew study (2005) many folks download programs to their computer and never get them all the way to their iPod. This time around the 2006 PEW study asked approximately 972 users out of a total 3,000 survey respondents about listening and viewing.

PEW

• 12% of Internet users have downloaded a podcast (vs. 7% in 2005)
• 1% report doing so on a typical day
• Almost twice as many men (15%) download vs. women (8%)

ME

• I subscribe to approximately 7 videocasts including The Show with ZeFrank, Rocketboom, Amanda Across America and 88 Slide
• I watch 2-3 of them once a week or so. There is no program I watch daily.
• I subscribe to no audio-only 'casts'
• Everything ends up on my iPod (30Gb video)
• I often watch Battlestar episodes on my laptop (usually with Nick)
• I have purchased and downloaded only 2-3 music videos. I would purchase more but the selection on iTunes is terribly small.

The Gist of It:

I use iTunes (after a terrible customer service experience with Real). I do not launch iTunes everyday on my laptop. That is the 'trigger' required to download fresh episodes. After some gap of downloads on a program, the system will not automatically download the most recent episodes. It requires a click.

I subscribed to FeedDemon but don't use it. So, I rely heavily on iTunes (on my ThinkPad T60). I need a utility inside my browser environment that will check for subscribed feeds and then download them in the background (or ask me which ones I want to download as that process ties up the computer for some time even on broadband.

Until the process of downloading audio/video programming becomes even more integrated into daily Web usage, I would not expect the download statistics to really accelerate. And I do not believe this is indicative of a lack of desire on viewers part. Some of the programs I download and watch are far more satisfying than old school-TV fare.

On Vox: Meeting Birdie

I have to admit it. I am a bigger fan of Birdie Jaworski/Beauty Dish now that I have met her. I have paid attention to Birdie's blog for some time now believing that she is the greatest brand ambassador that Avon could ever have (and probably underappreciated for that contribution).

Of course, she is so much more than that. Her story is well documented on her blog - that's what makes her so popular - her stories. My tribe scooted down through the mountains of Taos to Las Vegas, NM to meet up with Birdie at her home. That is all I will say about the location of her secret hideout.

» Read more on Vox

On the Road to Visit Birdie...

As we get ready for Thanksgiving around the bonfire in Tres Piedras, New Mexico, I am taking the family on a quest. We are going on a road trip to find Birdie Jaworski, aka, the Avon Lady, aka, author of Beauty Dish. I have come to know her through her writing online. And have marveled at all that she has done to help the Avon Brand presumably without much recognition from the mothership.

She is a fantastic writer. A really smart media company would invite her onboard in a minute. Her parody (I hope it's a parody) of TomKat's Scientology wedding is hysterical. If I find out, how 11 opened the face powder, I promise not to break the story.

Road trip, road trip, road trip. (I am pretty excited). 

Powerful Recommendations 1

Via Techcrunch comes mention of statistics out of Flickr. You can find out what the most popular cameras used by Flickr members. Canon must be thrilled.

And the folks at Sony Ericsson for their camera phone. I have the Samsung Razor-killer from Sprint and there is no good way to download pics to your PC without using the monthly fee service ( I tried the software they pointed me to online and it doesn't work.)

Vlogging in Taos

Every 4 years we run away to New Mexico for Thanksgiving and visit our friend Robbie who lives in Tres Piedras. I am hoping to visit Ms. Birdie Jaworski later this week and connect with a blogger whom I have long admired.

I am searching for other local bloggers and coming up empty handed until I came up with this super wonderful vloogger account of the local video retailer - Mondo Video - who held a stunt yesterday afternoon. He tried to get a permit to create a bonfire of all Fox Entertainment Network DVDs. He's fed up with the network's airing of O.J. Simpson's hypothetical musings on murder. They wouldn't let him burn 'em. So he used a Bobcat to tear 'em up real good. It is a shameless publicity stunt but fun.

Check out the blog where I saw it first.

Curbly - DIY

Curbly.com is a bit of a community for DIYers. There are great discoveries and ideas from community members about furniture sources, make-it-cheap ideas, and more. In their words:

"Curbly is a Web community for people who love where they live. By connecting with others, sharing your experiences, participating in feel-good contests, and getting advice from experts, Curbly is the best community to help you feel good about your place."

Currently there seem to be 419 registered members. Certainly more readers on top of this. The service hasn't been around too long  - judging by when founders Ben and Bruno "joined" - I would say a month or so. I love the overall design and the openness of it. It's a great simple way to bring the young DIY crowd together.

The image above is a wall art recommendation that is actually pretty cool for the apartment set.

Digital Advocacy x 3

Three very interesting cases of digital advocacy popped up recently:

My Space Impact Awards: "Honoring My Space members for their positive impact on culture." Clearly, My Space the mega media company has great potential towards activating it's membership. they are a proactive group to begin with and have already formed their own affiliations within My Space. The categories include Poverty Relief, Environmentalism, Health & Safety, International Development, Social Justice and Community Building. Users nominate individuals or groups from within My Space. And then what? It's hard to say, they never clarify what happens to those nominated.

Greenpeace Apple: Greenpeace pressures Apple to do something about the disposal of computer "waste" by turning Apple evangelists into green evangelists. Alison has a great post on this and convinced me that this was a super-smart way of using the company's own customers to pressure for change.

Witness Human Rights Video Hub - Pilot: This not-quite-baked service with Global Voices promises to extend Witness' core capability of facilitating the videotaping of human rights abuses and getting them seen by the right people via the You Tube-ultra-democratization of video creation and distribution. So far only a simple pilot (blog.vlog page) exists but more is on the way.

The Intel Blogger Challenge

We launched this great collection of bloggers - folks everyone knows - blogging together on weekly topics. This is happening to focus attention on Intel's Centrino Duo Mobile Technology. Everyone got a laptop to use. There was one "mystery blogger" who today was revealed as Robert Scoble.

Pulling these voices outside there regular blogs gave them a chance to share more personally. That sounds odd. doesn't it? The format is probably what's doing it - being asked questions by someone else (I think Rohit cam up with the questions). It made it nicely personal. My favorite so far was week one where they all talk about why they blog - why they started. I particularly like Bre Pettis:

"Even though I’m not in a classroom, I still get to do my favorite thing - empower people to be creative, innovative and explore possibilities. Every week I teach my viewers how to make something on my Weekend Projects video podcast. The pic above is the first project that I used my intel pc laptop to program an Atmel microcontroller to control LEDs in a pumpkin."

And Mindy Roberts story is amazing:

"At first, all I had was a Word document that was largely a transcription of notes I took while my newborn son was in an induced coma, receiving Level 4 care at the Lucile Salter Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford Neonatal Intensive Care Unit for a catastrophic case of viral myocarditis. I was sure he was going to die and wanted to remember everything. That got hard. The writing, that is. I couldn’t actually formulate it. And then he made a full recovery and grew into a feisty little boy who drives me up a fricking wall, giving me lots of other things to write about."

Check it all out.