Digital Influence Mapping Project

Still in love with BlogHer

I know its right but sometimes it feels so wrong - my love affair with BlogHer. Tomorrow is the first day of the BlogHer Business Summit in NYC. We are hosting the "Best Practices" track. I continue to believe strongly in the value of the BlogHer community for marketers. They are unique. Maybe they don't have the same reach as Federated Media. But they have a vision and integrity (I mean, FM has that too but BlogHer's is special).

The tie that binds members to the collective is stronger than other affiliations. It's born from the relationships developed online in what for all intent and purpose is a social network. These are made deeper during the annual big conference event (July in CA).

The NYC event is really for brand marketers to come together with BlogHer and talk about real ways to collaborate between marketer and blogger. We will be video-ing a bunch of it and will publish soon after. I, of course, cannot be there. Butthe 360° Digital Inlfuence team - Virginia, Laura and Kaitlyn (and I think Matt, too) will all be on hand. Stop in. Say hi.

A window into BlogHaus at CES

Take a look at our buddies, Podtech's, Mogulus implementation for CES. As per previous years, they are running an "off-campus" house for all of the bloggers at CES. Our guys will be out there with Intel. It's fun watching the live feed.

Viral Video: Laughing With Us, Not At Us

Thanks to NewTeeVee, I saw this wonderfully produced video from the Church of Blow and laughed. Somebody should absolutely hire this man (not presuming that he is looking for a job or anything but he is a sharp talent....)

Take a look:

Our team is at Verge: London

Ogilvy has a conference series they run called Verge. It happens in different parts of the world. generally it represents an advertising POV but is now getting more engaged with the principles of participation, engagement and earned media (think of earned media in a new way - very broad and based upon doing something of value which authentically motivates people to discuss or tell stories...)

The London Verge just happened yesterday/today (time shift, right). Rohit was there and has neat interview with Bill Kircos from Intel (disclosure: client) There is another funny one with Bob Garfield who delivers his usual (and smart) death of advertising POV.

Check it out>

The Power of an Idea?

It says "FREE HUGS."

She said she was "aware" of the YouTube video (18m have seen it). She was not vlogging the experience. She had no one with her that I could tell. When I asked her if she was here because of the YouTube meet-up (DCTube) on Saturday she said "no."

She just wanted to do it. Now I could have really grilled her - sorority? religion? drugs? But instead, I got my hug and went to work.

The power of the idea.

Using Video Well #1

We are always concerned when a client begins a conversation about digital influence with viral video. It's just that we want to create a strategy first. There are plenty of good uses of remarkable video. They can serve reach goals and they can sometimes serve engagement goals.

I wanted to take a look at individual videos that are being shared out there. Some I have discovered through my seemingly endless reading (ok, scanning), some came from my very smart students at Johns Hopkins, some from colleagues. This is a simple round up of what works (beyond the obvious grand slam of our Toronto group's success with Dove Evolution).

Entertainment
Getting a talent like Christopher Guest to direct a 2:33 music video - or a couple of them - is a great move. He obviously has a draw amongst a smart, well-educated audience and he embraces the geek in all of us through every movie he has done. This particular video for Intel (a client but we had nothing to do with this) is great - it's funny, dense-enough that you may watch it a few times, lives up to what I expect from Christopher Guest, and it associates Intel with someone/something that is uncharateristically cool. It's at almost 25K views over 3-4 weeks which is not huge. But it is very B2B and huge numbers aren't necessarily the endgame. There are lots of B2B videos out there with tech companies, specifically trying to have fun. Branded entertainment isn't as it easy as it looks. And Christopher Guest is 'A' - level talent.

Good for: Reach & Awareness (not much about it leads to engagement - there is no click-through call-to-action)

How-it-works
I am a big fan of white board How-to's and How-it-works and this one about social networks is particularly good. This format is deceptively simple-looking yet it relies heavily on the "presenter" - either by being compelling or being a great counterpart to the visual story. The visual story is tightly choreographed. I would be surpised to discover that this was not painstakingly rehearsed. This is part of the "in Plain English" series that also includes "Wikis in Plain English."

Here's one from another source that has been around about a year (610K views) and outlines the marketing potential of SecondLife
Good for: Engagement, Thought Leadership

Futurecasting
There have been a lot of compelling videos that portray a vision of the future. This one was shared by Steven Feld, one of my graduate students (and smart guy). Called Prometeus - The Media Revolution (Prometheus?) it paints a picture of the future with enough sprinklings of present fact to be super compelling. And the Italian accent doesn't hurt either. Intel has one called the Intel UMPC Vision Video (again client but not involved in this one)

I am a sucker for future visions. We used to do these regularly at ATT&Viacom back in the early nineties to vision out what ITV might become.   
Good for: Engagement, Thought Leadership

Interviews & Notable Presentations

Hearing from someone you admire or who interests you is "of-use." This goes beyond entertainment by offering access to a thoughtleader's POV that you might not normally have access to. Google has an internal series, Authors@Google, which is pretty much what it sounds like. this one features David Weinberger, author of Everything is Miscellaneous and the Cluetrain Manifesto (co-author). So, Google has these on-campus events for the sake of employees and then posts the videos for the sake of everyone. Great move. I have seen David speak and know he is insightful and inspirational. This is a series which features many authors including Christopher Hitchens  and Floyd Landis.

Good for: Awareness, Engagement, Thought Leadership ( I have added 'awareness' here as the authors or notables will draw their own viewers thus introducing fans of the author to the sponsoring company.)

Corporate Climate Response in London - NOW

We have been blogging and vlogging from the Corporate Climate Response conference in London for the past two days. The conference brings together experts in climate issues and corporations who are all instituting policies and products that start to address some of the challenges we face.

There are some spectacular vlog entries. And it's a great model for making a live event connected via the Internet.

Check out our coverage here>

State of the Vlogosphere - March

Ever since Rocketboom was Amanda and Andrew, Ryan turned me on to Have Money Will Vlog and we went to Vloggercon, I have loved video blogs. Having grown up professionally creating highly produced, million-dollar commercials, the immediacy of well-made vlogs is a relief. Just watch any historical ZeFrank episode.

Thanks to Jackson West at NewTeeVee, I found MeFeedia's State of the Vlogosphere. I am not sure their methodology is the most thorough in the world it seems like they rely on "self-reporting" via an RSS feed into their directory. But with over 2 million espiodes from 22K feeds and 13K sites, the directory is pretty substantial. MeFeedia is a great site overall, but back to their "State of..."

 

Here is the topline:

• their focus is on episodic video blogs not viral video
• Vloggers are an indepoendent sort and that impacts their choice of platform (opensource) to how they use video sharing sites. I can remember Ryanne Hodson warning me of YouTube's terms of service from a vloggers perspective a year ago. Not sure if those concerns persist but her POV speaks to that independent attitude.
• Viewer choice is a driving force causing vloggers to not settle on one sharing service and to offer episodic content in as many formats as possible.
• Hollywood still doesn't know what to make of the Long Tail vlog phenomena beyond scooping up some talent.

You can see the full blog post from MeFeedia here.

Asia: Jeremy Goldkorn & Danwei.tv

BBS and blogs are big in Beijing. The view from the US looking into China is of a repressive censor on the lookout for troublemaker bloggers. The reality seems to be that China has a tremendous freedom of speech that has never existed there before. True, you cannot access Vox there periodically, nor Wikipedia but apparently there are wll know hacks that can give you access to pretty much everything.

I have to remember one adage that Jeremy Goldkorn shared with me about visitors to China. Go there for 2 weeks and you you feel entitled to write a book on the subject, stay there two years and you'll realize how little you have to say. I am going to limit myself to a few short posts about what I learned from smart folks like Jeremy.

He's got a blog at Danwei.org and a great video blog at Danwei.tv. Go to the video blog and watch his interview - "Blogger Wang Xiaofeng sticks it to the man." Not only is Wang Xiaofeng  hysterical when foulmouthed as Lenny Bruce on a tear, he actually offers an insight into attitudes about rebel bloggers resenting Sina's late entrance in the blogging market. I think about News Corps desire to get MySpace deep into China and the resistance they are likely to experience.

I spoke to Jeremy while in Beijing. he's actually been there for quite a few years and started by teaching English in Eastern China. Now he does three things really well (not just three things  but these are the ones I know about).

Danwei.tv features regular-ish epsiodes of interviews with bloggers and other media notables

Danwei.org is a great blog on Chinese media, advertising and urban culture and is written by multiple bloggers. Check out the great post on the rash of bogus celebrity trademarks like these:

And Goldmines Film & Video Production where he offers some of his talent for hire. jeremy has some great insight into social media as it unfolds in China and not from the all too common ex-pat perspective. He has great respect and interest in what is happening in Beijing.

The energy in the city was palpable. there is a huge amount of investment something that Tangos covers routinely in his China Web 2.0 blog. People are optimistic, business is booming, and social media is thriving.

I forgot to ask Jeremy about the hard hat.

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.