Television Does YouTube: Tavis Smiley Edition

Recently, I noted on Twitter that Tavis Smiley’s YouTube videos didn’t quite “crack the code” when it came to producing effective (read: engaging) social media.

I’ve noticed that, next to corporate lawyers and sleepy government agencies, television shows have the hardest time adapting to social media. I’m not sure why, but I have some ideas.

1. It worked on television, it’ll look great on YouTube! Effects and snazzy promos are nice, but they don’t look so hot on my crowded computer screen. With multiple windows open, an online video takes up less than a quarter of my screen’s real estate. (And for goodness sake, don’t use YouTube for TV commercials!)

2. Television personalities, like Oprah, behave on YouTube like they do on television. Scripted, polished, full makeup, etc. But social media is the great equalizer, and this medium is at its most effective in accidental, unscripted moments, like this simple Katie Couric clip.

3. Television is both push and pull. Online video is all pull. Every second has to offer the viewer value. YouTube videos produced by television shows often lack value. When you’re talking about celebrity video blogging, as is the case with Tavis Smiley, the primary value will be getting to know that person better. Tavis strives to do this by answering viewer questions, but the format triggers TV-like responses. See for yourself:

Folks at PBS might want to try filming Smiley in unscripted, impromptu situations. Like when he’s discussing that day’s show with his staff. Or talking to a guest backstage. My theory is that television personalities are hard-wired to act a certain way in front of a camera, and unfortunately, that persona does not translate well online. It’s great to see Tavis Smiley, the television personality, on YouTube. But I’d rather see Tavis Smiley, the man, on YouTube.

Case Study: Building an Online Brand, GameJew-style

Defining success is important, but it shouldn’t always be about high traffic, viral growth, and mainstream pick-up. The case study below reveals how building a small, but passionate, online community of supporters can have a far greater impact than going for instant mass appeal.

Jonathan Mann is the GameJew. (Watch the first episode of GameJew, released May 2006.) In the past two years, Mann has built an online community around two of his greatest loves–music and gaming.

How did he do it? Well, as far as I can tell, there are two key reasons:

1. Working really, really hard, producing lots of original songwriting, videos.

2. Being 100% authentic. (There is only one GameJew. Think about that.)

I contacted Mann to learn about his stats, and how he measures success. He writes:

My community is pretty tiny, in all honesty. I had about 400 or so subscribers at GameJew, and so far about 65 have signed up to the more “web 2.0-y” mannmade.tv ..

But down at the far reaches of Chris Anderson’s long tail is the fanbase. The early adopters. The core supporters. Folks who should be considered social media GOLD. Mann continues:

…what’s interesting for me is that despite not really having the numberss (most of my videos do well under 5,000 views! that sucks!), it would seem that the “right” people have been watching my stuff.

In fact, Mann’s audience landed him some amazing new opportunities. Two examples:

• A GameJew fan named Robert, arranged for Jonathan to participate in an artist residency in his hometown of Vienna (“The Vienna trip happened because a guy, Robert, who’s now a friend, became a huge fan and basically hooked me up with this artist residency.”)
• The folks at 1up.com hired Jonathan to produce singing video game reviews, after becoming big fans of Jonathan’s homebrewed video series.

What’s the future for GameJew?

My plan as of now is to get an online store up and running, where I can sell my music, then try to leverage some of the progress and connections I’ve made through gamejew into 1. more paying gigs and 2. something involving my non-video game music. Beyond that, it’s hard to say.

I’ve written here before about brand evangelism, about how we build a community of passionate supporters online. Businesses and organizations should looks to artists like GameJew for inspiration.

Judging by the comment threads on his videos (“You are amazing!”), I’m pretty sure Jonathan will find success.

You can find Jonathan at MannMade.tv, GameJew.com, and www.jonathanmann.tumblr.com

Notes from “Top 10 Worst Social Media Ad Campaigns”

This was an enjoyable, voting-enabled panel that featured some of the panelists’ picks for worst ad campaigns on the web. Listen to a complete podcast of the session here. A few of my favorites below:

Molson’s poorly-conceived Facebook contest (slide pictured here) teaches us the following: If you have bad marketing to start with, it’ll be even worse on social media.

Carlton Beer’s “Big Ad” goes viral on YouTube, but no one remembers the brand’s name. Lesson: Integrate your product/cause with social media content. Don’t hide your brand!

HP’s campaign paying consumers to promote their digital cameras, creating what Jarvis called “human splogs.” Lesson: You can’t buy brand evangelism. Instead, you should take that money and invest it in better products/content. Check out the results of this kind of marketing in the YouTube below.

The now defunct, “All I want for Christmas is a PSP” a fake blog by a marketer posing as a consumer, backfired when bloggers swarmed the site and posted hundreds of negative comments. One comment summed it up nicely, “Good job turning consumers off your product.” Lesson: DON’T LIE

A member of the audience asked about the difference between secrecy and lying. Panelists suggested that campaigns with a built-in disclosure plan can succeed in social media. Afterall, sometimes the fiction is fun. There’s a difference between teasing and lying. There’s also a difference between lying and a punchline.

The panel closed the session by noting three basic trends in social media advertising:
1) Not surprisingly, advertisers are acting like asses;
2) Advertisers are trying to fake-out audience by posing as consumers, fans, etc;
3) Trying to corrupt us, taking authentic voice we have online and trying to buy it (Jarvis: “I think pay-per-post is EVIL.”)

Other blog posts on the panel:

• BFG Communications Blog
• The Social Media Marketing Blog
• Ian Schafer

Tweeting Your Way to a Better Life

Harder. Better. Faster. Stronger.

For those of us immersed in social media, things always seem to be getting better. But as tools improve and people assimilate, it is increasingly difficult to break through the noise and connect with someone. Twitter, and the speed of micro-blogging, is the epitome of social media’s possibilities. Community-driven, conversational, content rich and fast-moving, it’s the nonstop, 24/7 bullet train to all your answers. But it can also be a crowded room where it is difficult to get anyone’s attention.

Seeding your Twitter Community

As an organization with a brand spankin’ new Twitter feed, consider seeding your friends list with a few staff members, allies, members or online activists. A seeded list will provide conversational content from the get-go, and allow your org’s Twitter account to have a more personal voice. Unless you’re BBC News or W00t!, it’s imperative that you arrive at the party with a few close friends.

Ask and Ye Shall Receive

Twitter is at its best when people are providing one another with tips, recommendations and leads. This week, I made the mistake of asking my coworkers for a dentist recommendation before consulting my 100+ person Twitter community. My coworkers provided just one recommendation, which turned out to be a bad one (retired). So, I turned to Twitter, asking for DC-area dentist recommendations. The vast majority of my Twitter community is not local–in fact, most of them reside in sunny California. Despite the lack of local Twitterati, I managed to receive three very enthusiastic recommendations.

I also received a direct message from a Twitter friend that I’ve never met in-person. Thanks to my Tweets, I’m actually excited for my dentist appointment next month.

Media snacker summary:

• If you’re an organization or institution of some kind, try seeding your Twitter list with people you talk to
• Twitter is a powerful tool for recommendations, tips and questions. Use it that way!
• Follow me on Twitter!

Rethinking the Social Media Release, Courtesy of Brodeur

A recent Brodeur study looks at how journalists are using blogs and other social media. The study found that journalists are primarily using social media to find new angles and arguments for their stories. They’re not interested in original reporting. They’re interested in the movement of opinions and perspective on the web. The Brodeur press release reads:

“While only a small percentage of journalists feel that blogs are helpful in generating sources or exclusives, they do see blogs as particularly useful in helping them better understand the context of a story, a new story angle, or a new story idea. It appears that reporters are using blogs more for ethnographic research than they are for investigative research,” [Jerry] Johnson commented.

Okay. So, absent any detailed info on where journalists go and how they get there, let’s imagine what this looks like. Political reporters on deadline are checking out Daily Kos to read the community chatter of the latest debates. They’re surfing to Feministing to see the reaction on the new FDA ruling on birth control. And Business reporters are scrolling through a company’s blog to get their take on a recent product recall.

If all this is true, what does it mean for the social media release? Right now, the Brian Solis-branded social media release is more like a distribution center for value-rich content. It is intended to start or assist conversations around an issue using company-provided content. A typical SMR could include a series of quotes from decision-makers, a YouTube video on the issue, Del.icio.us bookmarks to related articles, boilerplate language about the company, and a Facebook fan page for the company product.

These items all serve as content for a potential blog post, article or report–but the template itself does not emphasize an opinion or perspective. In fact, I would argue that official quotes and company boilerplate washes out the essential ingredients that makes blogs so interesting–that is, nuance and disagreement.

How about retrofitting the SMR with a bit more attitude? Maybe there should be a space for respectful disagreement. Or perhaps we need to add some bite to the typically dry soundbites of our spokespeople. Whatever the approach, Brodeur’s study suggests we take a second look at the SMR and our assumptions behind it.

When the content takes over…

Oh internet tubes, how do I use thee? Let me count the ways.

In 2006, my social media diet was fairly basic. I regularly consumed and produced content on YouTube, Flickr, Gmail and Myspace. It wasn’t hard to find and organize the information I was consuming/publishing–because it was a relatively small amount of content.

In 2007, things got a bit more complicated. I adopted the following tools as part of my daily social media regimen:

1. Twitter (began Twittering regularly and “friending” colleagues early Fall 2007)
2. Facebook (Opened an account this summer, and promptly stopped using Myspace. Log in about four times a day, but generally have not found it as fun and absorbing as Myspace was in its hay day. Either I’m getting too old or I’m experiencing the dreaded social networking fatigue.)
3. RSS feed reader (Finally found an aggregator that I liked–Google Reader. In 2007, I began reading 80-100 feeds daily)
4. Professional blog (Launched The Full Plate blog Fall 2007, after many months of commenting on blogs)
5. Hobby blog (Created an mp3 blog, Eggs for Becky, with a friend in April 2007)
6. Del.icio.us (I’ve used Del.icio.us in previous years, but never like this before! Here are the ways this nifty social media tool had made a big impact on my day-t0-day routines in 2007:

• Convinced colleagues and my librarian girlfriend to open an account, “friending” them as part of my network (Rebecca has become an unexpected evangelist for Del.icio.us, convincing her friends to check out her saved bookmarks for articles she tells them about. She is also interested in the emerging art/science of folksonomy)
• Installed the Del.ici.us app on my Facebook profile, publishing my bookmark as feeds for my Facebook friends and colleauges
• Saving 2-4 bookmarks per day
• Checking my network weekly bookmarks for interesting articles
• Saving bookmarks for my girlfriend, and vice versa (instead of emailing links to one another)

In 2007, I abandoned Myspace for Facebook (just as I had abandoned Friendster for Myspace back in 2006). I ramped up use of my Flickr account after receiving a new digital camera. I spent hours installing and uninstalling crappy Facebook applications. I tested out Remember the Milk, Utterz, Jaiku, and various live video streaming tools. I am consuming, saving and producing more content than ever before, and now I’m facing a potential crisis.

Chris Brogan writes, “My thoughts keep coming back to Rachel Happe from IDC who said that the main benefit and value of social networks (and social media, by extension) is to capture unstructured information that otherwise rushes past without a “bucket” to connect it to the “memory” of an organization. ” I agree, but my problem is this: I’m no librarian. In fact, I’m known for my inability to organize and save things. (Example: I don’t have a single paper file at the office.) When I capture information, tag it, save it or republish it, I’m not really contributing to the memory of an organization (that organization being me, I suppose). Instead, I feel like I’m adding to the clutter. My Del.icio.us tags are a mess. My blog tags are fairly random. My Flickr tags are equally as random. And what do I do with all these Twitter posts?

It’s like having a library full of books and no dewey decimel system. I catalog my “books” with tags, but the more information I save, the messier things get. I don’t even know what my Del.icio.us tag for “blog” really stands for any more. Does it mean this article is about blogs? Or is it an actual blog? Or is it about bloggers? Or is it a blog about a blog? Arghhh!

If 2007 was a boom year for my personal social media consumption, 2008 will be a crisis year. Too many feeds, too many bookmarks, too many tags. Semantic web, rescue me!

2008, A New Year for Social Media

In an effort to break free of this writer’s block, I present to you my “short vs. long” list for 2008.

Short

• Myspace I seem to be in rhetorical cul de sac when it comes to Myspace, but my feelings remain the same. It’s overrun with hacked accounts, phishing scams and creeps. My friends and colleagues have already migrated to Facebook, and while we mostly match the description of Facebook’s target demographic, it’s only a matter of time before the mass migration begins. Myspace members continue to grow, but is anyone paying attention to the account activity?
• YouTube YouTube isn’t going anywhere. It’s a staple of everyone’s social media diets, thanks in part to YouTube’s core community of users. But there is also a shift happening that will bleed attention and high-performing users away from YouTube. Sites like Veoh and Revver will continue attracting early defectors (my favorite defector du jour: gamejew) , looking to start a different kind of community–one that isn’t built on piano-playing cats and ninjas.

Long

• Microblogging I’m convinced that Facebook is acting as a gateway site to grown-up microblogging tools like Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce. As ordinary Facebook users become accustomed to Facebook’s “status updates,” they’ll begin to find value in dedicated micro-blogging sites. Furthermore, the text-messaging and instant messaging habits of younger people are easily adapted to micro-blogging. Twitter is group chat/group-texting for grown-ups. Just a few more years and it’ll be commonplace in the office.
• Live Streaming The technology seems to be reaching a critical point. Sites like uStream.tv and Seesmic are set to be the hot adoptions in 2008. Meanwhile, the social-networking site Stickam is popularizing live streaming technology with younger people. In 2008, live streaming on free social media sites will become commonplace.
• Flickr Last week, Flickr unveiled account stats (traffic, referrers, view counts for sets, collections and photostreams) for users with paid accounts. Finally, it seems worthwhile for me to invest in a professional account–and I think other users will feel the same.
• ROI It was a nice run, wasn’t it? For years, our bosses were impressed by costly experiments in social media. Unlike those poor kids in online advertising laboring over cost-per-clicks, we didn’t have to define success. But the time is over, my friends. Executives are starting to ask for it. Managers are demanding it. And web workers the world over are scrambling to define it. ROI for social media is the great riddle of 2008. And if we want to keep the party going, we’ll have to get this figured out.

Paul Harvey, Fish Oil and Social Media

I spent this past weekend in Pennsylvania, visiting my 85-year old grandmother, Louise, who happens to be a life-long fan of America’s most successful radio huckster, Paul Harvey. Harvey has been on the air for more than 70 years, narrating brief news summaries along with his trademark “page 2” advertisements. Each week, his programs are heard by more than 22 million people–Grandma Louise, among them.

Devotion

Every day, twice a day, my grandmother stops whatever she’s doing and turns on her Paul Harvey-advertised BOSE radio to listen to Paul Harvey. If she’s on the phone, she’ll call you back. If she’s cooking, she’ll turn off the stove. If she’s reading, she’ll put down her book. In fact, I recall her once sitting in her parked car for more than 15 minutes before heading into the grocery store. She would not go shopping until Paul Harvey was finished.

That is a very special kind of brand loyalty. It is consumer devotion. I wonder, could this kind of devotion take place on the web? Or does the long tail work against consumer devotion the same way it works against big hit products, songs, books, etc.? Is the Paul Harvey-style devotee on the verge of extinction?

Evangelization

My grandmother buys whatever Paul Harvey sells. She buys the weird pills, and the fish oil and the BOSE radio. But she’s not just a consumer. She’s also a mighty foot soldier in Paul Harvey’s vast and ever-expanding army of loyal fans. (I enjoy imagining my grandmother as a brand warrior.) My grandmother spent 20 minutes this weekend trying to convince me to take fish oil daily, using the same phrases I heard on Harvey’s broadcast earlier that day. For forty years, my grandmother has probably told more than 500 people about scores of products endorsed by her radio god.

It’s a special kind of WOM marketing. It’s almost…inspired. And I’m left wondering, can WOM marketing via social media achieve such heights? And what does that look like, exactly? I suspect it will be far more removed. Shouting at each other through the noise of social media.

WOM and the Social Media Hat Trick

Paul Harvey is a trusted member of my grandmother’s social network. His enterprise is social media 1.0. When Harvey tells my grandmother about ocular nutrition, she feels as though she’s listening to the advice of a close friend. And then she goes and tells her neighbor about it.

It’s not that different for me and my social presence on the web. Example: When I first heard fellow Twitterers casually recommending Virgin Atlantic, I decided to book my next flight to SFO on the airline. I figured that my fellow geeks share my taste in air travel, and I’m pretty unhappy with other airlines. I haven’t even flown on the Virgin yet, but I’m already mentioning the brand to friends, saying “I haven’t flown on Virgin, but I hear it’s great!” and they, in turn, tell me they’ll check it out. It wasn’t the product experience that made me become a brand evangelist for Virgin, it was the WOM experience.

My grandmother and I aren’t so different, after all.

Here’s what I’m left wondering about…

• What will product/brand devotion look like in the mature social media age?

• How can on-demand, ever-abundant social media inspire the same kind of “I’m not leaving the car until this program is finished” product/brand devotion?

Is Social Media the Antidote to Folk Media?

Folk media. I heard this term for the first time today, while listening to a podcast of NPR’s “On the Media.” Christopher Hayes, Washington editor for the Nation, talked to host Brooke Gladstone about the prevalence of conservative (and often false) meme-spreading via email.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now, you’ve called this a viral form of, quote, “folk media”? What do you mean?

CHRISTOPHER HAYES: There’s this media that is peer to peer, is viral, goes from inbox to inbox and can have what is essentially a broadcast effect, without ever sort of surfacing up into the professional media.

In some senses, you have two parallel political narratives happening, and I think that’s increasingly going to be the case as the campaign carries forward. [Read the full transcript]

Hayes is unclear about the distinction between folk media, social media, self-publishing, etc., but to his credit, the term is introduced by Gladstone without ever being properly defined. Let’s confine it to the following:

Political folk media is exaggerated, sensational or false information, that is spread virally, peer-to-peer via email. Generally, it is in the written form, and is meant to prompt an emotional response from recipients.

If you want to read a few examples, check out MyRightWingDad.net, a blog containing the forwarded emails one man was receiving from his father. Why do these false memes spread like wildfire via email and not on social networks? The answer: networks police bad content.

Most of the information peddled in folk media is easily debunked by a quick visit to Snopes.com or Wikipedia, so why do false emails continue to spread? A few possibilities:

• Conservatives think sites like Snopes and Wikipedia have a “liberal bias.”
• Users trust the people forwarding emails, and therefore do not bother to fact-check before forwarding this information themselves.
• People already believe the messages they receive, so that the forwarded emails serve the purpose of affirming, not informing.
• Folk media participants are not critical consumers of web-based information.

Just some scattered thoughts on the issue. There could be positive applications for political folk media, but for now, it seems that folk media is then enemy of the truth.

Possible topic for next post: How social media-integrated email platforms can squash improve folk media.

SEO is Over

A recent comment on this blog (“SEO strategies to get you the job you want”) got me thinking about the term “SEO.”

Search. Engine. Optimization.

(Before I launch into this, I’ll pause here to ponder the possibility that folks are using the term “SEO” to refer to something else entirely. Sometimes I am just. that. paranoid.)

SEO strategies. It’s thrown around a lot these days. I’m not sure it makes sense anymore. Optimization involves organizing (and in some cases, creating) information that is machine-friendly. But social media is human-friendly. It takes the machine out of the equation. (This gets a little blurry with the advent of the semantic web, but the human element to social media remains the same.)

In the days before tags and feeds, we relied on search engines to comb the web and find information for us. But the more information out there, the more burdensome it became. Too many news sites. Blogs. Photos. Store fronts. How does one find quality?

Search engines can’t find quality. They can be tricked, and repeatedly so. One of the latest examples are splogs — junk sites that masquerade as blogs and include malicious links and gobbly-gook content. I’ve stumbled across at least a dozen in the last month alone, and all while searching for something with Google.

Only human beings can find quality. Flickr has been using some calculation (what, I don’t know) to determine the “most interesting” photos in single account. Mine are seen here. Now, I’m not a very good photographer, but I can assure you that I’ve got more interesting shots than the one of my mom cooking Christmas dinner.

SEO is dead. Human optimization is social media. It is about quality. Quality content. Quality interactions.