Shorter is Sweeter (And Smarter) — The Proof

When communicating, make your point early. While you still have your audience's attention.

Just one of the many brilliant things about digital branding/communications/advertising and the like is that the results are so easy to measure.  We look at a lot of results data at Rassak–and often use it to improve things, even on the fly. But the data is often proprietary and unshareable.  I thought I’d share one interesting tidbit with you from some personal communications I put out on the web last week. Nobody can yell at me (except me) for sharing this.

Last week was the week leading up to the Jewish new year AKA Rosh Hashana  (in fact it is actually today… so if I were an observant Jew I would not by typing right now!). I’ve traditionally made a new year greeting and sent it via email to people who I think would be interested in the week before the holiday. Even though my greetings have been in video format for a few years, this time I decided to upload the video to YouTube and share it that way.

Once the video is seen a minimum number of times, YouTube gives you back viewing data — demographics, etc. One of my favorites is the “hotspot” data. This data compares your video to other videos of similar length — and shows where people, on average, tend to leave your video.

My new year video, is about one and half minutes long. You can see, in the image above, where people begin to get a bit antsy. This data is based on about 900 or so views on YouTube.  If you like, you can check out my  video for yourself here. And happy new year!

Now.. not all videos (of course) have the same graph. Here’s a cool video of a guy explaining hotspots.. and he shows some of his graphs.

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RIP Frank Batten: An Early New Media Adopter

Frank Batten, creator of The Weather Channel, died at age 82 yesterday.

What an incredibly vibrant and experiment-to-win company he created!

It’s perhaps a bit hard to imagine cable TV as new media now–but every media was new once! The idea of putting the weather (that thing that everybody talks about ) on TV and making it work was a bold move.

When  I worked at Wink Communications in the mid-1990s, The Weather Channel was one of the very first to experiment with our then-new interactive television technology. They were really early on the web too.  I’m not close to the company anymore, but I can bet they are already looking long past what is currently considered the newest media phase/trends — social, mobile, etc.

Batten’s book, The Weather Channel, The Improbable Rise of a Media Phenomenon is a really good read about enterpreneurship, being human and media innovation. Check it out if you can.

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A Book Publisher Feels the Web

Check out this nice little video promoting the kids book group at HarperCollins—and highlighting some of their titles. It’s a nice example of an old-line old media company dipping their toes into emerging media — and using content in smart ways to market themselves. This doesn’t feel like a top-down corporate thing… most likely some young’uns who feel the web in their daily lives had an idea to make a video and put it on YouTube. (If this is a pro job by a  guerilla marketing specialist, I don’t know about it). I felt the ending to be a little anticlimactic … but let’s hope this is just the beginning. More commentary after you watch.

I’m sure the people in the video are not joking when they say most people asked whether they had nothing better to do. And I believe their answer: “no.” Print publishing marketers are notoriously old school, even as digital media threatens them as marketers and in the core of their business. Even if the people who made this video had something better to do in the immediate term (like, I don’t know, file an expense report) I’d argue that this sort of activity is more important than almost anything. The ability to pique interest in a products/brands/companies is hard. Really hard. It gets harder over time. And it gets almost impossible when the old ways of doing it are disrupted by new ways — and the people in charge, like the slowly boiling frog, have no clue until it is too late.

Thanks to 100 Scope Notes … where I first saw the video. BTW, if you guys make another.. keep up the opera. Nice.

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Google Ties it Together: Billboards That Change Daily, Twitter (Of Course) … Plus Paper and Thumbtacks

Here’s an ad/marketing campaign from Google worth studying. It’s for their Google Apps product. Apps, for those of you who haven’t tried it, are the web-based version (basically) of the ubiquitous Microsoft Office.*

I feel the messaging on the campaign that I’ve seen so far could be tighter, clearer. But it’s certainly OK. What’s is really smart about this campaign is that is  nicely integrated (fancy marketing speak for “tying various elements and media together”). It uses traditional billboards in strategic locations… but does something interesting with it to generate attention (the billboard will change every day for a month) …

… it leverages Twitter as a viral distribution platform

… plus (via this website) Google is attempting to leverage paper and thumbtacks as a viral distribution platform The site calls on converts to do “internal marketing” on their behalf with things like flyers for tacking up on cubicles. Here’s one:

The "spread the word" website allows converts to print these and paste 'em up

* Of course ubiquity is a fickle beast— my kids (a sample of the future population) use Google Apps (email, word processing, chat, etc.) almost exclusively for their school work. Although… my eldest son, who just got a netbook for his birthday, IS asking for PowerPoint on it.

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This Ad Campaign Won’t Be The Thing To Save Them Now… But It Might Help You

If you are a CIT employee, exec, customer or lender (am i forgetting anybody? oh yes, investors, though they saw a 70!! percent bump Friday) these cannot be easy days. The 101-year old lender to small businesses might file for bankruptcy on Monday. If that happens, it’ll be the fifth largest such filing in US history, per the Wall Street Journal.

Given my job I probably should remember a lot more ad campaigns than I do. The fact is I don’t remember very many at all. But I do remember one from CIT. I would actually look forward! to seeing the ads in the New Yorker — even the repeats. It was a really nice example of engaging, interesting, informative advertising — “content”  or stories really.  It wasn’t earth-shattering…  in fact it was a pretty basic idea of profiling customers. Somehow they did a good job choosing a mix of customers to profile. They were good storytellers. And they really dug into it with them. The straight-up print ads (which unfortunately I can’t get a hold of to show you here) were particularly engaging.

Here is where the campaign lived online: Check it out while you can here.

There are probably many lessons to learn about what CIT did wrong… but this one is something they did right.

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Ideas Worth Spreading — to 4.5B More People

The smart people who put on the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference — but who actually are also becoming a very interesting digital media brand —  announced something interesting today. It is now possible to either translate yourself or view translations of any of the many interesting videos (AKA “Ted Talks”) at TED.com. The idea: make the talks useful to the 4.5 billion or so people who don’t speak English. To quote head-TED Chris Anderson:

The TED Open Translation Project will enable thousands of volunteer translators to use subtitles to make TED available to their own communities. To do this the right way has taken a year of preparation. But now we’re ready.

The site is filling up with  what they call “interactive transcripts”. They allow you to click on any word in English or a translated language — and actually make the video of the given talk play from that word on.

This is all very good for making the site and videos people-friendly to many more people. But it’s also very good for TED.com’s search engine friendliness… talks are searchable and findable, increasing the site’s profile on Google and other engines.

BTW, here, per TED, are the languages with the most talks translated in them, as of this posting.

Source: TED.com

Smart. Or, if you like, inteligente, интелигентен, 智能, חָכָם, لبيب, วิทูร

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Secrets of the Web’s Most Popular Video EVER

Distribution, Distribution, Distribution. Photo credit Reed Kavner

In a rather excited blogpost (lots of exclamation points!!… count them) Visible Measures, a company that makes it possible to track video views online, has listed the top viral videos of all time.

Number one is “Soulja Boy Crank That” logging in at 356,300,000 views.

Check out the video. It’s very very smart. Do you think its a coincidence that the most watched online video of all time does the following things so well:

Branding: the song has the singer’s name in it — and it’s no cameo.. “Soulja Boy” basically IS the hook/chorus. This makes it easy to remember the artist, easy to talk about, easy to find again.

Calling people to action: the video is jampacked with imagery of, well, people watching the video. And many times they are watching it together. What a terrific, not-so-subtle reminder to share the video and enjoy it with others.

The thing is built to work. Crank dat.

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Hey, That’s Not Me

Here’s a nice example of a website doing something different to achieve their goals. Mixx is a news/info/photo/link  sharing site. Like most sites they know they will get better results if people SEE THEMSELVES in the site and if their friends and colleagues see them too.People are more likely to use the site, link to and from the site etc.. 

Most websites today that ask one to register and upload a photo are pretty humdrum in their appeal. They have a generic photo if you don’t upload your own, they might have a little bar telling you what percentage of your profile you’ve filled out, etc.

Mixx is mixing it up. Here’s how they’re gently encouraging me to fill out my profile. A smart underdog move.

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