Doing the Honors — Leveraging Human Desire To Build Community

YouTube is not always what it seems. On the face of it it’s a video site. It’s also a search engine (some say it’s the second largest one). It’s also a great example of a community … and their community platform offers many lessons for digital community leaders. Here’s one:

My almost-teenage son was very excited last night. He and some friends made a tribute music video of a song by teen heartthrob Justin Bieber.  They posted it to YouTube.  He was thrilled that the video received three “honors.” The video was ranked as most watched, top rated and most discussed — in a specific category, in a specific geographic region.

Good community organizers understand the desires of their members. Great community organizers leverage those desires to grow and engage their communities.

YouTube — one of the most fascinating community platforms — has leveraged technology to do just this. At least 100 community members multiplied by a huge, huge, huge number of categories and geographic regions were “honored” (great choice of word!) with feel-good feedback on their work yesterday. And this happens everyday. This is certainly not the only reason that 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute (source, YouTube).  But it certainly helps.

PRACTICAL TIP: Even if you don’t have the technology built into your community platform, do something (anything) today to honor members. And honor them for something that will encourage an action that will grow and further engage members in your community.

P.S. Check out the video… my son plays Bieber :-)

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.

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.

Skype vs. United Airlines… In This Case Skype Wins. Directing Video From 6,000 Miles Away

OK…. before I even start let me say that what I’m about to write is cool and all.. but THIS tale of directing SURGERY via text messages is a billion times more important.

Anyway…

Last Saturday night here in Spain (SaturDAY in San Francisco) we were shooting a video for a customer. It was an interesting experiment in needing to COMMUNICATE subtle needs/desires over a somewhat challenged medium (Skype)  — and of using Skype as a remote camera monitor. It was this or flying back. To sum up the experiment:  if I had really NEEDED to direct in great detail (calling cuts, etc.) this would NOT have worked. But we knew going in that this level of detail was not going to be necessary. The tools worked well enough for me to be able to talk with the actor early on (after observing for a while) and set a certain tone … and the awesome crew (including a “director on the ground”) could take it from there. So… in this case Skype beat United Airlines. At some point I might write more seriously about this.. (and I’ll try to get Dylan and Ben to write about it from their perspectives in SF)… but for now here is a light-hearted reverse chronological look at the evening/day in the form of a screengrab of my posts on my Facebook wall.

Let’s Make a Movie Together

I just got off the phone with somebody in California who wants to involve several people in the making of a video. The contributors will be all over the world… and he wants it to be very easy for them to upload VIDEO, AUDIO or STILL IMAGES that he can then ultimately edit into a finished piece. This blog post is nothing more than a way to test out one tool that might suit his purpose. It’s called Kaltura. Their tagline is ‘creating together”. If you are interested, please add either video, audio or photos to what I have got going on below — DON’T WORRY ABOUT CONTENT, THIS IS A TECHNICAL AND WORKFLOW EXPERIMENT, NOT AN OPUS IN THE MAKING.

I have set this up so that only Dylan, Ben and I can edit the final piece, but it CAN be set-up (with a flip of one switch) so that anybody can edit as well. I’m curious to see how this works out. Gracias.