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 :-)

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.

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.

One Generation’s Halo Effect Is Another’s … Or Disrupt Yourself Before Some 18 Year Old Does it For You

It’s Day 3 of “Monaco Media Forum — The-Delayed-But-Not-Too-Delayed Reaction.”  It’s a generation thing. And one day my generation will have to yield too.

I was struck in Monaco when adman-oligarch Maurice Lévy of Publicis Groupe said he has yet to find a new digital media that gives his clients the “halo” effect of being associated with media like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal.

Another generation's halo effect. Photo credit Jeremy Burgin.

t was unclear to me whether he was referring to a halo he achieves by getting his clients covered in these pubs (Publicis owns PR firms) or buying his clients ad space in them. Either way…

Consider this homegrown research (it’s a busy day today.. so no time to go searching out refs to actual research that validates this.. but it exists): My kids (7 and 11) give young, disruptive media brands a very different “halo profile” (should I TM that?) than older people do. They don’t give more credence to Disney than they do to YouTube. They’d actually rather go to dinner with a YouTube star than a Disney Channel star. Certain YouTube stars mean more to them than Miley Cyrus. And I’m deliberately not putting “stars” in quotes… YouTube stars are stars.

YouTube is an example of a disruptive media in the true Christensenian sense (“typically cheaper, simpler-to-use versions of existing products that target low-end or entirely new customers”).

And some companies that provide halo effect today are too blinded by it to see the disruptive halos of tomorrow.

And those darn disruptive companies — as they begin to feel their power, they start to move in. In fact, just last week, YouTube put a lot of effort into “hollywoodizing” (you could say “halo-izing”) itself and it’s stars… check out this page for an archive of their YouTube Live event.

Their branding is interesting. In a smart bit of positioning they put stars like Fred and Akon on equal footing. They’re borrowing from Akon for Fred. And they’re borrowing from Fred for Akon. And they’re borrowing from both for themselves. Feel the glow.

A screen grab from YouTube Live. Akon and Fred are giving equal billing.