Archive for November, 2009

O’Reilly are more than just a book publisher and events organiser. For one, they’re among our main influences.

They’ve opted to release their new book The Art of Community, by Jono Bacon, in paper-based version, electronic book reader versions and a free PDF of the whole thing.

In the words of the author it’s intended to be a “solid guide to building, energizing and enabling pro-active, productive and enjoyable communities”, which is right up our street of course.

The contents are released under a Creative Commons licence (Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike in this case). It’ll be interesting to see how people adapt it and how that boosts attention for O’Reilly and the author.

(Thanks to @zambonini for the tip.)

I met a representative of an arts organisation this week. She mentioned one of their key aims is to help artists and other people they deal with to share knowledge. So they are organising an event, a get-together, to allow people who wouldn’t normally meet to do so.

The event itself sounded like a good move. It also made me think of the possible benefits of recording the event and uploading it online.

The recording might be a video, on a service such as YouTube or Vimeo. Or it might be just the audio, on a service such as Soundcloud. Attendees and other people can then embed a player on their blogs and websites, if you allow this (and usually there’s no reason not to allow embedding). Ideally you could embed it on your organisation or company website – but you don’t even need to do that to get started, at least for now.

The equipment for just documenting something is so ridiculously cheap now. We’re not talking about high production values or live streaming, just documenting the thing.

(There plenty of other ways to document an event using social media but today I’ll focus on getting the whole event as audio or video.)

Most attendees can be fine with audio or video if you tell them beforehand. Let them know about good opportunities to introduce themselves and plug their own work – at the start of each person’s first comment for example.

For video we use the Flip cam at Native, which is just a suggestion but it is cheap and an additional bonus is its size. It’s portable and so small that even the less confident people can happily ignore it and get on with sharing their thoughts.

So here are some possible benefits.

Extending the reach
There will probably be people who want to attend your event but can’t, because of time and geography. Recording it allows them to catch up afterwards.

Reminders
For people who do attend your event it serves as a reminder of what was discussed. It might even help them to concentrate and fully participate in the meeting rather than struggle to take notes of everything.

Awareness of your organisation
Publishing a recording helps wider awareness of your organisation, its aims, its projects and so on. Relevant recordings lead to inbound links and boost to your online reputation.

Openness
One feature of the web, thought by many to be the beauty of the web, is that your recording is potentially accessible to anyone. What about exclusivity? Some audio and video services do allow you to control access to recordings. But in most situations you can just make it open. Why place limits on who can get this information? It might seem paradoxical, but some of the most competitive people and companies are the ones sharing the most useful recordings. Most things aren’t sensitive. They may as well be open.

Promotion of the event itself
This follows from the previous point. There are lots of reasons to attend your event. Some of these reasons are: meeting other attendees face-to-face, asking questions, having more influence, helping oneself to a drink or buffet. None of these are replaced by a recording. Often the recording can promote the event. (For instance, look at how the prestigious TED talks have taken off since they started sharing video. The attendance fee has increased too.)

Persistence
Having a recording of key points may allow you to avoid having to repeat yourself. You can keep the recording online for weeks, months, even years afterwards. All of the good audio and video services will give your recording a permalink. This will not change and can thus be emailed to your community and shared between them and other people. Your recording will also be found by people searching for keywords contained in its title or list of tags.

Unknown reasons
I kick myself to think of the useful events I’ve attended – or even organised – and not had recorded. That’s because you don’t always know how useful the recording will be until afterwards. Or maybe sometime later. Those meetings just vanished into thin air. I’ll get by, but it would have taken hardly any effort to record them – so why not? (I’ve also been to some boring and irrelevant meetings in my time, but that’s subjective. Even those might have been of use to someone out there. You never know.)

These benefits can apply to anything good you choose to put online, not just audio and video. You could substitute the word “recording” above with “blog post”. You might already have guessed that for me, typing out this blog post ticks off some of the benefits described above.

Our friends (and client!) National Theatre Wales are launching their 2010 programme today.

More info from director John McGrath on the community site.

Join the online chat and watch the live video stream, see Catherine Paskell’s blog post for info on that.

I’ve long had a problem with the word “viral” when used in phrases like “viral marketing”, “viral video” and related contexts. I haven’t always been able to explain exactly why in a succinct way.

Judging from his blog and the work he does, Kevin Marks is a guy who understands the web. He absolutely nails it with this blog post about the scammy connotations of viral. He suggests we retain the word “viral” but use it solely for “exploitatative applications that violate trust to reproduce against the interests of their hosts”. Love it. It’s worth reading in full, as well as this earlier post How not to be viral.

Marks’ emphasis here is on companies who create software, citing the photo sharing service Flickr as a good example of somewhere that supports “fruitful social interactions”.

Our emphasis is slightly different. In my experience the word “viral” is also used for funny videos and other online content that spreads rapidly.

For marketers discovering YouTube and other services, as methods for spreading a “brand message”, the word viral can be seductive because it implies a smaller investment of effort. (Let the viral do the work and go home early!) But of all the viral videos you can name, how many can you associate with a specific company or product? It makes a good straw poll for colleagues whenever they mention the dreaded word.

Viral videos often merely advertise themselves. That is, you remember the video but seldom remember the company. It comes back to another one of my bugbears, which is the over-emphasis on hit count or view count as metrics of success. We’ve never met a client whose sole aim was to notch up a million video views, it might help the ego but it just isn’t an objective in and of itself.

At Native, we recognise the value of good marketing – but what we do seldom intersects with interruption advertising or one-way broadcast videos and the like.

That’s because we hold that good marketing is far more than spreading a brand message. Good marketing is being aware of what people are saying about you, helping customers with problems, meeting them on their terms, making a quality product or service – and providing or supporting spaces where customers can talk to each other. These principles apply offline. Now online we have some great opportunities and tools to do these things in new ways.

Another benefit of online is allowing niche conversations about all the subjects that relate to you and your business. These take place in text, images, audio, graphic visualisations and yes, videos.

“Viral” annoys me because it’s too much of an abstraction of the real human beings you’re trying to deal with. These people become prospects, targets, vectors, hosts. This is actually how I feel I’m being categorised when I watch TV advertising now. It’s too general and it alienates me. Besides, people don’t really talk like that. The same goes for viral videos. Actually the videos that spread most effectively are the ones that have no product or company behind them, like the “free hugs” movement. People are not stupid, they’ll assess your motives and share the videos that smell genuine.

Incidentally, often the memorable and useful videos I find online are straight-to-camera, lo-fidelity, quick, unpolished recordings, not slick adverts. This is a guideline, not a rule, but if it’s a social media conversation people are coming to expect videos that are like blog posts, not brochures.

All this is about as far from a single-message viral video as you could hope to get.