It’s the weekly roundup of stories posted on the Oddly Studios site!
Apologies for being a couple of days late, watch the video to hear the tale of woe regarding corrupted video files.
This time we cover some figures recently released by Comscore and Global Web Index, tying it together with some comments made at NextMedia Conference and GDC earlier this year. We look at what makes for good video for consumption online, and take a glance at one creative use of video being conducted by FITC.
Many thanks to Courtney for her video suggestions for this week.
In local things happening, we have a few pics from Winteractive, DMA Ninja Pub, and an audio recording session with Simon Conlin.
Enjoy, and feel free to comment (on anything except my hair, haha)!
This was a particularly busy week around Oddly Studios and the Oddpod.
At this time of year, there are so many interesting things happening both during the day and afterwards. Thankfully, us a the studio have a little time off over the next few days, because we’ve been going non-stop (and loving it).
This week we had Mr. Simon Conlin come by the OddPod to use the studio for recording audio for a project that he is working on. I think Simon is very busy these days, as he was also working hard on two other initiatives, namely Winteractive and Galaxy Goo.
Simon Conlin recording audio at the Oddpod
Simon’s other big event this week is a mixer that happens each year for people in interactive, and it is called the “office party for people with no office”. Co-founded by Simon and Craig Swan, I’ve been to this the last couple of years and it is always a good time.
Following Winteractive came Ninja Pub 15 the following night. If you caught any of the live broadcast last time and were looking for more, I apologize. For this time, the popular pub night started by Joe Bodick and Andrew Tedford of Seneca’s School of Communication Arts took place at the Frog ‘n Firkin rather than on campus. The advantage was a pool table, and the possibility of opening things up to yet more friends.
Sabrina Rossi, Raz Peel, Nick Lowe at Ninja Pub 15
Ninja Pub 15 was another big success, and I was happy to see a few people who were also present at Winteractive the night before. I had a good long chat with Sumeet about an article I’m writing that compares social media to disruptive technology and draws parallels to the disk drive manufacturing industry. I also had pints.
Everyone seemed to really enjoy the event, and it was wonderful to see friends outside of just work.
Many thanks to the good folks who work hard to put these things together, so that everyone can have a happy holiday and prepare to charge into the new year. 2010 should be the best year ever for the interactive industry in Toronto.
What does it take to create video content that engages an online audience?
This is a question that burns upon the minds of most people involved in creating online content right now, as many recent finding have shown a massive upswing in video consumption online as well as a high degree of content recall and retention.
It seems that everyone knows of some viral video that has made the rounds that can instantly be recognized by a room full of friends.
“Did you see the one with the two-legged dog?” you ask, and immediately almost everyone knows what you are talking about. From this we could assume that everyone in the world has seen the video – why? Because that room full of people constitutes OUR world.
Therein lies the key to creating compelling online video. Video online is driven by our social connections, as perhaps it once was in traditional (television) video as well.
Is Television Really Non-Interactive?
Most would agree that television watching is a non-interactive form of entertainment, but I would only halfway agree. Yes, television during the last fifteen years could largely be seen as unnatural and non-interactive. The argument is made convincingly that prior to mass-media, our entertainments, including theatre, involved the audience in shaping the narrative. However, I would argue that not so long ago television was in fact the focus of a great deal of interactivity – it was just that the interaction took place post-watching.
Years ago, the number of shows available, as well as the number of networks, were fewer. Chances were that if you ran home from school to watch “Gilligan’s Island”, or paused during housework to watch “Days of Our Lives”, your friends and associates were doing the same.
I recall vividly watching kids act out their favorite scenes the next day from the shows they had watched the night before, such as “Bionic Man” or “The A-team”. It was a cause for concern for many parents, but these days parents are rightly concerned about NOT seeing such imaginative recreation.
As the number of shows and channels proliferated, we began to drown in our own media until the chances of a shared experience among us consumers became very slight.
Social Media Returns Us
The death of the water-cooler talk made for bad television. In a way, social media has become the answer to this missing interaction. With it’s use, we once again come full circle, back to the place where we began, able to converse with one another and arrange to share our entertainment among a group whom we specifically choose.
Slowly, we are all coming to recognize that social media is not about large numbers of followers or friends, but rather about filtering down to a select group of like-minded people and then engaging in meaningful interaction with them. You might enjoying watching this brief presentation with the very latest information from ComScore regarding video watching habits:
Keeping that in mind, it makes sense that we would tailor our content to respect the goals of the social media. Otherwise, our work becomes no more than another chatter in the background, and users have the means and desire to tune out content that goes against their goal of refining their social networks.
Rule No. 1: Give up on the Lottery
The phrase “going viral” has become such a lure that content producers have pored over every possible aspect of production to attempt to create this phenomenon. It is like watching the gold rush happen right on our own video screen, with everyone rushing to the hills that must surely produce untold riches. But in reality what can happen is a great big case of ‘paralyses by analysis’ in which it becomes impossible to act at all while we try to score the ‘big idea’.
The ‘big idea’ is another of those notions that advertisers have slavishly attempted to categorize. Many agencies promote themselves entirely on the notion of the ‘big idea’. I like to point to the example of David Ogilvy, however. David Ogilvy was arguably one of the greatest ad-men of all time, renowned for his keen insight and big idea thinking. Yet even he acknowledged that in his entire career (spanning decades) he had come up with only twenty insights that he considered ‘big ideas’. Most come nowhere near that figure.
Stop trying to ‘win the lottery’ by making ‘viral video’. Like most things in life, making good content means slavishly working on it, bit by bit, getting better over the course of days and years. There are no true shortcuts. This really is a case of the tortoise and the hare.
Rule No. 2: You have two ears and one mouth
I used to work as general labour on construction sites, and one of the first rules I learned there was that listening twice and speaking once made for a better result all around. One of my bosses liked to quip that we are all given two ears and only one mouth for a reason – to listen more than we speak out.
Online, listening happens in a few ways. But first of all, know that this approach means a lot of hard work. We can listen right on the front lines, by reading comments and replying to them. We can reciprocate by choosing to watch those who subscribe to our micro-blogging platform. This is not always easy to do, as I was reminded by Tara Hunt in a recent presentation, during which she admitted that she has occasionally been overly brief in her interactions, given how much work she puts into her efforts. Thankfully, she is good-natured and can come back from such moments, and we should try to do likewise.
The vast majority of our listening should happen in this manner, for this is how we find our voice online and build seed communities. In other words, we respect the goals of the social network.
Another means of listening happens at a macro-level, and this includes such things as our analytic information and tracking of user activity. This is also very important and can give us a general overview of the successfulness of our efforts (but I would question whether such findings are as useful as the first method in actualy figuring out what to do next).
In the first method, we just ask our most loyal viewers what they want. In the second, we try to imagine a composite person out of all the numbers, then further try to anticipate activities of that imaginary person. Which do you think is more effective?
In recently published findings, after over 200 studies, Comscore, the leading metrics organization stated the following: “Clicks don’t reflect a campaign’s sales impact, nor the cumulative latent impact of ads. Clicks don’t tell you anything about brand building effects”. (See video above)
Rule No. 3: Release it into the wild
That content is your baby. You’ve produced it, cared for it, corrected it…but now it is time to let it go. This is the nature of interactive media, you must allow it to go out there on the wild web and have people interact with it. They may interact in ways you never imagined, and when they do you must note it and not freak out. This is the nature of social media, to create conversation. This becomes the fertile ground in which your ideas can be planted like seeds and allowed to grow. If you have total control of the content, you also have constriction of it’s spread socially.
Rule No. 4: You can’t be everything to everybody
Recall that we mentioned above that the true nature of social media is to allow a filtering of contacts and content to happen. You can’t fight against that principle, and would be far better advised to work along with it. Make your content easy to filter. Again there are two ways to do this, a micro and a macro level. At a micro level (which is harder to do but more effective) you can actually contact the individuals of your network and let them know something about the content you are putting up. You can also create content that is focussed on just a few ideas, and thus is simple to categorize.
At a macro level there are such tools as tagging, thumbnail images, and search terms that will allow the network to categorize what your content is about. Make use of these, but again do not allow these to be a substitute for good old fashioned talking. Tools are no substitute for personal communication.
If you find it difficult to describe your content in simple terms, chances are you are not thinking niche when you create your content. That is a bad thing, as it makes the filtering of your content much harder on the network. When that happens, the network will bin the content and move on.
Rule No. 5: Be Like Turtle
If you are putting things online, you are giving up a degree of control over them. The benefit is that you will spark a lot of conversations. The down-side of it is that you may not always like what you hear. Sometimes it might be downright nasty. Like the mighty turtle, you must have a thick shell you can retreat behind. Resist the temptation to react in an unthinking manner. Take a breath and follow the simple rule of not putting negativity out into the web. Sometimes you just have to ride it out.
That is about all I have so far – five little rules that may help anyone seeking to add on video in their online efforts. Take a little time to watch the excellent information from ComScore, and if you feel inclined, leave a comment below.
For a while now, social media has been all the rage, enough to make the advertising industry sit up and take notice of what is happening there. But have advertisers trully figured out how to make social media work for them?
If you’ve been following along on this site, you’ll see that we’ve been gathering our information at Oddly, comparing many sources. We’ve been consuming work from Terry O’Reilly, Mitch Joel, Jeff Gomez, Tara Hunt and many more. Furthermore, I’ve been taking their findings and comparing it against the information we get from analyzing our own local sources.
Online Video is Ruling
A few findings jump out as difficult to dispute, and one of the biggest ones is that video rules the internet now. That may seem like a bold statement, but both my own findings, and recent information released by Comscore and Global Web Index all support this idea.
On pages I regularly track, I’ve found that pages with video embedded get over twice as many hits, and furthermore people stay on them over three times as long.
This same finding was echoed at NextMedia, where Comscore highlighted several key pieces of information in their presentation. Take a look at the following slide:
What you’ll notice right away is a steady advance in video watching online. And this advance is happening across the board, not just with one specific age group as you might expect. It would be tempting to think that only young people are consuming this much video, but in reality older users are looking at video as well. The older users fall a bit behind in terms of creating, uploading, and sharing video, but not as far as you might expect.
Recent figures released by Global Web Index (as recent as January 2009) show that 72 percent of users watched video online during that month, compared with 46 percent who read a blog (the other really big activity online). About the same amount who read a blog also managed some kind of social network profile. Look at this image:
The number of users uploading video falls behind at 32 percent and skews toward young users, those 16 to 24 years old, then declining with age, but still hitting about 20 percent for users aged 55 to 64. What it means, essentially, is that age is not a huge factor in participating in video sharing online. About half as many people reaching retirement age upload videos as do sixteen year olds. In Tara Hunt’s book “The Wuffie Factor”, she recounts the activity of one of Youbtube’s most popular posters, a 74 year old man who related stories of his life and of World War 2.
Online Video is the new Network
The end result is astounding. In less than four years, the amount of video being consumed online actually rivals the video watching habits of television viewers. Global Web Index points to Comscore figures in December of 2008 for the viewing habits of the major networks, and compares them against their own findings that showed online viewing matched any one of the networks, at about 97 million viewers in the United States.
It is incredible to think that in four years, online video could stand up as the new network, taking it’s place alongside traditional networks that have needed decades to develop such a viewership.
Now what is even more remarkable is the way that videos are shared around. Far and away the most common form of video sharing is…ready for it??…email.
Yes, that is right. According to Global Web Index findings, email is still numero uno for spreading the word about a video. Half of people choosing to share a video do so this way, with the remainder being spread out in social networks, sharing sites, instant messenger and more. This makes sense since the same findings indicated that fully 37 percent of people who share video do so to less than three people in their network.
On a personal note, I can agree that some of the most powerful and successful campaigns I’ve been involved in, in terms of user engagement, have been email campaigns. They consistently show high rates of click-through (provided they are made well and do not trip the spam detectors). Email messages need to be short, to-the-point, and have a clear simple callout. Personalization is important.
Global Web Index went a step further with their findings and looked at the income levels and education of those with regular video viewing habits. They found some interesting things, namely that those viewers preferred content created and uploaded by consumers themselves (compare only 8 percent of the video consumed through Hulu, that roughly matches video consumed looking at video on friend’s blogs). Their findings showed that those watching consumer video through friend’s blogs and social networks tended towards higher income levels and education. They cite that post-grad students were 47 percent more likely to watch such video, and income-earners in excess of 100K were 96 percent more likely to watch.
This would place such viewers squarely within a target very desirable to advertisers, and actually matches the figures I saw presented earlier in the year by Konami at GDC. At that event, they looked at what made for desirable figures in terms of supporting mobile platforms, and I actually see an eerie resemblance to the numbers reported by both Comscore and Global Web Index.
So what does it all mean?
Well in the immediate term, it means that everyone is scrambling to get video online, and enable their users to upload their own. They’re trying very hard to enable sharing of video, but perhaps missing a few possibilities to do so inside of “less sexy” means such as email.
But how exactly does one create good video that will appeal to the kind of people who fall into that group, who are likely to look at your content on a page?
That is a subject for another article. In the meantime, it might be worth looking at the published reports, and comparing them with your own analytics to see if the findings match what you’re seeing on your own site.
