Category Archives: video

Interesting Reading, 11/13/08

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Traditional Media Hit Harder Than In Past Recessions

It used to be that three mainstream media channels – newspapers, radio and magazines – reliably predicted the economy’s decline into a recession and its recovery. That all changed about three years ago. Newspapers and magazines fell while the economy was rising and show no sign of anticipating a recovery. The results, writes Erik Sass:

While softening ad revenue anticipated the two previous economic downturns by about a year, in the most recent case, the slowdown for magazines, newspapers and radio began about three years before. In addition, the declines have already proven to be steeper in this pre-recession period than at the height of the previous ones. This suggests that all three traditional media, suffering from both secular and macroeconomic trends, are poised to suffer unprecedented losses in the economic downturn that is now unfolding.

Magazine Ad Pages Drop, Holiday Season Looks Grim

OMG, these numbers are terrible. At least we’re all in this together. Quoting:

On Oct. 28, the Conference Board announced that its consumer confidence index had plummeted to an all-time low of about 38 out of 100, a drop of over one-third from its level of 61.4 in September. The expectations index–which evaluates consumer sentiment about the future–went even lower, dropping from 61.5 to 35.5. Lynn Franco, director of the Conference Board’s research center, said the decline in the confidence index was “the lowest reading on record” since the index began tracking consumer attitudes in 1985

Macy’s said it will eliminate all magazine advertising in the first half of 2009, although its holiday marketing budget is still largely intact. Subsequently, The New York Times reported that Neiman’s specialty retail segment–including Neiman Marcus Stores and Bergdorf Goodman–saw sales tumble 27.6% in October, while Nordstrom is down 15.7%, and Target fell 4.8%.

Online Retailers Tightening Belts

Here’s one explanation for the story above. Quoting:

  • In a Shop.org holiday survey, 30% of online retail marketers said they were trimming marketing budgets, while 16% said they were reducing promotional spending.
  • 45% of retailers said their budgets for free-shipping promotions were either significantly or somewhat higher compared to last year.
  • Forrester projects sales this holiday season will grow at the slowest rate ever, 12% vs. 21% a year ago.
  • 45% of online consumers plan to buy less overall this holiday due to uncertainty about the economy, up from 20% in 2007.
  • A full 21% of consumers plan to shop primarily or entirely online this season, up from 19% last year. And 24% of total dollars spent this season are expected to be spent online, compared with 22% last year.

Marketing Executives Networking Group Survey Finds Social Media Practices Still in Infancy Stages

A survey last month and found that 67% of respondents consider themselves beginners at using social media for marketing purposes. Additionally, more than 87% of respondents are not regularly measuring the ROI of their social media marketing efforts. “

The Viral Video Marketing Dilemma

Metrics expert Mark Ghuneim suggests that we still have a long way to go in evolving our thinking about viral video metrics beyond view counts. Marketers are beginning to think more holistically about how to measure success. Quoting:

According to a recent FEED Company study, some 70% of ad-agency and media-buying executives plan to increase budgets for viral video marketing in 2009. In addition, 72% of ad-agency executives and media buyers say their clients are “interested” or “very interested” in using viral video as an integral part of their marketing campaigns.

“Favoriting,” commenting, linking to, embedding, social network amplification and other action all constitute a level of user attention that must somehow be accounted for and given appropriate value.

In addition, a marketing executive would also want to know how users were discovering their video, as well as how quickly the view counts were growing. The velocity of consumption and adoption is an important indicator as well as factors beyond the standard impression and stream data. For example, are bloggers talking about the video? Are users micro-blogging about the video?

The Vote: A Victory for Social Media, Too

BusinessWeek is all breathless about the energy that social networks brought to election day, and there are some good stories/examples here. However, also listen to NPR’s story on turnout levels for a more sobering view. Turnout was good for the US, but we still lag far behind other democracies.

Top Five Ways to Piss off a Blogger

With tongue only partly in cheek, Peter Shankman lists Stupid PR Mistakes that annoy bloggers. Most of these have been annoying reporters for years!

Google Aims To Predict Flu Outbreaks

Privacy advocates may blanch, but I think this is a totally cool way to mine patterns from search behavior that contributes to the common good. What an innovative idea!

LinkedIn cuts 10 percent of its workforce

With an average member earning about $110,000 a year and more than $100 million in investment capital in the bank, you’d think LinkedIn would be sitting pretty. Yet the company is laying off about 36 people. Smart move. Don’t let VC love make you fat and happy.

Yahoo’s Yang Has No Regrets — He Should

Om Malik has little nice to say about Jerry Yang’s stewardship of Yahoo. Yang now basically admits he should have sold to Microsoft when he had the chance and the collapse of a partnership with Google is particularly painful. With the economy now in the tank, what’s next?

An Online Video Strategy That Hits The Mark

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I just returned from my second trip to Toronto in the last two months and was again impressed with the Web-savviness of the Canadian audience. Did you know, for example,that Canadians are the world’s most active users of Facebook? Or that Canadians spend, on average, two morehours per week viewing online video than their counterparts south of the border?

And don’t give me that “Of course! It’s cold up there!” cliché. Canadian homes are wired and its businesses are doing some very innovative things to reach those web-savvy customers.

Take FutureShop. Canada’s largest consumer electronics retailer is using online community not only to learn more about its customers, but to help sell products and support customers. It has built an online advisory and customer support service that is like nothing I’ve ever seen.

“Ask an Expert” is formulated on a high-touch model in which sales associates are taught to be valued customeradvisers. The company has come up with a strategy to duplicate that real-world experience online. The screen shot shows “Aaron,” one of the video avatars who guides customers.

Since mid-2007, visitors to Future Shop’s website have been greeted by a video image of a sales associate who offers to help guide their experience. Customers can ask any question of the avatar (he’ll even dance for you) and get results from a growing database of advice contributed by sales associates and customers. Future Shop created the video front-end itself and bound it to a community portal from Lithium Technologies.

“We’re trying to blur the lines between the offline and online experience,” says Robert Pearson, Future Shop’s director of e-commerce. “Our goal is to become the largest technology community in Canada.”

Future Shop is well on its way to that objective. In less than a year, the site has signed up 50,000 members, which would be equivalent to about 450,000 members in the much larger U.S. market. But the community isn’t just a discussion forum. Future Shop co-developed a ranking system with Lithium that lets customers provide feedback on each other and on the quality of information offered up by sales associates. Customer contributors can earn discounts and status in the community. The most helpful sales associates can earn cash.

Next up: Facebook-like functionality that gives contributors their own personal spaces and ties sales associate profiles to store locations. Success is measured by a survey of customer affinity with the brand. It’s still too early to draw measurable conclusions, but all the trends are pointing in the right direction. “We’re getting about 250,000 visitors a day out of a population of 33 million,” Pearson says. “That’s many more than come into a store. We actually see people walking in with printouts and asking for specific experts they’ve met online.”

Future Shop isn’t using video to be cool. It’s using video to reinforce an in-store experience that is essential to its business strategy. It has also bound its customers to the company in a way that is rewarding for both parties. The company is now owned by Best Buy, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see a similar capability showing up on a retail website near you.

Report: Half of online adults, 85% of online kids to use social nets by 2011

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eMarketer says that 37% of online adults use social networks at least once a month and that the figure will grow to nearly 50% by 2011. Among teens, usage is already well over half and will near 85% by 2011. Social nets clearly offer value that conventional news and information sites don’t.

Allan Cattier, Director of the Academic Technology Group at Emory University gave a mind-blowing statistic in his presentation to the Communintelligence Executing Social Media conference in Atlanta last month. He said Emory had surveyed its freshman class and found that more than 80% of the students log on to Facebook 18 or more times a day. Imagine how our institutions will be shaped by this trend in coming years. He also showed a compelling video called “A Vision of Students Today” created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University. See below.

Why most viral video is stupid

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Bulldog Reporter‘s Daily Dog has an exceptionally thoughtful and well-informed article on the viral video craze that lambastes marketers for trying to add in viral buzz after a campaign has already been created. Author Andrew Foote’s point is that anything that doesn’t look genuine will be savaged by the community – and rightly so. He cites some excellent examples. If you’re a marketer trying to get a handle on the viral phenomenon, read it.

Why there'll be no social media bubble

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South by Southwest is my seventh social media conference in about a year (the others were Syndicate, Gnomedex, BlogHer, Podcast Academy and New Communications Forums in Boston and Las Vegas) and I’m again impressed with one thing: the lack of interest in financial rewards or profit motives on the part of the participants.

That fact was driven home to me again this evening, in a panel session called “Production Companies 2.0: Taking Online Video to the Next Level,” which featured some of the early winners in video blogging. In contrast to the industry panels of a decade ago, which were all about creating huge new brands and reaping rich rewards for the founders, this session focused on issues of artistic control, voice, independence and freedom from the pressure of commercial interests.

Ryanne Hodson of RyanIsHungry.com spoke about the importance of not signing away control over content to investors, while Andrew Baron of Rocketboom boasted about new features on his site that enhance social networking features and make it more useful to viewers. “The vast majority of our discussions about Rocketboom are about how to make it better for the audience,” he said.

Where money was discussed, it was always in the context of how video bloggers could manage to make a living from their craft. Rock-star blogger Robert Scoble actually drew oohs and ahs from the audience for mentioning that he had signed a sponsorship deal for his video blog totaling $300,000. A decade ago, such a small amount would have prompted snickers.

As a veteran of forward-looking industry conferences going back more than 20 years, I find this spirit remarkable – and refreshing. Ten years ago, the tony Internet industry confabs attracted swarms of bankers and venture capitalists looking for the next billion-dollar company. Entrepreneurs who played the game successfully at the time were rewarded with billion-dollar payouts. In contrast, Jason Calacanis, arguably the most successful social media entrepreneur to date, sold out to AOL for $25 million. That’s nothing to sniff at, but it’s a far cry from the payouts awarded to the founders of Yahoo, Lycos and Broadcast.com.

Last September, I wrote a column in BtoB magazine (the original doesn’t appear t be online since BtoB revamped its website) arguing against the probability of a social media bubble. “Bubbles need air supply in the form of venture capital and inflated expectations for investors. They also need a payoff. Almost none exists in this market,” I wrote at the time. I still hold firm to that position. Perhaps the big money is still waiting on the sidelines for a viable business model to emerge, but I think they’ll be waiting a very long time. The Internet bubble of the late 90s was driven by investors’ misguided assumptions that the Internet was a channel for big media and big brands to emerge.

In fact, the opposite is true. Social media is fulfilling the Internet’s promise to make it possible for millions of small communities to form around very specific areas of interest. People now have the tools to share and comment upon information that’s compelling to very small groups – and to do it at almost no cost. Political super-blogger Glenn Reynolds calls this phenomenon An Army of Davids and the terminology is apt. The Internet is all about specificity, not generality. It just took us a decade to realize that.

Did JetBlue get it right?

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Is this JetBlue video effective? This is a topic of debate here at New Communications Forum. Some people are saying this is a master stroke of corporate honesty and transparency, an effective use of social media to deliver a message that looks genuine and unscripted.

Other people are saying that the CEO looks panicked, scared and not in control. There’s also debate about whether the production value is right. Does this look like it’s been engineered to look “rough” and is rough right for a message like this? Would David Neeleman be more effective in a studio with a coat and tie and professional lighting?

These are the conundrums marketers face in using social media. What works on TV doesn’t necessarily work on YouTube.

There’s one thing JetBlue did right, though: it acted fast and it went direct to the customer. As Steve Crescenzo said in a panel discussion today, “It takes most companies three weeks to get an article about the United Way approved by HR. JetBlue got a Customer Bill of Rights through the legal department in a week. “

Blendtec's appealing videos

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I hear marketers ask all the time how they can engage with their audiences and build “buzz” in new media. Check out what BlendTec is doing. The company makes mixers, blenders, mills and other appliances that chop stuff up. They took a cue from Letterman and posted a series of videos in which they grind up things you didn’t think could be ground up (like golf balls!). It’s a lot of fun to watch and it reflects very favorably on BlendTec because the videos really show off the power of the appliances.

So think: what do you do that’s really remarkable? How can you demonstrate that with new media and build awareness virally? Blendtec is an example of a company whose product most people consider a commodity using Web 2.0 media to look different.