Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Web Video Marketing Example: Book Promotion on Amazon

Tim O'Reilly has a new book about Twitter coming out on Amazon in late May. See the promo video on Amazon here.

Sunday, April 26, 2009

New: Web Video Marketing Classes from Yours Truly - Coming July 18


Interested in learning more about web video marketing for your organization? If so, you might want to consider taking my brand new course in web video marketing at U.C. Berkeley's Extension.

Details here.

Friday, April 17, 2009

Social Media Marketing: Video Interview Process



I spent the afternoon visiting my new friend Andreas Weigend, professor at the Haas School of Business, who teaches a class in social media marketing and who consults and speaks on social data mining to corporations. He is the former chief scientist at Amazon.com.

Today in his class he featured an interview with a former student Mark Choey who recently became a realtor and used social media to grow his firm ClimbSF.com rather dramatically. Mark Choey used a Wordpress blog to grow an informational site at SFNewDevelopments.com and has since added Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and Google chat to his social business arsenal. I was really struck - and reminded again! - of how incredible useful chat can be. See his home page on ClimbSF.com for the example.

Takeway #1: Certainly this could be useful for internal communications. Who knows why people don't want to pick up the phone and call, but having internal chat could be a great enhancer for internal communications.

Secondly, after the two hour class, Andreas and Mark did a video interview for both of their web sites on Choey's social media use as a business case study. I'll post the link when the video is edited and available online from Shaun Toi who has been shooting and editing videos for Andreas. (Andreas found Shaun by posting an ad on Craigslist, of course). Shaun works with a number of rappers, producing videos for them.

It was interesting to observe the process - one I have recommended but not seen someone else do which is to set up two tripods with two camcorders and therefore get two points of view, like a super-quick two cam shoot. See the photo to see what I mean. I am excited to see the final results.

Most importantly, you can hear and read transcripts of all of Andreas' class presentations in the Social Media Marketing class online at his website www.weigend.com.

An interesting note: Weigend has his own sound equipment, which includes two wireless mikes, and does all the recording of his talks and interviews with his own audio equipment so he can post it on the web. We are grateful to you, Andreas, for sharing what you know - and for being a great role model in this way.

Friday, April 10, 2009

TV's Latest Mashup: Google Ads

Google announces program for combined video ad buys on TV and online. See the WSJ article here.

Get the details:

YouTube Video Downloader



Have you ever wanted to download a video from YouTube (for personal use). This is the ap for you.

TubeSock lets you capture it and play it on iTunes, your iPod, whatever. Check it out.

Thursday, April 9, 2009

Obama Campaign: 20 Videos a Month, 77 Million Views

I read a book today about the success of the Obama campaign, Barack, Inc., Winning Business Lessons of the Obama Campaign by Barry Libert and Rick Faulk (who run Mzinga, a social software company). It says a lot less about the role of social media in the campaign than I was expecting, but it was still worth the 60 minutes it took me to read.

It's sometimes a little complex to explain to my clients why they might not want to use a video creation process that is labor-intensive or costly. Now I have the perfect proof.

My favorite quote:

"Hundreds of videos produced rapidly and cheaply by the Obama staff, were put up on YouTube. Toward the end of the campaign, they were being uploaded at the rate of 20 or more a day. As of October 2008, the videos had been seen 77 million times on YouTube alone."

Of course, these are far better results than almost any other campaign in history - and the stakes were high - but the very idea of creating 20 videos a month is a good concept for people to contemplate.

Most people seem to be happy to be able to publish just one - and that takes a tremendous amount of effort.

One way to succeed is to find easy ways to make videos - which, of course, is what I like to teach my clients - just how to do that very thing!

Monday, April 6, 2009

Speaking at the New Communications Forum April 27

I will be on a panel on Integrating and Measuring 2.0 Across the Enterprise at the New Communications Forum April 27 at the San Francisco Marriott.

The panel is at 9:30 am, following the keynote address by the rockin' ace philanthropist Charles Best (video about him here.)

The conference is sponsored by the Society for New Communications Research.

Check out the conference site for more details.

Saturday, April 4, 2009

Even The Catholic Church Is Using Web Video

I went on a local architectural history tour yesterday of the architecturally significant new cathedral in Oakland and was surprised to learn from one of the docents that the cathedral had several videos on its web site so visitors could learn more about the building of the new church from both its sacred and secular builders.

The videos are not embeddable or I would publish them here. They're not notable for the production values, but as a sign of the times - and good ideas that other groups could follow up on. How wonderful it would be to find a video by the architect about various buildings - on the web.

Check out the Cathedral video page here.