Thursday, December 21st, 2006
Reuters reports that YouTube has helped Ontario police find a man they believe to be responsible for a murder at a local night club.
A video posted on the ultra-popular Web site YouTube has helped Canadian police find a man they believe responsible for a murder.
Police in the Southern Ontario city of Hamilton said on Thursday that they uploaded a one-minute, 12-second clip from a surveillance tape onto the video-sharing YouTube site.
The video, which showed suspects arriving at a local nightclub for a Sean Price hip-hop concert, garnered media attention and was viewed more than 30,000 times.
Reuters Pictures
Photo
“This is the first time Hamilton police have utilized video web posting in an investigation, and to the best of its knowledge, the first time that law enforcement has ever used it as a direct investigative tool,” Staff Sgt. Jorge Lasso told a news conference.
This whole “Web 2.0″ thing might just be useful, huh?
This reminds me of the “America’s Most Wanted” poster that hangs in the FBI building in Washington DC. That could be really cool if YouTube et al began having a law enforcement section of the website to help with things like this. I know that many people would be interested in viewing footage like this in their area - All of the cop/America’s Most Wanted/etc TV shows are certainly a testament to this, as is this story.
Thursday, December 14th, 2006
StumbleVideo launched today and Andy Beal got a first look, digging in with yet another thorough writeup.
With the launch of StumbleVideo, the company is betting that people will enjoy discovering new videos in the very same way, and spend even more time “channel surfing”. “People demand instant access to online video content that’s personally gratifying, and they don’t want to spend all day looking for it. That’s where StumbleUpon fits in,” says Feller. “StumbleVideo allows people to discover great videos they would likely never find using traditional keyword searches. The experience is like channel surfing through video content that is laser-targeted to your tastes.”
And without further ado: First Look: StumbleUpon Announces New Video Surfing Site, StumbleVideo
Thursday, December 7th, 2006
I first have to give credit to the following people’s knowledge, experience and their willingness to share some great ideas here at SES and at PubCon. All of their presentations have been both excellent and informative.:
And now…onto the good stuff. ;-)
Social video usage stats are becoming both staggering and hard to ignore:
- “The market for video is doubling every 6 months” – Adam Beguelin, Aol Video Search
- “54% of online users watch video” – Eric Papczun, Performics
- “72% of video viewers watch news online” – Eric Papczun, Performics
And my favorite quote of Day 1 at SES Chicago:
“Optimization of video for search is like optimizing your website for AltaVista in the late ’90s.” - Gregory Markel, Infuse Creative
To make sure that your videos don’t get lost with the millions of others that are out there, follow these ten tips for success:
Host Your Video on Your Site:
- Make Your Videos Accessible to as Many People as Possibile
- Encode your video into different formats to cater to multiple types of users.
- Viewers will generally always view the higher-bandwidth, but you may want to consider having a lower-bandwidth download as well.
- Submit Your Video to Video Search Engines
- Add Meta Data to Your Files
- Research keywords with a tool like
- When encoding your video to different file formats, YOU WILL LOSE THE META DATA. Be sure to add it again post-encoding.
- Use software like AutoDesk Cleaner XL (PC) (Formerly Discreet Cleaner) or AutoDesk Cleaner (Mac) (Formerly Media Cleaner) software to edit your meta data.
- Create a page that hosts the video and optimize that page via the same means as you would organic search engine optimization.
- This will help for ranking in both video search engines and organic searches for things like: “[keyword] video”
- Place all of your video content in your video directory and create a Video Sitemap.
- This will help video search engines more easily find your video content, and will help to increase the relevance of your videos for organic search engines.
- Create an RSS feed/Atom Feed/iTunes Feed/MRSS feed for your videos.
- Similarly to a podcast, if you have a show with episodes, create a separate feed for each show. If you just have random videos etc, one feed will do.
Distribute Your Video to Video Content Providers:
- Submit your video in the highest encoding quality as possible within each site’s guidelines.
- One theory is that the video quality can actually gain more visibility, but a higher quality also means a greater chance for services that transcribe audio for content to use in ranking algorithms…that’s a good thing.
- The top providers are YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, AOL Video, Yahoo! Video
- Optimize your listings with keywords
- Title Tags.
- Description.
- And any other fields that you are able to optimize.
- Again, use a keyword research tool like Keyword Discovery.
Get the word out!
- Bookmark your video links in Dabble, a social bookmarking site for videos.
- Also include links in your own social bookmark lists as well.
- To help create action and branding, and to drive traffic to your website, add a watermark to your video with your company/URL and create a call to action at the end of the video.
- For an even greater response rate, incentivise your viewers to take action. ;)
- BONUS! If your video is content that is newsworthy with a short shelf-life, or your frequently generate videos based on news:
- Use Yahoo! Buzz to do market research
- Buy relevant Pay-Per-Click ads
- Get your video online THAT DAY
- Submit your video to video search engines THAT DAY.
So, go get rolling!
Monday, December 4th, 2006
Chris Richardson was kind enough to not only listen to me talk about the cool video search marketing stuff that’s out there now, but also was kind enough to interview me and put it up on WebProNews.
Here’s a link to the video. Or watch it below ;)
Thursday, November 9th, 2006
I’m not even going to try to out-do the in-depth analysis that Hitwise has done in their Consumer Generated Media Report.
The report also touches on something I was actually thinking about earlier today: The seasonality of social media.
It has been reported that there was a decline in visits to sites like MySpace and Facebook in September, which is a typical seasonal occurrence as school-aged users shift their attention from socializing online to academic pursuits. Last year, the market share of visits to the top 20 social networking sites decreased by 7.6% from August to September 2005, but recovered in October, increasing by 10.8% from September to October 2005. This year, a similar pattern emerged, with visits to the top 20 social networking sites decreasing by 7.3% from August to September 2006. Category traffic was flat from September to October 2006, indicating a slow down in growth, but by no means a decline.
Certainly very telling of the demographic for consumer-generated media as well as social media.
EDIT: When I was tagging this, I wanted to also tag it in a category that might contain articles that are focused on Wikipedia. Is there a name for sites such as Wikipedia, Digg, etc, where the value of the media comes from social collaboration, rather than individual contribution (blogs, social networks, etc)? I’ve labeled this as “Social Information Media” in the meantime, but was curious if anyone had set out to define what this may be referred to as.
Monday, October 30th, 2006
So, my submission for the Marketing Pilgrim SEM Scholarship Contest is up and ready to go. :)
What I’ve found is that Social Media Marketing/Optimization is such a rogue discipline at this point, that there’s very little structure for how people are discussing its philosophies, principles, strategies and tactics.
In The Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing, I discuss the five key forms of communication with your marketplace and how those conversations transpire.
The first three are:
- Declaration of Identity
- Identity through Association
- User-initiated Conversation
I’ll let you read the full article for #4 and #5 (it is a contest, btw :-P), as well as specific channels for creating a conversation with your market in these 5 ways.
Monday, October 30th, 2006
“Can you make films? If so here’s your chance to win a trip to film a WFP School Feeding project in a developing country.
FightHunger: Walk the World is looking for an upbeat viral video that spreads the word about ending child hunger by 2015 – which is part of the first Millennium Development Goal.
Create your video (no longer than 120 seconds) and submit it to an online video service - we recommend blip.tv or ourmedia.org. (You may also use other services such as YouTube.com or Google Videos but make sure you understand their copyright conditions.) When uploading your video please use the tag “fhvideo”.
Read the contest rules before you submit your entry. The closing date for entries is 15 Dec 2006. Winners will be listed on this site on 29th Dec 2006.
To enter the contest first register and login to the site. Then submit your entry using this webform. If your video is accepted we will send you a confirmation email.”
To find out more about the contest, Click Here.
Subscribe in a reader