The reality, I think, is pretty far from the mark: people don’t want high quality, (and in the case of media, accurate) content; they just want to be entertained. What’s more, the threshold for entertainment is frighteningly low. Even before the YouTube revolution, “Reality TV” was gaining ground and prime-time space with each new season, and Fox News/CNN were reporting on trivialities (on good days) — exactly the problem that crowdsourced media was supposed to remedy.

Unfortunately, look at the content that does really well online: stoned children, rude celebrities, general failure, and of course, cats — none of which requires any editorial effort, and generally reflects poorly on our collective taste. If we have network neutrality, and this is the content that really thrives, where then is the drive for media companies (or individuals) to make high-quality content when they can just as easily monetize the equivalent of the Springfield film festival winner? Instead, media becomes a race to the bottom with media companies competing with Joe-Sixpack to see who can first discover the one true lowest common denominator.

This mirrors the old saying about democracy: “it’s the form of government where the people get what they deserve” — we’ve now got democratic media, and people are going to get what they deserve there too. It seems to me that if we’re going to collectively demand network neutrality, and the power and responsibility that comes with it, we’re going to have to raise the bar in terms of what we expect and demand in terms of quality content — and “Twitter journalism” (and the like) shouldn’t make the cut.

Even if there isn’t a collective intellectual awakening, there will always be people online who want premium, high quality content. However, under this new model, in order to make the delivery of that content sustainable (let alone profitable), we’re going to have to pay for it, and it certainly won’t be cheap.

When Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown came out, the best analogy for a movie like this was to a Hip Hop track — a piece of music that remixes together samples from all sorts of sources into something new. While that analogy holds, so too does one about Hip Hop and Open Source software. French trip-hop producer Wax Tailor explains this quite well in a suitably-remixed/sampled track of his own, Once Upon a Past. For those not keen to listen to music at the office, the song argues that a society that allows its members to borrow from and build upon the achievements and accomplishments of others is culturally richer than one that does not. This is an argument also made at length by Larry Lessig in reference to sharealike licensing and copyright law reform. Given the ‘Transitive Principle of Analogous Creation’ (a term that I just invented), we can look at Tarantino’s work through the lens of lax copyright law and open source philosophy. Under this reading, his work is neither homage nor theft, but is instead a synthesis of and reflection on the work that came before his.

Unfortunately, what works for Tarantino is a luxury that most of us do not share. As I wrote about a bit ago, when amateur content creators try to remix existing cultural artifacts together into something new, they get takedown notices, sued, or see their work make money for someone else. There’s clearly a divide: a Hollywood movie exists to make money, buying sound samples or paying licensing fees is a cost of doing business. Unfortunately, small-time directors who are looking to make a movie, not piles of money, and host it for free on YouTube or Vimeo aren’t able to leverage the same library. Even if they release their creation under a free license they’re still on the hook for any and all IP that they added into their mix.

So where does this leave us? As user generated content seems further into our collective popular culture, it will increasingly become fodder for Tarantino and anyone else who wants to paint a comprehensive picture of the world as they see it using parts of the world itself. I think that we need to have a discussion around what we want the roles of IP protection and the public domain to be. This doesn’t seem to be a discussion many people are having — and it doesn’t seem to be a discussion that many people realize needs to be had at all. So, if you are sitting around with your friends after watching Inglorious Basterds and run out of things to say about the movie, use it as a talking point to segue into the debate surrounding copyright law and the rights of content creators and producers. Your friends might flash you a strange look, but it’s a conversation well worth having.

For each of these superhits (JK has over 18 million hits) there are, of course, thousands of brilliant (or at least enormously time-consuming) efforts that warrant a happy face sticker from the Wikinomics team.

As I brought up in a blog post a couple of years ago, a classic Weird Al video has found not just new life on Youtube, but has spawned some competitors including the all-Lego version below. Watch it and consider how much time it took and how much attention to detail. I’m not saying that it helped jrdmovimkr meet some ladies, but it got him some page views.

Another example I find fascinating is Monty Python’s Camelot song. Watch the original here, another Lego version here, and a Star Trek mashup below.

Speaking of Star Trek, fan fiction (Editor’s note: probably best not to provide a link) has provided a fertile platform for some web hi-jinks. Fans of Hogwarts should check out the Potter Puppet Pals.

This video has been viewed 66 million times – how do you like them apples, Jill and Kevin?

I’m no fan, but the mainstream appeal is clear: the video has almost 13,000,000 views. I’ll allow Wired.com to explain what happened next:

On YouTube’s business blog, technical account manager Chris LaRosa and music partner manager Ali Sandler describe how Chris Brown and Sony Music managed to capitalize on the 12 million-plus times people have watched the “JK Wedding Entrance Dance” video, which shows Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz’s wedding party boogieing down to the Chris Brown song “Forever.”

“The rights holders for ‘Forever’ used [YouTube's content management tools] to claim and monetize the song, as well as to start running Click-to-Buy links over the video, giving viewers the opportunity to purchase the music track on Amazon and iTunes,” they wrote. Not only did the song rise to No. 4 in the iTunes music store and No. 3 on Amazon, partly as a result of YouTube’s links, but Sony and Chris Brown also collect a share of revenue from Google’s text ads on the page itself.

The wedding video is inspiring people to click through from YouTube to Amazon and iTunes at twice the normal rate, according to LaRosa and Sandler. And the effect appears to be spreading to YouTube’s official music video page for the song, where they say the click-thru rate has increased 250 percent over the past week.

And the kicker:

Unfortunately the newlyweds depicted in the video aren’t making any money from the video’s millions of views, which would have surely helped defray their wedding and honeymoon costs. YouTube spokeswoman Jennifer Neilsen confirmed that Sony is the one monetizing the video, and that the people depicted in the video are not part of the revenue equation.

This is very frustrating. Worse still is YouTube’s prideful gloating about finally monetizing a video.

Sony’s implicit logic is that because that they own the rights to the music they could have the video removed. Since it remains online by their good graces alone, they are entitled to all click-through revenue that the video generates.

This makes sense legally (it shouldn’t) and is exactly the kind of arrogance I expect from Sony. It’s also a terrible way to engender consumer loyalty. The increased Chris Brown sales would not exist were it not for the video. Taking advantage of content creators and then leaving them out in the cold is not a viable long-term strategy. If users feel that their work is going to be leveraged by others to great effect, they’ll stop sharing it.

An even more egregious example of the one-way flow of content control was South Park’s Internet Meme episode. Viacom felt entirely within its rights to take the likeness of iconic Internet/YouTube celebrities and use them in the episode to generate ad revenue. If those same Internet celebrities uploaded clips of the episodes that featured their claims to fame to their own YouTube channels they would receive takedown notices. This is completely unfair.

Both of these are examples of a larger issue at play which is tightly knit with copyright law. The use and compensation surrounding content between individuals and media companies is not bidirectional. YouTube is not only complacent, but jubilant at the prospect of allowing its users to be exploited. And worst of all, I had to listen to a Chris Brown song to write this post.

Something has to change.

Although this innovative campaign has been very successful, I question Tourism Queensland’s choice to retain almost entire control over the candidate selection. A key strategy in the campaign was to engage the public through their interest in the candidates, and there may have been more engagement if they had allowed the public to choose the 10 finalists, instead of a single wild card, from the 50 shortlisted candidates. By shortlisting candidates and by choosing the final winner of the competition from the ten publicly chosen candidates, Tourism Queensland would still be able to ensure that an appropriate candidate was chosen. In addition, allowing the public to be more involved would result in a winner that has great charisma and would be able to create a large following for his/her blog. Would the campaign have been even more successful if the public had been more involved? The question of how much control should be retained by a company and how much should be left to consumers is becoming increasingly important as more companies begin to include consumers in the development of their products and services.

Another interesting example of an organization incorporating public opinion is NASA’s contest to name the new module for the international space station. The name that received the most votes was Colbert, after the popular comedian, Stephen Colbert. Although NASA did ask for public opinion, they reserved the right to name the module themselves and decided on Tranquility, one of the top ten suggestions from the public. In recognition of the winning name, NASA did name the new space station treadmill the “Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill”, or COLBERT for short. I think that in this case, NASA made the right decision in not allowing a module of the international space station to be named as a result of a joke, but to incorporate the winning name in NASA’a own joke. In other cases, however, it is not as clear, and it will remain a difficult judgment call to decide how much control should be retained by a company working in collaboration with the public or its consumers.

On this platform, everyone contributes to a library of content that can be used by anyone to do anything, the payoff for sharing your content is that everyone else has access to yours. I think Larry Lessig would agree.

Unfortunately, the interface for accomplishing such a level of collaboration doesn’t yet exist, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t already started happening. Introducing thru-you.com — a site run by YouTuber ‘Kutiman’ that remixes unrelated existing user-submitted YouTube musical content into new pieces; making songs played by ‘bands’ whose members have never met one another. The result is pretty cool to behold:

Under the editorial control of Kutiman, a massive pool of unrelated source material has been crafted together into an original piece. Conceptually, this is reminiscent of the sampling done in hip-hop, but from a much larger, more diverse pool.

Generating these movies required downloading each of the YouTube videos, converting them to an editor-friendly format, stitching them together and then uploading them again — something that is likely beyond most casual YouTubers’ technical abilities. It won’t always be this way, and soon I believe new technologies will emerge that allow all YouTube users to better leverage the content that their entire community has generated. Once this happens, the remix-culture will really be in full swing.

Part and parcel with viewing YouTube as a platform with open content that can be used and displayed however a content remixer likes is a new way to view YouTube videos: YooouuuTuuube.com. YooouuuTuuube.com takes a normal YouTube video and spits out the frames on a grid before your eyes. The result is pretty different from the normal experience of watching a YouTube video, but it shows the new kind of media that can be created when existing media is open (or at least taken) for use by others. To see it in action, check out this YooouuuTuuube’d version of ‘Junior Kickstart’ by The Go! Team — Enjoy!

YouTube has also run into trouble over expiring licensing agreements, with music companies seeking better terms for their contracts (essentially, more money from YouTube).  As one example, Warner Music removed its Youtube videos back in December amidst an impasse in negotiations.  Music videos and other mainstream tv/film clips, Youtube’s premium content, represent the one area where YouTube could generate more revenue (operating more like Hulu), but maintaining favourable licensing agreements is difficult.

Recently, Google’s top brass have been trying to point out optimistic trends.  In an interview with MacLean’s on Tuesday, Google CFO Patrick Pichette maintained that advertising models will support YouTube in the future.  He might have a case – YouTube announced earlier this month that they had reached an agreement with Universal Music to create Vevo, a seperate video site.  YouTube is also working on the launch of a specialized portal to accomodate tv and film content, hoping to compete with Hulu and generate more ad revenue.  Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently stated that YouTube has been making “good progress” in negotiating with small- and medium-sized studios for this purpose.

But even if YouTube can profit off of their premium content, will they be able to earn enough revenue to offset the massive cost of hosting the world’s home video library (for free)? 

I’m skeptical on this business model.  Let’s assume for a moment that Google can’t find a way to stop bleeding cash through Youtube (which, I think, is a safe assumption for the near future).  What are they to do?  Here’s 4 possible directions:

1)  End the free ride and start charging users.  I’d wager that Google will do anything to avoid this- with over 100 million YouTube viewers in the US alone, and the role it now plays in society, the backlash against Google for ending the free Youtube era could be fierce.  This would be a major controversy, and would probably be a last resort.  A middle ground, however, might be to have some videos “expire” at a certain point.

2) Invent their way out of this mess.  If Google could figure out a way to substantially lower the cost of bandwidth, the problem would be solved.

3)  Maintain YouTube as a cost center.  For now, they might be stuck with this option. 

4)  Create new revenue streams.  To their credit, they are working on a few options  that show some potential, but still, I’m not sure that these fixes will offset their growing costs.

YouTube (and Google) are staring at a problem that’s likely to get worse.  As more and more people worldwide become Web savvy, the number of YouTube users uploading content will grow, with growth in bandwidth costs continuing to outpace growth in ad revenues.  Eventually, Google’s going to be faced with some tough decisions, as option #3 becomes less attractive and #4 falls short (*fingers crossed for #2*). 

Forget the monetization of Twitter for the moment – it’s YouTube that needs a business model.

To give some background, last year ViralManager.com did a study where they indexed a “large number” of YouTube videos, and counted how many views they got in the first month. If you just look at the graphic they provided, it appears to be a compelling long tail story – it drops of really quick through the top 10%, then has a thick “long tail” that extends out through the next 90%. However, if you look at it closely, you’ll note that the scale on the Y-axis does not increase arithmetically, but rather geometrically. In other words, each mark is 10x higher than the previous (i.e. it goes from 10 to 100 to 1,000, and so on). So I did some quick math to give an indication of what it would REALLY look like on an arithmetic scale:

Ok – so I didn’t actually make the graphic, and it’s easy to see why not. If I did, and I wanted a view count of 10 to be represented by one centimeter on the chart (so it’s viewable), I’d need the Y axis to be about 10 kilometers long. Once you hit the top 1% marker (i.e. more popular than 99% of other videos), you’d be around the 500 meter mark. At the top 3% marker, you’d be around the 25 meter mark. At the top 10% marker, you’d be around 1.5 meters. At 50%, you’d be around 10 centimeters.

Or for another way to look at it, as I wrote about on my blog last week, it would appear that the top 1% of videos are viewed several hundred more times than the bottom 50% combined, and about fifty times more often than the bottom 80% combined.

To me, that looks like a blockbuster model – and based on the viewing habits of people I know that go to YouTube, this makes sense (many simply check out whatever is most popular, which becomes a self-perpetuating cycle). But what do you think – am I missing something here, or is the long tail really not that important no YouTube?

Click on the YouTube video above to hear President-elect Barack Obama invite the nation to participate in the Inauguration festivities surrounding his swearing-in as President on January 20. True to form, Obama’s opening words include “But this inauguration is not about me. It’s about all of us.”

It’s this kind of inclusive thinking that clinched him the nomination and then the election.

Can’t make it to Washington to participate in the official ceremonies? Then host a Neighborhood Ball Party of your own. Invite your friends. Want to roll up your sleeves and participate in the spirit of renewal that he promises will be the hallmark of his administration? Begin by going to www.USAservice.org and volunteer in your community the day before the inauguration to help mark Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Watch the online video by Michelle Obama encouraging everyone to participate. Enter the YouTube video contest and find out about local events through Facebook.

The Obama administration promises to employ the digital tools of Web 2.0 as much as possible in the campaign to introduce to the country a newer and much more participatory democracy.

No longer to content to lay claim to being the world’s largest scientific collaboration, it seems CERN, which operates the Large Hadron Collider, is now flexing its viral marketing muscles. I had a good laugh at this and can barely wait to share it with my son in the morning.  

As I was scanning the web today I came across this interesting Guest post on Social Times, which was written by Michael Mossoba of Genius Rocket, that builds on some similar findings. Of particular note, the lessons from examining the top-50 viral videos of the year include the following as #1: the most viral content is usually corporate content. It’s also interesting to note that the most viral content is usually OVER a minute in length, and “Ads” more often succeed as viral content than “Politics”, “Comedy”, and even “Sexy” (which when combined with #1, challenges the conventional wisdom of 30 second advertising slots). Michael goes on to add:

These results undermine some of the conventional wisdom about viral videos. First, it contradicts the stereotype that viral hits are the mysterious province of webcam diarists. Indeed, the most viral videos are dominated by the film and music industries, and a few savvy companies like Dove, Sony, Honda, and Cadbury.

I couldn’t agree more – and it’s something people (and marketers in particular) should really think about. Too often we all get wrapped up in all the things that are changing, and don’t pay enough attention to what is staying somewhat the same. I encourage you to check out the rest of his article, as it really is an interesting read.

However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that prosumers aren’t an important part of the site. I got to thinking about this again when I read the recent NY Times piece YouTube Videos Pull in Real Money. It’s a story about how some of YouTube’s partners are now starting to make serious money from ads served on the original videos they create – with the feature story being about Michael Buckley, who has created his own celebrity chatter show.

Michael’s story looks like a classic case of prosumerism – he was an administrative assistant at a music production company who started producing a thrice-weekly (self described) “silly” show, after investing $2,000 in a camera, $6 on a piece of fabric for a backdrop, and bit more in a couple of lights. His silly show became quite popular after a full year of concerted effort, and he now receives an average of 200,000 views per video, while the most popular get millions. Now a funny thing has happened – he’s becoming so successful, and making so much money, he’s quit his other job and is now devoted to it full time.

So this leads to a simple question – is Michael a prosumer or not? I would personally argue that he was, but he isn’t anymore. After all, it’s now his full-time job – there is no fuzzy line. In turn, this brings an interesting dynamic to prosumerism on YouTube – as the business model sorts itself out on the site, it might not so much empower prosumers (because most aren’t popular enough to make an real money), but to allow the most popular prosumers to turn into full-time producers – a subtle but important difference.

As I note in my research, this is leading to an interesting dynamic. It’s a common belief that YouTube represents a shift away from the “few to the many” broadcast model to a “many to the many”, or even “many to the few” (each with their own piece of a long tail). However, combine the views for these popular prosumer-turned-producers with the traditional media content on YouTube, and the model continues to look a heck of a lot like “few to the many” to me.

And that’s not a bad thing – in fact I think it’s great, as YouTube effectively creates a meritocracy where anyone with a good idea and presentation style, a couple of thousand bucks to invest, and the willingness to dedicate themselves to building an audience, can earn their just rewards. Though it is not neccesarily so great for established media companies of course…

The following is my analysis on why “Lost in America” didn’t achieve the desired YouTube fanfare that AT&T was hoping for.

1. These videos seemed too much like an infomercial. Within the first 90 seconds the cell phones are introduced in such a way that makes it appear like a blatant attempt at product placement. If people skip commercials on TV, why would they watch a 7 minute commercial on their computer? “Meet the Beckers” was intelligent because it let the story and the characters sell the brand, they didn’t include obnoxious scenes of the car driving down a country lane. Not only does the obvious use of product placement seem forced and out of context, but the premise of the story is as thin as floss; how many people do you know get lost in a major city with an entire camera crew following them?
2. The characters are almost impossible to relate to, but even worse than that, you don’t even want to relate to them. Part of what made “Meet the Beckers” so successful was the fact that you wanted to be like the brother who drove the Audi. He was young, successful and respectable. These girls come across as ignorant and unintelligent at one point exclaiming “I don’t even know what a caribou is!” Aside from a small niche market of 15-year old girls, Justine and Karen don’t appeal to many demographics. Who wants to be associated with a girl yelling “Here moose-ey, moos-ey, moose-ey” into a bush located in urban Alaska?
3. AT&T contradicts themselves. One of the challenges for Justine and Karen was to find a place in Anchorage, Alaska where they got “full-bar service.” Now, I’m not a geography major but I happen to know that Anchorage, Alaska is not exactly in the middle of nowhere. Shouldn’t AT&T be promoting the fact that they get full-bar service in any location?
4. It’s not engaging. After watching Episode 1 “The Drop Off” I had no desire to tune into episodes 2-11. I wasn’t compelled to research for more information about the phone and I certainly wasn’t interested in buying one. Is it because I am not in AT&T’s target market? Perhaps, but after receiving a mere 31,000 views across YouTube, MySpace and four other websites I would be inclined to suggest that others may feel the same way. It is also important to note, that Justine posted six of the eleven episodes on her site (iJustine) which accounted for 20,000 of those views. I think one of the main problems for AT&T was that they tried to dress up a traditional telephone commercial (albeit a very long commercial) in viral clothing by incorporating two Internet stars. This differs from “Meet the Beckers” where Audi clearly deviated from the traditional car commercial, going as far as showing competitors vehicles for the same length of time as the Audi. A better idea might have been to give one girl the new AT&T phone and give the other girl a phone from a competing company and show which one has more accurate GPS service, easier keyboard to type on, takes better pictures, drops less calls etc.. Or even take a page from Audi’s book and use characters to represent competing brands and make the phone a secondary focus.

There are multiple avenues that companies can use to help create effective Internet campaigns but inserting two web-stars into a poorly written and executed Internet video series does not make for a successful viral campaign.

I’m blessed with having a wonderful 7-month old daughter at home, and her equally wonderful mother taking care of her. The latter has some very strong opinions on parenting, and in particular when companies try to send messages that dissuade mothers from doing certain things that, say, thousands of years of history and an extraordinary number of experts indicate are good things to do. In turn, I don’t really have to imagine how she might have reacted to the growing Motrin Mom controversy. (Editor’s note: Said mom has since read this post and viewed the video, and the words “pissed off” were prominently featured in her response).

For those that might have missed it, the video ad (which can be seen on YouTube) presents the following text (bold added by me): Wearing your baby seems to be in fashion. I mean, in theory it’s a great idea. There’s a (whole bunch of different types of carriers), and who knows what else they will come up with. Supposedly, it’s a real bonding experience. They say that babies carried close to the body cry less that others, BUT what about me?  Do mom’s that wear their babies cry more than those who don’t?  I sure do. These things put a ton of strain on your back, your neck, and your shoulders. Did I mention your back? I mean I’ll put up with the pain because it’s a good kind of pain. It’s for my kid. Plus, it totally makes me look like an official mom. So if I look tired and crazy, people will understand why.

Motrin, of course, is pain medication. The message above is not-so subtly trying to indicate that carrying babies is a “fashionable”, badge-of-honor type sacrifice to make – perhaps like drinking a Starbucks Vente latte, but with, er, sacrifice. As referenced, I know at least one person that’s VERY well educated on this subject that would probably object to this message (two if you include me) – let’s just say we’d drop things like “supposedly” out of the sentences above. Based on the brewing reaction described in articles like this one, we are hardly alone. After a big PR disaster, the commercial has since been pulled from broadcasts, apologies have been issued, etc. Rather cutely, on the Motrin site the ad has been replaced with the message “we have heard you.”

If you read my posts over the last few months, the intersection with my work here is obvious – I’m keenly interested in how the world of social media is affecting advertising, and the role of particularly important “N-Fluencers” in driving community action. I also wrote about an AdAge story earlier today, and I was happy to find AdAge also has the best account of how a few influential bloggers and twitters suddenly galvanized to bring this ad down – amazing details of how the message and uproar spread, and interestingly quite a long time after the initial ad was launched. And the following quote from story speaks directly to the media question I was asking earlier:

“You don’t have to have thousands of followers to start something like this. Many people with small networks have just as much influence as a few people with large networks.”

I suppose I should also note that I first stumbled upon this story reading something called a “newspaper” over lunch – I’m telling you this thing was coming at me from all angles!

So I agree with all the articles and commentators who are noting that this is a great example of the power of social media, and how it’s becoming increasingly impossible for companies to ignore. Though I do find one other thing to be interesting here. In truth, we’ve been through a ton of different baby carriers at our house, that we both use all the time. In truth, a lot of them (but not all) actually do cause my back to hurt a bit, and I think the realities of strapping a 21 pound and growing person to my stomach and carting her around for hours will lead to a little more pain now and again. In turn, why on earth would a company promoting pain medicine want to run a sequence trying to position baby carrying as a “fashionable” thing you should “supposedly” do (i.e. stop doing it)?

Me thinks the mistakes on this campaign run quite deep, and a fair bit of damage has been done. But how much I wonder? And does a company that presents a poorly thought out ad, but retracts it and apologizes after a storm of responses (i.e. shows they are actually listening), end up better or worse off than before?

For example, today Dan Herman forwarded me this AdAge story where Ted McConnell, GM of interactive marketing and innovation at P&G, speaks out against it. Very early on he offers up an interesting quote:

“What in heaven’s name made you think you could monetize the real estate in which somebody is breaking up with their girlfriend?”

This statement really gets to the heart of what people are struggling with. They’re called social networks for a reason – people see them as a social space to interact with friends. In turn, is it an appropriate place for advertisers to try to engage with them?

But here’s where it’s not really cut and dry. Yes, some people do use Facebook to break-up with their girlfriend (or at least announce the break up to their network of friends if their privacy settings haven’t been changed). I think most people would agree that advertisers may want to tread lightly here. But it’s also a piece of real estate where, for example, many of my friends play games with each other – is it inappropriate for advertisers to engage here? And as I’ve noted in recent posts, not only have many Facebook users created self-organizing groups around particular brands, but often hundreds of thousands opt to join company-controlled fan pages for the same brands. Are such people not implicitly inviting companies to engage in this real-estate?

While there might be implications for the type of advertising that is appropriate, saying that all of the Facebook real estate is inappropriate for advertisers seems a bit off. For example, I would probably agree with him that buying a banner ad on Facebook isn’t the best idea right now… but there are many other current and potential options.

McConnell also digs into the issue of “consumer-generated media”. To quote him again:

“I think when we call it ‘consumer-generated media,’ we’re being predatory. Who said this is media? Media is something you can buy and sell. Media contains inventory. Media contains blank spaces. Consumers weren’t trying to generate media. They were trying to talk to somebody. So it just seems a bit arrogant. … We hijack their own conversations, their own thoughts and feelings, and try to monetize it.”

So let’s dig into this a bit. McConnell’s first “requirement” for defining media is “something you can buy and sell”, arguing that “consumer generated media” isn’t, in fact, media. But here’s the definition of media from Dictionary.com:

The means of communication, [such] as radio and television, newspapers, and magazines, that reach or influence people widely.

Now personally I would argue that this definition is out-dated due to the use of traditional examples. You can simply the definition to The means of communication that reach or influence people widely. I would also argue that consumer generated media can, but not always, fit this definition. As noted in the YouTube research, while the vast majority of consumer generated media is niche / long tail content hardly viewed by anybody, some of it does have great reach and influence.

But perhaps the bigger question is whether this adjusted definition is still flawed. Does an individual piece of content have to reach or influence a “wide” audience? And what is considered “wide”? Again, this definition developed at a time when a mixture of technology limitations and oligopoly industry models dictated that only a scarce few people could ever get their message out to more than an immediate circle of people that they spoke with regularly, so it worked quite well. That has changed. Should the definition of media change with it? Might a thousand people that each have an audience of a hundred more “influential” than one company reaching 100,000 people? And what is it that dictates these people don’t want to allow marketers to monetize the conversations, so long as they get a share?

Where I 100% agree with McConnell is in the notion that while marketing dollars will continue to flow online, it won’t necessarily be a boon for online publishers. He elegantly describes the reason as fragmentation thwarts artificial scarcity – online display inventory continues to grow faster than the demand for it. I would actually take this a step further – not only does fragmentation thwart artificial scarcity, but what we consider marketing to be is fundamentally changing.

As a great man once said, the medium is the message. Social networks and consumer-generated “media” represent a new medium where the message is one of collaboration and engagement. Traditional advertising models are built on broadcast messaging, a notion that things like banner ads try to carry over. But the importance of these is declining (because they don’t match the medium/ message), while the importance of companies actually engaging with customers (and leverage N-Fluence networks) is increasing. And what I think companies are going to increasingly find is they don’t neccesarily have to pay for this engagement – at least in terms of the CPMs and the like.

Over 300,000 people have viewed the “If you vote, Starbucks buys you a coffee” video on YouTube. While a lot of people have given credit to Starbucks for coming up with a good marketing idea, they didn’t actually come up with it – BillMac did. And who is BillMac you might ask? Well, he is the person who posted the idea on MyStarbucksIdea on October 7th, 2008. I know this because mguiste, who works for Starbucks, wrote about it on Starbuck’s Idea in Action blog – while noting that a “similar theme was echoed by JavaOcha, Geraldo, rsj211, epiphanygalore, and a few others.” The idea rocketed to into the top-10 based on community votes, and Starbucks decided to go ahead and do it. They kicked off the initiative with a 60-second spot on Saturday Night Live, and the video was uploaded to YouTube on November 1st.

So how successful was the campaign? Well, let’s go back to Facebook Lexicon for an indicator. The picture below shows how many times “Starbucks” appeared on people’s walls over the last year. As you can see, there has been a steady and consistent decline throughout 2008, until all of the sudden there is a MASSIVE spike. On November 1st.

Pretty interesting example of a company starting to piece it all together- though it would have been really interesting to see what would have happened if they’d skipped on the SNL broadcast altogether. It would probably have also been good if the campaign wasn’t illegal .

http://www.openforum.com/marketing/video_socialgood.html

The question in this first one if the value of social networking to business (particularly small business). Seth gives a relatively entertaining answer that focuses on how many of the “relationships” people have on social networks aren’t real – rather just a collection of people that didn’t want to offend you by turning down your friend offer. While the bar of “people I haven’t met in person on the other side of the world being willing to let me sleep on their couch” seems a tad high, the notion of focusing on real, high value relationships resonates.

http://www.openforum.com/innovation/video_noonecaresaboutyou.html

The question is how to put the 5 billion monthly videos viewed on YouTube to work for your business. This is a particularly interesting topic for me, as I’m currently researching the role of prosumer-generated content in the creation of YouTube’s iconic success. Seth’s immediate response is an important reminder that “nobody cares about you” – basic idea is they don’t watch the YouTube video because they care about you, but because they care about me (themselves, not Denis Hancock ). Implicit in his response is the importance of entertainment value, as he indicates nobody will watch your companies video about being 12% more efficient this year. Though if “efficiency” is determined from a green angle, you never know…

http://www.openforum.com/leadership/video_delicatebalance.html

This one focuses on a true or false question: business is not a democracy – there is only one boss. Seth’s response takes a Coase-ian angle: any business is just a series of small businesses, and each of these small businesses has only one boss. The most important lesson from this – if all you want your employees to do is follow a manual, someone else can always find someone else to follow the same manual a little cheaper.

You can find plenty of other great snippets from Seth in the videos listed here. Anything jump out at anybody?

To set the context for this, consider this report from Viral Manager, who “indexed a large number of YouTube videos and counted how may times they had been viewed in the first month“. The distribution of views ended up looking like this:

If you look at the numbers behind the chart, 50% of videos are viewed less than 100 times; 90% are viewed less than 1,500 times; 3% are viewed 25,000 times +; and 1% are viewed 500,000+ times. You can mix those numbers together a variety of ways, but it’s notable that the top 1% are viewed many, many more times than the bottom 90% combined.

Seeing this allowed me to spend days watching all kinds of YouTube videos in the name of “research” led me to start analyzing all of the YouTube viewership data I could get a hold of, in order to see how the prosumer story plays into this. What I was keenly interested in was the split between prosumer content (where an individual either created it themselves, or extensively re-mixed traditional media) vs. traditional media content (i.e. an SNL skit uploaded to the site, Madonna music video, etc).

Here’s a few of the high-level findings so far:

• of the top-100 videos on a given date, approximately 1/3rd could be considered prosumer content, while the other 2/3rds should be considered traditional media content.
• of the 15 sub-categories for content, the top-6 appear to account for the vast majority of video views. 5 of these 6 categories are dominated by traditional media content. Of the remaining 9, 4 are split roughly equally, while 5 are dominated by prosumer content.
• it appears that the further you move towards the longtail, the higher the proportion of prosumer content is.
• if you dig into the prosumer content itself, certain categories appear to be dominated by a couple of “superstars”, while in other categories there are indications the long tail is far more important.

I see some interesting implications emerging out of this research in terms of prosumerism and user-generated content. One of the biggest early questions is that while “broadcast yourself” is the corporate trademark, is it really that important to YouTube’s iconic success? I can definitely say that a “sample of one” outside of the research (i.e. my own viewing habits) found that most of the videos being watched were not user-generated…

It’s cute, but moreover, it shows that YouTube (and Google) understands that a number of video comments would have been better-off not posted (a point similar to my previous post, about the extent to which online systems should be designed to protect us from ourselves). Not just that, it shows a lot of personality, something that seems like something of an odd comment when talking about a website or large company. These personalities serve to “de-technologify” technology, making it easier to simply interact with it.

Some examples; things that made me smirk (or frown) as I tried out new software and websites:

• Google’s Chrome Browser — when something goes wrong in Chrome, you’re not presented with some snippet of code in HEX along with an error code. Instead, you get “Aw snap, something went wrong.” It catches you off guard the first time, and it’s not drab or boring like a typical application error.
• 404 pages — Things will go wrong and people will try to access pages that don’t exist, there are lots of ways that a webmaster can choose to let a visitor know that something isn’t right.
• Windows Vista’s Cancel or Continue — a good example of a complete lack of personality, especially on a prompt that shows up far more than is necessary, it ends up simply becoming a nuisance, making the software aggravating rather than useful.
• OSX’s bootup login prompt — when a mac boots up and requests a password, if you enter the wrong password, the window shakes. It’s simple and communicates that you typoed, all without the need for a popup asking you to try again.
• Winamp — I don’t think that many people use Winamp anymore, which is too bad, because it’s always been great software. Way back when I first loaded up Winamp, the software autoplays a clip “Winamp, it really whips the llama’s…” — backside. Nothing especially functional, but it still serves to set the software apart, and stayed in my memory to this day.

As we do more and more things with and through software, that software itself becomes the face of the company that designed it. For personable companies and applications, having a certain degree of transitivity between the personalities of the applications, and the personalities of the companies, becomes a very good thing.

Looping this back to the XKCD-YouTube example, I appreciate that Google/YouTube is able to recognize that there’s a lot of rubbish-comments on their site, and that they’re able to make light of the situation in a very public-facing way. This doens’t mean that my YouTube usage is going to go up (the only way that could happen is if more hours were added to the day), but it does serve to make the company a little more human, and a little more likeable — not a bad accomplishment if I’m trying to decide where I want to go to watch online video content.

My list above is far from exhaustive, are there any companies or applications that strike you as really having some personality of their own? Does it improve your experience, or detract from it? Or, are you just waiting for the day when most of our overt interactions with technology are intermediated through Turing-capable virtual people, complete with their own, robust personalities?

Anyway, judge for yourself…here is a screenshot from Wikileaks, who I blogged about several months ago.

Oh, and remember the Swift Boaters? Here is a video from the Hockey Moms for truth.

It was created by a young, talented kid who lives in Japan called Adrian, aka kidguru. With a straightforward, easy to understand video, kidguru very articulately explained how someone looking to connect their laptop to a tv would go about doing it. Going to his YouTube channel I discovered that he’s been doing this for almost a year now and has turned his site Tech-World into a blogging, vlogging, podcasting, twitter site/community. He’s managed to turn a hobby into a paying job, with sponsors and understands the value of creating community around his videos. He does product and app reviews, and tutorials among other educational things.
KidGuru’s YouTube channel now has over 1,500 subscribers and over 47,000 channel views, and he is now an official YouTube partner. The YouTube partner program is an ad revenue sharing program to reward users that frequently post original content and who have a steady following of thousands of viewers.

If you have any tech related questions I suggest checking out Kidguru’s channel or sending him an e-mail!

If you go to the YouTube partner sites you’ll see all the different YouTube partner channels, the vast majority of which are Net Gen (Net Generation – The children of the baby boom; the generation that has grown up with the Internet) using YouTube to express their creativity and build a community around something they love. Some great examples are KevJumba (#6 most subscribed of all time with over 285,000 subscribers and close to 9 million channel views); HappySlip ( #11 most subscribed of all time with over 205,000 subscribers and close to 7million channel views); and VenetianPrincess (# 17 most subscribed of all time with 153,000 subscribers and almost 2.5 million channel views).

These aren’t small numbers, they are reaching a huge number of people and are influential in their own way. The best part is that from what I can tell, they’re not doing it for any particular reason other than to have fun doing something they love and sharing it with the world. Literally. If they can make money at the same time, that’s even better.

Web 2.0 and the tools made available have changed the face of American politics. Not only are campaigns finding new ways to reach out to citizens, they’re also finding ways to engage them to become active participants and volunteers. Some people may argue that the ‘old people’ (so to speak), are the ones that vote; but for this election, Obama has mobilized the largest demographic – the children of the baby boom. And coincidentally, many of them are now coming of age and have the power to make a difference. The numbers speak for themselves. As Don Tapscott wrote in a previous post – During the Iowa preliminary, Obama had won by a landslide in millennial votes. His 28,000 vs. Clinton’s 5,400 and Edwards’ 6,900.

Web operations can no longer be in the corner of political campaigns, rather it now plays an important role at the center. However, where there is opportunity there is also danger. Sites like stop-him-now.com are everywhere, feeding into the misconceptions surrounding a candidate like Obama. According to a Pew Internet survey, 12% of Americans believe that Obama is Muslim – while he is, in fact – Christian . Obama’s website has a full page dedicated to “fight the smears” – calling on his supporters to help spread the word behind the misconceptions.

With political commentaries and videos (on air and on YouTube) it’s amazing the rate at which these stories can spread and make an impact – either positive or negative. There are certain organizations that are dedicated to making YouTube documentaries and political videos such as Brave New Films that produced clips like McCain’s Mansion Story that spread like wildfire over the blogosphere. Within a week of being posted on the net, it already has over 350,000 views. 35% of Americans have watched online political videos while 39% of Americans have used the internet to access “unfiltered campaign materials”.  If a campaign fails to recognize these changes, they’ll very likely be left in the dust…