Shortcast opinions and ideas » Social Media

if you navigate a lot on youtube this might interest you

TTB — Fri, 08 May 2009 18:28:59 +0000

Recently webware had a good article on expert’s guide to youtube. here is one i thought was fun way to navigate youtube

Search and browse with your eyes.

If titles and thumbnails are not enough, you can explore additional, related video clusters by using YouTube’s warp feature. Simply inserting “warp.swf” in the URL instead of the word “watch” will send you into full-screen “warp speed” mode.

image source: cnet.com

This is a feature that can still be found on some videos, but YouTube has since relegated it to its TestTube section.

You might find some newer videos with this option that directly takes you into warp mode.

For more productive ways to search youtube and access content .. here is the link to that article.

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i may be 46% wrong on nielsen’s report conclusions

TTB — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 15:10:42 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

I look forward to metrics and industry reports to understand where the adoption is and where people are spending, making money and so on. Recently i came across nielsen’s report on online usage/behaviour and spend. My usage of this report has grown 746% since it was released. (duh .. yeah read on)

Just because one can make up a metric does’nt mean it makes sense. As the title says i could be wrong a arbitrary % on this nielsen’s online engagement of internet users report. I found many relevant numbers and some too vague to be a report and highlighted. (as i said .. i may be wrong )

Highlights Of The Report Include

The number of American users frequenting online video destinations has climbed 339 percent since 2003. [ttb: sound very irrelevant .. since when did we start having online video destination sites? ]
Time spent on video sites has shot up almost 2,000 percent over the same period. [ttb: are you serious? how can you report this as a relative number? this is like saying users of NotYetInventedProduct are below 20%]
In the last year alone, unique viewers of online video grew 10 percent, the number of streams grew 41 percent, the streams per user grew 27 percent and the total minutes engaged with online video grew 71 percent. [ttb: ok now this seems like a good number to report]
There are 87 percent more online social media users now than in 2003, with 883 percent more time devoted to those sites. [ttb: this is someone sitting there going let me make up a number now .. some startup will use this in their business plan to make their business case]
In the last year alone, time spent on social networking sites has surged 73 percent.
In February, social network usage exceeded Web-based e-mail usage for the first time.

full report

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B2B Social Media – Has Marketing Effectiveness and Efficiency Improved?

TTB — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 14:27:49 +0000

Marketing organizations within enterprises actively engaged in establishing social media marketing initiative and want to understand the dynamics of social media when applied to B2B channels. Found this interesting article written by Michele Goetz. Good read to formulate what questions to ask that is focused on effectiveness and efficiency.

Quick Read:

How much effort do you need to put into social media before it pays off in B2B? The answer probably has to do with what you expect from social media in the first place. The problem with B2B social media marketing is that instead of 1) increasing marketing effectiveness by facilitating sales and deepening customer relationships 2) making marketing more efficient by streamlining process and resources, it may be doing just the opposite.

There is a real hidden cost to utilizing social media for B2B marketing. It is the cost to do business. Due to the number of ways you can connect to customers, it requires a significant amount of effort to cover and manage all the properties. While you can write a single blog and push it out across multiple communities, the lack of diversity in conversations may hurt more than help. Each community probably has a different DNA. One message is not going to be relevant for all. Thus, you have to produce more content across more topics to be effective.

Another aspect of inefficiency is the art of the conversation. For social media to work, it requires a de-centralized communication web to interact with customers. Sales already has this in place as it is what they do every day. Marketing is smaller and has less resources. This puts pressure on the organization to have personalized attention to carry on a conversation. Marketing needs the ability to respond to comments, participate in groups in a conversational manner, and organize discussions and groups around a multitude of topics that customers are interested in. If you go to forums today, there are few that have real conversations happening. Mostly you see blogging and promotional content being posted. This is because it takes a huge amount of bandwidth to truly be interactive with your customers.

Full Article

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