See What’s Out There

At See3 we have worked for organizations that have it in their mission to be accessible. For example, See3 client Easter Seals is all about helping people with disabilities. They need to model being accessible in their physical spaces as well as on their website.

See3 Director of Interactive Marketing and Fundraising, Shirley Sexton was the VP Interactive at Easter Seals for 8 years. She couldn’t do everything she wanted to do with video because videos playing in a Flash player — like those on YouTube — are not accessible. If you can’t see and hear it, it won’t work.

We have created workarounds for this within our own projects. And when asked about broader-based captioning what we have always said is that it’s a value, but it’s expensive. Someone has to create good captions before they can be added to the video.

We have been watching carefully the advances in speech recognition online with interest. People such as David Pogue are big believers in speaking into their PCs instead of typing. It didn’t seem a huge leap to us that someone would take this technology — which is amazing — and apply it to video. [Here’s a review from Pogue of this software from 3 years ago, and it is much better today than it was then.]

So it came as no surprise to us that Google is the one to step up. They have been leading advancements in all kinds of translation and other technologies, and oh, they also happen to own the biggest video site on the web, YouTube.

Here’s the lead from today’s NYTimes:

In the first major step toward making millions of videos on YouTube accessible to deaf and hearing-impaired people, Google unveiled new technologies on Thursday that will automatically bring text captions to many videos on the site.

While the technology can only insert captions on English language speech, Google is giving users the choice to use its automatic translation system to read the captions in 51 languages. That could broaden the appeal of YouTube videos to millions of other people who do not speak English but could use the captioning technology to read subtitles in their native language.

The speech recognition technology that Google uses to turn speech into text is not new; Google currently uses it to transcribe voice mail messages for users of its Google Voice service. But Ken Harrenstien, a deaf engineer who helped develop the automatic captioning system, said the technology had never been applied on such a large scale.

“This is some thing that I have dreamt of for many years,” Mr. Harrenstien said speaking through an interpreter. “To see it happen, is amazing.”

You can read the whole article here.

You have to be able to make fun on all this stuff that we live on the web. Here’s a good one:

Link: [College Humor]

I recently conducted a little experiment with my work Inbox. When I left my position at Easter Seals, I had seven-plus years of research covering the field of nonprofits online flowing (more like gushing) in daily via email newsletters, listserve digests, etc.  I felt guilty every time I hit delete without reading them, because I knew there was gold in them thar emails, but the sheer volume was more than any one person could consume.

When I set up my new Inbox here at See3 Communications, I decided rather than sit down for hours conducting a massive re-subscribe, I would wait and see what professional enewsletters I really, really missed. After three months, it’s been a cleansing experience (for my Inbox and my brain). But more importantly, it helped me identify the really great ones. If the topic of nonprofits online is also your bag, I hope you’ll make room in your InBox for these enewsletters that refused to be forgotten.

NPAdvisors e-Fund News: Thought provoking weekly articles on online donor development written by Rick Christ and Heather Fignar. If you’re responsible for online fundraising in any capacity, each email will either reinforce your efforts with well written points to use with upper management, or give you a good kick in the pants for what you need to be doing.

ASPCA: Oh, how many good ideas have I “borrowed” from ASPCA online over the years? I always keep one eye on these folks because they’re just so darn good at what they do. In my defense, I’ve adopted three rescue kittens in the past year. Or did the enewsletter make me do it?

Alertbox: Jakob Nielsen’s column on Web usability: Not for nonprofits only, his lessons on Web (and email) usability are universal. I’m an avid follower for his invaluable research on user-centric Web site creation, but I love him for his forthright use of the word “bad”. “Bad content, bad links, bad navigation, bad category pages… which is worst for business?” Go get ‘em Jakob!

All of these enewsletters share two key ingredients — they consistently bring me information I need and are very well written, so they’re worth my valuable time and a joy to read.

What enewsletters can you not live without, and why? There’s still room in my Inbox for something new….

Internet traffic hit a record peak on Tuesday as millions of people around the world sought to watch and read about the inauguration of President Obama.

The web and TV are coming together and we saw evidence of that yesterday. The web isn’t quite ready to handle the traffic, but we are seeing video content bringing more people online and keeping them online for longer. Text will always be important on the web - the multimedia nature of it makes it more interesting than TV which is a passive medium. But video is becoming the dog to the text tail and nonprofit organizations — and businesses — need to get their online video game on.

From today’s NY Times

Internet traffic in the United States hit a record peak at the start of President Obama’s speech as people watched, read about and commented on the inauguration, according to Bill Woodcock, the research director at the Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit organization that analyzes online traffic. The figures surpassed even the high figures on the day President Obama was elected.

When people are checking for election results or the score for a big game, they tend to produce smaller bursts of traffic spread out over several hours. On Tuesday, everyone wanted to watch video, and that produced bulky streams of data traveling from media companies’ data centers out to people at work and in their homes.

Data from CNN.com captured the uniqueness of the online surge. CNN said it provided more than 21.3 million video streams over a nine-hour span up to midafternoon. That blew past the 5.3 million streams provided during all of Election Day. At its peak, CNN.com fed 1.3 million live streams simultaneously, according to Jennifer Martin, a spokeswoman for the site.

Akamai, which helps companies meet demand for their online offerings, worked with media companies like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Viacom to stream live video. It reported a record-breaking day, feeding up seven million video streams at one time.

1. Tell a story.
If you want your audience to identify with your mission, you need a compelling story that connects your work to real people. If a story moves you, it will likely move others as well—and become the foundation for deeper involvement.

2. Be relevant.
People respond to what’s going on around them, so try to relate to the news or the calendar as much as possible. You’ll also have a better chance at success if you’re pitching your video to bloggers or other websites—they’re always looking for something current and fresh.

3. Tell them what you want.
You have their attention, now tell your viewers how you want them to engage, whether it’s donating money, visiting a website, or volunteering. They won’t know to give unless you ask for it.

4. Be brief.
Few people are watching your 7-minute online video—that only works when you have them locked in a room. Try to get everything out in 2 minutes or less.

5. Videos don’t raise money by themselves.
Your organization should think of online video as one of many tools to fit into your fundraising program. Adopting video into your organization is critical, but it has to be a means instead of an end.

6. Embed video on your donations page.
The distance between the “play” button and the “donate” button should be short. Also, give your viewer the right web tools. Can the viewer forward the video to a friend, subscribe to your RSS feed, get involved, and sign up for your newsletter right there on the spot? If not, they should.

7. Put video at the center of a campaign.
Video is often best used in the context of a campaign. A campaign can be raising money for a particular village, trying to reach a specific goal, or giving limited to a specific timeframe.

8. Empower your viewers.
Ever heard of peer-to-peer fundraising? Encourage your audience to pass your videos along. Make the embed code easily accessible within your page so your video can reach a broader audience.

9. Create a media library.
Start gathering your footage now—you might have all the ingredients already! Building a media library is a valuable long-term asset for your organization. Have a camera ready for every important event. Ask volunteers to document their work and make it available for future events, trainings, and online use. Using existing footage you get more bang for the buck.

10. Test.
You don’t know if something works unless you test it. Send out emails with video and some without, and measure the results. Each nonprofit will have different nuances, and you’ll want to know when using video is most effective.

11. Know when not to use video.
Truth is, your strongest donors will likely donate with or without online video. They have been already, right? They don’t need any extra convincing. Use online video for attracting new audiences, for driving specific campaigns, for empowering your membership to spread your story or for deepening or expanding existing relationships.

Brian Reich and I often speak on the same subject — how nonprofit and causes can use social media effectively. Brian wrote a book called Media Rules! which goes over the big issues that have lead to an online communications revolution.

I have my way of explaining these things. I talk about massive media fragmentation, permission marketing and how the infrastructure of TV and the web are coming together.

Brian covers the same ground, but in a different way and I want to share it with you. This is from an email he sent to folks who attended his talk at the Cause Marketing Forum, where See3 was a sponsor.

Here’s a quick explanation of the new world we are in, from Brian Reich:

In my book, Media Rules!, I address this in the context of three big themes:

Everything is fragmented and blurred: It is necessary and expected that our society will evolve and the impact of those changes will be felt by all organizations. But never has our society changed so quickly or and never have organizations been so dramatically impacted. We are all challenged to adapt in ways, and at levels, not previously imagined. And with little sense that the chaos will settle down any time soon, it is important, new frameworks for operating – and succeeding – must be developed and manage along the way.

Small Can Be Big: Our culture and economy are increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As a result, what you sell is different. How you sell is different. The services you offer have changed. The expectations of those who shop, and share, and create are shifting as well. New markets have been created, for products and ideas alike, and organizations must determine whether to participate, and if so, how.

We Are All Connected: Technology has fundamentally changed our culture. The online world is about connection, community and conversation. And as the online world goes, so goes much of what the rest of the world thinks and acts on. What we know about each other is changing, or in some cases just being learned. How we think and the decisions we make are increasingly driven by many voices not few. Total control has been replaced by complete understanding and participation.

If you haven’t already, go buy Brian’s book Media Rules.

I like Twitter.

At first, I thought we were all nuts. A year or so ago, Twitter was described to me as text messaging what you are doing every minute of the day to your friends and then getting text messages of what all of your friends are doing, every minute of the day.

Buzzz
“I am eating ice cream.”

Buzzz
“I am doing nothing in particular.”

Buzzz
“I am wasting your time making you read this.”

Buzzz
“Are we nuts?”

Twitter is like a combination of micro-blogging and social networking. Micro-blogging, meaning blog posts of no more than 140 characters. Social networking means connecting these micro-blogs directly to your friends.

I started to like Twitter the minute I turned off the alerts on my phone. No more buzzing.

Now, I open a browser tab with Twitter and it looks like this.

Why do I like it? The same reason I like reading blogs — I get interesting information. But the best part is that each of these info tidbits are no more than 140 characters long. Long thoughtful blog posts are nice, but so is something that says:

Hear free teleconference w/Andy Sernovitz on getting started with word of mouth. Use code ‘wommafreebie’. http://tinyurl.com/5na6gm

That’s a tweet from @Nedra (Twitter-speak for username Nedra who is social marketing guru Nedra Weinreich.)

She’s telling me about the Word of Mouth Marketing Association free teleconference with Andy Sernovitz. And she told me in 131 characters, including the URL.

With Twitter you can build a following for your organization and send updates, with links. It’s a smart way to communicate. You can send Twitter updates from a mobile phone, so someone in the field in Uganda could send mobile updates that your Twitter followers can learn from.

No, don’t drop everything and have 10 employees Tweeting full time. But you can start playing with it, see what it’s about and you might find it proves to be useful.

Congress is actually starting to pay attention.

From CNN:

Rep. John Culberson, R-Texas, is at the forefront of a new effort to reach constituents by using services such as Twitter.com, Qik.com, and Utterz.com. Twitter is a micro-blogging service that allows users to publish short text messages known as “tweets.” …

Word quickly spread last week via Twitter.com that regulation of congressional use of the site might be coming. It prompted the Sunlight Foundation, a non-partisan organization advocating for greater use of the Internet in order to make information about the federal government more available to the public, set up a Web site as well as a Twitter-based petition.

House Franking Commission Chairman Mike Capuano, D-Massachusetts, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi each weighed in on the matter and sought to make it clear that any new regulations would be limited for now to use of online video sites such as YouTube and Qik.

In my first job as a political consultant based in San Francisco I wrote Congressional Frank Mail for a half dozen Members. Frank mail are those free newsletters that are sent at taxpayer expense and tell you how hard your Member of Congress is listening. With Twitter — and YouTube and MySpace and Facebook et al. — we’ve come a long way since then.

Link [CNN]
Link [Twitter]

I have a whiteboard in my office and I often use it to draw out complex problems, workflow diagrams, website diagrams, lists, etc. It helps to see things clearly. This is a technique we think can go successfully into video and help your organization explain complex tasks.

Here are some examples of different versions of this technique.

UPS - They have an elaborate whiteboard campaign complete with TV spots and a very expensive website. But we can learn something from it, do something less elaborate and succeed in explaining our issue. Here’s the whole thing — UPS Whiteboard HQ — it’s very elaborate.

Here’s one short animated spot from UPS.

The folks at CommonCraft use a technique with paper that’s pretty cool. They have explained many things, including RSS feeds and podcasts. Here’s Social Media:

Of course, where we got this whole idea was from Al Gore. Think about it… The guy won an Oscar with a PowerPoint. But he’s doing the same thing, explaining something complex in a way people can understand it.

If you haven’t seen the latest version of his talk, here it is:

The tech blog, Read Write Web has a post today called How To Use Social Media for Social Change. That’s a really ambitious title, given that the topic is huge and that thousands of folks like us at See3 spend their full time working on the question.

The post has some interesting examples and focused to some extent on Twitter. If you don’t know Twitter, it is a newish social network (based on short cell-phone text messages) that is using up a lot of the oxygen in the social media conversation these days. Word is that Twitter just raised another $15 million in investment. Twitter is really a mobile-centric application and I believe that mobile activism, fundraising and engagement will be coming on very strong over the next 18 months. Stay tuned.

One of the more interesting case studies in the Read Write Web story is about Nerd Fighter:

Use YouTube to Promote Charities

Last December, we wrote about how two brothers used YouTube to promote various charities. The brothers started a project called “Nerdfighters Power Project for Awesome,” which entailed a series of videos, each featuring a certain charity. Their videos briefly became YouTube’s most discussed videos, filling each one of the slots on the YouTube’s Most Discussed Videos page. They didn’t use any tricks to do so, either. Instead, they reached out to the YouTube community to generate interest, messaging many high-profile YouTubers and generating a mailing list of around 4,000 interested people who were later alerted when it was time to act.

Here’s a Nerd Fighter video for you to view.

Learn more about the project they talk about here.

Learn more about the Nerd Fighters here.

I did a webinar today for about 400 professionals from America’s YMCAs about the web and membership marketing. I will write more about this, but I was reminded of my audience and their questions while reading Seth Godin’s online discussion on the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s web site.

You can see the conversation with Seth here. A highlight for me was the question about brochures. Here’s the full, unedited exchange on that subject:

Question from Tennessee Nonprofit:
Are brochures dead?

Seth Godin:
and buried