See What’s Out There

The MoveOn.org Obama in 30 Seconds video contest has a winner. To refresh your memory, MoveOn asked it’s 3 million+ members to make a 30-second campaign commercial for Obama. It had to be positive.

They received over 1,000 entries. Their members and the general public voted on the finalists, more than 5 million votes. And a panel of judges picked the overall winner.

Here’s the winner:

You can see other category winners here.

Big companies have their perks. I have spent this week in Orlando as an invited guest of SAP to talk about Web 2.0 and its impact on corporate social responsibility. It is very important discussion about how web tools can put pressure on the enterprise to be social responsible AND be a tool used by the business sector to solve problems, in association with all kinds of stakeholders. Stay tuned for more on this.

But last night, we took a break from all that and went to a private concert with Eric Clapton. Yes, a private concert with Eric Clapton. Me and 15,000 other guests went to the Amway Arena (I assume where the Orlando Magic play). We used our conference badges to get in and then once in all food and beer were free. Yup, they went all out.

Clapton totally lived up to his reputation. He was awesome. And he had a pretty great band with him as well, including a left-handed guitar player who wasn’t do bad himself. He played lots of hits and Cocaine — not my favorite song — rocked out. It was hot. He did a one song encore of Crossroads.

I had the pleasure of sitting with Shel Israel, who had joined my group earlier in the day and was part of the broadcast part of our discussion. (I will post a link to the first part of our session once I find it.) Shel said he has seen Clapton 4 times over 40 years. The first show he saw was in 1969 in the summer. Cool.

Of course I took a camera. Here’s some of the video. It’s not great quality (it was actually my daughter’s Kodak EasyShare digital camera), but you can get a hint of what you missed.

Clapton opened with Motherless Children

He played Little Wing!

Some acoustic action as well…

Wonderful Tonight… this one takes me back…

The Obama campaign has already responded to the gas tax issue with a new ad. What’s amazing is how short the cycle for new creative has become. Can your organization produce something new in two days?

Link [Obama Ad on YouTube]

There is a new comScore report about online video.

Some highlights:

” U.S. Internet users viewed more than 10 billion online videos during the month, representing a 3-percent gain versus January (despite February being two days shorter) and a 66-percent gain versus February 2007.”

“In February, Google Sites once again ranked as the top U.S. video property with nearly 3.6 billion videos viewed (35.4 percent share of all videos), gaining 1.1 share points versus the previous month. YouTube.com accounted for 96 percent of all videos viewed at Google Sites.”

“Nearly 135 million U.S. Internet users spent an average of 204 minutes per person viewing online video in February.”

And, if you are still not sure you MUST have a video strategy consider:

Other notable findings from February 2008 include:

* 72.8 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
* 80.4 million viewers watched 3.42 billion videos on YouTube.com (42.6 videos per viewer).
* 50.2 million viewers watched 539 million videos on MySpace.com (10.7 videos per viewer).
* The average online video duration was 2.7 minutes.
* The average online video viewer consumed 75 videos.

Link [comScore Press Release]

Hat Tip [Jeremy Liew]

WebsiteOptimization.com has some interesting information about how web pages have grown in size and complexity over the last few years. You can read the whole story here and below is a piece of the story about multimedia that interests us in particular. Of particular interest is how many videos are abandon and how broadband is still catching up to allow for a seamless viewing experience.

The Growth of Multimedia on the Web

The use of streaming media on the Web has increased by more than 100% each year (Li et al. 2005). From 2000 to 2005 the total volume of streaming media files stored on the Web grew by more than 600%. More than 87% of all streaming media is abandoned by users in the first 10 seconds, however, wasting up to 20% of server bandwidth (Guo et al. 2005). [I wonder if that’s still true.] While only 3% of server responses are for videos, they account for over 98.6% of the bytes transferred (Gill et al. 2007). In true Pareto fashion, about 10% of the most popular videos on YouTube account for nearly 80% of the views, making caching an appealing performance enhancement (Cha et al. 2007).

Overall, for videos longer than 30 seconds, about 13% of home and 40% of business users experience quality degradation with their streaming media, caused by re-buffering, stream switching, and video cancellation. For sessions longer than 300 seconds, the results are even worse. As broadband penetration has increased, videos have grown in size, bit rate, and duration (see Figure 5).

In 1997, 90% of videos were under 45 seconds in length (Acharya & Smith 1998). In 2005, the median video was about 120 seconds long (Li et al. 2005). By 2007, the median video was 192.6 seconds in duration (Gill et al. 2007). The median bit rate of web videos grew from 200Kbps in 2005 to 328Kbps on YouTube in 2007. So by late 2007, the median video weighed in at over 63MB in file size. On YouTube, the average video size is 10MB, with over 65,000 new videos added every day.

MoveOn has to be running what could be called the most successful video contest ever — if the measurement is participation.

Their Obama in 30 Seconds contest invited people to make a 30-second spot, positive only, to help elect Barack Obama. They got over 1,000 entries, which is great. But they are, as of this writing, rapidly approaching 4 million votes to the contest. Now, there are many YouTube videos with millions or views, but in this contest each person has to vote for each video in three categories, so this is a higher level of engagement.

The whole thing is set-up beautifully. They are using Amazon S3 to host the video in their own player. They made the embed code available as well as a permalink. They require votes (out of 5 stars) in three categories, Positive Message, Originality, Overall Impact. They serve up the videos in a random order to make sure every video will get lots of votes.

Now, if success is electing Obama we don’t know how effective it is yet. But it shows the video contest is here to stay and making high quality media is easier than ever.

The quality of the videos varies greatly. Here’s a nice one I saw, but then because of the random serving I couldn’t find it again on the MoveOn site, but found it on YouTube:

[Link to video]

YouTube recently opened up its API (application program interface) so that users can now customize embedded players. They’ve provided some cases studies already, but it’ll be exciting to see just how this step encourages innovation using video on the web.

But this moves means a lot more than you’ll be able to change the color of your player. YouTube will still do the heavy lifting (videos will still be stored on and streamed through YouTube), but it means that you’ll be able to fully integrate YouTube into your site or application. Now your organization’s website can have its own YouTube without ever having to leave your site. Though of course you still have YouTube branding, still have conversation around the video happening on YouTube. It is NOT a white-label product.

If you don’t have a programming bone in your body, start easy like me and go to the YouTube page of the video you want to embed. Click “customize” and you’ll be able to change the colors, choose whether or not you want to include related videos, and remove the border. Then grab the code above and put it right on your site or blog. You can see my own example below.

One of the problems with YouTube is that while you can see how many views a video got, you don’t know much more about where or how that video was viewed.

YouTube took a baby-step in the right direction with the release of YouTube Insight. From the YouTube blog:

“Today we’re releasing YouTube Insight, a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload to the site. For example, uploaders can see how often their videos are viewed in different geographic regions, as well as how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time. You can also delve deeper into the lifecycle of your videos, like how long it takes for a video to become popular, and what happens to video views as popularity peaks.”

From the looks of it, we still don’t know how many people saw the frame vs. pressed play, how many people played through only parts of the video, etc. But it’s a start. (For some reason they did not link to the tool in the announcement.)

One of my presentations at the Nonprofit Technology Conference (08NTC) was The Age of YouTube: Using Online Video to Reach the Masses.

Here is the session description:

Broadband is finally here and the organizations that are creating compelling and viral video content are reaping the rewards. Those gala dinner videos are no longer enough. Readily available digital video cameras and editing software allow your organization to capture stories and introduce a wider world to your mission. Video content can be seamlessly integrated into your website and provide the compelling hook for fundraising and advocacy. Portable media players enable you to embed your message in hundreds of sites. But, how do you capitalize on the opportunity?
Takeaways:

1. The benefits to using web video
2. Case studies of innovative uses of video
3. How to effectively use video in your e-campaigns

I opened the session looking at the world we live in — the environment nonprofit messages are competing with. Here is the video I showed at the start of the session:

Here is the slide deck I used for the session. Mostly, these are just illustrative of talking points.

| View | Upload your own

Here is are relevant links to the videos we talked about from the session:

The power of video to breakthrough all the clutter. Example: Yes. We. Can.

The dinner video.
Other pieces you can make from a dinner video. (American Jewish World Service Passover Video)

Bread for the World video we showed as an example of something easy you can do with your staff.

Videos from Amnesty International showing both the man-on-the-street technique and how you can use video in an online campaign and how you can make videos with very different tone out of the same source material.

The funny video.
The serious video.

The PSA type video. An example from Chicago Foundation for Women and a very edgy UK one from Greenpeace International.

A documentary-style video from Columbia College Chicago.

Care2 is an online community where you can promote a video and seed your list in order to reach new audiences. If you are interested, you can learn more by calling Clinton O’Brien
Vice President, Business Development
Email: partners[at]earth.care2[dot]com
Phone: 202-785-7308

AOL quietly offers a program of free banners for certain organizations. If you are interested you should call us at See3 and we can tell you more about it.

If I left something out of this list that I mentioned in the session, please let me know with a comment.

Steve Grove’s YouTube for Nonprofits Tip Sheet. (Steve did not make the session at the last minute, but we got his tips. I will ask Steve some of the questions and publish the answers.)

The Basics

• Reach Out. Post videos that get YouTube viewers talking, and then stay in the conversation with comments and video responses.

• Partner Up. Find other organizations on YouTube who complement your mission, and work together to promote each other.

• Keep It Fresh. Put up new videos regularly and keep them short—ideally under 5 minutes.

• Spread Your Message. Share links and the embed code for your videos with supporters so they can help get the word out.

• Be Genuine. We have a wide demographic, so high view counts come from content that’s compelling, rather than what’s “hip.”

Your Channel:

• Design Your Channel. Go to Channel Design, then choose a color scheme to match your logo or other materials, and decide which modules you’d like to display on your public profile.

• Add Banners and URLs. Go to Branding Options, upload your icons and banners, and enter any of the other options you’d like to use.

• Choose Your Top Video. The top video on your channel automatically plays each time someone visits your page—choose it wisely. Update this video regularly to keep it fresh, or keep your most important video there as an introduction.

• Get Donations Flowing. Sign up for Google checkout, then go to your Google Checkout Options, enter your ID and Merchant Key, and choose donation amounts. Once you’ve filled in the information, the button will appear on your public profile and all of your video pages.

Your Content:

• Direct Dialogue. Make videos that create a dialogue about your work and what you’re trying to achieve. Ask questions and solicit video responses.

• Call to Action. Harness the power of user-generated content by asking supporters to submit videos to your cause. Create a group to collect these videos together; find ways to give recognition to the best ones.

• Tell Serial Stories. Engage viewers with a series of videos that tell a story around a specific theme, and keep them coming back for more. Once you’ve created a few episodes, put them into a playlist. This allows you to develop several video narratives targeted at particular demographics.

• Respond to Current Events. Address relevant news stories by posting videos that explain your position. You can then embed them in emails to your supporters—a video message can be more effective than a text-laden email.

• Use Endorsements. Whether they’re from celebrities or people you’ve impacted, it helps to have supporters chiming in about why your work matters.

Networking and Distribution

• Tag and Title Well. Tag and title your videos with relevant keywords—that’s how users will find your content as they navigate YouTube.

• Embed, Embed, Embed. Broadcast your videos over the web by embedding them on your website and encouraging supporters to do the same on theirs.

• Click “Subscribe”. Subscribe to the YouTube channels you’re interested in to stay up-to-date on their content; they may return the favor.

• Engage and Interact. Draw attention to your work by interacting with both allies and adversaries through video responses, text comments, or joint projects/debates.

• Make Web Traffic a Two-Lane Road. Use your video description field and branded banner URL to drive users to your website, and link to your YouTube channel from your website to encourage people to interact with your video content here.

For video production tips, go to: http://youtube.com/video_toolbox

When I told my 13-year-old daughter that this week in New Orleans I was going to be presenting the 2nd Annual DoGooderTV Nonprofit Video Awards in front of a crowd of over 1000 people, she said, “Don’t barf.” Which just about sums it up really.

We are getting very excited about the conference this week. See3 will be all over the place. Look for us at the Science Fair, and you can join one of my two sessions on Thursday. The first session is at 10:30 and is called:

A New Tool for Online Campaigns: How to Show, Tell, and Activate with a Video-centric Microsite

The second session is at 3:30 and it’s all about online video, it is called:

The Age of YouTube: Using Video Online to Reach the Masses

We pleased to have a special guest at this session. Steve Grove runs the YouTube Nonprofit Program and will be joining me at my session to talk a little about their program as well as give some tips for nonprofits in how to make the most of YouTube.

And then, on Friday we will be announcing the winner of the DoGooderTV Nonprofit Video Awards. Wow! We had 160 entries this year. We have three categories. And holy smokes it’s exciting. You can vote for your favorite up until Thursday night.

If you will be at the NTC please find me and say hello.