Broadcasting or publishing?: A new kind of student-created media.

Having been involved in the electronic media of radio, TV and video production since I was in high school, I tend to look at web media as essentially “broadcasting.”

Like radio and TV, computers carry electronic media. Like radio and TV, information on a website can be transmitted instantly.

So even if we’re talking about an online version of a newspaper, I still say it’s a form of broadcast media.

But If I had taken another path I contemplated — becoming a print journalist (after writing for my high school newspaper), I would probably look at web media as “publishing.”

Both views are correct.

The lines between print and broadcast media have blurred into what we call new media. Text, audio, video, photography, and the ability to interact with content creators and other readers/viewers are all ingredients.

And it’s increasingly apparent that new media will share a characteristic with their “old media” forerunners of radio and print: they will be portable. Multimedia websites must all be designed with devices like the iPad in mind.

So what kinds of skills will someone need to work in new media?

Everyone is running around with a camera these days and anyone can post a video to YouTube, put photos up on Facebook, or start a blog.

When someone does these things, he or she becomes a new media content creator.

It’s easier than anyone could’ve ever imagined to share something with family, community, customers or with the world.

The “how” part of creating new media isn’t really the challenge anymore. It’s the “what” that becomes the content that people seek out.

The platforms of web media are easily accessable. We can communicate something immediately, and often for free.

But if we want to make an impact, content creators need to work on the skills that make us better communicators.

We need to challenge ourselves to take photos that are more than snapshots.

We need to learn to edit video in a way that advances a narrative.

We need to work on becoming more creative writers.

We need to learn to ask interview questions that will elicit thoughtful responses.

We need to find out what our readers, viewers, and listeners really want to know, and find ways to bring it to them.

This fall at Northland, we’re going to work on those skills as our New Media students build a new kind of student media.

We’ll work on a multimedia website that’s part broadcasting, and part publishing.

The site will feature audio and video podcasts, live streaming of college events, blogs, photo galleries, and as much interaction as we can generate.

And we’ll make it as portable as we can, so get yourself an iPad!

So, what should we do first?

4 of msn’s “10 careers that didn’t exist 10 years ago” are new-media related.

Need a career change?

A couple weeks back, msn had a story called “10 careers that didn’t exist a decade ago.”

40% of them are related to new media:

Bloggers
Bloggers can either be self-employed or work for an organization. They write conversational posts to promote a product, service or cause. The article profiled a health and fitness blogger who increased his income from $25,000 to $60,000 a year by writing ebooks, hosting a podcast, and making YouTube videos. He calls his new media venture his “dream job.”

Social media strategists
Can you really Tweet for a living? You can if you get a job as a social media strategist. These folks stay on top of all the new social media sites. They use social media to help their companies promote themselves online, being careful to observe the rules of social media etiquette (Offering help and information, not overt sales pitches).

User experience analyst
User experience analysts study how people use a website, and find ways to make the site easier to use. They’re in charge of making the site “sticky,” so users stay longer and come back to the site more often (See my earlier post, “What’s in your storefront window?”).

Video journalists

Commonly called “One Person Bands,” these video journalists tell stories through words and pictures. Used to be that they’d have to work at a TV station. Not anymore. Today they could be working for a newspaper, a radio station, a stand-alone news website, or post on sites like YouTube. Sometimes called  “Backpack Journalists,” this new breed of reporters use today’s smaller cameras to shoot interviews and b-roll. They even shoot their own on-camera segments, called “stand-ups,” without the help of a videographer. When they’re finished shooting, they pull soundbites, write and record a script, edit the piece, and make the video ready for the web.

Read msn’s full article here.

A video contest uses new media to recruit employees.

There are creative people in your organization who would probably like to work with new media. Give them a chance to shine!

In 2007, the tax and accounting firm Deloitte & Touche was trying to recruit new employees. Instead of bringing in a professional video production company to make a “help wanted” video for their website, they enlisted the help of their employees — with amazing results.

The company held a “film festival.” Employees could make a video on their own or work in teams of up to seven. The videos were to be under 6 minutes and needed to convey the company’s culture and values. The best videos were used in college campus visits to recruit new employees.

Here is one of the 370 creative results:

Is there a way your small business, school, or community group could use an approach like this as a fun way to engage your audience?

With the amount of interest generated in making the videos, voting for the best ones, and commenting in social media forums around the videos, isn’t this way better than a typical “help wanted” ad?

Search engine optimization and video: Six ways to rank higher on google.

You have a website. You want your site to show up on the first page or two of a google search. With millions of pages on the web, how do you make it to the front of the line? The answer lies in search engine optimization (SEO) … and video is an important tool in effective SEO.

A recent Business Week article finds that “videos are 53 percent more likely to appear on the first page of search results than text pages.”

Web pages with a video embedded have an 11,000 to 1 chance of landing on the first page of google results, compared to a half-million to 1 chance of a text page making it to page one.

Here are a few ways to get your video ranked higher on a google search:

1. Upload to YouTube and embed the code on your site. Almost always, when a video shows up in a google “blended” search (meaning the search shows a mix of photos, text pages, maps, news stories, etc.), it is a video that has been uploaded first to YouTube.

2. Don’t limit yourself to YouTube. Use TubeMogul to upload and tag your video once, and have it instantly placed on a number of video sharing sites like Blip, Revver, Vimeo, Facebook, and others. Tubemogul also offers solid analytics tools that will give you lots of graphs showing who is watching your videos.

3. Link and encourage links. Google looks at links to and from your site as “votes” for your site’s relevance. Encourage Facebook and Twitter friends and fans to link to your video on their blogs and websites.

4. Surround your video with “engagement items.” Things like interactive maps, photos, video and audio are ways to make visitors come to your page more often and stick around longer when they get there.

5. Practice on-page SEO. On-page search engine optimization means including keywords and phrases that help visitors find each video you make. Embed your video on a page that includes text with copy that relates to the video. This will help google find you much easier.

6. Don’t forget the “call to action.” If you are posting your video as a marketing tool, chances are you want the viewer to do something after watching the video (buy your product, make a donation, register for a class, etc.). Don’t forget to tell them what to do next. Include your URL within your video. You should also put your URL in the description field on YouTube.

Be your organization’s storyteller.

I walk. A lot. I have two dogs who wouldn’t have it any other way.

The hours spent on the end of a leash give me ample time to check out a variety of audio content via my mp3 player. Sometimes it’s radio, sometimes it’s music of my own choosing, and more often than not, it’s a podcast.

In my ears tonight was a recording from the 2008 Blogworld and New Media Expo in Las Vegas. The speaker was Joel Witt from the Maryland Zoo. He and a few other zoo employees roam the grounds of the zoo each week and find interesting stories for a video podcast series called Maryland Zoo TV. It’s another great example of an organization whose primary product is not media taking a DIY approach to the creation of compelling content.

While the zoo doesn’t see a profit from the podcasts directly, they have seen a spike in attendance despite an overall reduction in marketing spending. You can call it guerilla (or gorilla in this case) marketing, education, entertainment, or even hyper-local community journalism, but what Maryland Zoo TV is doing could be applied to many diverse organizations who want to share their stories without needing a huge ad budget.

As I walked in the 8-degree-below-zero temps of northwest Minnesota tonight, bundled like Ralphie in The Christmas Story, Joel’s zoo stories got me thinking about my previous job as a reporter/producer/show host for a TV station based in a central Florida retirement community almost a decade ago.

WVLG Radio The Villages, FL

At the Villages News Network in 2000, we were doing the kind of hyper-local, hyper-focused content creation that would make for a fantastic video podcast. Problem was, no one had ever heard of the word podcast in 2000. Our work was created for a cable TV channel. If you weren’t already a cable subscriber in The Villages or the surrounding counties, you couldn’t see Around The Villages. But the stories we told (in Faux TV-news style) would have been a great sales tool for homes in the retirement community if there would have been an easy, free way to distribute them worldwide as there is today through iTunes and other podcast aggregators.

Our staff of mostly  rookie reporters covered every aspect of retirement life in the The Villages. It’s incredible how creative story telling can bring even seemingly mundane community events (Mahjong tournaments come to mind. Never covered one. Still don’t know what it is. Still think it’s funny.) to life.

We covered the opening of every new store and restaurant. We did feature stories on World War II heroes. We interviewed singers and other performers who came to town (I got to sit in Whisperin’ Bill Anderson’s bus and hang out with Melanie of “Brand New Key” fame). We did features on singing grocery baggers. We covered big events like the visit of Vice President Cheney.

Those of us telling the stories came from diverse backgrounds. Some of us were in our first TV jobs after graduating with journalism or mass comm degrees. We helped the others who didn’t have previous experience in video storytelling: retirees, high school students, and moms who unexpectedly found new careers at The Villages News Network.

Our employer’s main product was newly-constructed homes, not media. Nonetheless, we told the community’s stories for 30 minutes each day.

How will you tell yours?

Cameras are cheap.

Everyone has a story to tell.

There’s someone out there googling your small business, non-profit, college, town, product or service right now.

Give them a story.

Audio: Scott Hennen on New Media

AUDIO: SCOTT HENNEN ON NEW MEDIA

Fargo, ND-based company pioneers new media marketing

Scott Hennen, AM1100 The Flag talk show host and owner of Great Plains Integrated Marketing discusses new media marketing in this interview with Northland New Media Director Mark Johnson. Recorded November 19, 2009.

Small businesses need online video. USA Today says so.

I couldn’t have written a better ad for our New Media program than the article that appeared on page 5B of last Wednesday’s USA Today. A quote from a Forrester research analyst in the second line of the story says it all:

“Whether you’re a hot-dog vendor in Boston or a design firm in Santa Fe, you will be producing video for the Web. Video is how your customers will find you.”

The story goes on to say that right now only 2% of small businesses have adopted online video, because small business owners “don’t know how to get the video produced.”  

“They don’t understand yet how it will drive their business. That will change in the next two years,” said fliqz.com’s CEO Benjamin Wayne.

We’re looking at a ground floor opportunity for entrepreneurs trained in the tools of new media. If you can make compelling video that helps small business owners better communicate with their customers, you have value in the marketplace.

If you are a small business owner and can make videos yourself, more power to you. You have a really powerful edge over your competition.

The tools for making video are inexpensive. But making compelling video is not “point and shoot” simple.

There’s a lot to consider: What information am I trying to communicate? Who’s the audience? What do I want the viewer to do after watching this video? What mood am I trying to convey? 

There’s the artistic stuff: Camera angles, lighting, good audio, editing in a way that succinctly communicates the message, choosing music and visual effects.

And there’s the technical stuff: Knowing the camera’s manual controls, chosing the best compressed format for a small-but-good-quality file, creating graphics.

Here in northwest Minnesota, we may not have many video production companies, but there are some exciting opportunities for entrepreneurs and freelancers who have the skills to help small businesses use video on the web. It’s a wide-open market in an innovative new field.

New media, New jobs.

Here is an excerpt from a weekly employment scan of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities System Office:

 

Social media is a specialty field of public relations that uses the growing social networking technologies, including RSS, Twitter, Facebook, and blogs. A few years ago, social media duties were performed by marketing managers or communications directors. Now there is a social media career track.

 

An entry-level company blogger can earn less than $20 per hour (and many blogging jobs are part-time). A director of social media, the top of the social media chain, can pull in $70,000 or more. In the middle, a social media manager, can expect to earn around $50,000. A bachelor’s degree is usually required, and job seekers should possess strong writing abilities and a keen understanding of online marketing, public relations, and new media.