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?

The next big social media thing?: Give me 12seconds.

YouTube + Twitter = 12seconds

At 12seconds.tv, you use your webcam or cell phone to record a video (12 seconds, max — like Twitter’s 140 character limit).

12seconds gives you a unique email address where you send the clip, and it ends up on your 12seconds page.

There you can get an embed code or widget to share the clip on your blog, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.

I’d make a video right now to demonstrate, but my hair is messy.

Check it out here and tell me if you agree that 12seconds is the next big thing.

Will you use it?

YouTube’s Insight: Useful and free.

It’s amazing what you can get for free these days. If you haven’t checked out Chris Anderson’s (Wired, The Long Tail) new book on the topic, it’s a thought-provoking read on how the internet is changing how products are priced.

Some of the most useful freebies for new media creators are the great analytics tools available from Google and YouTube.

With traditional advertising, you craft a message for your target, then buy a commercial on the station with the most viewers in your demographic and hope that enough of them see your ad for the ad to make a return on your investment.

You will reach some of the people you want to reach, but you still have to pay for the people who have no interest in your product and will never have an interest in your product. (Although … I did buy a Snuggie, and I’m probably 30 years under their target demo.)

With YouTube, you can make a video about your product, put it up for free and leave it there as long as you want. Then people search it out, and watch it willingly — sometimes a number of times. YouTube makes it ridiculously easy for others to embed your video on their sites, too, giving you even more free exposure.

And best of all, YouTube gives you all kinds of information on who is watching, where they live (well, roughly. They don’t give you their addresses), and what terms they typed in to find your video. There’s even a cool graph that shows you “hot” and “cool” spots in your video — the graph rises at points where people rewound the video to watch again, or where they clicked away from your video out of boredom (or to find a better lolcats video). It’s like what CNN does during election debates.

(Like some of the other topics I write about here, this is old news to many YouTube users. But I am writing this blog for those who are investigating how new media can work for their small businesses, schools and other organizations. When it comes to web media, a vast majority are still passive viewers, not active contributors.)

So out of curiosity, I signed in to our account and took a look at Northland’s YouTube Insight statistics last night.

We started our channel in 2007 with some videos we had made about some of Northland’s academic programs. To begin with, we hadn’t really intended to put the videos on YouTube. YouTube was only a couple years old at the time, and not as well known as it is now.

The videos were made for program pages on the college website and to send out on CD to prospective students.

Posting to YouTube was just an afterthought. We know better now, though I still have several Northland videos available on our website that I haven’t gotten around to posting on YouTube. That’ll be fixed soon.

Our 8 videos have just shy of 6,000 views. That’s after they were just dumped on YouTube and forgotten (by me, anyway). The only promotion they have received is a link to the YouTube channel page on Northland’s home page.

Unlike entertainment videos, our student testimonial videos are aimed at a very specific niche audience, so we don’t expect to see big quantities of views.

It’s the quality of the viewer that counts — In our case, someone who is trying to find out more information about a specific program of training. That’s the game-changing value of new media. Your audience gets to actively pull in the specific content he or she is interested in.

The video for our Criminal Justice program has received 606 views — 138 from Minnesota, 61 from California, the rest from all over the country (you can check state-by-state) — again, helpful to know where the interest is since we’re trying to broaden our recruiting efforts beyond northwest Minnesota and northeast North Dakota.

Insight's "Discovery" Analytics

The most helpful information Insight gives is a 3-page list of search terms viewers typed in to YouTube to find the video. We’ll be able to use these keywords to refine our other online marketing efforts (Google Adwords). Sometimes it’s hard to guess at what keywords your users are typing in. With Insight, you get a user-generated list.

YouTube isn’t the latest flavor of the month in the new media world, but they’ve done a great job in capturing the attention of the mass market, and continue to innovate. With devices like AppleTV, WDTV Live, and Samsung’s Blu Ray player offering an easy way to get YouTube videos on your TV, anyone generating web video needs to be on YouTube.

What do you think? Have you checked out Insight for your own YouTube videos? What have you learned about your viewers?

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.

Polka like it’s 2009!

Polka music and new media are an unlikely pairing. But you’d be surprised at the number of online listeners we have at Pioneer 90.1 for The Saturday Morning Barndance polka show.

This Saturday, we’re adding more new media to the Czech Mix as we present our first ever live video stream on radionorthland.org. And this isn’t just webcam video. In the DIY spirit of new media, I’m using an antique 1994 video switcher I found in a closet to mix video from four cameras as we present a live broadcast from Gunderson Commons at Northland’s Thief River Falls Campus.

The hosts of the Barndance radio show have invited Karl and the Country Dutchmen from Wisconsin to play for the live Christmas party broadcast on Saturday morning.

The group has previously performed at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.

If the past three years’ events are any indication, we expect to have over 100 polka fans at the college. These are very generous people who donate about half of what the radio station takes in each year from listener donations.

Pioneer 90.1 Operations manager Ben Kosharek and I set up the station’s UStream account and embedded it into the station’s website yesterday. It was unbelievable how easy it was to take the switched video from an output on a digital recording deck, feed it through firewire into a computer, and connect with UStream. We had a live stream up and running in about two minutes.

Ustream also allows us to record the broadcast and archive it on our Ustream page or upload it to YouTube. The site has a live chat feature, and allows a streamer to update Facebook and Twitter right from Ustream.

UStream takes all the technical work out of streaming video so we can concentrate on creating great content. I plan to use it for video streaming other Northland events in the future.

So if you’re in the area Saturday from 7 to 11 AM, stop in for the Barndance Christmas Party. Or check us out on Pioneer 90.1, the video stream on radionorthland.org, or on Sjoberg’s Cable channel 13.

This is going to be fun!

Bob Vila beat me to Twitter.

Every time I walk by the “Cyber Cafes” here at Northland, most of the students are on Facebook. So was surprised to read today that of American adults, just 26% are using online social networking to stay connected with friends. Making up that 26%:

• Over 65: 3% 
• 50-65 year olds: 9%
• 36-49 year olds: 21%
• 23-35 year olds: 49%
• 18-22 year olds: 75% 

So there’s an obvious generation gap forming around those who are plugged in to online social networking and those who aren’t.

I’m someplace in the middle of that divide, and I’m very aware of it.

About half of my “real world” friends are Facebooking, Tweeting, and texting away. The other half don’t want anything to do with any of it. They’re curmudgeons, 40 years ahead of their time (Is there an appointed age when curmudgeonism becomes appropriate? If there is, 74 seems like a good number).

My Gen X compatriots grew up in a time before internet access (I was in college when web browsing hit big. I searched with Altavista — the google of 1997).

The only thing we could do for fun in the high school Mac lab was play Oregon Trail.

I clearly remember using a cell phone for the first time, too. It was also in college. Being on the phone … in a car … was a trip. My buddy made me keep the call short. He said it was his dad’s phone, and it cost 2 bucks a minute.

Now, it’s not uncommon to see 10 year olds on bikes chatting it up on cell phones. Who are they talking to?! Other kids on bikes, I guess.

So what accounts for the digital divide between age groups? Are my disconnected friends afraid of the new social networking tools? Too busy with work and their own kids to learn something new? Do they dismiss things like Twitter as being silly without really investigating their uses beyond following Bob Vila? (Twitter recommended that I follow Bob V. when I activated my account. I guess they thought I could stand to learn a thing or two about crown molding … Which I could).

We are quickly becoming a nation of those who are mastering the tools of social media and those who don’t know the first thing about them. And if the digital divide deepens, it’s going to be a major barrier to communication between people of different generations.

Social media is here to stay. We may not all be Digital Natives, but we do need to become fluent in social media as a second language.

Why your small business needs to use new media.

If you own a small business, you know you must advertise.

In a small community like ours, that probably means an ad in the weekly paper or a spot on the radio. If you are really forward-thinking, you probably have a website, too.

But there’s a new tool you should also have in your marketing toolbox, and it’s a powerful supplement to your traditional advertising.

It’s called New Media … and our new program at Northland Community & Technical College is here to show you what it is and how to use it.

And believe me, you want to use it. These statistics from a new Core Consumer New Media Study  explain why.

“Almost 80 percent of new media users interact with companies or brands via new media sites and tools, an increase of 32 percent from 2008. And the frequency of interaction is increasing, too, with more than a third of users engaging companies or brands via new media at least once per week (up from one in four last year).” 

Of new media users:

• 72% feel a stronger connection to companies using new media (up from 56% in 2008)
• 68% feel better served (up from 57% in 2008)
• 74% have a more positive image of the business
• 70% are more willing to engage
• 64% have an improved opinion when one of their friends interacts
• and 52% choose to “follow/friend/or fan” a company or brand because it helps showcase their personality online

People ignore ads.

People don’t like being “sold.”

People seek out businesses that provide information online that helps them solve their problems.

The New Media program at Northland will help your small business learn what you need to know about blogs, web video, podcasts, and other social media that will revolutionize your marketing and give you a competitive advantage.