In our Electronic Media Management class, we’ve been reading Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail.”
Anderson says that in the pre-Internet, pre-New Media age, talented people had to earn access to the production tools that enabled them to do creative work. Big companies held the keys to the expensive audio consoles, editing software, video cameras, and printing presses used to make and distribute media. Big companies also had a lock on access to a mass audience.
Today, media production tools are inexpensive (or sometimes free) to access. And more people are making content (web videos, albums of their own original music, self-published books, independent films).
And the Long Tail of available media content gets infinitely longer.
The ubiquitous availability of those production tools, coupled with the worldwide distribution channel of the internet, and sophisticated search technology, allows us all to be media producers.
Anderson says there’s been a shift from “Earn the right to produce,” to “What’s stopping you?”
More and more, we don’t make much of a distinction between media that’s produced independently by a dude in his apartment, and something that was created by a team of professionals working for a production company.
We know we we like, and we can find it … somewhere out there in the Long Tail.
And when the trollers of the Long Tail beat a path to a new media producer’s digital door, there are increasing opportunities to turn something that originally was done for fun into a way to make a few dollars.
Video is exploding on the web. And we’re not just talking Mentos and Diet Coke. Mobile users are streaming so much video, that AT & T announced last week that they’re no longer offering unlimited data plans for their 3G customers (iPhone and iPad users, mostly), presumably so as not to slow down the network.
According to ComScore, over 83% of U.S web users watched video online in the past month. That’s 178 million people. 40% of those videos were served up by YouTube, which only last month celebrated its 5th birthday. 26 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.
I first started making “videos” before video was really video. In the summer of 1984, when I was between 3rd and 4th grade, some friends and I made our first movie. We had to save up $10 to buy a 50 ft roll of Super 8mm film from the Ben Franklin store. I borrowed my grandma’s Kodak camera, and loaded up the film cartridge.
Kodak XL55 Super 8mm Movie Camera
50 ft of film runs about 3 1/2 minutes on screen … just about enough time to make a music video, which we were all seeing a lot of for the first time on MTV that summer.
Michael Jackson was BIG, and my friend across the street could breakdance, kind of. So we sanded a piece of plywood to make a stage, and added special effects by having someone blow soap bubbles off camera (Lawrence Welk meets Michael Jackson).
As the camera rolled, we pressed play on my RCA cassette player, the kind with a handle and one built-in speaker. The Super 8mm movie film was silent, so after we paid another $5 to have the film developed and waited a couple weeks for it to come back from processing, we had to start the projector and the cassette of “Beat It” just at the same moment for the action to synch up with the music.
We charged 25 cents for friends and neighbors to attend the screening of “Breakin’ USA” in the upstairs of the fort my dad built for us the summer before.
The place was packed.
I’ll bet we had seven people in there.
For a 3 1/2 minute movie.
Flash forward 26 years, and we would have been a hit on YouTube, if we were lucky enough not to have been sued by the record company first.
Home video cameras were a rarity in 1984. Today, they just about give them away in cereal boxes. And the audience for creative, instructional, or sales videos is literally worldwide … all for the cost of nothing. I’m pretty sure that J&P Pictures was the only 3rd-grader-owned film studio in my hometown that summer, but today it seems like everyone is making video.
At the Blogworld conference last October, one of the panelists recommended a great little video camera for bloggers called the Kodak Zi8.
Kodak Zi8
It’s a pocket camera that takes 1080p HD video (and 720p and standard definition) recorded to SD cards.
What made it unique last fall, though competitors’ cameras have also added the feature since then, is that it allows the user to plug in an external mic using an 1/8 inch mini plug. So you get a nice crisp picture and clean interview sound in a camera that’s a little narrower and lighter than a deck of cards.
The Zi8 has 2.5 inch screen used to shoot and play back video and still photos. It records files that can be directly uploaded to YouTube, though as we’ll learn this fall, an edited video is almost always better than a non-edited one.
If you’re thinking about getting into new media and are new to shooting video, the Kodak Zi8, a 5 foot 1/8 inch to XLR mic cable and microphone will get you started very nicely. The Zi8 sells for about $180.
Pioneer 90.1 presents a free concert by Thief River Falls-based blues performers Little Bobby & the Storm, Saturday March 6 at the Northland College TRF Theater at 7PM.
The show is the latest in a series of live performances highlighting Minnesota musicians that will be recorded and shared with public radio stations in our statewide network.
Along with the live performance, the radio broadcast will feature Bobby’s stories of playing last summer at actor Morgan Freeman’s blues club in Clarksdale, Mississippi.
Little Bobby & the Storm have released a concert DVD recorded last spring at the Empire Arts Center in Grand Forks, ND.
The March 6 show will be a trial run for our new TriCaster portable video switcher. The TriCaster lets us cover music and arts events on location with inputs for four live cameras. We can add graphics and transitions, and instantly encode the output for web streaming.
Networks such as FOX, ESPN, MTV, and the NHL use the Tricaster for portable live web video production.
Pioneer 90.1 Operations Manager Ben Kosharek and I are looking forward to bringing more diverse, original Minnesota music to Northland in the months ahead. Check back for a list of upcoming performers.
The faculty and students of Northland’s Architectural Design program have given us a look into the future with these models of our New Media classroom and studio space. Construction begins this summer!
Classroom/Mac Lab
The New Media/Radio Business classroom will be equipped with an iMac for each student. Students will get hands-on training with Final Cut Pro for video editing. These machines will also be used to write copy, edit audio podcasts and create blogs.
FM HD Studio 1
One of three new on-air studios, this space will be one of the labs for our Radio Business program. Students will use this space to conduct live and telephone interviews, present newscasts, and host music and talk programming on our community-oriented analog FM station. The studio faces into the hallway outside our department, so people walking by can check out what we’re doing on the air.
FM HD Studio 2
Our two new digital-only stations (Pioneer 90.1 HD-2 and HD-3) will allow students in the Radio Business program to hone their skills before moving up to FM-1. This studio will be home to an indie rock/alternative station. Students in the Webcasting and Podcasting courses will also use this studio to create web-only content.
Video Master Control Room
This studio will be used by students in the Webcasting and Podcasting courses to create video for the web. Control room operators will use our Globecaster switcher to switch multiple camera feeds, insert prerecorded video and add graphics to video streams and video podcasts. Using an intercom system, the director gives instructions to performers and camera operators in the video studio seen through the window. We’ll use a green screen to add digital backgrounds.
Reception Area
Just outside the FM-1 Studio, this area will be used to welcome guests prior to interviews.
When Apple makes a new product announcement, as it did today with its new iPad, I feel like I’m living in the future I grew up watching on The Jetsons.
Apple’s products aren’t just gadgets.
They are beautiful machines.
When I purchased the first Mac (a G5) for our mass comm department in 2004, I got a lot of quizzical looks from students.
There were many people who thought that the PC had simply “won” the never-ending battle of competing products.
Like VHS beat out Beta.
One media technology product is supposed to replace another.
It’s nature’s way.
Besides, everyone knows Windows. Why learn a different system?
But the iPod and iTunes and Drew Barrymore’s boyfriend changed all that in a very fast few years.
In 2010, everyone has an iPod. Everyone uses iTunes.
Everyone is getting very comfortable with Apple’s Jetsonian way of doing technology.
Today, the company changed the game again with its introduction of a 9.7 inch tablet computer that was talked about so much in the news my grandma said she was tired of hearing about it all day.
But I can’t hear enough about the iPad.
That’s because it opens up the market even more for the new media products we’ll teach students to create.
As another indication of how new media is beginning to heat up around niche programming, take a look at the buildup to this product announcement today …
Podcasters and bloggers have speculated about an Apple tablet for over a year.
Sites like Gizmodo, Appletell, and Engadget had reported on rumors and posted Photoshopped pictures of what such a device would look like.
All of this talk lead up to today’s announcement, which was covered live on web tv shows like Leo LaPorte’s MacBreak Weekly.
I watched the coverage on my laptop over lunch today.
At one point, Leo said they had 114,000 webcast viewers. To put that into perspective, some niche national cable channels are lucky to have 50,000 viewers at a time.
With the iPad in the hands of millions of web surfers when it goes on sale in late March, the audience for targeted new media content (audio and video podcasts, blogs, social media, Internet radio, live streaming events) will grow exponentially.
So, what do you think? Are you buying an iPad? Will it replace your netbook or laptop?
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?
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?
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.
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.
This blog is from the New Media department at Northland Community & Technical College in Thief River Falls, MN.
It's an introduction to some of the concepts, software and trends that we explore in class.
Many of the entries are directed at area small business owners who are interested in learning more about how new media can be used in their marketing efforts.
Some of the posts relate to Pioneer 90.1, the college radio station that is part of the Northland New Media department.
Please feel free to leave your comments or questions.
NCTC New Media Blog 