Week Four Reading: Old & New Media Collide in Video

This week we've been discussing video as a social media avenue, and I want to explore this a bit more.

Social video is a lot like traditional broadcast video in that it is:
• A static creation
• Disseminated over a broad aucience

Because of this, many news organizations, advertisers, and other traditional media users have found it comfortable to move into social video. For example, the Center for Investigative Reporting, an advocacy group that supports traditional media investigative reporting, recently announced that it is launching an investigative journalism video project that will be distributed on YouTube.

Another great example is how YouTube itself is now putting more effort into putting advertisements on its site, such as the now well-known AdSense ads from Google, which look like this:

Okay, well maybe they aren't always so... um... weird?

Another big player in Video is TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, & Design. TED has hosted conferences of intelligent speakers on a variety of topics since 1984, and began placing videos of these talks online for free in 2006. We have used some TED talks in this class, as you may have noticed. Recently, TED announced a new series of videos to teach children basics of science and other topics. Like CIR, TED is also using, on the surface, a broadcast model, as it is disseminating videos of talks that occurred prior to video posting, and do not incorporate any two-way aspects in the content.

However, remember how these videos are being distributed. TED puts it videos on its own web site, but still incorporates social features like allowing commenting on the videos. It also redistributes many videos on YouTube. CIR, meanwhile, is going straight onto YouTube without their own platform. Why?

First, YouTube is the second largest search engine on the planet. To have your video on YouTube is to be far more likely to be found. But on a more social level, YouTube is a community with registered users, rich commenting abilities, rating systems, and built-in sharing mechanisms to embed or share YouTube videos on still other social media platforms with still other users. This is the power behind how a video can go "viral": search and share, the second being the heart and soul of social media.

To get a good example of how this is being used, take a look at this post from Chris Brogan, where he talks about how a restaurant is making video ads for YouTube that are social. Watch the video there. Why are they social? Note that the advertisement is more than an advertisement. It doesn't state "here, come eat at our restaurant!" Instead it offers useful content that a YouTube user may actually want to watch, and then because that content also relates to a product that the restaurant sells, it makes that company's products seem better, higher quality, and made by people who care about the diner. This is an ad, but it's a useful ad and one that may be both enjoyed and shared. Thus we have a form of social media marketing known as content marketing.