Find me at Blog World and Mention Chris Brogan. Receive Free Top-10 Video Tips. Retail Value: $1 Billion.
So a week or so ago I sent Chris Brogan a note. Asked him if he could get me a free pass to Blog World San Fran Los Vegas (thanks CB and SG), and offered to fill a last-minute speaking slot, be on a panel, or hand out drinks. I can’t let Steve Garfield get all the attention with Get Seen when I’ve got my book, Beyond Viral, coming out in the next weeks.
So now I’m not only going (by plane, train or Greyhound bus), I’ll be giving away a card with top-10 secrets than can help you promote yourself and/or business via online video. But here’s the catch. I’ll be keeping these hidden, and giving them away to anyone that mentions Chris Brogan. I’d give away copies of the book, but I’m a little worried about carrying 500 books around inconspicuously.
Thanks, Chris. I want to be you when I grow up. And when are we going to work on your fledging YouTube persona? I can double your views in a week for one case of beer.
P.S. THIS JUST IN (3:00 pm): Marc Monseau invited me to the J&J sponsored healthcare round table (Social Health). I’m quite sure it wasn’t an inducement prompted by my giving him a free book… I didn’t even autograph it.
Semantics be important… especially for a relatively novel “space” like online video. For starters, I never much cared for the term “viral” marketing, because it had sick connotation. Like my marketing might make someone sick enough to cough on another hapless patsy. Then comes the term “viral” videos to celebrate the wonderfully horrible videos one couldn’t resist sharing. I created “Viral Video Genius” as a satire, people, and still use the phrase as an inside joke to piss off those too naive to recognize otherwise.
But still today we see “viral” referring to any video hoping to go virus. That’s just ridiculous, friends. Do you agree? By definition, a video isn’t “viral” unless it gets a lot of views. I used to say 500 to 1 million, but now you pretty much need 5 or 10 million to rise above the noise.
This post was inspired by a Tweet by Chris Brogan. He can’t be our new ZeFrank now because he acknowledged my existence. But Scoble’s up for grabs.
You see this guy, Mose, asked:
Fair question. If someone “seeds it” or pays to have it a preroll on some crappy video-sharing site that serves porn in India, does that count? ChrisBrogan, in a surprise move, punts the question my way:
Now this was surprising since I never figured Brogan for the type that would know the word “Nalts” (even if I’m kinda famous because I was on today’s eGuider reel with Daisy Whitney, Ben Relles, and that dude who MC’s the DiggNation show I stormed in my underwear. Can you imagine if all the people in “Welcome to eGuider” got together in a room? Would anyone get anything done?
But I digress from my digression. So to Mose and ChrisBrogan, in my infinite 140-character wisdom, I says, “Seeding counts as “viral”; not paid views. Lets call ’em prom online vids (pov) unless they actually go viral (rare).
Then Mose, who clearly has good taste, comes back with:
Mose is suggesting we use the hashtag #pov to track any activity about “Promotional Online Videos,” a term that’s perhaps more accurate than “viral” when talking about the majority of videos. But having searched POV I’ve decided it must be a porn term, and that is just as well. Maybe this blog post will pick up some accidental traffic, giving me the same satisfaction of creating a “viral” video that had an average view-duration of .04 seconds. Whoops? Another digression. This will be the only post since 2008 that Nutcheese finishes.
Seriously, though. Seriously? Calling a video “viral” before it goes viral is like calling karaoke singers Grammy Winners. One in a million may well be, but let’s call them karaoke singers in the meanwhile.
In a year you won't remember anything I wrote in this post. But you'll still be offended that I used a Japanese woman to illustrate karaoke.
Anyway, data point one: This edgy Scottish former comedian* — who fancies “stand-up” comedy as a higher form of art than improv — uses the term “curated content.”
This odd phrase flashed me back to data point two; a recent article (I now can’t find) which outlined how we increasingly need help finding good videos… I think the piece used that “curated” term too. Jan you’ll know where it is because we e-mailed about WVFF helping curate. I suppose that’s what I was doing with CubeBreak (I haven’t touched this in years). But it sounds more topical and valuable when we use the term “curate,” which meant otherwise to refer to a dusty cicada-like man who knows how to use microfiche.
Then today I see data point three: a Tweet by Daisy Whitney alerting me that my Glee video was featured on eGuiders. Yeah, I hadn’t heard of it either.
You need two data points to draw a line, but three is enough to indicate a trend (and you can use that quote if you credit me, or win a free piece of cheese if you can manipulate Chris Brogan into saying it). Hey, Marquis… let’s make Chris Brogan this blog’s new ZeFrank.
So along comes “curating” again… just like the days when YouTube had 2-3 videos on its homepage a day. Mind you, YouTube is wonderful if you know who to watch or how to search for videos. Remember how you’d check daily to see what’s hot? Not anymore. If you’re logged in, it’s one site. If you’re not logged in (like most) then it’s probably one of 10 people spotlighting through the homepage. I don’t think anyone considers YouTube a curator anymore.
It’s not the kind of place a novice will necessarily browse and find the best content like such sites as TheOnion or CollegeHumor… sites you love but often forget you love and so you stop visiting… kinda like a walk in the woods.
The reality is that I live and love online-video but I can’t possibly keep up. I rarely miss a massively popular video, but I rely on friends and family to help me find the best stuff… Is that curated video or mini-viral? Are they different ends of a continuum I just invented based on Brogan’s writings?
So here comes today’s lesson (it’s not that I buried the lead, I just have to get there by writing around it).
I see “curated” video as an essential long-term driver of views. One day when my organic regular audience runs screaming, I’ll hope curators send me some love. But here’s the thing… when my video is featured on a YouTube sub-navigation page (like comedy) it maybe picks up only 10-30K views (contrast that with a YouTube homepage feature that would fetch 100-1 million views). That suggests to me that few go to the various pages… maybe they’re too broad or not human like a curator is supposed to be. Maybe if if it was “Mark’s comedy picks,” we’d be more likely to follow them… if we found Mark’s comedic taste to be similar to ours.
Eventually YouTube will actually be accurate when it shows related videos… it will become as useful as Amazon’s “customers that bought that bling also bought this shizzle.” Until then, the curator serves an important role. But since our tastes all vary, there will be lots of curators at first until each category (music, entertainment, comedy) has a few leading curators.
Let’s summarize:
Nalts knows YouTube editors
Curating is important
YouTube isn’t really curating
WilVideoForFood has found a new ZeFrank: Chris Brogan (there’s really no reason… these decisions are arbitrary and not well thought out, but they do stick).
Lots of people will curate (like videos-sharing sites) until there’s a natural thinning of the herd
This post read like a teenager’s recount of a movie
