Taulbee Jackson wrote a blog post on April 7th about Google’s recent investment into high quality content for YouTube. Taulbee’s post was a great take on this investment and its meaning for search, but people who know me understand that I think the act of optimizing a site for search is the equivalent of securing a hastily constructed building against a Tornado. In my opinion, if built correctly a site will be found. Getting the site found for what you’d like it to be found for is a matter of becoming a quality website that is worth a visitor’s time.

This post is not about search though, this post is about video. Specifically the recent news that Cisco is discontinuing a product that it bought two years ago, and how that news coupled with the aforementioned news from Google is indeed a very big deal.

The Flip revolutionized consumer video production. I received the Flip Video Ultra for a Christmas gift in 2007 from my wife. I very distinctly remember being dumbfounded by it – not only was I stunned by it’s simplicity, but also by the fact that I knew NOTHING about it. Fancying myself a bit of a gadget geek, I had hit a bit of a slump in my ability to keep up with tech after the birth of my son – so I was truly impressed by my wife’s choice. It was small, portable, and just plain cool.

The Flip was a great tool for capturing moments. I used the small push button camera to capture video of my son, our neighborhood, and all sorts of fun little things. Unfortunately it was also misappropriated as the half lit torch of prosumers, hobby, and hack videographers everywhere. With my first Flip, NEVER did it cross my mind to use this camera for my job. NEVER did I think “640 by 480 pixels, mono sound and a backlit head shot is totally going to make my CEO look rad on YouTube!”

Now, I realize that not everyone knows the subtleties of compression schemes or frame rates and sizes. What everyone does know, but conveniently forgot in the last few years, is there is a difference between video of their kids playing on a slip and slide and videos of their brand messages. The years of 2007-2011 saw anyone with an eye for quality video living in a hell I could have never imagined.

Don’t get me wrong. The Flip product line matured very well, and as the company introduced smaller form factors with higher definition recording capabilities, I found myself occasionally using footage from it, and the team at Raidious has even deployed the Flip in quick capture scenarios. I believe strongly in the right tool for the right job, and while I have quite a few rants on the misappropriation of technology – the inappropriate application of the Flip to corporate and brand video had been hard to argue when consultants, speakers, and other short sighted social media specialists started writing blog posts and speaking at conferences about how easy making viral videos could be.

I can image it quite vividly, coming from the speaker in the sport coat and jeans – “It’s easy! Just buy a Flip and start talking to it! Your brand will explode into a social media ROI viral dynamic of user generated twitter SEO resulting in a zeitgeist.”

But now the Flip is dead – long live video on the internet!

As the aforementioned blog posts rot away in link bait hell, the Flip sits in purgatory. The marketing folks that learned how easy it could be to create videos are now caught trying to figure out what is next.

I admit that there have been some great videos produced and shared using the Flip. I know that this camera helped usher forth an era of videos, pod-casts, and other great content from social media gurus, not for profits, bands – some of which was created by yours truly. I appreciate that and I think it is cool, I do.

My recommendation is that companies take a long hard look at their video strategy, then call us for help. If you don’t call us, at least start thinking about how your video is going to stand out from the videos of the next few years, and how your brand is going to compete against YouTube’s professionally produced videos that it WILL be featuring over yours.

The Flip was the disposable party camera of the 2000s – remember those? I’d be willing to bet that young couples didn’t use the disposable for wedding portraits, but for the photos of the guests. I am hopeful that the death of the flip means one less excuse for bad video. As Google puts their money where their mouth is, I look forward to the internet of the next decade – an internet where sites like YouTube are full of professionally produced, high quality content that people want to watch, not full of your friend’s drinking at the reception.

Use your cell phone for that.

For a great article on how the Flip could have been saved, check out this great article by Peter at GDGT.

The New Yorker magazine is currently engaged in a fairly aggressive digital strategy. Rather than going the New York Times/Wall Street Journal route of hiding content behind a simple pay wall, the venerable culture and literary publication is going the freemium route and putting exclusive owned media content behind a Facebook “Like” wall.

While paid subscribers will be able to read the full story (an essay by National Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Johnathan Franzen) in the print version of the magazine, access to the full piece online requires users to “Like” the New Yorker’s Facebook page. This move is akin to recent initiatives in the music industry, debuting singles by artists like Jennifer Lopez and Lil Wayne via a Facebook “Like” unlock.

Coupled with the recent in-app capability to purchase individual issues of their tablet edition on the iPad and Kindle, this demonstrates a concerted effort by the print industry to remain viable in the digital age. The New Yorker enjoys a high subscriber base and renewal rate (85% as of 2009, one of the highest reported rates in the industry according to the Audit Bureau of Circulation), but seems to be keenly aware of the ongoing shift toward digital content across a variety of market segments.

According to Alexa Cassanos, spokeswoman for The New Yorker as quoted on Mashable.com:

“Our goal with this isn’t just to increase our fans. We want to engage with people who want to engage on a deeper level.”

So what does this all mean?

• The print edition of The New Yorker had over one million subscribers nationwide as of 2009;
• The average age of its readership was 47 years;
• Average household income of readers was $109,877;

The website NewYorker.com boasts similar numbers:

• An estimated average of 1.3 million unique visitors per month;
• Overwhelmingly older with 66% of visitors 35 years or older;
• 30% with a household income over $100,000.

Clearly not the demographics Mark Zuckerberg and Co. had in mind when they first unleashed Facebook upon the world of the young and hyper-connected.

With such a solid and loyal readership, why bother with digital editions and Facebook fans? Clearly The New Yorker is banking on a long-term digital strategy that values reaching out to and engaging with readers via the channels for which they are showing an increasing preference.

At the base level, the publication is striving to retain the three qualities that comprise quality content: making it interesting, relevant, and valuable.

The basic digital edition–available at no extra charge to print subscribers–includes a limited selection of content, usually truncated down from that which appears in print. The tablet edition features a more robust selection with complete articles and bonus content. In concert with exclusive content contingent upon a higher level of engagement (a Facebook “Like,” etc.) the magazine is seeking to add value to the experience of being a reader, utilizing digital platforms.

This new digital strategy has two likely positive net effects on readership: attracting younger readers by engaging with them in places and means to which they’re already well-accustomed; and taking older readers through the baby steps of the digital shift. By making it easy for both potential and existing customers to take advantage of content unavailable anywhere else, The New Yorker is exemplifying the kind of forward-thinking digital strategy that should be at the top of any brand’s list of priorities.

Google announced today that it will be investing over $100,000,000 in quality content for YouTube.

As mentioned in an earlier Raidious post featured on SocialMediaToday.com, directly from Matt Cutts at SXSW, Google has admitted time and again that SEO is about one thing – delivering quality, original content. It is the best way to rank your web property, the end – not link building, or other gray-hat SEO tricks that try to game the system. High quality original content always has, does, and always will help you win rank.

That’s what SEO is – it is the optimization of content.

It’s one thing to hear Matt Cutts say this to a room packed full of people at the biggest digital marketing conference on the planet. It is another for Google to back up that statement by investing significantly in its own properties.

Google is making a $100,000,000 dollar bet on high quality, original content, because guess what – Google knows it can’t lose.

One thing that YouTube is that Netflix and Hulu are not is a search engine. In fact, YouTube at one point was the second largest search engine in the world, behind Google, and it is still by far the first-choice destination for any user looking for video on a given topic. The fact that Google is investing like this, in high quality original content, should be the mother of all clues to anyone who wants to rank a website – you should be spending your money on high quality original content. Because that is exactly what Google is doing for its own properties.

Related articles

• YouTube to get more TV-like with channels and $100M worth of original content (venturebeat.com)
• YouTube Drops $100 Million to Add Original Content (techland.time.com)
• Google planning premium YouTube channels (gadgetell.com)
• Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO – Filing a reinclusion request (blogs.sitepoint.com)

Today at SXSW Interactive 2011 started with the realization that my seven dollar gamble on a dual-charging iPhone cable did not pay off. My iPad and iPhone greeted me with barely-charged batteries as I awoke feeling much the same.

After a hurried drive back to Austin, I was able to get downtown and into a great session with Kevin Pollak, AOL, and some other folks called “Banking on Big Brands/Celebs for the Web.”

Brands, content, and journalism have been much-emphasized topics at the conference thus far. It’s a great time to be representing a company that specializes in developing great content for brands.

Click to enlarge

If you don’t believe brands are thinking about or needing digital journalism and content production, then the line outside the room for the “Brand Journalism: The Rise of Non-Fiction Advertising” session would have convinced you.

I was back to stop by the FreshBooks birthday party–complete with clowns–and had a stellar ice cream sandwich for lunch, washed down with a shiner bock.

On the agenda for this afternoon: a quick jump into the keynote after my phone chargers, and a stop by the Social Media Data Visualation panel.

Recently ESPN announced plans for a spin-off website for writer Bill Simmons. Simmons has a massive following for his online content of columns, podcasts, and tweets. The site will not have ESPN branding, which makes sense as Simmons often delves away from sports and into popular culture commentary, and doesn’t shy away from critiquing ESPN broadcasts and personalities. This site will host all of his content, as well as from a team of contributors, and will almost undoubtedly garner huge traffic.

What stood out to me from the press release was this:

Bill sees the site functioning with limited fan interaction, including a selection of about 300 fans with exclusive access to comment on the site and interact with contributors.

At first I was a little upset at the thought of such confined comment limitations; after all, that goes directly against the openness and engagement that the internet provides. Even though it isn’t a done deal, the fact they are considering declaring a “free speech zone” for comments was a bit of a shock.

However, after thinking about this proposal for a while I changed my mind and began to open up to the idea.

Currently Simmons is one of only a couple ESPN writers whose posts are blocked from commenting. Much of this constraint has to do with the divisive nature of Simmons’ articles which are blunt, full of home team bias, and often make jokes at the expense of teams and players. While such posts would have extraordinary numbers of comments, the discussion would most likely lose value instantly.

Comments have the ability to add incredible quality to online content. TED is a great example of a website where educated and well-reasoned comments create a community around the content, providing a deeper attachment and involvement. Quora operates entirely on the principal of crowd controlled comments/knowledge being enriching if properly managed.

So here Simmons has the idea to allow for a vetted group of personalities who will provide beneficial comments, will not be anonymous, and can be held accountable. The decision, if they do decide to go this direction, will exclude some quality comments and valuable insights from those outside of the 300, but it also will ensure the comments will add value and not be drowned out by the screams of a million FIRST!’s, trolls, and spam bots.

The strategy of curating comments can create a deeper breadth of content as it grows beyond the post and readers will come to expect the comments to be of value. In some ways this angle takes a step back from the Internet as a new two-way dialogue model and towards the old one-way broadcast model.

As content marketing evolves, one way to make content more valuable is to highlight the opinions of experts and value-driven commenters. For the most part, comment sections have been seen simply as allowing the reader to engage. With this move ESPN may find that comment sections are a way for reader to go deeper. This shift takes comments away from user involvement and more into user experience. I think it could be a successful strategy.

Thanks for visiting our new site – we have spent the last few weeks on a redesign, courtesy of our very own Brian Conradt. We changed things up a bit from our old site, because a lot of our users were telling us they had visited the site, but still were not sure exactly what we did.

It’s understandable – we are a very different company than most marketers are used to seeing. Most advertising agencies, PR firms, and digital agencies talk a lot about technology oriented stuff like email marketing, integrated campaigns, specific platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and the buzzword of the century (so far) – Social Media.

We don’t use that language because we don’t think or operate like those kinds of companies. We are a content company. We take a content-centric approach to all of those tactics. If you think about it, it’s all content. Email marketing is successful not because of the technology, but because of the content. Social media is all content (what would Twitter be without the tweets?). Websites are just places to put content. Every analytics measurement you make in online marketing is a measurement of the success of the content. Technology doesn’t integrate with offline campaigns – the content does.

So why is everybody else so focused on all the technology?

It’s glamorous. It’s sexy. It’s the new-new thing. I totally understand – everyone at Raidious has a pretty high geek factor. We love this stuff, too. But none of it works without content.

With that in mind, we built a company to solve the right problem – the problem of how to create, manage, and distribute content online for brands in a platform-agnostic manner. What happens when you invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in something like MySpace, and then Facebook comes along? If you have a MySpace strategy, you’re screwed. If you have a content strategy, congratulations – you just got a brand new platform to publish your content! When your online strategy is a content-centric strategy, technology can just evolve all over the place, and it won’t matter – because no matter what the new-new thing  is or what it becomes, it will be driven by content.

We also look at social media as a content problem (which it is). We are purpose-built not just to publish content, but to monitor and moderate the dialog around it – to leverage content that other people are producing about your brand. Most importantly, we developed a culture of optimization – we measure and optimize your content to deliver ever-increasing ROI. The longer we work with you, the better your results get.

The big question is . . .  how? How do we make the content? How do we manage the dialog? How are we so different?

The answers are all here – and if you can’t find what you’re looking for, email me, and I will be happy to help. Enjoy the new site, and be sure to let us know your thoughts in the comments section!

WordPress is pretty awesome. I’ve used it on many projects, and we use it quite often at Raidious.

The first time I used the web publishing platform was in 2007, when I launched the RockitBomb podcast. I was impressed with the ease of deployment and the fact that I could do it all without writing any code; so impressed, that I set up a WordPress installation for every nearly every website  on my personal web server. My assumption was that by deploying this easy to use content management and blogging software and inviting collaborators that every site would quickly overflow with regular updates.

As one can probably imagine, this did not happen. Easy-to-deploy and easy-to-use software does not instantly make authors out of contributors, or contributors out of enthusiastic friends. After some time, I inevitably found my installations consolidated. The band site I had built pulling a feed from mySpace, the podcast being combined with my personal site, and other projects simply being shelved.

Easy to deploy, easy to use, and easy to maintain, but it still fails without content. WordPress, like any other blogging software or content management system, is nothing without humans creating content to fill it, and engaging with the site’s audience.

Fortunately, that is what Raidious is all about.