Posts Tagged: heritage key

convergence / virtual online / web2.0 — No Comments
8
Jan 10

Content Co-Creation First Program is Ancient World in London

We are pleased to advise that we have our first content co-creation and web event series signed-up and underway = Ancient World in London. It is a time-based, online/virtual/mobile/live series that will inspire people to make their own discoveries of the history that makes London one of the world’s great cities. More info here and the micro-site is here.  We think this first program will be the shape of things to come more and more for making online communities relevant and engaging. (more about the benefits for co-creation here). We think this is one way to deal with free content to users and also help getting brands above the noise on the web. In addition to monetization it will also help us generate new traffic.

cleopatra's needle 08

Our web-oriented event and content series -- the Ancient World in London -- will run for 3 months. It is an example of how online communities to use a broad mix of media and tools to create new, popular content.

The Community Challenge

I don’t expect that just because we will make more web content and tools that those efforts alone will generate meaningful community effect. We will need to meet people live and mix events and contests into the action the online content. Part of our mission with Heritage Key is to make history/archeology more accessible and allow people to participate (somehow).

Visitors will be invited to join:

  • Contest and Quests in London and in new 3d online virtual areas — and of course win cool prizes
  • Contribute articles, images, video clips (and get paid a little)
  • Attend lectures, discussions
  • Help us complete a massive listing of places, artefacts, key people, timeline events and publications
  • Share their ideas on good tours of London

Getting the balance between local London and sharing that online = globally will require attention. We are also excited about the Grand Finale event which will be live in London and webcasted/virtual simulcasted. It will be an ancient world costume party.

The content will be hosted using our Rezzable Real-time Community Platform which is comprised mainly of Drupal and Opensim plus a bunch of code of our own. More about our tech here.

Event Partners Still Needed

We have the main sponsor in place, but still are looking for Event Partners to support events and offer relevant prizes or services to the events/content series. If you might be interested please drop us an email at info@rezzable.com. It should be a great opportunity for a range of companies that might be interested in understanding more about the social web, online video and virtual 3D online.

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web2.0 — No Comments
12
Nov 09

Brand Benefits from Co-Creation Web Media Projects

Co-creation is a new, important media direction for Brand managers trying to find cost-effective ways to reach fewer, more relevant people online (read my top 7 benefits to Brands below). One of the major challenges with online advertising and promotions is in reaching the early adopters/thought leaders with the right message.  These people typically do not click on banners, hate spam and are too savvy to fall for link bait. There are also complex  issues around Brand Trust that make people wary of clicking on offers.   Co-creation changes the low-cost cpm/high-spray model for brand managers and gives an powerful new approach for online community participation.

French Brains (not human)

More brains the better? Sorry this is sorta disgusting. But the point is about getting more people involved via online communities. (French brains, not human btw).

It is of course ideal to have community members enrich content–but is UGC to hard to deal with online? Is it too random and too much spam? How to get to the next level = Community-Inspired-Content (CIC).

What is Online Community Content Co-Creation?

There are 3 main participant groups need for a co-creation program: 1) Brand 2) Community Manager 3) Community Members.  The Community Manager (which is how we see our role at Heritage Key) needs to create the focus and deliver the program.

The Brand and the Community Manager should frame the focus of the content and outline the mix (video, articles, interviews, virtual, real world events). The real new area is to get the right balance between commissioned work and user generate content (UGC).  UGC needs to be on-point with the focus, but more importantly needs to allow the Community Members their own space to participate.  I think the real world events are an important part of this.

The Co-Creation program should run over a period of time like 3-6 months. We think of it as a sort of series. People can then catch if from start or  catch-up through referrals or web buzz around the activity.  You can also have an endpoint where you can convert content into a final package.

Benefits to Brands

  • New Relevant Web Content – Content is unique and will fit major interests of the community members. It should also be branded and embeddable off the main microsite (via widgets or YouTube players).
  • No Other Brand Interference — it would be exclusive to the sponsoring Brand. No noise, no unexpected placement. And the microsite area would be much more engaging than an Brand controlled site.
  • Community Interaction — program should offer people chance to contribute (for free or payment), share opinions, contests, join real w0rld events.  Ideally there should be some time-based momentum designed into the program.
  • Leverage Existing Brand Assets – Brands can repurpose or simple use existing assets and place them in proper context/linking to new content.
  • Fresh Ammo for PR — Program should give PR/Marketing teams new materials to work for customer and media outreach.
  • Destination to Drive Promotions — Brands can use their existing email lists to drive customers/prospects to microsite for targeted promotions. Surveys can also be very useful to learn more about customer needs.
  • Speed to Market – Community Manager should be able to deliver program rapidly and across 3-6 months time period to build momentum.
  • Innovation – Brands should seek Community Managers that offer web site, websphere, and interactive applications that when combined with new content will be very exciting.
  • Lower total costs — Co-Creation should not be massively expensive. It will have potentially high CPM metrics, but you would expect reasonable total costs and good CPA downstream.  It is key to understand that co-creation right now is a way to access the early adopters and thought leaders within the communities, so it should also be considered as a strategic play.

We are working on Content Co-Creation programs for Heritage Key that will be focused on visting/experience history of ancient world sites. These programs  will mix video, virtual and article content.  More info will be shared soon!  Get RSS or follow us on twitter @xlent1 or @heritagekey or for virtual content @rezzable .

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web2.0 — 7 Comments
1
Oct 09

Best Way to Publish Videos on YouTube

Ok, so our scare about losing our entire YouTube channel is over–after 12 hours of downtime and still no info from YouTube. See details here. YouTube is such a major part of the web today, so you almost have no choice but to publish your video content there. But what is the best way to do this and how can you protect your assets along the way?

The video publishing process has a few important elements:

  • Hosting — where the video is stored and how people can stream it
  • Transcoding — converting the original HD show into various formats so people can view it on their choice of device
  • Embedding — allowing other bloggers to insert your video into their blogs to add value and also drive traffic back
  • Search = Findability — remember most traffic comes from Google these days, so make it Google-friendly
  • Distribution – what other channels can your show zap across to reach as many viewers as fast as possible.

The biggest recent change in Video publishing on the web has been that Youtube allows you to post a 1-gig, 10 minute HD file. This was a big move and dented most/all of the competitive services. Google of course also crawls YouTube and weights popular videos high on results page.

But as we are aware now, YouTube is not organized for good/any customer/publisher user service, so now the competitive offers are about service and support unsurprisingly.

We hear a lot of great stuff about Hulu, but they only stream within the US at this time. Also they seem to be more oriented around the big studios, tv channels. So I had a look at some of the other options including Vimeo and Blip.tv .  While they both seem to have about the same publishing offer as YouTube, Blip has recently pumped up its capability for bigger distribution and even some hope for monetization support.

You could of course try to host your own video using server/hosting/player combo including Longtail JW Player, or Flowplayer. If anyone has any experience with these it would be great to know how good/bad these options are. If you are going to go on your own, then you need to have a good hosting contract (with unlimited bandwidth!).   The main benefit is that your content would only be available from your site/servers, but then again you might lose the audience hitting the other platforms.

Our feeling right now is that actually YouTube is not driving that much traffic to http://heritage-key.com, but Google is. So probably we are sending more of our traffic to YouTube right now, then the other way around–but we hope to see some lift as our heritage Key Channel popularity increase (so please favorite our videos!)

Hot-Swap Options for YouTube Videos

In addition to finding a hot-swap for YouTube in the event that something random happens again, we also wanted a better way to publish to iTunes–which Blip.tv offers as part of it distro mix.

Youtube is so big = 1.2 billion streams a day and growing, that they just dont seem to care about servicing the smaller content creators. You need Youtube, but you also need some hot-swap options

Youtube is so big = 1.2 billion streams a day and growing, that they just don't seem to care about servicing the smaller content creators. You need Youtube, but you also need some hot-swap options

So first we had to make a quick tidy on how we even handle the Video files.  We set-up a Lacie NAS in our office to hold the final shows archive. We went for a 4terabyte rack mounted one, but actually you can get cheap 1tr desktop versions now also. Just make sure you keep back-ups!–as video seems to kill drives frequently enough.  Anyway, make an archive, organize all the show related stuff into folders.

Then in addition to posting to Youtube, also post the video to Blip.tv. It is a little more effort. Blip has an posting utility that works ok or you can use ftp.

Our site runs Drupal where we have a specific content type to post the videos and related information, descriptions (see an example). So to present the video to a site visitor we want to use the embed code from YouTube. Now we will also hold the embed code for Blip.tv in case we have to quickly switch over. We would just need to make a simple change on the Drupal code to present the blip.tv embedded player rather than YouTube.

Blip Does A lot More than YouTube — Distribution to iTunes

While I did send an email to Blip.tv people and still no reply–it would seem more likely to get someone on the phone from Blip than YouTube–which is impossible.  I even stumped up for the Pro Account, which is of course a nice show of support, to get the iTunes publishing capability. Publishing to iTunes is not so straightforward.  Blip will also flow your show across a lot of other sites, channels including aol, twitter, facebook, vimeo and internet archive. Interestingly they also send to Tivo and some hotel channels. See Blip.tv distribution info here. So if you want iTunes then Blip is an easy way, plus you get the additional benefit of other downstream audiences off their platform.

They also have a feed to YouTube. But as far as I can tell, the feed is to their Blip.tv channel on YouTube. I am not sure if this is so useful as it would mean our content would be on YouTube twice–deflecting the traffic from our channel and also annoying Google SEO. But if you didn’t have a website this might be a great option. Blip also will share the monetization from YouTube that only the larger YouTube content partners can get their paws on now.

So that’s our latest thinking about how best to publish, manage our video content using the big elephant YouTube but also watching out not to get stepped upon. If anyone has any other ideas, please share here. Any question drop them in the comments.

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