The New York Times
had an interesting article, YouTube’s Quest to Suggest More, that covered their
goal to have people stay longer on the site which would increase ad revenue.
Compared to other Web sites with similar content (or really almost any Web
site) they are way ahead. But compared to that other channel for viewing
content, televsion, they are way behind. Users spend an average of 15 minutes a
day on the site and they spend about five hours in front of the television.

To increase time
spent on YouTube Hunter Walk leads a team of about a dozen engineers, designers
and project managers who are fine-tuning YouTube to users what they want, even
when users aren’t quite sure what they really want. This is where discovery
comes in. One way is to select the 10-15 most appealing videos for a specific
user from their library of over 100 million.

The process starts
with search. The NYT reported that in November, Americans typed some 3.8
billion search queries on YouTube, more than on any search engine other than
Google, according to comScore, a market researcher. But there is a
difference. While Google queries tend to be very specific, users often come to
YouTube with requests as vague as “funny videos.” This is where discovery can
help by providing a range of results that are not simply literal matches.

One challenge is when
to anticipate the user might be getting tried of their original topic and
proactively offer related content to keep them on site.  One way to provide good options
suggesting videos that users may want to watch based on prior viewing before, or
on what others with similar tastes have enjoyed. The effort requires
data-mining techniques similar to those used by and Amazon to make music or book recommendations.

Darwin Ecosystems is
also in the discovery business. Instead of offering content in a list format
based on your prior behavior or others similar to you, it offers a set of
topics arranged in a Scan Cloud™ that correlate with the original search term
or, as we say attractor. Then you can hop around to explore the related topics
based on your interests. It is an alternative model to trying to read your mind
as YouTube and Amazon do.  Instead,
it gives you a range of choices in an easy interface to allow you to better
make up your own mind. 

The New York Times
had an interesting article, YouTube’s Quest to Suggest More, that covered their
goal to have people stay longer on the site which would increase ad revenue.
Compared to other Web sites with similar content (or really almost any Web
site) they are way ahead. But compared to that other channel for viewing
content, televsion, they are way behind. Users spend an average of 15 minutes a
day on the site and they spend about five hours in front of the television.

To increase time
spent on YouTube Hunter Walk leads a team of about a dozen engineers, designers
and project managers who are fine-tuning YouTube to users what they want, even
when users aren’t quite sure what they really want. This is where discovery
comes in. One way is to select the 10-15 most appealing videos for a specific
user from their library of over 100 million.

The process starts
with search. The NYT reported that in November, Americans typed some 3.8
billion search queries on YouTube, more than on any search engine other than
Google, according to comScore, a market researcher. But there is a
difference. While Google queries tend to be very specific, users often come to
YouTube with requests as vague as “funny videos.” This is where discovery can
help by providing a range of results that are not simply literal matches.

One challenge is when
to anticipate the user might be getting tried of their original topic and
proactively offer related content to keep them on site.  One way to provide good options
suggesting videos that users may want to watch based on prior viewing before, or
on what others with similar tastes have enjoyed. The effort requires
data-mining techniques similar to those used by and Amazon to make music or book recommendations.

Darwin Ecosystems is
also in the discovery business. Instead of offering content in a list format
based on your prior behavior or others similar to you, it offers a set of
topics arranged in a Scan Cloud™ that correlate with the original search term
or, as we say attractor. Then you can hop around to explore the related topics
based on your interests. It is an alternative model to trying to read your mind
as YouTube and Amazon do.  Instead,
it gives you a range of choices in an easy interface to allow you to better
make up your own mind. 

Would you like to give your editors the possibility to add Youtube videos to your RedDot CMS project?
But you don’t want them to be able to edit the HTML directly to enter the iframe tag that youtube provides and you don’t just want to add a link to the youtube URL because that would drive content from your site to youtube and the marketing department definitely wants visitors to stay on your site, right? Right.

Well, use this template, inspired by Kim Dezen to embed yutube videos by just entering the URL. The ASP code strips out everything but the video-ID and embeds the content into your project page without editors touching the HTML.

Explanation
<%stf_youTubeURL%> – Holds the complete URL to the youtube video.
This part removes the URL and returns just the youtube video id used for the embedded object tag.

<%
  youTubeID = Mid("<%stf_youTubeURL%>", InStrRev("<%stf_youTubeURL%>", "?")+3)
%>

Get the code

Donate a dollar or $2 and then download the template here. The code is a plain text file for you to copy and paste, you still have to create the element(s) yourself and do some thinking around this.

Licensing

YouTube video template for RedDot CMS by Kim Dezen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
Based on a work at www.reddotcmsblog.com.

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It was recently reported in New Media Age, picked up by the Hubspot blog that Coca-Cola were moving their campaign sites from “traditional” websites to social media platforms and they are not alone, Pepsi recently created a stir as they announced a move from big budget Super Bowl ads to investing in their social media community. So what does this mean for “traditional” web content management?

From a content publishing perspective (rather than a marketing trend) this isn’t really a big deal is it? Surely these guys have merely changed platform – moving to platforms that have greater focus on community tools. Should we now consider YouTube and Facebook as web content management systems or at least web publishing platforms?

Well.. I think.. yes.. and errr.. no.

The core functionality of any content management system, whether its digital assets, structured text content or documents – are the principles of not just authoring/uploading and publishing content – but of governance, permissions models, brand protection and approval processes – stuff these social media platforms simply don’t have.

Does this move suggest that perhaps Coke has surrendered all that back end control for some community features? I think, probably not.

The key I think is the quote from the New Media Age article where Prinz Pinakatt, Coke’s interactive marketing manager for Europe says:

“We would like to place our activities and brands where people are, rather than dragging them to our platform.”

They want to publish content to where their audience is – and their community hangs out on Facebook and YouTube. Of course it’s the community that these platforms have attracted that is their value to these brands, rather than their functional and technical capabilities.

Build it and they will come. That’s the normal mantra of community building on the web, build a fantastic destination, invest in attracting visitors and encourage them to interact, engage and form your tribe.

But, hey with these social media networks – someone else has already built it and the people have already arrived.

As I referred to in my last post, there is a lot of talk about the redefinition of WCM, of separating the management bit from web delivery - publishing to social media networks could be a strong use case of that. That organisations are increasingly going to think of these sites as part of their multi-channel publishing strategy.

Of course the nice thing about the “build it and they will come” philosophy is that you exclusively own that community, you can listen to their interactions through web analytics and personalize or adapt your content and delivery in response.

A social media publishing strategy therefore needs a social media listening strategy to build that insight – but more of that in future posts.

But for now, as web publishers, looking to engage our visitors we need to rethink our idea of what the ‘destination’ is.

Coke Triumphant image courtesy of Oliver Scott reproduced under Creative Commons License.

Related posts:

1. Techrigy and Persuasive Content
2. Engagement – the new CMS buzzword bus?
3. Software Developers: The New Rock Stars of Marketing

Here is another angle on the convergence of
TV and the Web. The digital marketing firm eConsultancy asks the question, Is
online video destined to look like television programming? They quote Brian
Stelter in The New York Times: "News Web
sites are starting to look a lot less like newspapers and a lot more like
television." Brian also writes that online ads are booming,
if they’re attached to a video.

They report that traditional
television has been impacted by commercial fast-forwarding, but with online it
does not work quite the same way. And as much as people complain about pre-roll
ads, they are increasingly watch them instead of skipping through them.

Digital video earned $477 million in revenue in the first half of 2009,
which is an increase of 38% from the same time period last year. By online
standards this may seem small as online search is estimated to be a $10 billion
market this year. However, this growth is good news for struggling media
companies. Especially since online views are not poaching traditional TV
viewers. During the daytime, online is popular, but at night viewers are
switching to television. I think people will switch to online videos as a
diversion while working on their computers but will prefer the bigger TV screen
for more devoted recreational viewing.

I have written elsewhere that traditional media cannot not simply
reproduce itself on new media (see Here is a Creative Blend of Mainstream Media and Social Media and The Misplaced Fear of the Mainstream Media) and this post agrees. It
points out that in the longterm, merely reproducing TV content online at a
quicker pace is not likely save the networks. They quote Todd Teresi, chief
revenue officer at Quantcast: "We need to get to solutions that are as
elegant as search. The power of the search marketplace is that Google does not
sit there and tell you what you should buy. Google gave people control. That
fundamentally is why that marketplace works so well."

I wonder if traditional TV will ever gives us the same control and the
online world? It could be a very powerful move. Will hardware be the driver or
content?  (see TV Moving Closer to Mobile Phones and the Web). 

I’ve worked with RedDot now for more than 7 years and I think describing Open Texts CMS flagship RedDot CMS in the year 2009 can be done best with a quote which came up in 2009:

“What RedDot needs is some love! Instead they got renamed from RedDot CMS to Open Text Web Solutions Suite and must have felt like Cinderella living with the step mother and some ugly sisters.”

source

What’s next in 2010

Open Text will present us something new in 2010 I believe, something to show some support for the RedDot Community, something new and shiny and hopefully not too marketing flavoured. I had good conversations this year with some Open Text guys. A lot of guys are trying hard to make a change there and wake up from the RedDot buyout fatigue but Open Text is a big fat vendor vessel (no offense) and those are usually quite slow, so getting something ready for crew usually takes time and it might be a bit like the Titanic struggeling with changing course. But we learned from the past, didn’t we?

Where can you find some RedDot love before the year ends?

Yep – you are right – within the community. That is you out there! You are on the lookout with everyone else and we are willing to shout if we either think we can see an iceberg or on the contrary something of interest worth heading for. The people from Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia, United States, Planet Earth don’t have icebergs and they seem really happy with their RedDot CMS.
So they did something neat to share with you earlier this year and made a nice video. I’ve already tweeted this one earlier this year and I think in the spirit of Christmas this video is worth being seen and getting some props from us.

With the right RedDot CMS Partner and/or the right RedDot integration Team for your implementation this video is pretty close to what could happen to you when you migrate your CMS project with RedDot CMS. Sounds like marketing (and I apologise), but fact is: The more your development team has to think and suffer – the happier your editors should be.. right?

Merry Christmas!

to the guys from Longwood University and all of you out there in the RedDot Community!
Thank you for a great 2009 and see you next year!

Wishes?

What do you wish for 2010 from Open Text or your favoured CMS vendor?
Which

• features?
• fixes?
• additional geek toys?
• usability enhancements?
• the next big marketing suite report bang?
• simplified collaboration and solution sharing?

…or whatever gave you grief in 2009 and what would you like to get solved or rather not have to encounter again in 2010?

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