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Posts Tagged ‘youtube’

Is YouTube the Most Important Social Media Service?

Here’s the thing about social media: it fueled by innovation and creativity while being layered with many elements of human nature.

Over the past five years, our lives have been significantly changed by social media but there is heated debate over which services have been the most influential in our lives.

I would suggest the social media service with the most impact is YouTube. It can even be argued that YouTube is one of the greatest innovations in the modern era. Social media services come and go – Friendster, Bebo and MySpace – but there will most likely never be a substitute for YouTube.

Granted, you have to acknowledge the popularity of other social media networks when discussing the success of YouTube given they have allowed YouTube videos to be easily embedded. Even on its own, YouTube was worth the $1.6 billion that Google paid for it, and has seen very few speed bumps during its rise.

If is a knock against YouTube and its success, it has been the use of illegal content to attract in users. This might be accurate but it is a small part of its success, if not a mere footnote.

YouTube has been difficult to monetize but it seems to be overcoming that hurdle as well given in-stream advertising among other ventures coming into play. In fact, at this point in time the future is incredibly bright for YouTube when you consider people spend about one billion minutes on YouTube each day collectively.

Smartphones have only helped YouTube as they all come with video cameras and the ability to upload content instantaneously. This has turned just about everyone into amateur auteurs, while filling the coffers of YouTube.

Some would argue Facebook is the predominant social media serviced while others would suggest Twitter but from my perspective YouTube rules the social media universe, and with apologies to Vimeo, there isn’t a strong competitor in sight. At least, for now.

By Mark Evans - October 14th, 2011 - No Comments »
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Posted in Social Media, Technology

Will the New Delicious be Delicious-er?

If you were looking for a classic example of a social media start-up that fizzled after it was acquired, Delicious might be one of the best examples.

Launched in 2003 by Joshua Schachter as a social bookmarking service, Delicious was acquired by Yahoo in 2005 for $30-million. Over the next six years, Yahoo did a stunning job of ignoring Delicious.

It was an injustice to Schacter who built Delicious into an extremely popular service, only to see the new owner seem to not respect his work.

Despite Yahoo’s indifference, Delicious has somehow managed to maintain its cache and status as one of the leading social bookmarking services despite inroads by players such as Propeller and Mixx. Personally, I’ve used Delicious more frequently in recent months as a way to archive the huge number of links that I encounter every day.

For anyone who likes Delicious, it was encouraging when Avos, a company owned by Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, best known for starting a video start-up called YouTube, bought the company in April.

While Hurley and Chen have held their cards close to the chest since then, there is growing signs that a new and improved Delicious will soon be unveiled.

So far, Chen and Hurley have suggested Delicious will have a new design, as well as a new to tag and organize links. Given how the Web has become so much more social since Delicious launched eight years ago, it will be interested to see Delicious evolves.

One thing that has remained constant is the value of social bookmarks. With more links than ever being shared, there should be lots of potential for Delicious to re-establish itself as vibrant player within the social media landscape.

For more thoughts on the new Delicious, check out this post by Soshable.

Note: For Delicious users who want to continue to use their bookmarks, you have until Sept. 23 to  transfer your bookmarks and user data to the new site.

By Mark Evans - September 21st, 2011 - No Comments »
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Posted in Social Media

Is There Life Beyond the Social Media “Big Five”?

For all the companies operating in the social media marketplace, there are really only five options for companies looking to establish a strong presence: blogs (WordPress), Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube.

This is where the biggest “parties” are happening so it makes complete sense to focus your efforts on them. The “Big Five” sport the biggest audiences and, in theory, offer the biggest bang for the buck.

Their emergence as the dominant players reflects the natural evolution of any market in which there is a small group of large companies and a large pack of smaller companies with lots of aspiration but little market share.

One of the key questions, however, is whether there’s any value for companies to consider activity beyond the “Big Five”? Does it make sense to explore the use of MySpace, Foursquare, Flickr, Tumblr, Friendster or Orkut? And what about Gowalla, Posterous, Digg, del.icio.us and StumbleUpon?

While it is easy to just focus on the “Big Five”, there are plenty of interesting opportunities to leverage other social media services to serve different interests, audiences and geographies.

For example, MySpace, still had 64 million unique U.S. visitors last month, and has maintained its status as the social network for musicians and music fans. The company recently unveiled a new, cleaner home page that looks a lot like Facebook’s.

For companies looking to attract audiences in Brazil and Asia, Friendster is worth considering, while Google’s Orkut is a strong presence in India and Brazil.

Flickr doesn’t get much attention these days as Yahoo struggles to find its way but it had 23 million unique U.S. visitors last month. Tumblr is gaining a lot of traction as a user-friendly alternative to WordPress, while Digg is showing signs of life after badly sagging.

And then there’s new, emerging markets such as location-based services in which Foursquare and Gowalla are battling to establish strong footholds. Although still unproven, companies such as Ann Taylor and Starbucks are experimenting to see whether they have potential as new social media channels.

The challenge for many companies is trying to sift their way through the multitude of social media choices. In many cases, it is easier to simply stick to the “Big Five” because there’s less risk or guessing involved. It’s like the old adage that “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”.

That said, there are alternatives definitely worth exploring to take advantage of niche, emerging and geographic opportunities.

For some companies, using social media services off the beaten track could be a way to differentiate themselves in a marketplace in which everyone is using many of the same tools.


By Mark Evans - August 17th, 2010 - 1 Comment »
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Posted in Social Media

Life Beyond the Four Social Media Giants

As a growing number of companies embrace social media, a key strategic and tactical decision is selecting what social media services to use.

This process depends on determining the best fit for a particular business and its customers, as well as the social media services being used by the people that a company is trying to reach and engage.

Not surprisingly, the default choices are Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube because they are the most popular.

While these solid choices that no one is going to question, they’re just a small part of the massive social media “menu” in which there are thousands of choices that cater to different markets and interests.

In a recent blog post, Jay Baer made an excellent point that there is life beyond the “Big Four” but that “in the rush to “do” social media, companies are forgetting that the communities that are most social (and thus carry the most potential) are those that are topically focused.”

If you’re in the sports business, it’s a no-brainer to consider sports-specific social networks such as RootZoo, FanNation, ArmchairGM and BallHype.

If you’re in the food business, the non-Big Four options include FoodBuzz and Group Recipes.

In other words, there is a vibrant social media ecosystem beyond Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube.

It may take some time to find the right opportunities and establish a foothold within these communities but it’s worth the investment if these social networks meet your social media goals and objectives.

At the end of the day, you may discover that social media networks off the beaten track could be as valuable as the Big Four.

By Mark Evans - March 19th, 2010 - No Comments »
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Posted in Social Media

New Sysomos Report: How the Blogosphere Uses YouTube Videos

It may be a 500-channel television universe but the real action when it comes to what people are watching is videos, particularly YouTube videos.

We were curious about how bloggers use YouTube videos so we analyzed 2.5 million unique YouTube videos that had been embedded into blog posts or featured links between July and December, 2009. Here’s the complete report.

Some of the highlights include:

- There is no clear correlation between the rating of the video on YouTube and how often it is viewed. Videos with a rating of more than four out of five tend to have fewer views than those with a rating of two or three.

- Music videos are the most popular within blogs 31% of all analyzed videos, followed by entertainment (15%) and people and blogs (11%).

- 20-to-35 year old bloggers are most active in embedding and linking to videos within their posts with 57% of total videos coming from this demographic group.

- The average YouTube video within blogs is four minutes and 12 seconds, and the average number of views is 99,160.

You can find the YouTube/Blogosphere report here. The report also includes links to the most popular videos within the blogosphere.

The other special reports that Sysomos has published on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are here.

By Mark Evans - February 18th, 2010 - 3 Comments »
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Posted in Social Media

How to Pick the Right Social Media Service

socialmedia-signIn our last blog post, we talked the importance of having a focused approach to social media as opposed to trying to be all things to all people. If you buy into this theory, the next step is determining the best and most appropriate social media services that meet a company’s strategic and tactical needs.

The first – and probably most important – step is listening to what’s happening within the social media landscape. It’s a walk before you run approach that gives you a good handle on where the most conversations are happening about a company’s brand, products, services and industry.

If there’s lots of chatter on Twitter, it probably means Twitter is a good place to get involved. If there’s no action within the blogosphere, then maybe starting a blog isn’t such a good idea. All you want to do during the listening phase is discover the hot spots.

The next move is selecting a small handful – one to three – of social media services where the target audiences exist. Then, a company needs to determine whether it has the people who can run these services on a day-to-day basis, whether it needs to hire some people to dit, and whether there’s a budget (time/money) to make it happen.

Once these hurdles are handled, it comes down to tactical execution and making sure that whatever you do is sustained, enthusiastic and engaged. A key point to remember is social media is a long-term commitment in which tangible results can take time to materialize.

Sure, there are examples of companies that hit the social media jackpot with a video or contest that goes viral but these examples are few and far between even though you might get the impression they happen all the time based on how often they’re cited by social media consultants.

Another important consideration is that it’s important to take a flexible approach to social media. While you may have a well-defined social media strategy, you also need to go with the flow, experiment and be willing to change directions tactically if you’re not getting the desired results even after putting in the time.

Final point: despite the hype surrounding social media, it’s still early days. There’s lots of time to get involved so don’t feel like something has to happen right away. Take your time, study the landscape, and then take the plunge.

By Mark Evans - January 20th, 2010 - No Comments »
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Posted in Social Media

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