All video is no the same… it really does depend on what channel you are looking to post it to.
Where your audience is should frame what channels you are looking that.
In turn, those channels should have a big say in how long your video should be.
So, if you are aiming at people on Facebook, 15 seconds for video that is likeley to drop through the timeline is best. Longer than that and your audience is likely to be evaporating.
Here’s an update on the optimum times.
There is research that says 30 seconds for LinkedIn is enough.
There’s a number of other ways to present video I’ve not touched upon. VIMEO has fallen behind in recent years but still has fans and you can upload via VIMEO LIVE with a premium account. You can go live via YOUTUBE LIVE but there is little accessible guidance for the amateur. FLICKR can take video of up to 1GB but will only play back the first three minutes.
360 & VR Facebook and YouTube in particular are chasing this new way of shooting video but there is little out there on maximum and optimum upload times.
Back in the olden days video online was so simple… chucked it up onto YouTube and share the link.
Those days have long gone. The web is a different place and people use different channels in different ways.
On Twitter and Facebook where you scroll through your timeline your attention span is shorter. On YouTube, where you can go looking for content on specific subjects it can be longer.
This is a list of the maximum length for content and also the optimum time based on research:
Other questions to ask
Of course, the length of your dependent on a few factors. ‘Is your audience using this channel?’ is a key question.
‘Is the video useful?’ is also a key question. Does it have sub-titles? Music? There’s a few other questions to ask but the optimum video length is a good starting point.
The last time I blogged the optimum a few months back people asked for the source of the research. So this time, here are some links to help you. Not all the channels have an optimum length. Periscope, for example.
LINKEDIN is the new kid on the block with native uploaded video. Five minutes is the most you can upload and there is no clear research on what is optimum. As a platform, I’d guess it falls between the 45 seconds of Twitter as video falls into the timeline. But often people post ‘how to’ videos that run beyond the YouTube max of three minutes.
Other platforms
There’s a number of other ways to present video I’ve not touched upon. VIMEO has fallen behind in recent years but still has fans and you can upload via VIMEO LIVE with a premium account. You can go live via YOUTUBE LIVE but there is little accessible guidance for the amateur. FLICKR can take video of up to 1GB but will only play back the first three minutes.
360 & VR Facebook and YouTube in particular are chasing this new way of shooting video but there is little out there on maximum and optimum upload times.
Useful? Not half as useful as the new round of ESSENTIAL VIDEO SKILLS FOR COMMS workshops in Edinburgh, Manchester, London and Birmingham. More here.
There was a brilliant update on Twitter the other day which hit the nail right on the head.
“The best social media,” it read “doesn’t happen in an office.”
That’s dead right.
For a long while now I’ve been arguing that communications people should share the sweets, relax a little and learn to let go. It’s by doing that they can really reap the rewards of good and trusted communications channels.
I’m not alone by any means in thinking this and it’s excellent to start seeing the rewards being reaped.
Here are some good examples of digital communications that caught my eye over the last few months.
What’s worth commenting on is that the majority of the good examples are not done directly by comms people. They’re done by people in the field telling their stories or they’re using content that first originated outside an office to tell a story.
Real time updates by people on the ground work brilliantly.
Back in 2008, digital innovation in the public sector – and third sector – was isolated. What this quick link collection now shows is that it’s mainstream and unstoppable.
Twitter
National Trust Dudmaston Hall, Shropshire – If only more organisations were like the National Trust. We’d all be eating better cake for one. They’re also getting good at digital communications. They’re equipping venues with social media accounts to give you updates and insights from the ground.
I’m quite partial to this stream from the Shropshire stately home which is near Bridgnorth and a personal family favourite. They talk to people and they update. More people are likely to sign-up for a venue rather than an organisation that looks after lots of venues although there is a space for that too. You can follow them on Twitter here.
Acton Scott Museum, Shropshire – An imaginative use of pictures makes this Twitter stream fly. How can you not see horse drawn ploughing and not want to go and visit? You can follow them on Twitter here.
National Trust Central Fells – Using the principle if you do good things tell people the @ntcentralfells Twitter do a good job of updating people on the work they do. Most of the time it’s witnessed by two walkers and some sheep. They updated progress on building a bridge in a remote spot of Easedale in with pictures of them at work and reaped the benefit of feedback from people stuck in offices. You can follow them on Twitter here.
Supt Keith Fraser – A Superintendant in Walsall who keeps people up to speed with events and crime in the town. Personable. Informative and willing to engage on the platform. You can follow him here.
Swedish Tourist Board – It’s rather marvellous is this. Technically, it’s run by the Swedish Tourist Board but this isn’t a collation of picture book shots and platitudes. They give the @sweden Twitter to a new Swede every week. More than 20,000 people follow it. You can follow them here.
I know this writer! Qaisar Mahmood askes what it means to be Swedish. The answer he gets: ”Blond and reserved”. svd.se/nyheter/idagsi…
Walsall Council Countryside Officers – I’m a bit biased in that I know Morgan Bowers the countryside ranger but I absolutely love what she has done with social media. A digital native she uses her iphone to update Twitter with what she is doing, what newt survey results are and pictures of the sky over Barr Beacon. This is brilliant. You can follow her on Twitter here. Her manager Kevin Clements has also picked up the baton on Twitter with regular updates. You can follow him here and it’s good to see the burden shared.
Walsall Council Environmental Health Officer David Matthews – Britain’s first tweeting environmental health officer David Matthews was a big part in why Walsall 24 worked as an event. He was able to spot snippets of interest that he passed through for others to tweet. Afterwards, he didn’t need much persuasion to take up an account in his own name. The @ehodavid was puts out the normal updates and warnings but with added humour. Much of the frontline updates is anonymised. Pictures taken of dreadful takeaways need a health warning to look at during lunchtime. You can follow him here.
9 cases of Campylobacter food poisoning last week Symptoms include diarrhoea/vomiting/stomach/pains+cramps+fever FAQ? tinyurl.com/boeanm2
Pc Rich Stanley blog – Walsall has a stong claim to be a digital outpost. One of the big reasons for this is the way West Midlands Police have picked up the baton – or should that be truncheon? – and embraced social media. Pc Rich Stanley uses Twitter well but also blogs excellently on various day-to-day aspects of the job. Here he talks about policing the Aston Villa v Chelse football game.
Walsall Council Social Care – People in social care do a brilliant job. They’re good at saving lives. Literally. But all too often they don’t do a good jo of telling their story. As a sector they shelter behind big stone walls and hope a high profile case like Baby P NEVER happens to them. Tina Faulkner and Becky Robinson are comms people who both understand old and new media and have blogged stories from the frontline. You can read them here.
Audioboo
Walsall Leather Museum Audioboo – Francesca Cox eyes lit up when she heard of Audioboo. A couple of days later she posted this chat with a demonstrator about her first day at work. What the clip does is open up all sorts of possibilities with oral history and when embedded on another website brings a different aspect to this. [gigya src=”http://boos.audioboo.fm/swf/fullsize_player.swf” flashvars=”mp3=http%3A%2F%2Faudioboo.fm%2Fboos%2F721044-first-day-at-work.mp3%3Fsource%3Dwordpress&mp3Author=Leathermuseum&mp3LinkURL=http%3A%2F%2Faudioboo.fm%2Fboos%2F721044-first-day-at-work&mp3Time=11.02am+21+Mar+2012&mp3Title=First+day+at+work” width=”400″ height=”160″ allowFullScreen=”true” wmode=”transparent”]
Pinterest
US Army – Like geeks with an interest in sub-machine guns the people behind the US Army social media presence are blending both interests well. Pinterest is a way to collect pictures in the one place. If pictures tell 1,000 words this collection speaks a great deal on what messages the military would like to get across. It’s split into themes. You can find it here.
Facebook
Can We Make Walsall A More Creative Place? – Walsal Council’s regeneration scrutiny committee wanted to look at the creative industries. We launched a Facebook page to begin to connect. Fifty people have liked it so far to allow the start of feedback. Face-to-face meetings are now planned. You can like it here.
NASA Facebook timeline – One of the many things I really love about this page is the way NASA have embraced timeline. Scroll back to 1965 and you can look at content they’ve updated from that year featuring the first NASA spacewalk. For any organisation with a long history this approach is a must. You can like it here.
Northycote Park and Country Park on Facebook – Wolverhampton Council’s parks team do a really good job of innovating using social media. They’ve been experimenting with creating Facebook pages for venues. This is Northycote Park and Country Park and has 200 likes a few weeks after it was launched. It has pictures of new born lambs and updates on events. You can like it here.
Monmouthshire Council Youth Service on Facebook – Hel Reynolds has flagged up this page. A youth worker updates it. Not a comms person. This means that it has a tone that suits the people it is aimed at and doesn’t come over as trendy uncle Monmouth breakdancing at a wedding. You can like it here.
Flickr
US government’s EPA Documerica project on Flickr – In the early 1970s the Documerica project sent photographers to capture environmental issues across the country. They captured car jams, low flying planes, people meeting up in public spaces and other things. They’ve posted many of the images onto Flickr and they’re a time capsule of how the US was. You can see them here. To update them they have a blog to encourage a 2012 version here and a Flickr group here.
Torfaen Council on Flickr – Here’s a council that is posting images to Flickr routinely. They show a good range of images that residents can see. You can see them here.
Covering meetings
WV11 on PACT meetings – The wv11 blog have worked with West Midlands Police to cover public meetings – known as PACT meetings – to allow residents to pose questions and see what is happening in their patch. It’s great work and shows how you can connect to people who want to be civic minded but struggle to reach meetings. You can read a blog of a meeting here and a storify here.
Birmingham City Council – Comms officer Geoff Coleman has done some excellent work with live streaming council meetings. It opens up democracy and promotes transparency. It’s netted 10,000 views. You can read about it here.
Crowd sourcing
Birmingham City Council’s election plans – This year plans to be a big year in Birmingham. There’s a chance of a change of administration and there will be great attention on the council and most importantly, how they communicate the changes in real time. What better way than crowd source what people want? You can read it here.
YouTube
Caerphilly Council – Digital video clips are easy to consume but notoriously difficult to do effectively. Many have tried in local government but few have been as effective as Caerphilly Council with their nationally sigificant use of YouTube clips. One clip both pokes gentle fun at themselves and features a sheep with social media logos roaming the borough. It makes you smile. It keeps you informed. It’s fleecey brilliance.
If William Wordsworth was alive today he’d be using Twitter.
Not the old stick-in-the-mud he became but the young man fired by revolution.
Why? Because he celebrated the English countryside through the media of the day.
How we think of the landscape was shaped by Wordsworth. Before him, mountains were frightful places. After? Beautiful. And Willie cashed in with an 1810 Guide to the Lakes that was the iphone app of its day.
Exploring how our countryside team could use social media made me trawl through some examples.
Whoever said places work can really well on social media were bang on. That’s especially true of parks and countryside. So how is social media being used by to promote the countryside? There’s some really good ideas in patches out there but nothing fundamentally game changing that makes you sit up and write verse. That says to me that there is plenty of potential.
Photography should be at the heart of what the public sector does with countryside and parks. Why? Because a picture tells a 1,000 words. Because they can bring a splash of green into someone’s front room or phone at one click. Criminally, many sites should be promoting the countryside relegate images to a postage stamp picture.
Here are 10 interesting uses:
1. The British Countryside Flickr group has more than 4,000 members and some amazing images. It’s a place where enthusiastic amateur photographers can share pictures and ideas.
2. Peak District National Park chief executive Jim Dixon leads from the front. He blogs about his job at www.jimdixon.wordpress.com and tweets through @peakchief. It’s a good mix of retweeting interesting content and puts a human face on an organisation.
3. Foursquare, Walsall Council added a landmark in a park as a location. The Pit Head sculpture in Walsall Wood was added to encourage people to visit and check-in. You can also make good use of ‘tips’ by adding advice.
4. On Twitter, @uknationalparks represents 15 UK national parks run a traditional Twitter feed with press releases, RTs and some conversation. With 2,000 followers it’s on 145 lists.
5. But you don’t have to be in a national park to do a goods job. In Wolverhampton, @wolvesparkies have a brilliantly engagingly conversational Twitter stream. There is passion, wit and information that make most councils seem the RSS press release machine that they are.
6. National Trust have an excellent Facebookprofile. You may get the impression that members are 65 and own a Land Rover. That doesn’t come across here. They observe one of the golden rules of social media. Use the language of the platform. It’s laid back and it’ll tell you when events are planned.
Yorkshire Dales by Chantrybee
7. Even more relaxed is the quite new I Love Lake District National Park is quite brilliant. It allows RSS, it blogs and it really encourages interaction. Heck, they even encourage people to post to the wall so they can move shots into albums.
8. On YouTube, West Sussex County Council have a slick short film on tree wardens that deserves more than 45 views in five months. Or does this show how much take up there is on YouTube?
9. The rather wonderful parksandgardens.ac.uk is an ambitious online tool for images of 6,500 parks and gardens and the people who created and worked in them. @janetedavis flagged this up. It’s a project she worked on and she should be proud of it. There’s a school zone to to connect to young people too and is populated by google map addresses and photographs. Really and truly, council parks and countryside pages should look like this but mostly don’t.
10. Less a government project, or even social media Cumbria Live TV celebrate the landscape they work in utterly brilliantly. Slick and powerful broadcast quality three minute films do more than most to capture the jaw dropping awe of the fells. They self-host some brilliant films on a changing site. Check them out here.
EIGHT things you CAN do aside from write bad poetry about daffodils and shepherds called Michael…
1. A Facebook fan page to celebrate a park or open space. Call it I love Barr Beacon. Yes, the Friends group can use it as a meeting place. But naming it after the place not the organisation leaves the door open to the public too.
2. Give a countryside ranger a Twitter account. Use @hotelalpha9 as an inspiration. Let them update a few times a day with what they’ve been up to. Post mobile phone pictures too.
3. Despite a dearth of amateur good examples there’s potential in short films to promote countryside. You only have to point a camera at something photogenic for people to come over all Lake Poet.
Flowers by Vilseskogen
4. Start a Flickr group to celebrate your patch of countryside. Walsall has 1,000 acres of parks and countryside with amazing views and vistas.
5. Start a blog. WordPress takes minutes to set-up and after messing around only a short time to master. Tell people what you are up to. Whack up a few images. Lovely. For no cost.
6. Make your countryside and parks pages a bit more web 2.0. Use mapping to set out a location. Use Flickr images – with permission – to showcase the place.
7. Add your parks and countryside to a geo-location site such as Foursquare. If the future of social media is location, location, location then venues, landmarks and places will score big.
8. Text. With more mobile phones in the UK than people sometimes the humble text message can be overlooked as part of the package of ways to connect with people. Most councils are also text enabled. Create info boards around a park or countryside with numbers to text to recieve info on what they can see. Change it for the seasons to make best use.
Picture credits:
Newlands Valley, Lake District, UK: Dan Slee.
Wordsworth: Creative commons courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.
Months before Stephen Fry turned Twitter’s guns on injustice a happy band of cricketers got there first.
Instead of Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir the target was the heirarchy of a Midlands village cricket club.
Angry at the ousting of Fillongley 2nd XI cricket captain Richard Bennet the Save Benno campaign was launched.
Inspired by Barack Obama, Soccer AM and Top Gear the Save Benno online campaign was started across a blog, You Tube with more than 300 views and Twitter with 440 followers.
PRESSURE
It raised a smile, support and pressure on the powers that be.
Every time the club’s committee tried to outflank the campaign with the club’s rule book it was across social media. They appeared wholly out manoevred by the protesting players.
The campaign was designed by frustrated player David Howells and his team mates. In the end they were beaten by the club’s committee. But was it all fruitless? Not entirely. A point was made.
It was also an imaginative marker for how a campaign using social media could be waged.
What could be the first cricket match arranged over Twitter was also played as a result. Looking for a fixture Save Benno used Twitter to broadcast an appeal.
‘NO BRAINER’
As press officer for Stone SP Cricket Club and a Twitter user the fixture was a no brainer.
The game was excellent, except for my comedy run out with just 1 run on the board.
Aside from this, it was an excellent match decided by a boundary hit on the final ball.
Footage shot on Flip was taken for a Sky Sports-style highlights package. After much beer was drunk in the Pavillion that idea got kind of scaled down.
Instead an A Team-style You Tube calling card was made for more fixtures.
SO, WHAT DID IT PROVE?
1. Social media are excellent campaigning tools.
2. Sports teams looking for fixtures can use Twitter.
3. Sports teams should use Twitter to broadcast score updates.
4. Flip video highlights packages for You Tube are a brilliant idea.
5. Brilliant ideas are dreamed up over a beer.
6. Cricket is a superb sport played by superb people. It’s just the administrators that let it down.
7. If you are not part of the conversation (in this case the committee were not) you look leaden footed, slow and unresponsive.
We’ve all been there. The You Tube clip starts. Fatboy Slim ‘Right Here, Right Now’ fades in and you are bombarded with fact after fact with one almighty underlying message. The world is changing. Get with the plan, Stan or join the Linotype machine operators in the dole queue.
“But I just can’t taken it all in,” you think. “Isn’t there just a crib sheet to all this so I can take it all in myself?”
To ease fact overload here is a crib sheet of Socialnomics 09’s ‘Social Medis: Is it a Fad?’
Chew over. Question. Digest…..
By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber baby boomers. 96 per cent of them will have joined a social network.
Social media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the web.
1 out of 8 couples married in the US last year met via social media.
Years to reach 50 million users: Radio 38 years, TV 13 years, Internet 4 years, Ipod 3 years
Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months.
Ipod app downloads hit 1 billion in 9 months.
If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest. Yet China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million users.
2009 US Dept of Education study revealed that on average, online students outperformed those recievibg face-to-face instruction.
1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum.
80 per cent of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees.
The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55 to 65 yearold females.
Ashton Kucher and Ellen deGeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire population of Ireland, Norway and Panama.
80 per cent of Twitter usage is on mobile phone devices. People update anywhere, anytime. Imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
Generation X and Y consider email passe. In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing email addresses to incoming freshmen.
What happens on Vegas stays on Twitter, Facebook, bebo, flickr, digg.
If you were paid a dollar evertime an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour.
34 per cent of bloggers post opinions about products or brands? Do you like what they are saying about your brand?
78 per cent of peope trust peer recommendations. Only 14 per cent trust advertisements.
24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record circulation declines.
In the near future we will no longer search for goods and services. They will find us via social media.
Social media isn’t a fad. Its a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.
