Less Clutter. Less Noise. In Church Communications

Good video interview about communications and how to get your newsletter and news out to people involved with your organisation.

This video is a great introduction to using social media to promote your blog.

Twitter’s EarlyBird deals. Watch the video about how Twitter is looking at making it’s savings and deal’s offering come alive.

For the world cup. An augmented reality application from Pringles. You can make Peter do his famous robot dance. Its a nice use of the augmented reality technology.

A new way of using t-shirts with webcams that use augmented reality. This is a great way of using printed t-shirts that is a noval way of interating with the website. The website plays you at Rock Paper Scissors. I wonder who will be using this kind of idea in the future.

The website to play on is:

Rock Paper Scissors T-Shirt using Augmented Reality

A good video that isunder 5 minutes long, and explains a load about social media and how to make a mark on it.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/alexis_ohanian_how_to_make_a_splash_in_social_media.html

The video features Alexis, one of the founders of reddit, and he talks about the Greenpeace whale naming vote. That they backed.

There are 2 messages that Alexis mentions:

• Let go, don’t be afraid to let the audience have some control.
• Have fun, if you want to do well in viral or social media, then you need something that is fund.

Have a watch and share your thoughts.

Today I found an a really good example of an artist using all the different social media’s like twitter, facebook and youtube. The artist is called Imogen Heap and she has been blogging, twittering and using video blogging to engage with fans over the production of her new album.

Her youtube channel has had a small updates regualry asking fans for feedback through the new album production. And she regulary uses 12seconds to showcase thoughts and work.

Also she talks indepth about the struggles and successes of making the album and uses the video platform to really give fans an insight the production and thinking that go into the album. There is more in this article http://threeminds.organic.com/2009/09/unleashing_the_artist_within_t.html which goes into more depth about what Imogen is doing.

For anyone that is making music or even any businesses this seems like a good method to follow to really connect with your fans and make them fell part of everything. Which leads to more sales hopefully.

Application

The video updates are a good example of not just using video for viral video marketing, but using video marketing in a way that engages people and gives them more insight into what makes your product and how much work you put into them.

If you have a product that people can engage with you even participate in, then maybe the use of social media will create a load of evangelists for your product.

Everyone by now has probably heard about the Kanye West / Taylor Swift VMA Award thing, where Kanye West supposedly ‘disrupted’ Taylor Swift’s speech and said that Beyonce’s Video was better. The funny thing is how many people have voiced there own opionion about it. If you search for this on you tube there are litterly thousands of people with a webcam shot video either sharing there side of the story or saying that everyone should stop talking about it, thus making even more chatter about it. It has blown up on Twitter too.

I thought this ‘stunt’ was pretty rubish from MTV but now I changed my mind. If you look at the views some of these webcam videos have got I counted over 1 million views just on one. The amount of web chatter, and buzz this generated surly is beyond was even the event marketing people could have thought.

I guess its a lesson in viral marketing, but with an interesting twist, rather a video that gets shown everywhere, the content keeps getting created by the crowd, by people who have listeners and everyone jumping in on the debate. It is an interesting thought that could this be applied to other types of products. That is the challenge I am trying to take up now, can I think of things like this that grows for my clients.

And now this post has just added another comment on the stunt, so it continues to grow.

Having a twitter page and facebook are now not just good enough anymore, you need to get people to actually read them!

An article about SEO for facebook and twitter from imediaconnection gives some tips on how to optimize your SEO for the social networking pages. This applies to more than just these two as well. I think that these tips can be used for most social marketing methods.

http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/24335.asp

The highlights are:

• Social media pages are like any other, but with the built-in benefit of residing on a very powerful domain
• Use Facebook’s “about” box for relevant content and keyword-rich descriptions
• The first 40 characters in a tweet are what appears on a search engine; use them wisely
• Create a custom Twitter background showing links to your other social media pages

Ok, so need to get my Twitter sorted out then.

I watched this video called the “100 Famous Rock Guitar Riffs”, the video was made by a guitar teacher and session musician. Not only is it a good watch and as a guitarist I know that trying to remember all that in one take is well hard, but it has had over 340,000 views of the video. Wow! that is a load more than just having a website or even placing an ad somewhere. The youtube page links to his website so people can see about him.

If you have a service or product that you do, it may be something to think about, doing something that is fun but will attract alot of attention. Start thinking about how to promote your service using social video.