Short video on mobile: the story of 2014?
By Steve Keenan
I was pleasantly surprised to watch a report on BBC Newsnight this week about the rise of video on mobile.
Surprised, because it is a rare to see a report on social media that isn’t about privacy on Facebook, trolling on Twitter or any other slight of SM that is the standard old media angle. It was about technology, and was interesting at that (watch it here, starts 36’42′ in).
The co-founder of YouTube, Chad Hurley, was interviewed. He now works on Mixbit, an app and site that allows users to share bits of video and post. “The MixBit site is the first site that lets users collaborate with each other and remix videos uploaded by the community,” it says.
As we know, there is a proliferation of mobile video apps, from Vine and Intagram to Viddy and Socialcam. Hurley says what has changed since YouTube launched eight years ago is the proliferation of smartphone cameras which allow direct posting to social, bypassing the desktop.
Hence the rush among app developers, and the big boys, to gain users and traction. But no-one is winning yet, apart from maybe Facebook-owned Instagram, which has leveraged its existing users and swamped Vine - if the drop off in my Vine feed is anything to go by.
“No-one really knows the magic formula that will work well for video. In the case of video, no-one has really figured out what the framework is like. Who thought that a year ago, six-second videos (Vine) would be the right way to generate really popular social video sharing?” said Guy Rosen of Onavo Insights.
The eight-minute Newsnight report also featured Directr, which raised $1.1m in funding a year ago and helps users make better videos by creating storyboards. “Video is hard,” says CEO Max Goldman. “It’s not like taking a photo and slapping a filter on it.”
Newsnight postulates the theory that short-form video will be an imperative for commercial companies in the future, which is of course feasible. But with 99% of video being appalling in quality, it’s very interesting to hear about the next generation of apps that emphasise sharing, collaboration and editing to make them better.
I heard this week of an ex-BBC journalist launching courses on how to edit video on an iPhone. Even better. I’ve banged on for the past three years about how video will be the most important aspect of social media - I just hadn’t thought through the mobile video aspects properly. I am now. Thanks Newsnight.
New York City powers ahead on social and digital
This is the first feature in a five-part focus on how NYC uses social media in travel. To read the rest of the report, written for WTM London, click here
HEADING to New York City this year? Don’t worry about staying in touch – you’re heading to one of the world’s most connected cities.
There is now 98% connectivity in the city’s residential areas, and every public library has free wifi. So do many of the parks. Quite aside from the coffee shops, hotels and restaurants.
Forgot your charger? Again, help is at hand – free, solar-powered phone charging stations have been installed at 25 locations throughout the city this summer.
New York’s stated aim is to be the world’s leading digital city - and what it is doing for its residents is having direct, beneficial spin-off for visitors and tourists alike, with social media at the heart of distributing information.
Helping spearhead the charge is Rachel Haot (pictured above with Mayor Bloomberg), appointed in January, 2011, to be NYC’s chief digital officer. Born in Manhattan, and raised and educated in New York, Haot went on to found GroundReport, a crowdsourced news service, before joining the Mayor’s Office, aged 28.
Her first 90 days were spent putting together a background report on the city’s digital roadmap. Then shortly afterwards, she was to marry her newly-found knowledge of local government with her social media skills when Hurricane Irene hit town.
As Vogue reported in October, 2011, Haot was “at the centre of a real-time experiment in how a municipal government networks with its citizens during a natural disaster. It involved coordinating the city’s use of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr, Crowdmap, and its own Web site and data mine to send out alerts (“Stay indoors”), provide maps with citizen-submitted photos and reports (downed trees, power outages), and answer questions spreading through the digital sphere.”
Now there are 300 social media channels in New York City, for New Yorkers to send a photo about a manhole cover missing, sign up for email updates or send a question to Mayor Bloomberg on the city’s Tumblr account.
“We want to make sure everyone gets online,” she says. That includes lower-income households, hence initiatives such as extending free wifi, while another project - Made in New York - is giving grants to help start ups open and get online in the city. “Infrastructure is No 1,” she adds. “The city is working hard to increase the amount of fibre connectivity.”
Storify, TechCrunch and Livestream are among resident social/digital companies, with Storify recently announcing it is to hire 130 more engineers to add to its 200+ staff. A quick Linkedin search I made one one day in June also showed 470 jobs available for social media managers in the city - New York is giving Silicon Valley and Boston a run for the title of America’s digital capital.
There has been a hackathon to formulate ideas to rebuild the city’s website, while the first of a series of meetings with residents was held this month to discuss the next phase of the digital roadmap. And New York has also succeeded in getting its own domain suffix. Haot posted on her Twitter account (@rachelhaot): “Follow @dotnyc to stay informed on next steps for .NYC, rolling out in late 2013/early 2014 - http://mydotnyc.com.”
It was followed up by: “Want to build an app using @nycgov open data? Over 2,000 data sets, from WiFi hotspots to water fountain locations: http://nyc.gov/data.”
And the ever-active Haot tweeted a photo of people using the new solar-powered charging stations - an idea that is hoped to become permanent after the three-month experiment this summer. And certainly an idea other cities can be expected to adopt, for residents and tourists.
Coding and digital engineering are helping transform the city to enable it to tackle challenges. But it will always need social media to get the message across, a lesson for travel and other industry leaders to understand.
TAKEAWAYS
* The importance of connectivity in your hotel, restaurant or resort. Being permanently plugged into social is now an imperative.
* The value of engaging with your community (be it readers, clients or neighbours) to buy into your plans, and help evolve them.
Facebook’s new promotion and competition rules
Many small travel companies have thought to themselves “Why don’t I use Facebook to run a promotion or contest to get more people engaged with my business?” However, until now, it has been something of a convoluted process and a potential minefield for small businesses.
Until the rules changed last week, there were strict limits on how you could run promotions and competitions and the types of activity that were allowed to encourage people to enter.
The biggest change is that competitions and promotions no longer need to be administered through a third-party app, such as Shortstack and SnapApp, and can be simply carried out on a Page’s timeline. Apps can still be used to make more visually appealing competitions.
The change to allow entry on timelines means that companies can now solicit entries by having users post on, message, comment on or like a brand’s page. Likes can also now be used as a voting mechanism.
Some readers of this blog will probably be thinking, “Hang on a minute I have already been doing that anyway”. In fact, such promotions and competitions have been against Facebook’s rules but they have been widely ignored or the companies behind them have been unaware that they have been breaking the rules.
However, Facebook points out that companies are not allowed to encourage people to like or comment on their own personal timelines as an entry mechanism. It also means that shares are not a permitted entry mechanism. In its promotion guidelines, Facebook says, ” We want to make sure that people continue to post authentic, high quality content to their Facebook Timelines to stay better connected with the people they care about.”
Another change is that companies are now not allowed to encourage users to tag themselves in photos that they are not actually depicted in.
Facebook says, ” It’s OK to ask people to submit names of a new product in exchange for a chance to win a prize. It’s not OK to ask people tag themselves in pictures of a new product in exchange for a chance to win a prize.”
Get ready for a wave of new competitions and promotions from small travel companies seeking more likes on their Facebook pages as a result. And a deluge of spammy fake followers too.
The future of search? This time it’s personal
By Mark Frary
Some people will call it yet another encroachment on personal privacy while others will be desperate to get their hands on it?
And what is it? It is Google’s My Answers and is an indication of where we might all be going soon when it comes to searching our own information. read more
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