Videomeme

Movie Buzz Chart Launched

New chart! Now you can see the top twenty most buzzed about movie clips on the Viral Video Chart. 300 has more buzz than the rest of the movies put together at the moment!

Charts Now Updating Every 15 mins

We've just done a complete overhaul of the machinery behind the Viral Video Chart. We're now updating all chart data every 15 minutes so you'll see things zooming up and down the top 20 during the day. This means we'll catch breaking videos much faster. Previously we were publishing static data that was frozen at midnight and we didn't update stuff til the following midnight - way too slow!!!

We've also done some major improvements that'll speed up chart generation, allowing  us to publish lots more charts for interesting types of video content. More soon.

One unforeseen consequence is that we've fucked up our ability to show movement  up / down compared to the previous day. That's why all the arrows have disappeared. Oops. We'll add this info back soon. We could have waited and corrected this before deploying the latest improvements, but we don't like doing that. We get itchy if we don't deploy new code every day and don't like lots of stuff building up in the pipeline.

How deeply should your brand try to connect with me?

Assuming I'm interested, that's a lot like asking how deeply you should try to connect in a personal relationship. Connected marketing is about nothing more than forming and deepening relationships with your customers and prospective customers. So the answer's easy. As deeply as possible. (Which may be more or less deep, depending on the product you're selling).

It's interesting to see how Nivea is trying to create a little bit of blue water between the Nivea brand and the blog that DBM have set up to solicit feedback from people in the UK trying out the Goodbye Cellulite product for the first time.

In one respect, this distance seems well-intentioned. Nivea is trying to make it clear that they're not moderating or controlling any of the content or feedback on the DBM blog. Quite right, too. If you give people the tools to talk back to you, you have to let them bite.

In another respect, though, this distance represents a  lost opportunity. Nivea staff should be contributing to the blog and they should certainly be responding to comments. If you want me to talk to you, you have to make it clear that you're listening and you have to make it clear that you'll respond.

To be clear, I don't mean Nivea should have someone from the marketing department writing copy and trying to be warm and fuzzy with me. Ick! I mean they should find someone who's worked on the product, ideally a scientist who's spent a couple of years in the lab perfecting  it, and have them talk to me honestly and openly about the joys and -  this bit is important - the agonies of bringing this product to market. 

If you're going to persuade me that your product is worth trying, this is the person who's going to do it. It's also the person I'm going to be most motivated to give feedback to - because they'll care about it and be likely to do something about it. Not because they're paid to. But because they've invested two years of their life in the product and their honor, reputation and self-esteem are all on the line.

Hello Bloggers - Goodbye Cellulite

Nivea's campaign for it's new Goodbye Cellulite product is kinda interesting. It's online only - no TV, no print, no outdoor, no nothing - and centres around a blog that's soliciting feedback from people who've been sent product samples, and a bunch of videos.

(Disclosure: we're being paid by the marketing agency, DBM, who created the blog, to track the buzz around this campaign measure the online impact of the blog and the videos. Note: we have not been paid or even asked to write this post. To be totally clear, no one is being paid to blog about the product and that's one of the things that I like about the campaign: it's asking real people to give honest feedback and is simply trying to increase the visibility of that feedback).

 

Sending out product samples to people and encouraging them to blog about the results, both on their own blogs and on the DBM blog, is smart. If this product does what it promises, the results will be obvious and there'll be plenty of  people making genuine recommendations. Giving product samplers lightweight  tools to do that and surfacing the conversations is a great idea.

The video strategy, on the other hand, seems much less sure-footed. The one below is over two-and-a-half minutes long, which seems incredibly long-form. It's moderately shareable. You can get the embed code from the DBM blog, though not from the BoreMe page where it's been seeded, and not from the Nivea microsite.

The Nivea microsite makes me go absolutely bonkers. It opens in a pop-up window and suppresses the address bar. So if I want to send you a link to one of  the videos, there's nary a URL in sight. Not smart. Wouldn't be so bad if the inbuilt tell-a-friend feature was usable. It isn't. Dark colors, low contrast, input fields too small for the inputs, no indication as to what inputs are mandatory. I managed to fire off an email to a friend, but it took me two or three goes. The video's OK, but I'm not going to go through this much pain to send it on to someone.

UPDATE: I've updated this post to make it clear that although the DBM blog is about Nivea's Goodbye Cellulite product, Nivea are not writing, controlling, moderating or responding to any of the content on that blog.

 

 

PS3 Song - How to Kill a Brand

This anti-PS3 video is very good. Slick, malicious, funny and enough truth to wound. We picked it up in our top 20 global videos on Sunday, just 4 days after it was uploaded to YouTube.   A few days later, it's been all over the blogosphere (Note to Sony: have you any idea just how influential some of those blogs are?), it's clocked up 300,000 views and nearly two thousand edgy comments, and it's apparently been making some waves down at Sony's HQ this afternoon.

If I were Sony, I'd hire a talented comic singer-song writer and a good videographer to come up with a response. And fast. I mean, the target's Microsoft, for pete's sake, how hard can it be? Make a spoof advert for their new combined gaming-console-cum-cell-phone.  Or something.

Oh, and I'd also buy the keyword "PS3 Song" on AdWords and do something smart with it. These surely aren't the search results Sony wants us to see. Tell me how great you are. Laugh about the clip. Offer me a discount if I do something. But for god's sake, don't sit their paralysed, giving me radio silence and pretend like it's not happening.

Hey, you know what. Screw making a response piece. Just post and promote this video of Steve Ballmer screaming and dancing like a monkey everywhere. Once the sweaty balding mania has got inside your head, it's very hard to dislodge, and very hard to buy Microsoft again.  That would take seconds to execute and cost no more than a few hundred dollars.

Introducing The Book

No. 6 in the chart today and yesterday, but only 40,000 views so far, we predict this is going to get bigger.

*Update*

The original video was blogged over 600 times and did I think hit a million views before it got pulled. I've changed the embed code to a reposted version of the video, which is currently on about 60,000 views.

Chart Widget

We've  just  launched a chart widget  so you can embed today's top 20 videos in the sidebar of your blog (see right) or in a post like this one (below).

It's dynamic, so there'll be fresh stuff in every day. Please tell us which blogging platforms support this...and which ones don't!!!

Source: Viral Video Chart

Not All Views Are Equal

From an interview with Scott Kirsner, of the newly opened up Variety.

Variety: What are the challenges of measuring the popularity of videos across multiple sites? Is a view on MySpace really the same thing as a view on Revver or YouTube?

VVC: No, different sites count a video as being viewed at different points in the viewing cycle, and of course some sites still don't publish view data at all. It's precisely because of the difficulty of verifying and normalising view data that we don't use view data as the basis for our video charts. We collect our own data, measuring the number of people embedding and linking to videos on their own blogs and personal websites. This buzz metric lets us publish a list of the most popular videos that's unaffected by definitional discrepancies, view-fraud or marketing expenditure.

Variety: Do you feel that most sites' data about the number of times a video is viewed is pretty reliable? 

VVC: No, absolutely not. With many video sites, you can simply open up the page with your video on it and set your browser to automatically refresh the page. This is a really simple way to inflate viewing figures, requiring almost no specialist knowledge.  We estimate that at least 200,000 videos a day are currently being uploaded to video sharing sites. Getting your video noticed amongst this ocean of content is hard. So the prize for getting your video onto the homepages or most viewed lists of MySpace or YouTube is huge, and the incentive to game these sites really strong.

To combat this, some video sites are beginning to use third parties to verify view figures, particularly in cases where a marketing agency has paid to have their video campaign placed and promoted on the site.

Variety: What about compiling an accurate number of views for a video that may be posted on multiple sites, by multiple people?

VVC: That's hard. We have tools to help us detect the same video on multiple sites (or on the same site, posted by different people) and we aggregate figures where this happens. Some of the video sites are working on audio and visual 'fingerprinting' but these techniques are being developed chiefly to detect copyright-infringing clips. They haven't yet been proven to work at Internet-scale and don't address some of the subtler issues of content identity that we're concerned with. From our point of view, a longer clip or a differently edited clip may be materially different content but fingerprinting techniques, which are based on sampling, are not designed to care about these issues, because they're not particularly salient to the enforcement of intellectual property rights.

Variety: It seems like we don't really know much about how much video content is being viewed on sites like  NBC.com or BBC.co.uk or ABC.com, do we? Those sites don't seem to present the number of views they deliver, for a show like "Lost," for example, as public information.... 

VVC: This is something we'd like to work on, but it will require greater co-operation from the sites themselves. We'd be delighted to talk to any large media outlet that delivers a significant number of video streams.

Variety: Are there other problems or barriers that still exist, in terms of measuring which video content people are watching?

VVC: Sure. There are other well-known deceptive practices designed to increase viewing figures. Many videos are misleadingly titled. And there's an increasing tendency to manipulate the thumbnail image produced for the video by briefly inserting an unrelated still image halfway into the video. Images of bare skin tend to work pretty well. And deceptive practices aside, legitimate, paid-for marketing activities are increasingly being used to drive traffic to commercially produced video content that's hosted on YouTube or MySpace. So it's incredibly difficult to get a real measure of what, in a grass roots, organic sense is truly popular just from viewing figures alone.

Get Virals Via Web2.0 Toolbar

The nice folks behind the Web2.0 Toolbar just added Viral Video Chart's daily feed to  their video category.

You can download the toolbar here.

YouTube Shares The Love

Video posted by JeffJarvis - via NewTeeVee and thedailyreel. Nalts predicted this days ago, of course.

Nalts' 7 theories why YouTube decided to pay creators is worth a read, too, but my favourite quote is from NewTeeVee's, Liz Gannes. "You do need ads in order to share ad revenue" she notes snarkily, "so perhaps that’s why rewarding creators was a non-starter until now." Indeed.