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In a sign that online video is becoming increasingly popular, Hitwise is reporting that US YouTube visits have increased 26% from last year’s numbers.
For many, YouTube has become the preferred destination for everything from movie trailers to how-to videos. Many video podcasts are also uploaded to YouTube, and the vast amount of random, hilarious videos cannot be understated.
Myspace TV holds the second place spot, though lost 44% of its traffic from last year. My theory is that this has a lot to do with Fox shows being streamed from Hulu instead of Myspace.
Google Video is still impressively in third place, even though Google now owns YouTube and has thrown most of its video love behind that. As a result, Google Video’s traffic is down 52%.
Yahoo! Video is clinging to fourth place, trying to ride out all the Yahoo! drama going down in Sunnyvale. From last year, traffic has dropped 31%.
In last place we have Veoh, the company with the smallest market share but the biggest percentage gain in traffic. Since last year, Veoh’s visits have increased 32%. What exactly this means remains to be seen. Will Veoh come on even stronger before this year ends and perhaps steal third or fourth place? Only time will tell.
Apparently, that answer is yes, according to a survey done by Clark, Martire & Bartolomeo.
The survey found that, of the 1,003 adults polled, 44% saw a product or service advertised in a newspaper and decided to do further research online.
It was also discovered that out of those who do this research, 47% go directly to the product or service web site.
With all the hoopla over new media, the newspaper business has strugged to prove its viability. Do these numbers prove that the newspaper has its place, or do they further cloud its future?
I thought I’d share something with a little bit of humor today. This is a rap about search engine optimization by The Poetic Prophet (also known as The SEO Rapper). The video is called, “Design Coding” and the lyrics are below the video. Enjoy! Thanks to iJustine for finding this gem and GottaQuirk for the lyrics.
Your site design, the first thing people see.
It should be reflective of you and the industry.
Easy to look at, with a nice navigation
When they can’t find what they want it causes frustration
A click costs an action. To increase the temptation
Use appealing graphics that create motivation
You have animation please use in moderation
‘Cos search engines can’t index the information
Display the logo of all associations
Highlight your content; therefore that’s an obligation.
Create clean design; you can use some decoration
But try to prevent any client hesitation
Every page that they click should provide an explanation
Should be easy to understand like having a conversation
Create a site style you can use your imagination
But make sure you use correct colour combinations
Do some investigation, looks at other organisations
But don’t duplicate or you might face a litigation
You done? Congratulations start construction
Move into production, please follow these instructions:
Your photoshop functions, slice that design
Do you layout with divs make sure there is a line
Please don’t use tables even though they work fine
When it come to indexing they give searchers a hard time
Make it easy for spiders to crawl what you provide
Removed font type, font colour and font size
No background colours, keep your coding real neat
And tag your look n feel on a separate style sheet
Better results with XMl and CSS,
Now you making progress, a ‘lil closer to success
Describe you doc type so the browser can relate
Make sure you do it great or it won’t validate
Check in all browsers, I do it directly
Gotta make sure that it renders correctly
Some use IE some others use flock
Some use AOL, I use Firefox
Title everything including links and images
Don’t use italics, use emphasis
Don’t use bold please use strong
Cos if u use bold that’s old and wrong
You use CSS your page should load quicker
Your client’s satisfied like they eating on a Snickers
They stuck on ur page like you made it with a stickers
And then they convert now that the real kicker
Make u a lil richer, your site a lil slicker
Design and code right man I hope you get the picture
What I’m telling you is true man it should be a scripture
If it’s built right you’ll be the pick of the litter
Everyone will wanna follow you like twitter
Competition will get bitter
You will shine like glitter
If you tryna grow; your company will get bigger
Design and code right man can you get with it?
Are you taking advantage of holidays?
This past Memorial Day got me thinking about how one could do a better job at bringing in holiday search traffic. For instance, tailoring content on your site for Halloween, Christmas, Valentines Day, Easter and so on could increase search engine traffic during those times.
To do so, one should take notes from blogger Darren Rowse. In this post, he talks about anticipating the influx of readers during different holidays. He suggests that, while you should write to please the search engines, you should also make your content valuable to those who loyally read your writing. I couldn’t agree more.
Memorial Day might not be a highly searched term online, but we do have another major holiday coming up soon - Independence Day. Writing content for Fourth of July search traffic may take a little imagination, but it can definitely be done. For instance, if I were writing a piece on this blog, I could perhaps write it about the top ten most patriotic web site designs. All I would have to do is slip a few keywords in, such as “Independence Day” or “Fourth of July” or “4th of July” and write around them. As an added bonus, the sites I link to might link back, and backlinks to your web site are never a bad thing.
Here’s some homework for you - try writing a small sample piece about a holiday of your choice. If you’re a big turkey fan, do it about Thanksgiving. If I were to write an example, I’d write it about how designing a web site is a lot like preparing a Thanksgiving turkey. The approaches you can take are only limited by your imagination.
Imagine if keeping up with interesting people was as simple as clicking “Subscribe”.
Guess what? It is.
FriendFeed, a service created by former Google employees, aims to take the web activity of your friends, colleagues and other favorite people and streamline it. Check out mine, for example:
If you were subscribed to me on FriendFeed, you would be able to see my new Twitter updates, blog posts I’ve written, what songs I’ve liked on Last.FM, what items I’ve shared in Google Reader, and much more. If you use a desktop client such as Twhirl, you receive updates almost immediately after the action takes place.
Not only that, but every item in FriendFeed can be commented on. Earlier today in my post about Microsoft and Yahoo/Facebook I linked to two discussions taking place on FriendFeed. The discussion took place independent of the blog post that actually inspired it all. For some, commenting this way is quickly becoming their preferred method - it’s much more like talking in real life than commenting on a blog. In real life, you can have a conversation about someone’s idea without that person standing right next to you, listening in. FriendFeed comments take a similar approach.
So how can FriendFeed help you? It saves time. No longer do you have to visit many services seperately to keep tabs on the people you find important - now you can just visit FriendFeed. If you’re involved professionally in a certain field or are just interested in it, follow some of the major players in that field on FriendFeed. Chances are, they’ll clue you in to the latest trends through their actions on the web.
Adding your own services to your FriendFeed can be beneficial, as well. Getting into FriendFeed now will undoubtedly earn you an “early adopter” title, and being one of the first in your niche can net you “trendsetter” status. In business, these can mean gaining a huge advantage over slower-moving competition.
If you’re at all interested in keeping track of the people and/or topics you care about more quickly and efficiently, or if you are looking to give yourself or your business a head start on competitors, I highly recommend signing up for a FriendFeed account. Some pretty smart people think that FriendFeed is a pretty big deal, and at this point, I’m not going to take my chances doubting them.
The rumor floating around Silicon Valley today is that Microsoft not only wants to purchase Yahoo!’s Search technology, but also wants to acquire Facebook for $15 to $20 million. This has, of course, created quite a stir among techies and has Robert Scoble claiming that the web is in peril.
So what does this really mean for the internet?
Well, a few things could happen.
- The disappearance of Yahoo! Search and nothing more. I’m assuming that Microsoft will roll Yahoo! Search into their own product, tossing out the name but keeping the technology. Live Search would either cease to exist or would (somehow) come together with Yahoo!’s technology. Nothing would change on the Facebook front.
- The disappearance of Yahoo! Search and the banishing of Facebook’s data portability initiatives. Microsoft will follow the steps in #1, but also decide they like the closed environment of Facebook and decide to abandon any data portability initiatives the company is currently involved in. Great strides have been made lately in data portability and information sharing between different social networks. Facebook’s walls, which have been sealed tight for so long, are finally starting to come down just a little bit. Microsoft could wipe out that progress completely.
- The disappearance of Yahoo! Search, the banishing of Facebook’s data portability initiatives AND the ability for Microsoft’s search to crawl Facebook. The possibility of this taking place is really what has the tech community up in arms. Microsoft could acquire Yahoo!’s search technology, keep Facebook a closed off environment, and then allow only their search engine to crawl Facebook’s vast amount of information. Google search users would be hung out to dry. You can see some of the FriendFeed discussion on the issue here and here (what is FriendFeed? Look for a post later today).
Understandably, this is a very big story in the making, though it is still only a rumor at this point. If Microsoft follows through on even one of these acquisitions, the results will be game changing. More on this as information becomes available.
The awesome from Ignite Social Media has written a great post about how to develop a social networking strategy. To do so, she asks the following questions:
1) What networks are my target audiences interacting within?
2) What is the level of interaction my target audience is having within these networks?
3) What conversations already exist about our company? Within which networks?
4) What type of interactions do users have within each network?
5) What are other brands doing?
To me, all of these seem right on the money.
For instance, let’s say we are a hip new ringtone company targeting an audience between 16-23. A large portion of this demographic would be found on Myspace. Myspace users are notorious for heavily customizing their pages and they frequently interact with the network.
There may or may not be conversation about our brand - if not, no fret. That’s why we’re developing this strategy!
Users either write private messages back and forth or post “comments” on each others pages. How about introducing an application that allows users to send song clips to each others profiles? We could brand it with our logo and a link to our ringtone site and watch the users pour in. Or perhaps we could give users an incentive to place a banner on their Myspace page - maybe a free ringtone?
Lastly, an important thing to do would be to watch what other brands are doing, particularly our ringtone competitors. If they come out with a cool new way to let users interact with their brand, we would have to one-up them, so to speak. We can’t afford to let other companies have the “cooler” brand or else we risk losing our customers.
All in all, these were great points made by Lisa and I encourage you to head over and check out her full post as well as the discussion in the comments. This information will be extremely valuable to you in your quest to create a social networking strategy.
“How will social media change business?”
BusinessWeek’s Stephen Baker threw this question out to his readers, who gave some pretty outstanding answers in the comments.
One reader, Brent Terazzas, pointed out that “businesses are no longer held down by the more ‘traditional’ PR methods of releasing company info”; for instance, through a public relations or advertising firm. Instead, companies can now speak directly with consumers, whether it is via a blog, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace or some other social network.
Another reader, Shany Seawright, pointed out that “the number of print publications is significantly decreasing.” Businesses that some refer to as “old media” (newspapers, magazines, etc.) are feeling the pressure to keep their product current, and that means moving it online.
Social media can also be used as a weapon. Last month, Miller Brewing Co.’s “Brew Blog” broke a story about rival Anheuser-Busch’s new brand of beer, Budweiser American Ale. By beating their competitor to the punch on the announcement, it allowed Miller to spin Anheuser as a “copycat” - Miller claimed they had thought up a similar brew in 2006.
There are likely many more examples out there of how social media has, for better or worse, changed the way business is done.
How has social media impacted your business?