On September 23^rd, the US. Coast Guard put onto “You Tube” an announcement from Admiral Thad Allen letting their force know that the Coast Guard is embracing social media and Web 2.0. This is big! Check out the video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdEAY1XLapQ]

What’s the big deal, you might ask? The big deal is that the government has been, until now, overall pretty hesitant to publicly embrace this change in how we are communicating through Web 2.0 and social network initiatives. I have actually sat in on meetings with government media and public affairs groups that have been trying for a while to have their “top brass” understand and embrace these changes and they have been met with hesitancy and fear of this change. Questions of control and policy continue to brew up and a general lack of understanding of the significance of this new communication seems prevelent.

As I had explained to one person I talked to, you have to change the perception. That person, who works for a government agency I won’t name, was explaining that their top folks are afraid that if they start a blog, negative posts will appear. My reply to that is that’s a good thing. Today, people go to the water cooler in his organization and complain there (it’s not like it’s not happening). By providing a social network medium like a blog, yes, you might get complaints. But unlike the water cooler where you can’t hear the complaint to solve it, the blog will allow the organization to respond directly and publicly, letting all know what can be done. It also allows for a community of others to respond to that complaint as well.

It seems the Coast Guard gets this and I think that will be a good thing in the long run. They have even started using “Facebook” to get the word out. Next time you are on Facebook, look up “Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen”. You can join the page and become a fan. Now, it wouldn’t be fair to say they are the only ones. I know that the Air Force has created a group on Facebook as well. But the Coast Guard leader presenting as strong a statement as in the above video shows that they are serious about implementing this communication solution. I applaud them for taking such a stance as an early adapter government agency.

Three great examples of the educational potential of new media:

1. This visual dictionary of 53,463 nouns in the English language on one page

2. This incredible video that gives a visual representation of the Civil War in four minutes (please Google it if you have trouble with this version)

3. This animation of the Bayeux Tapestry

Notice the effect in each case of the use of multimedia to compress time and space, relate the visual and the semantic, and give a big-picture perspective.

In the case of the Civil War, for instance, we’re given an instinctive sense of the relative length of its major stages that would be hard to get from a written narrative, as well as an animated representation of wins and losses as control of territory: the time between Lincoln’s inauguration, Southern secession, and the beginning of hostilities; the seeming border stalemate through the middle of the country that begins early on and lasts for most of the war; the significance of certain battles for the control of territory; the seemingly glacial pace of the North’s acquisition of territory, as it moves like an amoeba across the map, until Lincoln’s second inauguration, after which the rate seems to increase exponentially. Meanwhile we get a running tally over time of the war’s cost in human life.

The dictionary is the most obvious case of the relationship between visual and semantic meanings, since it both matches images to words and orders words by the relatedness of their meanings. So you might learn that “Jell-O” and (oddly) “substance” are semantically close and then go on to explore visual similarities or differences.

Finally, there are some good reasons to animate a representation of the Bayeux tapestry: for those of us who haven’t gone to France to see it, it’s nice to get something of the experience by video. But then we need some compensation for the loss of the power of actually being in the presence of a 260-foot-long 12th century work of art—especially one that is also a historical narrative of a central event in English history. Since in this case the new medium—video—is a barrier between the audience and its subject; it needs to overcome that distance by drawing on its strengths. One of these strengths is movement: but what’s needed is more than a long (and potentially boring) pan of the tapestry. The new medium must tell the story in a compressed space that the old medium unfolded along 260 feet. So it’s helpful to have both a long pan of the tapestry and an animation of its content.

My latest OnlineMediaDaily newsletter pointed me to a Catherine Holahan article at businessweek.com about the seeming downward slide of user-generated (read “amateur”) video on the Web. Amazing, considering we really just got started consuming user-generated video in 2005 when YouTube launched. Can it really be a flash in the pan?

A highlight:

Over 57% of U.S. Internet users say they have watched or downloaded online videos, according to a July study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. But they’re not flocking to home videos. According to the study, viewers are most interested in news videos, followed by comedy bits and television shows. Research by Burst Media, an Internet ad network that studies the video market, echoed the findings, ranking news clips, movie trailers, comedy sketches, music videos, and TV shows as the top categories. The category that includes clips produced by users placed ninth out of 11.

I’m not surprised by that ranking, are you? But it’s not about from where, or by whom, the video is generated. This is about quality of content. And in that sense, sure, professionals have the upper hand. More years in the game, bigger production budgets, more contributors with proven chops as writers, editors, and directors. That’s not the point. The point is that user-generated content can be powerful, and can have a hell of a lot more impact than we currently expect from it.

I get that with the birth of user-generated content, the Web was flooded with, as Holahan put it, “skateboarding dogs and beer-drenched parties.” That crap will die down eventually, and good content will both rise up and find niche homes online. I leave the term “good content” vague purposely. I mean the really funny, the really unusual, the very passionate, the very dramatic, the most relevant.

In the past two weeks I’ve talked with folks about using user-generated video to help promote a park by letting visitors post video of their reactions and comments online. I’ve talked with folks who want to build a virtual museum from user-submitted interviews and stories. And I recently posted about Amazon allowing customers to submit video product reviews. All three are great applications of user-generated video. But in all three cases it still comes down to quality of content. People mooning the camera at the park, uninspired museum interviews, and lame product reviews would each render the respective intents worthless. BUT enthusiastic raves about the park, passionate storytelling, and insightful product reviews would each have greater impact than any professionally produced marketing piece could ever hope for.

Don’t write off user-generated video—just help it find its purpose.

My MarketingSherpa e-newsletter landed the other day. Students of email marketing (and video producers) may want to check out their lead story about how adding video to an email marketing campaign scored a larger conversion rate. Let’s face it, folks L-O-V-E video on the Internet. But in this case I don’t quite get why it worked.

The case study is about a florist that regularly uses email marketing. In addition to offering the usual photos of flowers, this time around they did two things relating to video. First, they bought 15 seconds of stock video of tulips, and they provided a link to that footage in the body of the email. Second, they included the word “video” in the email subject line. Aside from mentioning video in the subject, they also used some good copy to call folks to action in the email headline. OK, launch email.

Conversions—which in Web analytics speak means sales coming from that email campaign—jumped from the usual 1.35% to 2.8%. Nice, particularly since they learned that using “video” in the subject line seemed to dissuade folks from opening the email. Usually 16.5% of recipients open the email, but this time only 14% did. Perhaps they were afraid they might open a large embedded video file or even a virus. So that leaves us with fewer folks opening the email, but more actually buying. Thank you, stock tulip footage!

And now I’m back to why I don’t get it. To sum up, we just learned that 1) users are willing to make the extra click to see tulip video, and 2) are swayed by a video of tulips more so than by a single attractive photo of tulips. They’re flowers, people, they don’t move!

Oh, the sweet promise of Internet video.

Sony has recently announced that they plan to sell the first OLED TV during the holiday shopping period this year. OLED stands for Organic Light-Emitting Diode. That’s right, I said organic! This new technology uses a film of organic compounds that emit colors. The new technology doesn’t require back-lit LED and uses way less power.

Will Wheaten, my buddy from Star Trek: TNG (although I liked him better in Stand By Me), explains it better than I can:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ufs9Wx0VXQ]

It’s not all sunshine, though. OLEDs have limited lifetimes and are easily damaged by water. But maybe the coolest thing about OLED TV is you can bend it like Beckham! Get ready to trade in that old plasma screen. That’s already old school compared to the emerging OLED world.

It looks like the major networks have bought in to the web video phenomenon, at least until the next ratings book comes out. Witness the new ABC show i-CAUGHT, which I did in fact catch the other night. The concept is to highlight what is most popular on the web. We’ll see how long it takes for the network to make money from these clip-sharing folks (or maybe they already are).

I’m interested to see if this marriage between Internet video and broadcast TV will last. It looks like it has potential. One of the more interesting viral segments asks people to submit videos for inclusion in the show. The concept is to put in three words how your week has gone. The first round got my attention.

I enjoyed this idea so much I had to submit my own. Here’s hoping I make the cut next week!

I can’t decide if I should be saving my lawn-mowing money to buy a big-screen TV or a small-screen mobile device. Which takes priority: vegging out at home in front of oversized sports, or accessing videos anytime, anywhere?

While the big-screen is supposed to be every man’s ideal, there are increasingly compelling arguments for, as Steve Martin said in the 70s, “getting small.”

The e-newsletter Mobilized landed in my in-box today, profiling some very cool things that are happening with mobile video.

Story one: new handsets have better-than-ever image quality. Good to know. If I hold out a bit I’ll be better off, eh?

Story three: Discovery is producing a product just for mobile devices. Interesting. There’s actually content I couldn’t get in my living room no matter how big the screen is.

Story five: “Laughter is the best Medicine on www.lime.com“. The lead:

What makes mobile movies successful? Personally, I think that, in short bursts, comedy works a hell of a lot better than drama. With drama, you have to BUILD tension. That takes time. And horror on a small screen fares even worse. How scared can you be of a psycho with a knife the size of a clipped fingernail? A PINKY fingernail!

Makes sense, but I wouldn’t limit that logic to mobile or movies. I’d like to see more companies dare to add a little humor to their web presence. Web marketers are all about the immediate impact of landing pages, and what happens during the first few seconds a visitor is staring at a particular website — capitalizing on the short burst of their attention span, if you will. Marketing pros are always wondering, “What content or imagery can I use to quickly hook that visitor?”

If humor offers a fast hook, why not try that? Certainly the big hits on YouTube are humorous, right? If your company can generate something humorous (and sure, useful to your marketing efforts) you might hook many a visitor, and even end up a viral marketing sensation.

But are you funny?

El jefe is a beta tester for Brightcove, a company that helps producers publish, syndicate, and maybe even earn revenue from their video content. I’m guessing that’s how he came across MomMetv.com, whose owner is a Brightcove customer. MomMetv is, as you might guess, a site with video geared for mommies or, well, MomMes I guess. And apparently MomMes are well dressed white women in the suburbs of Denver, all of whom have gaudy TV lighting splashing the wall behind them. OK, so that was just a poke, here’s an actual thought about the site.

I think Missy DePew, the MomMe behind the site (and a TV producer, which is no surprise when you see the lighting), may have stumbled on a great plan for launching a social networking site, which is what MomMetv now is–she started it as an online TV channel to get the conversations started. Whether or not it was a plan, I think the result has two great outcomes:

1. By creating several videos herself, with her friends, she predetermined the tone and the type of content she wants on the social networking site. As a visitor I (ahem, well not me, but maybe my wife, right?) can see how it all works, how I should use the site, and even how to behave in that network, in a sense.
2. There’s already content to react to, and reply to; and not just a couple videos. As she explained during her visit to daytime news (clip available from the press page) she gathered about 50 friends and rolled with four cameras in one day to generate what seems to me must be a hundred or so videos.

So as it stands now the site is sort of a two-parter. Visitors land on MomMetv’s homepage where they can watch any number of videos, but then they can create a profile for themselves and start blogging or vlogging and doing all the social networking stuff networkers love to do.

So what? (At M&M we like to ask that question on behalf of our clients’ audiences, but we phrase it a little more nicely: “what’s in it for me?”).

This site? What’s in it for me? Nothing actually. But that’s where demographics come in. I would not be surprised if this site is bombarded with visitors. As a father of two, one thing I know for sure is that many moms L-O-V-E to talk about anything having to do with kids and mommy-hood. And that could mean significant traffic and advertising revenue, which I imagine is the ultimate goal.

My only advice would be to back off the lighting effects.

Here’s a question I’ve been pondering for quite some time: If everyone is acting like the Lumière brothers, where is the Sergei Eisenstein of broadband video?

Let me explain what I mean:

Four days before the end of 1895, the Lumière brothers held what would come to be known as the first commercial screening of a movie—actually, a series of ten short films approximately 46 seconds each in duration, and more akin to a primitive style of reality television, since the language of film had yet to be invented.

The Lumières, considered to be among the first filmmakers, made film history as such. Much more accurately, however, they were really inventors and early technological pioneers; according to Wikipedia, the brothers were responsible for patenting a number of significant film processes, including the creation of sprocket holes for the advancement of a film strip within the camera and projector.

It’s also clear that the Lumières, pioneering as they were, failed to understand that the technology they had helped invent wasn’t just a mere extension of photography, but a brand new art form. Their contributions were incredibly important, but they thought of the moving picture as more of a novelty and ultimately declared that “the cinema is an invention without any future.”

The Lumières were correct in assuming that the novelty of seeing people projected onto a giant screen clambering in and out of trains (as is the case with one of their most famous shorts, Arrival of a Train at a Station) would soon wear off. But it took a mind like Eisentein’s to understand that the invention—the technology itself—had the potential to become a powerful art form and so much more than just a novel technique for recording human activity.

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