Sunday, August 29, 2010

Picture This

One of the oft-overlooked elements in the routine of blogging is image selection. Now, not every blogger uses images, charts, graphs, or other visuals as part of their storytelling approach (Seth Godin, most notably, is almost always a text-only blogger). But for those of us who do, our photos can be just as important and compelling as our written copy.

The art of communications and marketing is largely one of storytelling. As someone with small children, I can appreciate the necessity of images to help tell stories. Images can help to set expectations, evoke emotional responses, draw attention, provoke laughter, or symbolize irony, among hundreds of other things.

So you see, the cavalier approach to image selection simply won't do for blogging. Or shouldn't. Similarly, the sources and the rights of images needs to be taken just as seriously as choosing an image. This post is designed to help you think about where and how you choose images for your blog (or site, or brochure, or whatever), with some bonus content thrown in.

Finding Images
Let's start with the basics. You need an image for a blog post. Where should you look? There are a number of great resources that are either low-cost or free:

Flickr The grand-daddy of all image sites. Flickr is a very powerful community with millions of photos at your disposal. There's an advanced search capability that makes it easy to pinpoint what you're looking for. Check out their Outstanding Shots,
everystockphoto.com Is just that. A full range of free images with various levels of licensing.
StockVault, according to its site, is a stock photo sharing site where photographers, designers and students can share their photographs and images with each other. Its sole purpose is to collect and archive medium and high resolution photos that designers and students can share and use for personal and non-commercial designs.
OpenPhoto A little more barebones than the other sites, but with a variety of content that is sourced in a wiki-like way.

Two great tools to help refine the image searching process:

Compfight will help you find images by text or by tag and will allow you to change the settings on licensing, original photos and safe search. The visual layout of the images is impressive and will help you more quickly assess what works and what doesn't.
FlickrStorm is a brainstorming tool that lays out the images based on a search term that you enter and that also lets you change the settings on image rights. You can add images to your tray as you're browsing, so you can compare them later.

A note about using Flickr photos: if you plan to embed a Flickr photo in your site, there are guidelines that you need to follow. Namely, you need to use the HTML code available from the "Share this" link and provide a link back to the original photo. Please be sure to abide by Flickr's community guidelines.

If you'd like to use your own photographs but you don't feel quite comfortable with your ability, you can check Darren Rowse's Digital Photography Tips, or grab a copy of Scott Kelby's The Digital Photography Book (as well as Volume 2 and Volume 3). And a camera like a Canon EOS Rebel T1i or a Nikon D90 DX wouldn't hurt, either.

What's all this talk about rights?
Just because an image appears on the Internet doesn't mean it's yours for the taking. Many images have copyrights associated with them. In fact, there have even been examples of companies that have gotten into trouble, as they didn't seek permission to use Flickr-hosted images before they used them in official advertising.

I'm not a lawyer (I don't even play one on TV), but I can tell you that many online images are covered by a Creative Commons license. What's Creative Commons? It's a nonprofit organization that offers free tools that help to increase collaboration and sharing. You can find out more about them here.

If you learn anything about Creative Commons, it's that they have a number of levels of licenses that authors, designers, bloggers, photographers and others can assign to their work. The categories basically come down to Attribution (giving credit), Share Alike (distribution), Non-Commercial, Derivatives (original vs. changed material). There are symbols that signify each category, and taken as a whole, you can tell what they mean. In my case, this site is governed by an Attribution-Non-Commerical-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.

Attribution
cc by
This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered, in terms of what others can do with your works licensed under Attribution.

Attribution Share-Alike
cc by-sa
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.

Attribution No Derivatives
cc by-nd
This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.

Attribution Non-Commerical
cc by-nc
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike
cc by-nc-sa
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. Others can download and redistribute your work just like the by-nc-nd license, but they can also translate, make remixes, and produce new stories based on your work. All new work based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also be non-commercial in nature.

Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives
cc by-nc-nd
This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, allowing redistribution. This license is often called the “free advertising” license because it allows others to download your works and share them with others as long as they mention you and link back to you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.

It's important to understand how CC works and how it applies to your own content as well as to others'.

Editing tools
If you want a few quick suggestions for editing and other useful tools, check these out.

Picnik Use this tool for quick editing of your Flickr photos, directly online.
Splashup An online alternative to Photoshop or the GIMP
FotoFlexer Self-branded as "the world's most advanced online photo editor." And highly recommedned by me.
ResizR Powerful and easy to use tool that will resize your .jpg images online.
And if that's not enough, this Mashable article lists 20 Great Online Image Editors

I hope these resources are helpful. If you have other suggestions or favorite sites, please leave a comment so we can all benefit from each other's collective knowledge.

Image credit: alpha du centaure (Flickr)

Labels: blogging

Posted by Scott Monty at 9:23 AM

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Sunday, August 15, 2010

Who Do You Trust?

It's been well documented that people don't trust corporations as much as they used to. But who do they trust? It's largely people from two categories: third party experts (academics, some media sources, analysts, etc.) and "people like me."

But when it comes to social media, we've also heard that people don't trust bloggers (from Forrester, no less). I've often doubted that assertion, particularly because it seems rather misleading. While the category of bloggers as a whole may be untrusted, people develop relationships with the blogs they follow and read most closely, and therefore develop a sense of trust with them.

This is demonstrated rather well by a recent study highlighted over on eMarketer: "What Makes Social Media Trustworthy?" in which they look at which sources of information are trusted by users of social media:

Take great notice of the percentages above: 30% or less feel they trust a brand, product or company based on a Twitter feed or participation in an online community; less than 40% trust a brand's Facebook updates or blog posts. However over 60% trust blog posts and Facebook updates from someone they know.

What does this mean for marketers? It means you need to get out from behind that logo and letting your employees represent the company in a real and human way. Make it apparent that real people (dare I say, people just like your customers?) work for you and that they can represent your brand or product in an authentic manner in places where it matters to your target audience..

The platform and even the personality are one thing. But what about the way interaction is conducted over social networks? To me, it's more about what you do than where you participate; that is, it's about the value that you bring to your customers or users rather than how many platforms you're on. The respondents to the study would also seem to concur:

Take a look at these numbers closely: people are saying that they want an opportunity for two-way dialog - not one-way messaging from your brand and not a place where they can simply vent. They want conversation - and an honest one that's open to negatives as well as positives. After all, that's how real people speak, isn't it?

Your staff should actively prepare for this frenetic and fast-paced environment, too: 60% say that responsiveness is important to them. This not only means that the author of a post, tweet or comment responds, but does so in a timely manner. Interestingly, the volume of content seems less important, as only 42% care about that. But they don't fault the marketer for not having a lot of fans or for not participating for very long. To the customer, it's important that you are participating first and foremost.

These are just a few instances of ways to measure trust. It's an important concept to consider. As an additional resource, I highly recommend Chris Brogan & Julien Smith's Trust Agents, as you can learn a great deal about this area in much more depth.

Who do you trust? And more importantly: why?

Oh, and if you were wondering about the image above, that's Bo, the boyfriend who jumped out of the way and let his girlfriend take a foul ball to the arm. They're not together any more. Trust issues.

Labels: Marketing, social media

Posted by Scott Monty at 8:23 AM

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Monday, July 19, 2010

Social Network: The Movie

As Facebook prepares to celebrate hitting 500 million members this week, we're seeing more news of the controversial film The Social Network.** With the tagline "You don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies," the trailer for the film has been running on thesocialnetwork-movie.com or 500millionfriends.com. You can watch it below now:

Sony is advertising the movie on Twitter - but not on Facebook (go figure!). The founders of Facebook have already reacted to the trailer. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is going to be played by Jesse Eisenberg, probably most well known for his part in Adventureland. Pretty good casting, in my opinion.

Now, here comes the fun part.

If they were holding open casting calls for extras and you were going to be featured, what famous person, dead or alive, would play you in the movie? Leave a comment below or reply with a post on your own blog with a link back to this post.

To get you started, here are ten individuals in the social media space and their Hollywood doppelgängers. Fair warning: these aren't meant to insult anyone - I'm going for humor - and I purposefully didn't use any women as subjects - I really didn't want to get into trouble. ;-)

Author & NML President Chris Brogan / Jeff Bridges

Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore / Orlando Bloom

Boston media maven C.C. Chapman / Simon Cowell

Video savant Steve Garfield / Dirty Jobs' Mike Rowe

Prolific author & speaker Seth Godin / Larry David

Ragan Communications CEO Mark Ragan / Bruce Davison

Web strategist & Altimeter Partner Jeremiah Owyang / Wayne Newton

Author & PR expert Brian Solis / Johnny Depp

Powered CMO Aaron Strout / Guy Fieri

WineLibrary.tv's Gary Vaynerchuck / Joe Pesci

Me? Oh, I almost forgot. Johnny Carson.

** No, this isn't the a remake of the 1976 movie Network, famous for the line "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!" But the results might be similar...

Bonus content:

Labels: facebook, fun

Posted by Scott Monty at 6:30 AM

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Saturday, July 17, 2010

Now That's Viral, Man

If you haven't followed the Old Spice phenomenon from this week, you've missed out. It's a great example of a really strong performing viral campaign that harkens back to some of the classics like Subservient Chicken, Shave Everywhere, and Tea Partay.

It started on on television earlier this year with the following Old Spice commercial, "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" (link for those of you in RSS readers):

(If you'd like to see how this was accomplished, Leo Laporte has a great interview with the agency.)

That commercial, first aired during the Super Bowl in early February, as of this week has garnered over 14 million views. And then the next commercial, "Old Spice: Questions", went up on YouTube:

Those ads are pretty funny to begin with and were passed around a good deal. But this week, Wieden + Kennedy, creators of the campaign for Procter & Gamble, took it to the next level. First, they began by promoting the latest video with a number of tweets, to ensure it was seen by many:

And then they fired a warning shot across the bow via the @OldSpice Twitter account, lest anyone question what they were up to:

And what happened next made all the difference between the past and the future of viral campaigns. They could have easily engaged people on Twitter all day long and continued to push for views of their existing videos. But what Old Spice did was head and shoulders (if I can use another P&G product reference in a bad pun) above anything I've personally seen before.

The marketers targeted a handful of influencers to kick off the process - Kevin Rose (founder of Digg), Ellen Degeneres, Ashton Kutcher, The Huffington Post and others. Questions were requested and collected on a number of platforms: Twitter, the Old Spice Facebook page, YouTube, Reddit, 4Chan, blogs and Yahoo, to name a few. And then, during the course of the day, the questions were answered in near-real time via custom-made YouTube videos like this one:

At the end of the day, there were over 80 video responses made. W+K's creative director Iain Tait describes how they did it in an amazing behind-the-scenes look at the process on Read Write Web via an interview by Marshall Kirkpatrick called How the Old Spice Videos Are Being Made. Suffice it to say there was a high degree of coordination between the social media team and the creative/production team. Tait also discusses his view of influence in a Fast Company interview: The Team Who Made Old Spice Smell Good Again Reveals What's Behind Mustafa's Towel.

From what I can tell, the reasons it worked so well are summed up as follows:

Go where the people are
Choose your influencers wisely
Use a personalized response
Respond on a universally understood & sharable platform (like YouTube)
Use a real-time platform to reply and promote replies (like Twitter)
Have fun, engaging content

So, this sets the bar high for the next major viral hit. Do you have any idea what's going to make the next one work well?

Bonus content:

Get your voicemail customized by the Old Spice Man.
Take a look at one of the parodies inspired by the Old Spice Campaign, from the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University:

Labels: facebook, innovation, Marketing, social media, Twitter, Video, Viral

Posted by Scott Monty at 1:30 PM

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Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Global Web Index

Around the world, social media has taken off. While this is an exciting time for companies, for the global social media executive that means a lot of headaches as we try make sense of it all.

The gradual adoption, platforms that differ by region and the difference in penetration of mobile and broadband connections all mean that there are bound to be disparities in how and where people around the world connect via the social web.

Once upon a time, Universal McCann did a series called Tracking the Impact of Social Media that consisted of four "waves" of the study. You can grab them here:

I found these very useful reference tools as the web was evolving. In fact, I used to use some of the growth charts from Waves 2 & 3 in my presentations. But Wave 4 wasn't quite as impactful as the previous two, and we had to wait a lot longer for it to appear.

As I was wondering about this fact, I happened to get an email from Tom Smith, who was the lead market researcher at Universal McCann who led these efforts. It turns out he left UM after Wave 3 (which explains the gap and the different feel). Tom has continued with his fine research and has his own company, Trendstream, which is doing some stellar work on the global implications of social media. In addition, they consult with global corporate social media teams to feed research into their local market and agency briefings, conference presentations or internal presentations.

Tom just let me know that his firm has recently developed the Global Web Index - as tool that, as Trendstream puts it, "provides anyone with the free of charge chance to view and play with the GlobalWebIndex data, and more importantly to start developing unique insights on social media." You may need to click through to the site, depending on how the embed below renders on your monitor.

These are real data, available from January 2010. Of course, this is only the "lite" version; if you want to know more, please click through to the link for info on how to get the full set of data.

Is this useful to you? Do you see any trends or surprises in the data that are particularly relevant to how you do business? Please leave a comment below.

Photo credit: Bill Gracey (Flickr)

Labels: global, social media, tools

Posted by Scott Monty at 1:07 AM

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