Only a handful of blogs picked up on Google’s fresh Translator Toolkit, which the company launched yesterday by means of a blog post, but this new service really deserves a second look, if only because Wikimedia apparently sees the tool as something that could “change the way Wikipedia grows in other languages”.
You can read an extensive review of the product over at Google Blogoscoped, but here’s the gist:
Google Translator Kit enables anyone to upload documents for a variety of formats (HTML, Microsoft Word, Rich Text, OpenDocument Text and Plain Text), enter the URL for a file on the web or input a direct link to a Wikipedia article or Knol entry. After submission, the text that requires translation is automatically translated in the back-end and subsequently featured in a so-called ‘Workbench’, neatly placing the resulting text in the target language next to the original.
Google will search their translation memory for previous, human translations of the uploaded segment and show the translations in the Search Results tab. Color-coded segments will depict ‘exact’ matches and ‘partial’ matches, so you can edit the text based on the memory as well as previous, human translations. In addition, you can use the computer-generated translation in the Computer Translation tab to jump-start the translation of your current segment. When available, the toolkit will also search Google’s multilingual glossaries to help you translate specific terminology for your language, or you could use the Dictionary tab to do custom searches on Google’s multilingual dictionaries.
Besides the self-learning ability of the toolkit, the service also makes it incredibly easy for people to collaborate on translations, bringing a human, crowd-sourced touch to the automated process of Google’s Translate service.
A year ago we modeled out the true value of various social networks based on the idea that users in high-value online advertising markets like Japan, the UK and the U.S. were worth more (financially speaking) than those in lower value online advertising markets. Facebook had recently become the largest worldwide social network in terms of users, but based on our model MySpace was still by far the most valuable social network.
Based on the original year-old model, if Facebook was worth $15 billion (their then-current valuation), MySpace, with far more U.S. users, was worth nearly $20 billion:
Our model takes Comscore data for available countries and regions. We’ve graphed each of 26 well known social networks with the data we have been able to collect. We’ve then calculated the average advertising spend (estimated by PriceWaterhouseCoopers in a recent report) for each person online in each of those countries. For example, in the U.S., the total 2008 estimated Internet advertising spend is $25.2 billion. We’ve divided that by the number of people online in the U.S. according to Comscore (191 million), to get an average Internet spend per person of $132. View the raw data and calculations here.
The U.S., by the way, is only the 4th most valuable market per Internet user, trailing The UK ($213), Australia ($148) and Denmark ($144).
We’ve then multiplied the average Internet spend per user in each market with the number of unique users each social network has in that market, essentially creating a “weighted average” based on the advertising dollars chasing users. If a social network has more users in the U.S., Japan, the UK, Germany, Australia, and other bigger advertising networks, they will have a higher weighted average valuation.
We believe this model is an effective way to rank various competing social networks. It bumps down networks like Orkut and Friendster who have tens of millions of users in markets with very little advertising spend, and bumps up networks with lots of users in higher value markets.
Based on this model, MySpace is by far the most valuable social network. Second place Facebook has just 75% of the value of MySpace (even though it now has more users), followed by Bebo (26% of MySpace value), Hi5 and Amebio. LinkedIn comes in at no. 11, at 6% of MySpace’s value.
The new model takes into account the dramatic rise of Facebook usage over the last year, the massive recent decline in MySpace usage, and less dramatic changes in the other social networks. We’ve also modeled out the various valuations with the old Bebo ($850 million) and LinkedIn ($1 billion) valuations as pivot points. We’ve also added Twitter to the list just for kicks.
The bottom line: If Facebook is worth $10 billion today, MySpace is worth just $6.5 billion. Bebo is worth $1.8 billion, Twitter is worth $1.7 billion and LinkedIn is worth $0.8 billion. Facebook also accounts for 37% of all social networking value points in our model. Another way of saying this: If Facebook is worth $10 billion, the value of the entire social networking industry is $27.1 billion.
Lots of charts and graphs below. The full model is here if you want to look at all the data (I recommend zooming unless you have super vision). Thanks to TechCrunch intern Dan Romero for running the new model.
David Spark (@dspark) is the founder of Spark Media Solutions, an organization that helps companies build industry voice through storytelling and social media. He blogs at The Spark Minute and can be seen and heard regularly on Cranky Geeks, KQED, Green 960, and ABC Radio.
From tracking fires through Twitter to breaking news before you see it on a major news network, we’re constantly hearing stories of how social media connections enable the community to help each other out in times of crisis. We love these stories. So here are five unique tales of social media coming to save the day.
1. An emergency personnel support network
Dr. Maurice Ramirez is an ER physician, disaster preparedness consultant, and social media expert. While he utilizes and relies on tools such as police radios and Nextel push-to-talk phones for official communications, his team of emergency response personnel need their own communications channels for social support.
For emergency situations, such as Hurricane Ike in Texas, Ramirez set up a closed Twitter network that’s used for private non-official conversation and communication among his team and their partners, the Red Cross and Loews Emergency Response Team. The private network allows them to speak openly and freely about the stresses and the isolation they’re dealing with. The Twitter network has become critical for their disaster recovery operations, said Ramirez. “You always have that feeling that the team down the road is superhuman,” Ramirez said, “When you’re dealing with 300 rescues a day and you’re miles from your colleagues, you need that social support that reminds you that you’re only human.”
During a disaster, the top issues are usually locating potable water, gasoline, food, shelter, and electricity. The ones who can best uncover that information are emergency personnel deployed on the ground in the disaster areas. Ramirez’s team and their partners use Twitter to keep each other informed as to the location of available services and supplies. It’s important to keep the network private, said Ramirez. Lack of non-critical personnel on the network reduces cross chatter and the privacy prevents rumors from spreading.
In the case of Hurricane Ike, not only did the Twitter network help them find water, gasoline, and shelter, but it was also critical for warning personnel sleeping in tents in Galveston, Texas that there were two lions and two tigers roaming the island. Once alerted on Twitter, the personnel immediately moved to a safer location.
One aspect of concern that many don’t think about during a disaster is the loneliness. The team at Galveston were very isolated and had to sleep in shifts so that they could provide 24-hour support. Late at night official communications are silent and voice communications can often be poor. Using text messaging and Twitter, staffers up late at night would play games, such as Texas Hold ‘Em, just to decompress. The Twitter and SMS communications were critical to the team’s mental health. “If you don’t have outreach, you can’t decompress,” said Ramirez.
For the next disaster, Ramirez is setting up a private social network using either CollectiveX or Ning (he hasn’t decided which yet) to act as a searchable repository where people from various agencies can post their situations and get input from staff. Ramirez has found that trading experiential knowledge from others who have dealt with similar situations is invaluable to a successful emergency response. All he wants to do now is create a bank of that information that’s searchable so his team and others can rely on it.
2 & 3. Survive foreign medical care
World traveler Leigh Shulman (@thefutureisred) has twice turned to Twitter in a crisis. Shulman’s family had just moved to Argentina and her husband, Noah, became very ill to the point that he was verbally unresponsive. She had no local phone access but got some support from a neighbor and Twitter. Friends offered support online, but what was more important were the Twitterers who had lived in Argentina and Chile and offered specific advice on dealing with the health care systems there.
What she learned from the Twitterati is that in Argentina you can call for a doctor to make a non-emergency house call at any time. She got the number to call and the cost (55 pesos or about $15 US) so she knew what to expect if someone quoted a higher price. She also learned that it’s better to first take a house call before actually going to the hospital. Your hospital visit will go more smoothly with a house call recommendation.
In another situation, Shulman was able to pay forward the favor to a friend of hers who was in Beirut when his dog seemed to be having a seizure and he was nowhere near a vet. Through Twitter she was able to connect her friend to a vet. Within two hours the vet advised Shulman’s Beirut friend that he keep the dog as calm as possible and in a dark room. Keep away from his mouth and speak soothingly. And to further calm Shulman’s friend, the vet let him know that in general epilepsy in dogs is not as severe as it is humans.
The next day, Shulman heard from her friend via Facebook () that his dog was fine and they were going to the vet that day.
4 & 5. The homeless need raincoats right now
Mark Horvath is an advocate for the homeless who admits that if it wasn’t for Twitter he’d be homeless himself. Already homeless once before, Horvath knows how tough it can be. Whenever he sees a problem in his homeless community he uses Twitter (@hardlynormal) as a bullhorn to get homeless people the services they need right away.
When he was working for the Burbank Winter Shelter in California, he was responsible for 150 homeless people waiting at a bus shelter about to get rained on. Driving around LA, he asked the Twitterati where he could find raincoats in bulk. He got advice to go to Sportmart and Costco where he cleaned them out of every raincoat they had. But one Twitter follower, Michael Buchanan (@holycowcreative) was so enthralled with Horvath’s cause that he blogged about it and raised $453 to buy and ship Horvath another 100 raincoats in just two weeks. The influx of raincoat advice charged Horvath, who joked, “I was on a mission to turn every homeless person in Los Angeles yellow.”
In another case, Horvath had a homeless friend, John, who moved to Seattle for a job opportunity only to get mugged upon arrival. Feeling helpless because he didn’t know anyone in the area, Horvath tweeted out if anyone in Seattle could help his friend. It was 27 degrees that night and all the winter shelters were full. Within minutes, one person close by to John walked up and handed him $100 so he would have a place to sleep for the night. For the rest of his time in Seattle, another Horvath Twitter follower shared his one bedroom apartment with John.
For more on Horvath, read my previous Mashable () article, “5 People Who Broke the Rules of Social Media and Succeeded.” While he’s not homeless, Horvath is without an income and relies on reader/viewer donations through his video blog invisiblepeople.tv. For his next adventure, Horvath is planning a cross country road trip to Washington, D.C. where he’ll visit tent cities in locations such as Las Vegas, Nashville, and St. Petersburg and let the homeless tell their own stories on his blog. Whrrl is his first sponsor, but he needs more donations and sponsors to make it happen.
Technologies to track a crisis
This is just a sampling of the many stories of how people are using social media to seek help and save each other during a crisis, whether life threatening or not. While social media technologies such as blogging, Twitter (), and ChipIn have risen to the occasion to help people in times of crisis, there is now a new market for technologies whose primary purpose is to track disasters and help people in times of need.
One recently launched application, now ready for hurricane season, is Emicus. Arguing that the web and social media have proven to operate a lot more efficiently than FEMA, Emicus aims to aggregate and optimize the flow of information and direct people to rescue services. Another far simpler site to check out is Crisiswire, which tracks and aggregates traditional and social media news from various emergencies.
Got a social media crisis story of your own? Feel free to share the tale with your fellow Mashable readers.
In recent months I, along with many other people, have voiced concern about the influx of “social media experts” with no real background in communications but a strong enthusiasm for social media tools. We’ve worried publicly that they lack real-world experience and strategic communications insight and that these two things will lead to their failure and, by extension, to them damaging the fragile reputation of the communications industry.
I take issues with a few points in the post, although I wholeheartedly agree with Phil that some people are falsely building Twitter up to be some kind of silver bullet solution to companies’ problems.
Twitter isn’t a silver bullet
I’m NOT one of the people who thinks that every company should be on Twitter (last week I told one company that it probably isn’t the right tool for them). However, I do believe that Twitter and similar tools (it’s just one tool in the social media toolkit) are useful for companies in the right situations.
Perhaps more importantly, I do not agree that traditional communications is dead. I’ve written several times in the previously that social media tools add to our communications toolkit; they don’t replace the old tools. While the growth of the Internet is changing the influence levels of our different tools, traditional tactics are still critical for most companies, and in all but a few cases are central to the success of promotional efforts.
Emotion doesn’t trump reality
I have a strong concern about posts written from the perspective of someone who admits they “hate” Twitter. I’m fine with the sentiment - I’ll be the first to agree that no tool will work for everyone, and Twitter takes some getting used-to. I’m also conscious that I come from the opposite bias.
Still, people contemplating such posts should remember that there are other perspectives, and that pure emotion doesn’t trump reality:
Butler’s post implies that while journalists may be on Twitter, you can’t engage with them there. While relationships should extend beyond tools, I and many other people have appeared in tier one media outlets thanks to journalist connections made on Twitter, I’ve developed solid relationships with journalists and, thanks to these tools, I can often see if it is a bad time to be contacting those people with story ideas.
Butler also says that Twitter is mainly a conduit for the already famous and that you can’t learn anything from using it. If all you’re trying to do is broadcast, then that’s right - as if you have no voice then broadcasting doesn’t work. If, however, you’re trying to connect with people in your market and your target market do use Twitter, then it’s possible. Companies like Freshbooks, Zappos, Radian6, Fairmont Hotels and more are taking that approach. Note that I’ve included small companies as well as big ones to demonstrate that you don’t need to be huge to engage effectively.
Business benefits
The post also asks whether businesses have benefited directly from using Twitter. Bottom line: ours has. While I can’t give specifics without getting a red-hot poker inserted somewhere painful, I can tell you that we have landed large corporate accounts thanks in large part to our Twitter presence.
We’ve also seen corporate outreach through social media tools, both Twitter and others, to have a noticeable effect, especially when solving problems for people. Simply put, it’s the personal touch that most people no longer expect - by exceeding their expectations, you can delight people with little cost.
Senior management adoption… huh?
Lastly, you point out that most CEOs don’t use Twitter. To that I say, “do they sit in their offices writing the news releases, too?” No, because they have communications staff to do that while they run the company.
Sharlyn Lauby is the president of Internal Talent Management (ITM) which specializes in employee training and human resources consulting. She authors a blog at hrbartender.com.
A few weeks ago, I wrote that your organization should have a social media policy, and one of the things I heard among all the great comments was: “Okay, but what should it say?”
There are generally two approaches to social media policy making. Some organizations handle social media in an evolutionary way. Chad Houghton, the director of e-media and business development at the Society for Human Resource Management, told me that he thinks, “it might be beneficial not to create some arbitrary rules without first seeing where the opportunities and risks really are.”
Other organizations, meanwhile, feel more comfortable establishing a clear policy from the outset. IBM, for example, has published their social media guidelines publicly for anyone to read. It’s a great policy, though rather long.
Whether you’re writing your social media policy from the get-go, or letting it develop organically in reaction to situations as they arise, here are 10 things you should definitely consider. These 10 tips will help you steer clear of pitfalls and allow you to focus on what’s important: engaging the customer.
1. Introduce the purpose of social media
All policies need to address what’s in it for the reader/user — what should the reader take away after reading the policy? One of the common themes I kept coming across in introductions to social media policies is the idea that the policy should focus on the things that employees can rather than what they can’t do. For those of us who have experience writing policies, this is a real paradigm shift.
But that’s the spirit of social media — it’s all about leveraging the positive. And that needs to be evident in the policy. Houghton agrees, “The old way of doing things is to create an unnecessarily restrictive model of engagement that prevents companies from leveraging new media appropriately.”
2. Be responsible for what you write
Oren Michels, CEO of Mashery, explains that “people tend to interpret having the ‘right’ to express themselves online as implying a lack of consequences when they say stupid things.” That’s not the case. Your organization and its representatives need to take responsibility for what they write, and exercise good judgment and common sense.
“Dooced” is an Internet expression that means to lose one’s job because of things one says on one’s website or blog. No one wants that to happen, of course, so using common sense and being responsible is important.
3. Be authentic
Include your name and, when appropriate, your company name and your title. Consumers buy from people that they know and trust, so let people know who you are.
4. Consider your audience
When you’re out in the blogosphere or Twitterverse or other social media channels, remember that your readers include current clients, potential clients, as well as current/past/future employees. Consider that before you publish and make sure you aren’t alienating any of those groups.
5. Exercise good judgment
Refrain from comments that can be interpreted as slurs, demeaning, inflammatory, etc. The Internet is full of varied opinions, and it’s okay to share yours, but you never, never, never want to be branded a racist or narrow-minded or an unstoppable hot-head.
Your employees should understand that companies can and will monitor employee use of social media and social networking web sites, even if they are engaging in social networking or social media use away from the office. Eric B. Meyer, an associate at the labor and employment group of Dilworth Paxson LLP, reminds us that, “employees should always think twice before hitting ’send‘; consider what could happen if your organization sees what the employee publishes on the Internet and how that may reflect not just on the employee, but also the company.”
Bottom line: good judgment is paramount regardless of whether an employee’s online comments relate directly to their job.
6. Understand the concept of community
The essence of community is the idea that it exists so that you can support others and they, in turn, can support you. You need to learn how to balance personal and professional information, and the important role that transparency plays in building a community. Your community shouldn’t be an environment where competition is encouraged or emphasized, but rather a platform where your customers or users feel comfortable sharing, connecting, and receiving help.
7. Respect copyrights and fair use
This should be a no-brainer, but just in case: always give people proper credit for their work, and make sure you have the right to use something with attribution before you publish.
8. Remember to protect confidential & proprietary info
Being transparent doesn’t mean giving out the Colonel’s special 11 herbs and spices used in KFC chicken or the recipe for McDonald’s Big Mac special sauce.
Those examples seem pretty self-explanatory, but Meyer, points out that, “employers may fail to make employees aware of any obligation they may have to protect confidential or proprietary information.” Transparency doesn’t give employees free rein to share just anything. Meyer says that every state has a law governing trade secrets.
Therefore, employees who share confidential or proprietary information do so at the risk of losing their job and possibly even ending up a defendant in a civil lawsuit. At the very least, companies will seriously question the judgment of an employee who shares confidential or proprietary information via social media. It’s a good idea to make sure all of this is clearly laid out in your social media policy.
9. Bring value
Social media will more likely pay dividends for you if you add value to your followers, readers, fan, and users. Michels, for example, said he’s used blog posts as a “means to frame the conversation around specific issues and make sure that our position is heard and commented on,” or as a way to build buzz for upcoming products or services.
Joe Homs, the CEO of Headset Bros., shared with me two instances where social media has provided an opportunity to bring customer value. Once, on Twitter (), they ran across a person who was looking for a recommendation for a product they sell. A simple message to her that was quick and relevant allowed them to make a fast sale.
Another time, on Facebook (), a customer complaint about not receiving an order led to the realization that their shipping company had lost the package. Sending the customer a new package overnight fixed the problem and they eventually worked out the problem with the shipping company as well.
Still confused about the different ways you can provide value using social media? Check out the video from Barry Judge, the Chief Marketing Officer at Best Buy, embedded below.
I asked Homs if he was concerned that his employees would lose focus if they were spending too much time on social media sites. His comment: there’s not much to balance. He told me, “talking to people (over social media or otherwise) is our ‘real’ job.” Headset Bros estimates that 90% of their business is communication with customers (online and by phone). To help with the rest, they’ve automated most of their other business functions.
But, your social media usage won’t get you very far if you don’t execute on the core competencies of your business. Remember that in order for your social media endeavors to be successful, you need to find the right balance between social media and other work.
Sample social media policy
The Headset Bros. were kind enough to let us republish their social media policy. It’s short, but that’s by design, because CEO Joe Homs told me, “we want people to read it.”
Online social networks are essential tools for journalists. They make it possible to build extended networks, search for story ideas, build contacts and dig up information. But even more important, they help to shake up the relationship between the individual journalist and the people formerly known as the audience.
But many journalists don’t know how to get the full benefit of online social networks such as Facebook or LinkedIn. They sign up, fill in forms, and … nothing happens. Or they have a lot of fun with friends but admit that, professionally speaking, their online network activity has little or no value. To get the full benefit of social networks, journalists have to be do more than just sign up; they have to be engaged and active within their networks. And that means they need to carefully think about what image they want to project of themselves, to a group of watchers that might include both personal friends and business colleagues.
Who are you?
In our newsroom workshop on social media, we talked a lot about Facebook. The main lesson of this discussion was that Facebook tries to be everything for everybody. That means that journalists can customize their pages to get the most out of them, but they should first think hard about what they want to achieve there.
There is one fundamental question for journalists in social networks: Who is it you want to reach? Or to put it another way, what kind of conversation do you want to engage in?
If your beat is covering bankers, chances are that you have to deal with a relatively conservative group of people. Maybe it is not a good idea to befriend them on Facebook in the same way as you would befriend your “real friends,” showing those funny pictures of that crazy party… But at the same time you do want to talk to these bankers in an informal, human way, without putting them off.
To help you run a page that caters to both professional and personal contacts, Facebook gives you tools to customize what you want to show to whom. These tools help you project an image of yourself that facilitates contacts. Facebook’s “privacy settings” allow you to control the access to the different components of your page: profile, search, newsfeed and wall, applications.
For every bit of information you can say who gets access: everyone, your networks and friends, friends of friends, or even specific individuals.
Whether you are on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or whatever, you should invest time in your profile. LinkedIn is clearly a network for professionals, but many other networks are everything for everybody, and it is on these networks that you have to decide how you want to present yourself.
Asking, answering, starting conversations
It is a bit odd to go to a bar, stay silent and almost invisible for the whole evening, and than complain that you had no interesting conversation. Yet this is exactly what happens a lot on online networks.
LinkedIn has a terrific system of questions and answers. You can ask questions to other people in your network; you can even specify the sector which you target for an answer. You can also answer other members’ questions, of course, a good way to get recognition as an expert in your field.
It is obvious there are a lot of opportunities here for journalists to ask questions or to announce that they are working on a story.
Each and every time you have a deeper contact with a source, whether it is online or in the physical world, you should try to connect also on a social network — but which network depends on your source. In that way your online friends are maybe not “real friends,” but they will be much more than just “followers”.
To start a conversation, you have to know who is out there and what kind of people there are in your sector. You will soon find out that the “degrees of separation” between you and most people in the sector you cover are very limited. You’ll discover new people who are connected to those you already follow. It is always very interesting to look on Twitter to see who that interesting new contact is following herself, to give but one example — most social networks allow you access to that kind of information.
If you feel you have a strong reputation in your sector and lots of people follow you on social networks, it could be interesting to start your own specialized page. Nothing stops you from creating a Facebook group which deals exclusively with your beat.
Linking it all together
So, instead of saying “Here we are now, entertain us,” you engage in online conversations and you even start them up. You will have a group of close contacts who you know pretty well, a group of contacts you are less familiar with, and a group of people which might be interesting but whom you hardly know them.
It is fashionable to look down on people who gather lots of followers because it seems they deal in what are called “weak ties” as opposed to the “strong ties” we have with our closest friends. Often, however, those weak ties can bring you unexpected and highly useful information and support. The “strong ties” share too much of your own background to give you radically new insights. It can be the weak ties that turn out to be very efficient.
A show of hands in the newsroom of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette illustrates how editors and reporters are using the Facebook social netowork.
Having many followers or “friends” also helps to promote your articles, videos, pictures etc. Don’t rely exclusively on your newspaper’s marketing department!
In your sector, you are the main representative of your newspaper, radio or television station or blog. Having good online conversations is probably more important for the brand of your publisher than yet another marketing campaign.
Of course, it is also important for you as an individual journalist. It is important to behave like a one-person enterprise, because, at the end of the day, that is what you are. It helps you to survive and flourish in difficult times for the media, and it helps your publisher.
So do not hesitate to have elaborate profiles and to engage in conversations on many online networks. Tools such as ping.fm let you send out messages and links to many networks with one simple click. However, don’t forget to listen carefully to reactions you get and engage in conversations — and to send out links to other stuff than just your own articles.
How to keep an overview of all this? Enter FriendFeed, a feed aggregator that groups almost everything together in a fast moving stream of information, and you can customize, slice and dice that information and your contact lists as you want.
Guidelines and pleasure
Media institutions have had to grapple with the fact that social networks are knocking down the wall between journalists’ personal and professional circles. The Wall Street Journal recently issued new rules of conduct for its employees regarding social networks. I do agree with some of these rules, like the warning against misrepresenting yourself using a false name while collecting information for an article. (Although maybe there are exceptions in an investigative journalism context), but there has been some criticism of the rules. One of the most interesting reactions came from venture capitalist Fred Wilson, focusing on three rules:
Let our coverage speak for itself, and don’t detail how an article was reported, written or edited.
Don’t discuss articles that haven’t yet been published, meetings you’ve attended or plan to attend with staff or sources, or interviews that you’ve conducted. . . .
Business and pleasure should not be mixed on services like Twitter. Common sense should prevail, but if you are in doubt about the appropriateness of a Tweet or posting, discuss it with your editor before sending.
Wilson reacted:
This misses the chance to make their reporting collaborative. Of course, they should discuss how an article was made. Of course, they should talk about stories as they in progress. Net natives — as WSJ owner Rupert Murdoch calls them — understand this.
Twitter, blogs, Facebook, etc. also provide the opportunity for reporters and editors to come out from behind the institutional voice of the paper — a voice that is less and less trusted — and to become human. Of course, they should mix business and pleasure.
I think this is a most profound reaction. If we journalists want to survive, we will have to learn to come out from behind our institutions and to speak in a human voice — to engage in genuine conversations.
What is your take on this? Do you feel online social networks are crucial for your job? And how should we behave on those networks, being journalists?
Roland Legrand is in charge of Internet and new media at Mediafin, the publisher of leading Belgian business newspapers De Tijd and L’Echo. He studied applied economics and philosophy. After a brief teaching experience, he became a financial journalist working for the Belgian wire service Belga and subsequently for Mediafin. He works in Brussels, and lives in Antwerp with his wife Liesbeth.
Pittsburgh newsroom photo by Robbmonty via Flickr Creative Commons
Catherine-Gail Reinhard is creative director at Videasa, an agency that focuses on creating video infotainment for the web and emerging media platforms. You can follow her on Twitter.
As YouTube () has grown into the preeminent video sharing service online, marketers have tried, with limited success, to broadcast themselves and to reach audiences with their messaging. And while individuals have used YouTube as a platform to step into the spotlight, most brands have been left behind in the shadows. Save for the occasional media-supported viral video blitz, or user generated contest, commercial success on YouTube has been elusive to the many brands that have tried to reach for that brass ring.
This is not to say that brands will ever reach the heights of popularity on YouTube that individuals have achieved, and it would be naive to start a Sponsored Channel with the expectation that millions of viewers will tune in right away. However, YouTube does represent a great opportunity for marketers to reach consumers who are searching for information about a brand or related products and services. YouTube can also be a powerful direct marketing tool, provided that it is considered as part of the marketing mix rather than a tactic in a vacuum.
One thing is becoming apparent: The brands that achieve long-term success on YouTube are the ones that consistently and frequently publish refreshing content that has intrinsic value for audiences online. Here are some of the standout brands that have created a strong position on YouTube by understanding the zeitgeist of collective content generation and some of the clever marketing tactics they are using to build their presence on the site.
Some brands are missing the boat
YouTube is littered with thousands of “contest-driven” videos and channels that have not been updated in many months, and in some cases, many years. Brands that let their channels lapse and fade away into the wasteland of untidy and untended pages lack a clear understanding of how to use YouTube as a social media vehicle.
I have also specifically excluded some very large brands from this post that have created one or more viral “one-hit wonders” but continue to use their branded YouTube channel to only post their television commercials online. These global brands tend to generate buzz for their one “viral” video but these efforts prove to be largely campaign-centric and media supported. Many of these brands still neglect to publish content on an ongoing basis.
Additionally, I have not included brands on this list that professionally create content as their primary product or service (i.e. newspapers, magazines, TV shows, Internet TV, entertainment companies, music industry, movies).
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For emergency situations, such as Hurricane Ike in Texas, Ramirez set up a closed Twitter network that’s used for private non-official conversation and communication among his team and their partners, the Red Cross and Loews Emergency Response Team. The private network allows them to speak openly and freely about the stresses and the isolation they’re dealing with. The Twitter network has become critical for their disaster recovery operations, said Ramirez. “You always have that feeling that the team down the road is superhuman,” Ramirez said, “When you’re dealing with 300 rescues a day and you’re miles from your colleagues, you need that social support that reminds you that you’re only human.”
When he was working for the Burbank Winter Shelter in California, he was responsible for 150 homeless people waiting at a bus shelter about to get rained on. Driving around LA, he asked the Twitterati where he could find raincoats in bulk. He got advice to go to Sportmart and Costco where he cleaned them out of every raincoat they had. But one Twitter follower, Michael Buchanan (
One recently launched application, now ready for hurricane season, is 
Refrain from comments that can be interpreted as slurs, demeaning, inflammatory, etc. The Internet is full of varied opinions, and it’s okay to share yours, but you never, never, never want to be branded a racist or narrow-minded or an unstoppable hot-head.
Being transparent doesn’t mean giving out the Colonel’s special 11 herbs and spices used in KFC chicken or the recipe for McDonald’s Big Mac special sauce.
