It looks so easy: you pull out a camera, live your life, and stick it up on YouTube for everyone to see. But if only it was that easy. In actuality, creating good online video that will reach an audience and interest people is much more complicated than simply uploading it. As a video creator you need to know how to best capture your subject, the best route of channel, and how to get the absolute most out of your energy. Here are five simple but effective rules to remember as you start on your journey to video bliss.

1. Your equipment is important. Lots of books will tell you that it doesn’t matter what kind of camera you use, or how clean your edit is- and they're lying to you. Of course you can grab the video setting on your digicam and try the whole thing in just one take. Maybe if you’re Gary Vee you can actually get a great piece of footage from that, too. But, if you’re a company trying to produce quality content the first time around, and clocks and wallets are ticking, you should probably put in a little more work. Flip Cam’s are absolutely fantastic for raw, on the go footage. For everything and anything else, reach out to a trusted production co.  Not only will your video look less grainy but the sound quality will be out of this world compared to anything you would have achieved on a pocket cam.

2. There’s more than just YouTube… but use YouTube. Blip.tv, UStream, Vimeo… there are plenty of websites to choose from when it’s time to upload your videos to the Internet; and they all have benefits. Some can be viewed in countries where others cannot. Some have better picture quality. However, in Social Media, when the aim of the game is to go where the people go, you cannot (at least right now) beat YouTube. And remember, with YouTube’s embed codes, you can feel free to plaster that video in lots of other spaces-  try a myriad of websites, bloggers, communities, emails- and still get all your analytics in one place.

3. Remember your  ABC’s of tags and titles. Be as simple yet descriptive as possible when you fill in that “title” field during the YouTube upload. A video about Washington DC travel in March, for example, could be titled “March DC Trip” but how much better would a title like “Washington DC Cherry Blossom Festival Getaway” be? Plenty helpful, since many people would be searching for “Cherry blossom” or “festival” and not specifically the month. This also applies for the tags you include during your upload. And don’t forget to include tags that hit on your research and are selected based on volume and competition.

4. Call on all of your promotional super powers. Video does not work alone. The biggest mistake some creators make is to spend time and money working on this fantastic movie, uploading it, and then sitting back and watching. What a waste of the resources at your fingertips! Chances are you’ve got a Facebook fan page and a Twitter account. You might even have a community or website, or even an email list. Go ahead and stick a call-to-action all over these properties. Link to the video in your emails and on Twitter. Embed the video in your website and Facebook page or community. Just because your video “lives” on one website doesn’t mean it can’t travel to others, and sometimes reaching out to the people is more cost effective than waiting for them to reach you. During editing of your video, you can also put in some URL’s you want people to go back and visit, giving the link backs a circle effect.

5. If at first you don’t success… then dig into your wallet.  If view numbers right off the bat are important to you, or you have zero time or resources to put into growing a following, remember that videos can pay to become a “YouTube Promoted Video.” Promoted Videos appear higher on search results, show up in the sidebar of YouTube homepages and channel pages, and appear higher on Google Search. This pay-per-click system encourages you to pay whenever you receive a new view, making it imperative that you also exhaust every other resource you can as well. Paid partnerships are also available. Finally, by keeping an eye on the YouTube blog, you can submit applicable videos for the Spotlight of the Month, cherry picked videos that include a theme YouTube is promoting for the month.  Of course, price should be analyzed on whether or not this is an effective means, based on results of other methods.

 

 

Using text messages to make donations isn’t a new concept, but few could have predicted the way this simple, innovative use of technology would explode in response to the earthquake in Haiti.

An historic $27 million had already been raised for disaster relief via text as of Monday (1/18), six days after the earthquake. Compare that to less than $500,000 total in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, or $190,000 raised by the American Red Cross Text 2HELP campaign from September to December, 2008.

The contrast with Katrina is even more startling when considering that total Katrina donations were more than double total Haiti donations over the first six days for each. Texting has accounted for more than 10% of Haiti donations. The American Red Cross has been the biggest recipient; of $112 million total raised through Monday, a staggering 15-20% came via text, with two-thirds donated online.

The effectiveness of the text campaign when combined with major media outreach was proven on a stunning level last weekend during the NFL playoffs. Frequent PSAs aired throughout all four games. The result: text donations poured in at a rate of $500,000 an hour during that time.

While the sheer amount of money raised may be a surprise, text donations reaching its tipping point is not. Consider the factors:

• A disaster of tremendous proportions commanding the world’s attention
• The ever-increasing use of texts not only for communication, but for companies to offer services
• Ease of use: Anytime, anywhere, text a short code to add the donation to your bill, no sign-in, forms or credit cards required
• Social media like Twitter and Facebook spreading the word to the same demographic most likely to adopt this technology in the first place

As with any new technology, expanding so quickly has not been without growing pains. News broke that donations could experience delays of 60-90 days in reaching its destination, as mobile carriers waited for donors to pay their bills. Almost immediately, providers announced they would fast-track the money, pledging to advance 80-100% right away.

As Haiti earthquake relief brings text donations to the mainstream, it will be exciting to see how organizations and grassroots campaigns harness this new power in the very immediate future. Also fascinating to track: How this may empower the demographic most likely to use it – the young generation who knows texting as a way of life, but may never have participated in a campaign like this before.

There’s a large, new generation ready to step up, and a whole new way for them to do so in the most simple, effective way possible.

 

 

It seems like every few months Facebook rolls out a new design, or changes on existing designs. For users, these changes are often frustrating, but for developers and designers, it can be downright crippling to turn the blind corner. There's no miracle tutorial, but there are a few very simple thing you can do to ensure that your next project doesn't go up in flame (or completely disappear) when Facebook incorporates its next round of updates.

1. Keep Up With the Timeline. No Facebook project ever keeps an exact date of completion, but the Facebook Developer's Wiki has some pretty good estimates that you can follow along with. Bookmark the site and check back regularly for updates. Even if a change goes live prior to expected date, you'll already know what was in store and know how to deal with it. Also, add Mashable, Facebook Insider, and All Facebook to your daily blog reader for other news and tips. 

2. Design With Changes in Mind. You can't always predict what the next big update will be, but remember that as far as Facebook goes, nothing is set in stone. Many companies spent thousands of dollars on promotions that use capabilities that are either no longer available, or not allowed any longer; that's wasted money and time. Of course you want to put your all into everything you develop, but keep the Developer's Wiki in mind. Maybe you want to roll out a game that has unique Application Dashboard settings now, so when that change comes, you're ready. Maybe it's time to begin designing in 520px and preparing your Boxes tab for removal. Any decision that prepares you will be well worth it.

3. Bounce Ideas Off the Like-Minded. If you aren't surrounded with Facebook-on-the-brain friends, try the F8 Conference. This Facebook conference, scheduled for April 21-22 in San Francisco, is a great way to catch up with other Facebook Developers. There's no shame in not being versed in every single detail of upcoming updates, particularly for a platform that changes so sudden and rapidly, which is why keeping a roster of friends around is handy. Who can tell what tiny detail you've missed that a friend can remind you of -- and vice-versa.

4. Expect Change. Certainly you expect change; you work on social platforms, after all. But your client doesn't. Gently remind anyone you create Facebook promotions for that this is a fast-moving system. Today’s great idea might be tomorrow’s ancient history. Online is not traditional marketing and everyone needs a little patience, and to go in and out with the tide. With this in mind, you’ll never have all your eggs in one basket with the chance of total failure should your well-developed pixels or sidebars change around. Plus, once this process is understood -- and once you've built-up trust -- you'll be working with a client who is open to so much more of what's offered out there, and you'll have more fun. 

 

Google announced last week that it is ready to begin its DoubleClick AdExchange.  AdAge reports:

The AdExchange works similarly [to how the search market matches ad buyers and ad impressions in real time], but for display advertising. It also includes integration with Google's search ad-sales system, with the idea that it will let search advertisers move money more easily to display and vice versa. In addition, all of Google's network inventory will be available as part of the exchange . . .

The exchange draws criticism from advertising leaders for failing to offer quality inventory based in genuine relevance because of a focus on moving ads as part of exchanges with other exchange centers that are already part of the display-advertising marketplace, but where Google's offer differs in the combination of its transparency and scalability. 

This combination of offers has always been the advantage of Google's advertising programs--any advertiser who has tested click-based against impression-based programs knows that quality scores and targets require a fine balance and that tinkering with that balance within each program is vital to return on investment. 

 

 

The criticism, then, that the DoubleClick exchange's weakness is its inability guarantee quality is no different than any criticism that one could make against any Google advertising program.  Advertisements ranked by quality scores--indeed, advertisements in any channel--have only ever been as good as the creative and marketing teams behind them.  Consumers do not respond to poor-quality ads in any channel.  The fact that Google traditionally rewards advertisements that will generate responses because they are constructed well--and that it continues to do so in new mediums--doesn't change that much from the perspective of a consumer market that benefits from additional creative display and more focused and scalable targeting.  

In that context, the criticism of "But will it be any good?" seems a bit like it's based in the straw-man and red-herring fallacies, whereby those that have an interest in maintaining premium, static pricing on digital-advertising real estate find it a protective necessity to play only with the major players within a narrow range of price points.  

This is where we find the true genius in the new exchange.  Before advertisers even begin to consider the elements of paid-search marketing, the core offers on their websites must be relevant, high-quality offers, and organic search concepts, arguably the foundation of search marketing, allow even the minor players to optimize and sustain competitiveness through the idea of the long tail, a frequency-distribution concept that means businesses sell less quantity of more unique unit types.  When sites communicate relevance for a specific product, that product gains visibility in search-engine results because it is focused to a specific target's need or needs.  

Google's DoubleClick AdExchange allows a similar focused targeting and scalability, only, now, advertisers can marry these benefits with high-impact creative, which has previously been limited to a mostly static, contract marketplace.  What this means for advertisers is that the best of all worlds are now coming together, so that the real opportunity of the DoubleClick AdExchange network is exactly that for which some are criticizing it--everyone now has the ability to compete based on merit, as measured by consumer response, across all playing fields, regardless of scale.     

 

Aside from a few exceptions, the currency of the web (or at least, social media) is social capital. You know, the number of friends you have on Facebook, your 2 million views on YouTube, your “SuperUser” badge on Foursquare, your hundreds (or thousands) of followers on Twitter and Tumblr. None of those things have any direct monetary value, although some people are trying to cash in on them through things like the Twittad network, or a good old fashioned TV deal-a-Tequila. As things currently stand, money can’t buy you love or Elite status on Yelp; the only way to get that is by earning it through creation of “compelling content” and/or being an “influencer”.  But something is in the works that’s going to change that, and potentially the way we view social currency in the online world.  

Picture this: you’re playing an online game. You run around and interact with other players of the game, and get points for everything you do. You can buy things with these points, and give these points to other people. You can spend real money to get these points, or you can just earn them (although to get the really good stuff, it’s going to take a while). Sounds familiar, right? It’s Second Life, or World of Warcraft, right? Wrong. It’s Facebook. Or it will be, in about 6-12 months.

Last week, a sales rep from Facebook came to Flightpath to have a discussion with us concerning the most recent changes to the site. During the course of the meeting, he revealed that Facebook will soon be allowing users to earn Facebook Credits by simply engaging with their friends, whether it’s by “liking” a status, adding a friend, or posting a video. People will also be able to gift Facebook Credits to others, along with using credits to purchase gifts. In short, Facebook is going to have a currency. Holy Terms Of Service.

According to the calculations of Lightspeed Venture Partners, Facebook made $35 million on Facebook Gifts in 2008 alone. That’s right. Those tiny little icons for $1 (or 100 credits) netted Facebook tens of millions of dollars last year (which is paltry compared to Zynga's $50 million). Ok, you’re saying to yourself, so what? I don’t care about little icons on my profile. Facebook isn’t going to make any money off of me. Well, you’re right—for now. You’re also probably over 25. And while you may not care about a teddy bear icon or some other form of digital embellishment, there are at least 27 million other people who do. They’re kids under 12, and they’re the people Facebook is ultimately planning for.

Maybe not all of you have kids. But those of you who do, or who have ever been around a kid who’s 12 or under, know about Webkinz and Club Penguin. For the uninitiated, Webkinz and Club Penguin are sites that are essentially Facebook for the under 12 set, only instead of a picture of yourself and your dog, the kids are COPPA-compliantly represented by animated animals. A social network combined with a game, they can play for free, but the really good stuff (digital furniture, digital pets, special invites, etc) goes to those who fork over the dough.  And fork over they do: with only 12 million registered members, Club Penguin made $35 million in profit ($65m in revenue) last year.

So what does this all mean? Well, it basically means that Facebook has the potential to make a lot of money. Kids who grew up having online access from an early age don’t have as many mental barriers between the online world and the real world. They don’t have problems spending a lot of (your) money to make their online room just as cool as their physical, brick-and-mortar room. Talking online for them is just another extension of talking in real life. So by attaching an actual value (10 credits, 15 credits) to the various actions one takes in the course of a 20 minute (or 4 hour) session on Facebook, Zuckerberg and Co. are actually monetizing social capital, which is pretty revolutionary. If you can get a special invite to a new Facebook feature by possessing a certain number of credits, you’ll essentially be able to buy your cool—which, ultimately, isn’t that different from the real world. But it’s certainly going to be a profitable revenue stream.

 

I start this piece by making one assumption--everyone is a Facebook  user. 

 

Isn’t that what makes social communities great? When they have hit a critical mass of users? Your entire community of close friends, family, coworkers, old college buddies, business acquaintances, and that girl you met at the Digital Wednesday’s networking event are all hanging out together in your Facebook friends list.

 

Now let me ask a rather blunt rhetorical question, “Would you invite all of these people over for Thanksgiving dinner?” Let me put things into my perspective.

 

My father just recently sent me a friend request, which unfortunately is still sitting in my inbox, after seeing me over Thanksgiving. My girlfriend’s sister rolled her eyes for denying her friend request after I tried to explain, “My Facebook page is really just for work purposes.”

 

My friends list is quite small, only consisting of coworkers and a handful of close clients. I have deliberately kept my personal   life separate from my Facebook one. This is not out of fear of possibly inappropriate content, but of the calamity that would occur if all the pieces of my social life melded into one unified bucket.

 

There is a huge opportunity for Facebook to expand its breadth from simple social networking into a true relationship management tool. No one   has just “friends” in his or her life. We dissect our social life mainly into family, work, and play. How are these very distinct aspects of our real social life going to interact in this digital social stew? I understand the argument—interpersonal transparency can be the catalyst for social discovery; however, we manage the relationships in our lives differently than how Facebook currently presents it to us. 

 

About a year ago, Facebook added a new feature that allowed those of us who have 5,000 friends to manage that immense data slurry into user-created categories. However these user-created categories are little more than a light contact list-building tool. This is the first step in the direction that I propose below. 

 

Facebook should allow you to designate your own categories for people in your friends list. Each of these created “friend categories” could have a separate sub-profile page where a user could design a page around that unique social interaction. This could simply all boil down to a privacy setting. You allow one category of friends to see a certain module on your profile. If a friend on your other list views your profile page, they would simply not see the module.

 

If you created a category of friends called “business networking” Facebook could finally be used as a quasi-Linkedin without the fear of your business prospect seeing pictures of you at the MTV beach party in Cabo last summer.

 

This would open a huge opportunity for Facebook to capitalize on the business side of our social communities. Lord knows as much as we all love Linkedin, there is little "social interaction" beyond the prospect of upward career mobility, which does not usually make for great conversation. 

 

I wish I could create a friend category called “work” and use Facebook as an internal communication and content management system. Most companies  already use Instant Messenger as a more efficient way to communicate internally than email. IM poses its own set of similar issues. If you use the same IM username for work and at home, while you’re at work your friends outside of the company are just one tempting click away to distract you. To circumvent this whole issue I have created a IM  account specifically for work—but, if my idea happened, I wouldn’t have to.  

 

Facebook would do the filtering for me, and I could finally become digital friends with my girlfriend’s sister, my coworkers, my clients—and my dad.  

 

 

Last week a few of us at Flightpath attended the Web 2.0 Expo at the Javits Center here in New York. I mostly attended sessions from the developer track and there is one theme in particular that I want to comment on: the future of JavaScript is bright.

JavaScript, the scripting language used in web browsers, is getting a boost. Firefox, Safari and, most recently, Google's Chrome browser have recently claimed improvements to the speed of their JavaScript engines. And we are not talking small improvements. When Google introduced Chrome, they stated that it was many times faster than that of other browsers and indeed benchmarks showed that. In introducing Squirrelfish Extreme (the new JavaScript engine for Safari), the WebKit team presented benchmarks that showed the new engine is over 10 times faster than Safari 3.0. Mozilla is also continuing to make JavaScript improvements for Firefox. Although trailing the speed race, Internet Explorer 8 is 2.5 times faster than IE 7 in some benchmarks. I believe the more dramatic improvements of the other browsers will pressure Microsoft into further improving the speed of JavaScript on Internet Explorer.

In addition to speed improvements, there are other browser related improvements that will empower web developers to build even more powerful applications. HTML 5 contains support for offline, locally stored data. Some browsers are starting to implment this features and Google Gears, a browser plugin, lets web applications store data locally in a fully-searchable database and run JavaScript in the background to improve performance.

What does this mean for web development? It means Web applications can be more robust and do more. It means that Ajax is a serious contender to flash for creating rich internet applications (RIAs). Other new features to browsers, including offline support, mean that browser apps are continuing to become more like desktop applications. Many of us were wowed by the improved user experience when Ajax first gained traction, and I believe we are entering a new era in which web applications are going to be able to integrate with the desktop to provide an even richer user experience. This is great for those of us who have extensive web development experience as it means we can leverage our HTML, CSS and JavaScript skills to create ever more powerful applications. After the last few years in which we've seen that the greatest improvement to web browsers has been the addition of tabs (well, maybe improved CSS support beats that, but you get the point), it is nice to see the competition and innovation heat up.

Nobody likes bugs. They're annoying, messy, unprofessional and embarrassing. Although, when it's someone else's bugs, I do find it amusing. I admit I love it when I see Google or Yahoo throw an error, and the best one yet was a 10ft high by 20ft wide video display in a New York City Sprint store that had a big empty black screen and this lovely message facing Broadway for everyone to see:
 
"Windows could not start because the following file is missing..."
 
So, what's the best way to catch these bugs (or defects) and eliminate them, before they become those irritating problems that frustrate end users? The general strategy needs to be test early and test often. But 'test' doesn't just mean the programmer completes development of the new feature, moves it to a testing site and then the QA team jumps on it and runs their tests. The idea is illustrated beautifully here, with a chart that I've become very fond of and used in an earlier post:
 

This chart, produced by Construx Software, shows the stages in the project where defects are introduced, and the cost of repairing defects at each stage of the project. The color scheme and curves remind me of flames, and if you think about it that way then the later you get in your project the bigger your fires get and the harder (and more expensive) they are to put out. The chart shows that most projects devote their resources to repairing defects at the very late stages of the project, in system test. Repairing defects at the system test stage, or the post launch stage is considerably more difficult and time consuming then if the defect were caught earlier in the project and repaired at that point. Part of the challenge of raising the level of quality and finding and reparing defects early is realizing the potential for defects to be introduced early. It's too easy to blame a bug on a programmer's bad code or missing code (not that the Flightpath programmers ever produce any bad code, that's a hypothetical software firm I am referring to), but what Quality Assurance engineers need to realize is that many defects can be created in the earliest stages of a project, before a programmer even gets involved. Designers and Technical Architects can make mistakes too (but of course Project Managers never make mistakes), and the more of those mistakes that can be caught, the healthier the project will be. Having grown up playing goalkeeper on my soccer team, I like to use an analogy from the game - everyone likes to blame the goalie when the team gets scored on, but people easily forget that there were 10 other people on the field that could have made mistakes before the ball got back to the net. Similar to many software project defects, they can be created anywhere along the process.

 
So, test early and test often:
 

• Review the requirements document with the customer, to confirm that all are on exactly the same page with the goals of the project
  
• Involve the QA engineers early on in the development of the specifications document and testing scripts, to verify that the requirements are met, and as many issues as possible are considered and properly handled
  

 
Frederick Brooks, in The Mythical Man Month, writes:
 
"Long before any code exists, the specification must be handed to an outside testing group to be scrutinized for completeness and clarity. As [V.A.] Vyssotsky [of Bell Telephone Laboratories' Safeguard Project] says, the developers themselves cannot do this: 'They won't tell you they don't understand it; they will happily invent their way through the gaps and obscurities.' "
 
When the project is in the development stages, continue to test early and often:
 

• Incorporate regular programmer peer reviews of code and functionality
  
• Schedule feature reviews & tests whenever possible, for both programming team and QA engineers
  

Ideally if all of these steps are taken (and I'm sure there's much more that can be done that I haven't mentioned), then when the project is ready for system test many of the issues have already been identified and resolved. This is not to say that no defects will be found in system test, but hopefully many less than if these steps weren't taken.
 
A couple of things to keep in mind while in full system test:

• Test the pieces isolated and then test them together. If a piece passed an earlier feature review, test it again and don't just assume that it will work fine with the other pieces
  
• Test thoroughly within the mainline scenarios and don't forget to hit the edges and the outside, as Frederick Brooks writes in his book when discussing test cases for software:
  
  1. Mainline cases that test the program's chief functions for commonly encountered data (the most time will be spent here).
     
  2. Barely legitimate cases that probe the edge of the input data domain, ensuring that largest possible values, smallest possible values, and all kinds of valid exceptions work.
     
  3. Barely legitimate cases that probe the domain boundary from the other side, ensuring that invalid inputs raise proper diagnostic messages.


• Once a defect has been fixed and verified in the test system, review all other areas tested and confirm they still work properly. This can be the most time consuming task, but critical. When this task can be automated, even better.

I'd be lying if I said that all of my projects launch bug free, but I am trying to incorporate more and more of these processes into my projects and will continue to strive to keep the bug count down.

Happy Bug Hunting!

 

In case you haven't heard the news, there's a new search engine in town, and they are gunning for Google. It's called Cuil (http://www.cuil.com), and the company claims to "search more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft." More about Cuil straight from the horse's mouth ("About" section):

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there. We believe that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach, so we don’t collect data about you and your habits, lest we are tempted to peek. With Cuil, your search history is always private.

Others have tried, unsuccessfully, to challenge Google's dominance in the search arena. Is bigger always better? Cuil will certainly return more results from more sources, but the question and primary concern as a searcher remains, will they be relevant? Make no mistake. relevance will always be THE key. I spent ten minutues searching for Whitney Houston's latest leaked single, and I can't tell you how frusterating it is to have to weed through pages of reviews of her "new" track, from 2003.

Google may be THE current undisputed search leader, but the company that remains there will ultimately be the one that adapts to the ways in which people will come to utilize search in the future. The key to success is evolving with your user or customer. At the very least, companies like Cuil keep Google on their toes (as well as keeping Google's research and development department's budget inflated). At best, they provide us with a more pleasurable search experience and a reminder that like tennis great Roger Federer, nothing or no one is infallible.