Dear Viacom: You're Doing It Wrong Again.

Viacom is embroiled in another (surprise) dispute over their content. If you live off the grid somewhere or don't like TV here's the deal: Viacom wants to raise the prices for their 19 channels (including MTV, Nickelodeon, and Comedy Central) and Time Warner Cable doesn't want to grant it.
Viacom just cannot seem to get with the program since advertising sales went flat. What they need to do is forge a partnership with booming sites like Hulu in order to start monetizing their content better, NOT up the charges on the end consumer. Whereas 10 years ago, consumers would have no choice but to pay the fees they can now simply go online for their favorite shows.
It will be interesting to see who wins this one.

~~ Caitlin

What The Flip: A Contest Done Correctly

We here at Sway are big fans of the Flip Video cameras. They only have 3 buttons so they are extremely easy to use, easy to upload videos online, and the video quality is excellent for a hand held device that small.
It's no surprise that MTV and Flip have teamed up to bring some user generated buzz (i.e. cheap) to the product while keeping MTV edgy and cool. The contest "What The Flip" gave 100 cameras to college students and asked them several questions and asked them to submit their answer via video. The contest is doing extremely well for a number of reasons that I want to highlight for anyone considering an online contest in 2009.
1) The barrier to entry is very low. Flip gave the cameras out. No one had to buy a camera. This is key because brands often want to make the participants of the contest their customers. What they should be doing is using the contest participants to generate buzz for the product like Flip is doing. Set people up to participate. Introduce a lot of steps or even a purchase to participate and your contest is done for.
2) The questions are general yet have direction. We work with a lot of would-be contest creators that want people to do "whatever they want". The thing is, no one will participate if you do that. It's like sitting down an artist with a piece of paper and saying "draw something." Direction is good. Tell your participants to follow a loose plan. Get too specific and you'll lose people too, general guidelines work best.
3) You can see the other entries. People who are participating in a contest want to see their competition. Period. They aren't going to dig through YouTube looking for them either. Create a nice, organized place for the videos to be displayed.

~~ Caitlin

Social Media 2009

Viral marketing and social media have come a long way in 2008. Last year at this time, I was forever explaining podcasts and widgets and this year people are creating their own from many different sources. It truly was the year of the widget.
If you are a small company and jumped on the bandwagon early, congratulations! You probably got some relatively cheap word of mouth marketing under your belt. This year, the big guns are coming and with their large budgets we'll no doubt be seeing big changes in the social media sphere again. My predictions for 2009.

1) Social media budgets will become standard. Last year there was a lot of "squeezing in" social media. No one had a set budget for it but everyone wanted to try it. With the economy uncertain, lots of brands are going to rethink their TV budgets in favor of more targeted online visibility.
2) Social media will become more highly measured. With companies like Avenue A (and even us) trying to corner the market on measuring social media this will become a new arms race in the online world. Tying ROI to social media is imperative and we must begin to make sense of social media in a more precise way.
3) The big players are staying. With lots of clients asking me "what is the next Facebook?" I have to honestly say I don't think there's going to be one in the very near future. As long as the brightest minds are concentrating on how to measure and monetize, it's unlikely more huge players will enter the ring.
4) We'll say goodbye to lots of startups. Sad but true, startups are coming and going more quickly than I can even keep track of. With VC's pulling away, we'll see a lot of startups fail in the first quarter.
5) The Blogosphere will continue to grow. Blogs went this year from "a couple of people in the ad and tech world" to "my neighbor, my fitness instructor, and the checkout girl at the supermarket" having a blog. There will likely be companies trying to create blog networks and organize the blogs as more and more people try their hand at citizen journalism.

Predictions aside, it's officially safe to try social media now. It's not a fad, it works, and it's not going anywhere. If you're a numbers and ROI type, you will be relieved to know that this type of measurement is in the works.

~~ Caitlin

Video Length: How Long Will They Watch?

It's fairly common for social media marketers these days to recommend that online video lengths mirror those of TV commercials. Shorter is better, attention spans won't last through a video, and that type of advice has largely prevailed.
I was guilty of that too.
Lately though, we've been changing our minds about that hard and fast rule here at Sway. While it might be true that people don't want to watch a commercial that's longer than 1 min. they will watch engaging content much longer. Just look at Hulu. Just look at some of the most popular videos on Metacafe.
So while I think it's still important to keep video relatively short, you may not have to stick to the "under a minute" rule anymore and here's a great JC Penney video to prove it.

~ Caitlin