Silicon Valley Startups Using YouTube to Build Community posted by Craig Oda at Wednesday, July 23, 2008

In the last three months, I've seen a big change in the attitude that Silicon Valley startups have toward YouTube. Every few weeks, I answer questions about what companies can do with YouTube or what is required to produce, publish, and promote YouTube videos. We've completed several projects, including one for the Linux Foundation that was our first effort at a YouTube channel.

Based on our initial experience, we decided to experiment with lavalier microphones and boom microphones. Even for YouTube videos, the internal microphone did not allow us to get decent audio quality. We followed an interview style format and kept the videos to less than five minutes. The primary goal of the project was to help people that weren't attending the show get a better understanding of who some of the key people in open source were. We didn't promote the video channel aggressively.

Shelly Milam is going up to OSCON tomorrow to do a similar project for SourceForge. She'll be using a new camera. The current plan is to stick with the internal microphone until we finish more testing with external microphones. We're going to continue to use iMovie for editing.

We're estimating that the total time for four movies, including production, editing, and distribution will be eight hours.

Social Media PR: the Big Idea posted by lonn johnston at Monday, July 14, 2008

Page One PR has used social media tools in our client campaigns since we started the agency in late 2002.

We developed our expertise at companies in the early days of open source and Linux. In open source, the winners are projects and companies that can foster communities of developers the fastest. The more developers you attract to your code, the more valuable your code becomes and that in turn attracts more users to projects. If you're a company, the more of those users who convert into customers, the more successful your business.

That experience informs how we look at "social media" PR at Page One.

It's very challenging to attract a lot of different people around an idea. The idea by definition has to be big. And authentic. For us, it was originally open source and the promise to participate in something that would change forever how software was made.

Google came to us in mid-2008 for help on a project. Their big idea was that software would be created in the cloud and run on clients in the browser. No one owns the cloud but Google has great tools for making software in the cloud. They wanted developers to know more about those great tools. Their business interest was to attract more Web developers to their Google I/O conference in San Francisco. I think by all measures it was a huge success. Registrations were so high that Google had to shut down the lines at Moscone to start the keynote address on time. We had onsite blogging from TechCruch, podcasts by Mashable, and twitter feeds from all of the main events. Pre-event coverage was up almost 600 percent from the year before and first day coverage jumped more than 300 percent. CNET alone ran 10 stories.

Many of our agency peers in the PR industry run around all bug-eyed like old Roman statues obsessed with Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, Seesmic, Plurk, LinkedIn or whatever might be the latest tool. But successful social media is not about the tools. It's about the big idea, and then it's about how you use all of the tools you can to foster participation in the big idea and, if you're a company, to advance a business interest that you can measure.

Twitter - Toy or Tool? posted by Craig Oda at Friday, July 11, 2008

A few weeks ago I got a call from a reporter who was writing a book with a section on the use of Twitter in corporate communications program. I was surprised. Up until four months ago, I thought of Twitter as a toy, a bit of time sink to chat about pets, the latest meals, and the latest reality show on TV. Before the reporter called, I had been involved in about three projects to use Twitter for corporate messaging programs. However, I had never taken a close look at how the programs were doing across our agency.

I checked up on Twitter usage across the agency and was given a big wake up call when I learned that one-third of our clients were using Twitter in corporate messaging programs. A well-known open source company that was using Twitter to promote a community choice awards contest really made me think hard about the changes I'm going to have to face with these new tools of online communication. One month into a two month promotion campaign, the number of voters had increased dramatically to 100,000. This was up from less than 40,000 total voters in the previous year. Increasing the number of voters is a primary goal of this ongoing campaign. With two weeks left in the program, we may push the total above 80,000 voters.

What changed? Why was Twitter a tool now for this company, not a toy? Although we're still in the process of executing the campaign and haven't finished analyzing the results, I have a few initial thoughts. Twitter is a great way to send short news updates to an existing community several times a day. In this example, Twitter wasn't used to build a community, it helped to focus the attention of some members of an existing open source development community on a specific action. In this case, they voted on the best open source software in different categories. Twitter was used to give updates on the process for community nominations and finalist selection by the community. Since Twitter helped more people to understand the process, more people felt invested in the outcome of the awards program and decided to take the time to vote.

Getting the phone call from the reporter helped me to think through how Twitter can be used. I've started to use Twitter software Tweetr and twhirl on my Mac desktop and recently installed the free application Twitterific on my iPhone. For me, Twitter has finally become a tool.