Say goodbye to Cable Guy

Have you always craved for that exclusive video of your favourite movie star? Want to see that sizzling video of Madonna hours before it goes live on TV? Well, YouTube has made it easy for you to browse, follow and curate the best of online videos.

YouTube took a quantum leap in revamping its UI design on Thursday with a whole gamut of features aimed at reorienting itself ever since it was launched in 2006 as an online video service. The new homepage design focuses on Channels and users video subscriptions, which also provides the option of pulling video recommendations from social networks like Google+ and Facebook.

Experts claim it to be as YouTube’s answer to cable TV. Video publishers will be dominant on new YouTube where users can filter and curate channels to personalise their likes. The revamp is part of YouTube’s recently announced content initiative that brings loads of exclusive videos from 100 original channels from celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, Tony Hawk and Madonna among others. According to YouTube blog ‘ behind every great video is a great Channel… and more of them are coming to YouTube, we want to make it easier for you to find and keep tabs of what you want to watch.’

Prabhjot Singh, a YouTube addict is quite upbeat about the new homepage, “The Facebook integration is by far the best feature coming from YouTube. The new layout and the grey colour scheme are quite easy on the eye. However, I feel the options on my personal channel have been reduced.”

This is a major shift that brings content publishers to the forefront with the aim of making users spend more time on YouTube which currently averages around 15 minutes a day. The revamped homepage and channels focus is in direct response to video curation done through social networks like Twitter and Facebook. According to recently releases data Youtube gets around 3.5 billion views every day, however this traffic isn’t coming directly from its homepage and people abandon the video network after viewing single video clips.

Diksha Sethi, a Chandigarh-based digital marketer said, “YouTube has been for long the lifeline of all digitally produced marketing content. Most companies produce videos with the aim of targeting YouTube users, and now with channels becoming more prominent it’s a big boost for them”

These changes are just the start for YouTube, the company has hinted at bringing further personalisation features to its connected devices giving tough competition to cable TV.

What’s new?
1. Revamped homepage: You can create and customize YouTube channels after you sign in. You can customise your homepage feed through recommended channels and connect Facebook and Google+ to keep a tab on what videos your friends are sharing.

2. Customizable Channels: Aims at simplifying the discovery mechanism for videos depending on what matters the most to you. Default channel templates for different uploaders to meet your uploading needs whether you are a video blogger, a publisher or just a causal uploader.

3. Easy access: Activity stream with video uploads, favourites, likes and live event announcements. You can subscribe to channels and get a single view on your homepage for easy access and recommendations arranged in a reverse chronological order. Grey background instead of white to make it less distracting.

Here is another of my article Say goodbye to Cable Guy  on YouTube’s layout revamp published in Daily Post

Related articles

• YouTube Gets Way More Social With Facebook, Google+ Integration (hubspot.com)
• YouTube Analytics: the Full Break Down (stateofsearch.com)

Apart from SXSW, what are the best social media marketing-related conferences around?

Image via Wikipedia

Apart from SXSW, what are the best social media marketing-related conferences around?

Some of the popular conferences other than SXSW are

1. Techcrunch Disrupt
2. Social Media Week
3. Socialmediaexaminer.com carries out regular social media summits
4. Here is a comprehensive list for social media conferences for 2011 from http://www.socialmediatoday.com.

Making your Boss understand the ‘fuss about Facebook’

Image via Wikipedia

Recently I met a social media executive friend who works at a company that take their traditional marketing a bit too seriously. But the good news is that they want to change and get on the SM band wagon. However, they fail to understand as my friend puts it, “What’s the fuss about Facebook?”

I guess they are baffled about Facebook becoming the integrating force of all online marketing efforts and can’t understand why. So I thought why not provide them with a context they can relate to, which by the way is also going to be my first blog post. So here we go.

Unlike popular perception Facebook users are not just teenagers or young people in their 20’s. It is safe to assume that Facebook has evenly penetrated or is actively reaching users of all age groups especially the 35+ demographic base.

So, why are corporates interested in Facebook?

Simply because people are spending more and more time on Facebook. There has been a surge as high as 700% on the total time spent on Facebook. Unsurprisingly marketers are simply following people through a medium that guarantees maximum exposure and a prolonged attention span. Earlier this was done through mass communication mediums like radio, newspapers and television as it provided companies a medium to advertise or place their brands to reach their target audience.

So what’s changed?

As any social scientists would tell you human being aren’t coded to follow a medium of mass communication (one to many). Our evolution process that goes back to millions of years makes us inter-dependent beings who hunt (now work) together, gather information and survive. In my opinion the mass communication mediums available before the internet revolution proved inefficient in addressing the basic human need of ‘Participatory Information Sourcing & Sharing’. In fact, the pre-revolution medium could be broadly described as information scavenging due to the lack of participatory mechanism.

So here comes the internet and the world becomes a ‘Global Village.’ And as you would expect people living in this village have families, colleagues, friends and other shared relationships. These relationships had to be sustained considering increased differences of time zones and industrial revolutions. This led to Social Media, which is nothing but a shared space of relationships in an augmented reality supported and appreciated by real-life inputs.

Why ‘fuss’ about Facebook?

Facebook has pioneered the social networking trend by customising its experience to a ‘real-life role playing’. It’s the most real-life interaction based network that replicates the social experience at a psychological level. The vital need for social acceptance (liked or accepted by peers) is inherent in human psyche.

Facebook provides a model for mass aggregation of social units (with relationships) each with the life of their own, connecting with other similar units. The prominent factor here is that these users have chosen to be Facebook and have not been lured by some marketing gimmick.  And once they are here the relationships they form with companies or other users are as good as it would have been in a real life scenario.  So a ‘like’ or recommendation here is easily identifiable by the community providing a proof of company’s credibility.

(Part II of the post to highlight what Facebook  means for companies)

Related articles

• Is Facebook Making Your Site Less Trustworthy? (webpronews.com)