According to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Bachelor’s Degree is overrated.
A great read for anyone looking at college admissions. From the summary: “College is a wise choice for far fewer people than are currently encouraged to consider it.”
My take: “[Your school] is a wise choice for far fewer people than are currently encouraged to consider it.” What does that say about your marketing strategy?
A great video stop-action version of Nokia’s popular Snake game, only done with people. Viral gold.
PS — Check the behind the scenes vid.
Ran across yet another company trying to leverage the online video market for college recruiting.
Live Video U (http://lvutv.com/) boasts 50,000 videos in their library, and seems to get permission to come on campus and stick a camera in students’ faces for quick, authentic takes on their own lives there on campus. Did a quick search for Pepperdine and didn’t find any videos. They must not be looking for UGC or else they’d have a lot more.
Looking specifically at LMU’s page, they seem to have 64 videos of individual interviews. That’s a ton of footage, but not unreasonable for one or two days of shooting. The videos are simple, short, and have nice color correction. They are all tagged (e.g., student athlete, environment, or school spirit).
The site also does a nice, quick link to all the YouTube videos tagged with LMU.
Combined with some simple “fast facts” and a link to Google Maps, Live Video U actually provides a nice template for a “one stop shop” for media for Universities.
For University marketers, your school should take a lesson from this site and embrace all the external media being created outside of your control. Flickr images, YouTube videos, and student blogs are all playing a part in the conversation around your school’s merits (and dirty little secrets).
What part does online video play in your marketing strategy? Is it a primary draw for your prospects, or does it take a backseat to other types of media? By putting video front and center, Live Video U is using it as strategic tool to bring traffic and then, interest.
Stumbled across an amazingly relevant interview with Brad Bird, Academy-award winning director of The Incredibles and Ratatouille.
He talks about his journey into Pixar, and his open and collaborative process for creating his films. His policies on keeping an open door, honest feedback, and cultivating the black sheep are right on.
Among the many meaningful take-aways from the piece is his last words at the end:
“Speaking personally, I want my films to make money, but money is just fuel for the rocket. What I really want to do is to go somewhere. I don’t want to just collect more fuel.”
Video Clix unveiled its on-screen clickable ads last week on an episode of Digg Nation (screen capture below). It made the otherwise too-talky video interesting for me, as I was clicking on everything from the host’s grey hooded sweatshirt to the website they were talking about.
Adding clickable areas immediately made sense to me as an additional layer of interactivity, where, yes, you can increase the ad inventory, but can also add supplemental content for actively interested viewers.
A related company, Overlay, has a similar technology that allows users to add their own flash layers on top of existing videos. I took two seconds and created a series of links on top of the #1 most-watched video on YouTube, Evolution of Dance. What resulted was an unfinished video with links to buy the CDs (on Amazon) corresponding to his various dances. If something like this took off, it could create opportunities for affiliate marketers.
Yes, big “b” as in “10.1 Billion.”
That’s the number of video streams watched during the shortest month of the year: February 2008.
(I was tempted to round down to “10 billion,” but that “0.1 billion” is still a hundred million views.)
Online video is big and your target market has fully adopted it into their online lives. What does that mean to your story, message, brand, PR, etc.?
Ostatic outlines a couple of nice Firefox extensions. Make your browsing easier and go grab a couple of them.
Personally, I use the following Firefox Add-ons:
What do you use?
Can’t help but mention this amazing video that my wife shot at a wedding we went to about a year ago. All the groom’s friends are bboys, and they performed at the reception.
The groom himself even got down — that’s him at the end… in his rented tux shoes, no less!
Kobe Bryant stirred up internet chatter with this seemingly real Nike commercial of him jumping an Aston Martin.
Is it his car? Certainly, it doesn’t belong to his partner in crime, Ronny Turiaf, who likely makes league minimum.
The commercial follows on the heels of last year’s video of Lebron James hitting cross-court jump shots (equally amazing).
Of course, neither video is real. The Kobe one is probably close to real: I think they locked the camera down and filmed Kobe jumping in one take and the car zooming past in another and stitched them together in post.
In either case, it did its job: making buzz for new Nike shoes.
Just saw that the 2008 Computers in Libraries conference (yes, everything has a conference) hosted their 2nd annual Info Tubey Awards, featuring great online YouTube videos used to market to their book-borrowing, magazine-reading, database-searching, group-room-reserving patrons (read: college students).
Some are really well done, and some are really well done… for librarians. Nevertheless, I applaud the effort libraries are putting forth these days to make their facilities relevant to a new generation of student needs.
Now Your Library is Open Late Night, Too!
QandANJ.org, New Jersey Library Network