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The Sound of Silent Videos

By lurieben July 14, 2016 October 26, 2016 Public Relations

In the early days of movies, the shift from silent movies to “talkies” was transformational. Sound brought a new dimension of verisimilitude and compelling emotional reality to the silver screen. Today, we see a reverse trend towards silent videos on social media. Even as the volume of video content shared online rises to new highs each year, with more than 8 billion video views per day on Facebook, the same again on Snapchat, and social channels such as Pinterest racing to encourage native video sharing, the 85% of all Facebook videos and similarly large percentages of videos posted to other social networks are watched without sound.

Pinterest is implementing a new native video player.

Silent video is the logical result of two competing pressures on social networks.

On the one hand, video content is compelling and sparks engagement, with the average US adult spending 115 minutes per day watching digital video in 2015. So the more videos that a social network can host and encourage its users to watch, the better. Not only that, but autoplaying video ads is great for advertising revenue. If a Twitter user watches an autoplaying video for three seconds, the advertiser gets charged and Twitter makes money. If a Facebook user watches a video for 10 seconds, the same happens.

On the other hand, people hate pages that automatically play sounds. Hate them. No one wants to be checking a social network at work or on the bus only to suddenly hear an unwanted video start playing; it’s embarrassing and annoying.

So there’s pressure to get more videos seen, and pressure for them not to have sound – thus silent videos are common.

The modern social media-optimized silent videos

Creating silent videos for social media calls for a different approach than a TV commercial or other traditional video. Expect that a significant percentage of your viewers will be watching with their sound off, so text overlays are critical to engaging your audience. Generally, this means that content created for other media can’t just be dropped in, even with subtitles added – the subtitles won’t convey the full meaning of the video. The early silent commercials had to use simple and clear visuals and narratives so viewers could clearly understand the message, and social videos must do the same.

When text is included, it should be visually dynamic and should accompany and reinforce the voiceover or dialogue (for those who turn sound on). It should also fit smoothly into the overall visual look; too much text combined with too much other visual complexity will confuse viewers.

Political campaigns on all sides of the ideological spectrum have been doing a great job at this. Here’s one example of a Twitter-friendly video that is strong with the sound off and stronger with it on (setting aside the particular policies and positions advocated; image links to the video itself on Twitter):

DigiDay has some useful additional recommendations particularly for Facebook, including starting with a compelling image before leading into a text-heavy video. They do mention that too much similar-looking video makes news feeds stale – so as always, consider your unique angle in your videos.

Micro social networks

By lurieben March 22, 2016 March 22, 2016 Public Relations

If you’ve ever spent much time on a cruise ship, you’ll realize that everything there happens at about a 15 degree angle to the rest of the world. There’s unique traditions that quickly become normalized, like the great and honorable tradition of squirting Purell onto your hands at least 10 times a day, because norovirus is a thing on boats, or looking at the floor of the elevators to find out what day of the week it is.

There’s the odd feeling that you’re staying in a comfortable hotel which – well, first of all, which you cannot leave – but also which, every so often, shifts beneath your feet. Not a lot, but enough to make you question whether your last drink of the evening was stronger than expected than, and then to remember that it is 8am and you have not, in fact had a drink in days because it turns out that they are extremely expensive.

And there’s the presence of Twit-arr to share your memes, hashtags and towel animal photos. There’s minimal access to the “real” internet on a ship, so some enterprising souls developed a Twitter-inspired, pirate-themed, micro social network so that people on the boat (and specifically with the cruise group I traveled with) could talk to each other online.

Twit-arr had no access to the broader internet, and in fact was operated solely through the wireless network on the boat, making it possible for people to share within the limited environment of the cruise – with about 1,000 people – knowing that whatever they shared would stay within that group and would not appear online afterward.

In practice, what this meant was that Twit-arr enabled a much broader version of that same connectedness that small groups in close quarters might, but effectively spanning 1,000+ people and an enormous cruise ship.

Because it was tailored to the experience, it could integrate the day’s events schedule and key information about the cruise, and serve as a one-stop platform for learning about the latest happenings and then chatting about them.

Because it was temporary and ephemeral, it allowed for the creation of a spontaneous online community inspired by but not identical to other social tools’ conversations, such as a lack of external “trolls.”

Last year’s SXSW Innovation Award winner, FireChat, tapped into a similar idea – bringing people together in the place and time where they are in a way that doesn’t share content too broadly. (FireChat also has a different technical approach that uses Bluetooth and peering to enable communication when there isn’t wireless or cell service or when they are overloaded – taking the core idea of time-and-place-specific connectedness in a different direction.)

In the internet as a whole, there’s only so much room for additional social networks – the giants of online social such as Facebook have a substantial first-mover advantage from their established user bases, as any number of social networks have shown as they tried to gain traction. Where it does seem like there’s a valuable niche is in micro social, where time, place and customized content bring something totally different – from being connected to the world to being connected to people here, now, sharing this experience together.

The commoditization of the concierge service

By lurieben January 8, 2016 January 8, 2016 Public Relations

Yesterday the American Express Black personal concierge service, tomorrow Siri, M and Cortana.

There’s been a lot of talk about the moves by Apple, Facebook and Google to enhance their “digital assistant” services’ AI and capabilities. In the latest news, Facebook is testing its M AI (a part of its Messenger app) with the aid of a team of humans, who currently are doing much of the back-end work to meet user requests as they train the AI and find out what capabilities their users actually want. If you’re a beta tester, you can use Facebook Messenger (through M) to make a reservation at a restaurant, order flowers, plan a route, and other such tasks through the chat app, just like a concierge service might do.

Facebook Messenger with M is part of a broader trend that’s been developing for years – the proliferation of “walled garden” social platforms that want users to spend a greater and greater amount of time on their site or app or consuming content mediated or accessed through that site or app.

Making that happen means removing reasons for people to leave the network or app to access other services or get information. Thus, Uber for Messenger (order a car right from the app, just as if you were texting). Users’ conversations and social interactions will move closer to being seamlessly and naturally and integrated with their brand interactions.

A better Ask Jeeves or a digital American Express Black?

The challenge with all these digital assistants will be scalability. Facebook’s M still only serves a small audience because many requests cannot yet be effectively answered by the algorithm.

For example, some beta testers used the app to get M to cancel their internet service for them by calling their provider. The app couldn’t call the provider itself, so a human had to do that. That’s the kind of service that you could get from a concierge service, but we’re a long way from having an algorithm that can actually perform such tasks. So the progress of these services will depend on other providers making their services similarly electronic and integrated – if it can’t be done online, a digital assistant will have trouble with it.

But let’s talk about what can be done with messaging and with digital assistants in the consumer realm – one of the more straightforward use cases, since e-commerce and online research are both already so well integrated into consumers’ lives. Some considerations include:

Algorithm-aligned SEO

“SEO” that’s adapted to the method each app will use to find the answer for you. If users are getting fully automated answers, this means understanding the methods Facebook, Apple and Google’s virtual assistants are using to answer these questions and ensuring that your relevant content shows up in those contexts.

In many cases, this may integrate with existing search engines – but the results will be mediated by this additional automated layer. If they’re tapping Yelp for reviews, your brand should be on Yelp and positioned effectively. Or, since Siri initially used Bing, it might mean optimizing for mobile on Bing in particular.

Not only that, but your content will need to be in a format that enables the assistant to respond in a useful and attributable manner either in a plain text response (“The best Italian Restaurant is <your brand>”) or by linking to your mobile-friendly, quickly loading and relevant site.

Integrated offerings

Where possible, partnering with social networks like WeChat or Facebook to gain added functionality can enable a custom experience for your brand. For example, a customer could text their local department store to ask about their men’s jeans, provide their size, and get a text back with images and integrated tap-to-buy buttons to make the process easy.

Conversational marketing

Taking a step back from the “digital assistant” format to the messaging apps they live within, it seems equally clear that conversation-based marketing and sales through these apps is going to become more prominent as people spend more time there and want to interact with brands more seamlessly.

The growth of conversation-based interactions as a primary way to learn about products will mean an additional blurring of the lines between content marketing, customer support and sales. As customers learn to expect that they can send a text for information or to order products, companies will have to be prepared to have conversations with their customers that feel natural and to provide support through similar methods.

These conversations will build on top of your existing content. It’s no longer enough to generate great static content that sits on your website, or even great “push” social posts. If the resources are available to make it possible, direct customer interactions will only grow in relevance.

Will digital assistants take over?

We’re still in the early stages. But there’s certainly untapped potential.

Image used under a CC-0 license from https://www.pexels.com/photo/hands-coffee-smartphone-technology-4831/.

Space Alert & Crisis Communication

By lurieben July 16, 2015 July 16, 2015 Games, Public Relations

Last week, a friend introduced me to a board game called Space Alert, a game of controlled cooperative chaos. You’re a team, new recruits crewing a tiny, poorly-built spaceship that has to go on 10-minute scouting missions. For those 10 minutes, a CD plays that tells you what problems you’ve encountered – broken computers, asteroids, alien attacks or communications breakdowns – and when you’ve encountered them.

You have a board that shows your spaceship and the various things you can do – charge up the reactor, fire the lasers, power up the shields, etc. You and your team have to work together to lay out on the table a series of cards to plan out in advance what moves and actions each of you will take to deal with every crisis and get home safe.

After the time is up, you’ll flip over your cards and go through the game again to see whether your plans actually worked as intended. Because you play the cards representing your “moves” face down, there’s infinite possibilities for chaos. Did you want to take the elevator down to recharge the nuclear reactor this turn? Whoops, the communications officer forgot to tell you that he already got in the elevator and it’s full. So you’ll have to wait until next turn to get down there and recharge the reactor. Of course, the security chief was expecting to use the power you generated to fire the lasers *this* turn, and now she’s stuck futilely hammering on the “laser” button as they make a sad sputtering noise like a deflating balloon and the enemies swoop in and start shooting…

…really, it’s a brilliant bit of concise, panicked, entertaining game design. And with the professional hat on, it’s a fantastic social media crisis simulator dressed up in board game clothes. At the beginning, you go in assuming that you know what you’re doing, and that everything will go smoothly. For a little bit, it does. But then, when things start to go wrong, suddenly everyone starts talking at cross-purposes under pressure. No one is clearly in charge, and information flows start to get clogged.

In both social and gaming, there need to be structure and processes for resolving each individual issue as well as for seeing the big picture. Before you reply on Facebook to a critic, does legal need to sign off? Are they familiar with the necessary turnaround time for social media? What do you do when other departments or executives start to reply on their own, or show up without complete information and start calling for specific actions? You’re going to get in each other’s way.

In both cases, when a crisis shows up, the response has to be:

Measured – appropriate for the reputational risks posed by the issue.
Coordinated – PR is just one member of a much larger “crew.” You’re the communications officer, but if you don’t have a plan in place across the organization to bring in the right people and express a unified brand message, you won’t make the
Goal-oriented – not responding just to respond, but intended to counter a false perception or address a concern with a tangible end state in mind.

All of these tie back to practice and preparation, whether it’s driven by the bitter experience of previous crises or a staged drill. You wouldn’t go into space without a test run – so why do so many brands venture out into social media without preparing for the risks?

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