Social Media

YouTube has changed the default size for embedded videos. By default they're getting bigger at either 480x385 for a 4:3 video, or 640x385 for a 16:9 video. YouTube says it went with these sizes, because they will give most viewers the best viewing experience because they better match current video encoding sizes.

"A video's life on YouTube is just the beginning; embedding gives it a life off of the site. Just look at your favorite blogger and they're likely to be embedding YouTube content in their posts," says YouTube Senior Web Developer Geoff Stearns. "In fact, almost every popular video on the site is first made famous by embeds on the Web. That number can be as high as 50% of views in the first 48 hours, kicking off a great cycle."

"When using the 'Play in HD' option, it's best to embed the player at a very large size (at least 1280x745) in order to accommodate the large size of the video," says Stearns. "If you play HD video in a small player, the user's computer will have to scale down the video to fit within the player, costing the user extra CPU cycles and bandwidth, which may result in choppy playback. It's always best to play the video size that best fits the size of the video player. And if you want even better performance when watching HD content, you can choose to watch it in full-screen."

When users click the embed code, on a video page, they will be able to choose the following for the video player:

- The color and size
- Whether or not to include related videos
- Whether or not to display the player border
- Whether or not to play in HD by default -- triggers video resolutions of 1280x720 (720p) or 1920x1080 (1080p)

This week YouTube also expanded its auto-captioning program. This is a tool  that combines some of the speech-to-text algorithms from Google's Voice Search to automatically generate video captions when requested by viewers. More on that here.

Social media use among businesses has grown significantly over the past year or two, but new research from E-Consultancy, in association with the Online Marketing Summit (where WebProNews is conducting exclusive interviews this week), indicates that most businesses are largely still in the experimental stage when it comes to their efforts.

There are a great deal of interesting stats to pick through in the report, but to me, one of the most striking is that 61% (nearly 2/3) say they have experimented with social media, but not done that much. Various stats suggest businesses are starting to get to the place where they view social media as crucial, however. For example, the vast majority (90%) say they expect social media to take up more time internally "in a year's time," while only 8% expect it will take up the same amount of time, and 2% expect less time to be spent on social media next year.

Some other highlights from the report:

- The majority of companies have difficulty measuring the return on investment (ROI) from social media. Almost two-thirds of respondents (61%) say their organizations are “poor” (34%) or “very poor” (27%) at measuring ROI.

- Increased traffic to Web site is the business goal that marketers are most likely to be trying to influence through social media marketing. Three quarters (74%) of companies say they use social media to increase traffic.

- Direct traffic to Web site is by far the metric most commonly used to measure the impact of off-site social media, measured by just under two-thirds of company respondents (63%).

- More brand recognition (64%) is the second most important business objective in terms of impact of social media. A similar proportion of respondents (62%) cite better brand reputation.

- Despite the widespread recognition that social media marketing impacts brand reputation and brand visibility, only a quarter of all respondents (25%) surveyed use online brand mentions and brand awareness as a metric for measuring off-site social media success. Just 15% use brand perception as a metric.

- Just over half of companies (56%) say that they try to achieve increased sales through social media activity. But only a quarter of companies (24%) use sales as a metric for measuring social media success.

Facebook is the Web property mostly commonly used in social media, with 85% of companies surveyed using it as part of their marketing strategy. This is followed by Twitter (perhaps more closely than expected, given Facebook's much larger user base) at 77%, LinkedIn at 58% and YouTube at 49%.

Over two-thirds of company respondents say that the amount of money spent on social media has increased since last year, while 30% say it has stayed the same, and 81% of companies expect social media budgets to increase over the next year, while 18% expect spending to stay the same. So while companies are still experimenting, they must be generally seeing good enough results to keep at it, or see the potential to use it on an expanded basis.

Do you have a concrete social media strategy or do you simply experiment? Discuss.

IHOP (otherwise known as the International House of Pancakes) is showing off today a great example of harnessing the power of social media for a tremendous marketing opportunity. Today is National Pancake Day according to IHOP (although apparently any day until March 9 is eligible to be called such, depending on where you live and if you celebrate this), and IHOP has used this to lure people in for some free pancakes.

Today, they're giving away a free stack of pancakes, and they've utilized various social media and sharing strategies to spread the word. Not only has the word spread, but it's spread in a huge way. It's one of the top trending topics on Twitter, and it's become a hot search on Google as well, appearing in Google's Hot Trends list. In fact, it's even appearing in Google's real-time search results.

Below are some simple things IHPOP is doing to promote it on its home page, and National Pancake Day promo page, respectively:





Beyond just those methods, IHOP has been offering "celebrity wake-up calls" to remind people of the special day. They also have a contest called "stacks for good acts".

If nothing else, this should be looked upon as a classic example of utilizing an event related to your niche (no matter how well-known), and using the viral nature of online marketing to send it into overdrive. Of course, the real trick is getting customers to come back when they have to pay for pancakes.

It seems that a lot of government scientists are betting people will turn to Twitter when Mother Nature lets loose.  Earlier, we wrote about the USGS's Twitter Earthquake Detector, and it turns out that the National Weather Service has cooked up something similar for storms.

Here's an official description of how the Twitter Storm Reports program is supposed to work: "The public will submit critical weather reports including a short description of their location (e.g. 'corner of 10th and Taylor fort worth tx'), and optionally photographs using the Twitter web interface, any number of 3rd party Twitter interfaces, or via a form set up on the NWS web farm."

Then the NWS will sic some software upon the reports and decide whether or not the information should be passed on through existing products.

This approach could work quite well, since information will only come from people who are intentionally participating (in comparison, the earthquake system scans for keywords that can be used out of context).  Also, the NWS has made it quite clear that tweets should include geographic info (whereas the earthquake system has to find location info where it can).

Format your storm report tweets to look like #wxreport WW <your location> WW <your signifcant weather report> if you feel like participating.  Do so after taking cover, of course.

Related Articles:

> Gov't Agency Turns To Twitter For Earthquake-Tracking

> Twitter Starts The Year With Some New Faces

> 2009 In Review - According To Twitter

The fact that reports of earthquakes (or at least messages reading "EARTHQUAKE!!!") are quick to surface on Twitter is a key reason many people first recognized the site as useful.  Now, the U.S. Geological Survey has decided to have a closer look, unveiling the Twitter Earthquake Detector.

An official page announced, "[T]he USGS is developing a system that gathers real-time, earthquake-related messages from the social networking site Twitter and applies place, time, and key word filtering to gather geo-located accounts of shaking.  This approach provides rapid first-impression narratives and, potentially, photos from people at the hazard's location."

Of course, a few things still need to be worked out.  Alexis Madrigal noted that Dairy Queen offers a brownie earthquake dessert, and if the fast food company ever decided to give some away, the Twitter Earthquake Detector could well interpret the promotion as the apocalypse.

Also, if a devastating quake did occur, the Twitter Earthquake Detector might not pick up on anything in the immediate vicinity, as cell towers would fall and victims would have more pressing things to worry about than getting their computers back online.

Still, this is an interesting use of Twitter, and the data that'll be gathered could prove useful.

Related Articles:

> Twitter Starts The Year With Some New Faces

> 2009 In Review - According To Twitter

> Stone Makes Several Billion Tweets Per Hour Prediction