It is very important to keep in mind that as social media is changing the way business, internally and externally, is conducted, it is not only important to listen to the on-going, multi -faceted conversations of your customers’ demands while interacting closely with them, but it is also fundamental that external parties, such as partners and stakeholders, are up-to-the-minute with your communication strategies.

In order to achieve this, Dimensione Danza, with the support of 77, has created a corporate video that clearly plots out the trends and social media tools the brand has adopted as part of their marketing strategy in order to keep everyone aligned with the company’s objectives.

The video was entirely conceived by 77, the rendering and post-production was done by Paolo Corsaro, founder of Zeroinquadro, a company that specializes in the production of  corporate and viral videos.

Marco Corsaro, 77Agency Managing Director has affirmed that:

“developing this video was an interesting and great opportunity to demonstrate what new media can represent for companies and the potential that leveraging social media can have on businesses today. It was also a good opportunity to bring together the talents of 77 and Zeroinquadro. We hope we will be able to repeat this experience with many other of our customers”

The project was conceived solely to communicate in a simple and effective way the latest trends and Web channels Dimensione Danza has decided to use for the implementation of their online promotional activities.

The video is not yet available to the public, however, click here to view the article featured on DailyNet.

What exactly would you say to someone who’s about to come into the world in times like these? Such spot couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time especially considering today’s widespread pessimism, and who better than Coca-Cola, an undisputed advertising leader in the market, to inspire us all.

The objective of the new campaign is to reinforce optimism, happiness and closeness all of which are usually conveyed in Coca-Cola’s advertising.

“The economic situation is quite complicated, so it is important that brands like Coca-Cola can inspire people,” said Marcos de Quinto, CEO Coca-Cola Spain.

The dialogue in the spot starts off by introducing Josep, a 102 year old man from Mayorca, a region in Spain, who explains how lucky he is to be alive at 102 and still be able to share with his friends and family.

His aim is to fly to Madrid and meet Aitana, who’s only a few hours from being born, in order to explain to her the beauty of life and to always make sure she seeks hapiness in everything she does, despite the bad things that life may bring along (making specific reference to the current world crisis).

His las remark in the commercial goes something like:  ‘don’t let yourself be carried away by small things, for you will only remember the good ones. When you grow up to be like me, you will realize that the one aspect you didn’t like about your life is the fact that it is too short’.

Josep was able to deliver his message to baby Aitana during their ‘encounter’, just minutes after her birth, and expressed to her, face-to-face, that she should, by all means, enjoy life.

Enjoy:

The realism of such commercial is one that has touched millions and millions of people around the world. McCann is planning to make the spot in different languages as to diffuse the ‘Enjoy Life’ message to the entire world population.

The pseudo young media platform that has been causing quite alot of buzz- also Start-Up of the Year at LeWeb ‘08, same at the Plugg European Web 2.0 and runner up at the Twiistup event taking place tomorrow in LA-, Viewdle, is being recognized internationally for attaining a numerous of significant milestones during its short life due to its revolutionary video search technology.

Viewdle’s technology is currently being used by Reuters, (what better endorsement)- its video search technology recognizes people’s faces on screen. While we’ve only been used to video search based on keywords related to the title of the video or the text around it, Viewdle actually sees the videos and better yet, recognizes the person in the video.

Reuters is using it along with their videos news inventory which allows users to search within their catalogue for a specific person. “Our goal at Reuters Labs is to proactively identify emerging technologies that add value to our trusted news offerings and keep Reuters at the forefront of the evolution of digital media,” said Nic Fulton, chief scientist at Reuters.

The platform serves for indexing videos frame-by-frame (55 frames per second) and create a “real-time index of true on-screen appearances with unrivaled accuracy and relevance.”

Video content owners who use Viewdle will be able to extract metadata not through text-based indexing but instead directly from news, videos and entertainment shows, in real-time, will maximizing the relevancy, usage and monetization of the video content.

According to Reuters, Viewdle is the new way to search, no more waiting for download or buffering to check the relevancy of returned results, no more irrelevant search results.

Check out the Viewdle Facebook Application!

Don’t you sometimes wonder how a video reaches 100,000 views? Usually it’s not necessarily a natural process in which this happens, it’s precisely why we call them ‘viral’, because they spread quickly and widely throughout the Internet.  People share them via emails, sms, social networks (Facebook), forums and blogs of course.

I just ran across a cool site dubbed Viral Video Chart by Unruly Media-the company behind the chart, which classifies videos according to popularity from the different video sharing sites, mainly the three most influential: YouTube, MySpace and Google Video.

Basically, the guys at Unruly Media browse several million blogs a day to see which videos are creating the most buzz. They take two main aspects into consideration, the number of times the video is linked to and the number of times the video is embedded.

Every day, Unruly Media posts up the top 20 videos of the day. Sometimes in their charts you might see videos from the previous day etc, if not, that means they’re obviously not popular anymore and a new list is then cooked up featuring hot, new content.

A cool aspect of the site is that for every video featured on the Top 20 chart, they include colorful line charts and pie graphs displaying a recap on the total views, buzz by language, trends and an entire list of all the blog posts that have made reference to a particular video.

I’ll leave you now with a couple videos taken from today’s Top 20 chart which have definitely made their way into the headlines these days:

CarreerBuilder.com

Cadbury Dairy Milk

Is YouTube’s new venture going to bring in the cash for Google?

The leading user-generated site is signing a deal with William Morris Agency which represents actors such as Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe. The idea behind such deal is to allow YouTube to play a significant role for the agency while putting its hands on more professional content.

On the other hand, the agency and actors would benefit from this deal by getting an ownership stake in the videos they produce for the website plus massive distribution of the content that the agency by itself could never accomplish.

Hosting videos starring top A-list Hollywood actors could really boost YouTube’s reputation as the next-generation video entertainment source and perhaps get the cashier to start ringing everything up.

As reported by comScore, YouTube received 100,000 million visitors this past October. The downside to this is that the website can only profit from those ads placed by companies like CBS or Universal Music and not ads within content uploaded by random users.

YouTube is really shooting for stardom with this deal. It will become a hub for Hollywood stars and superior video content, which somewhat reflects a similar effort to the webcasted YouTube Live 2008 this past November .

However, how exactly does Google intend to pay all these A-list artists and agency after struggling to monetize the video-sharing website?

Need you a more powerful endorsement regarding YouTube’s potentiality and magnetism than Pope Benedict XVI’s decision to venture into the world of social media?

The Vatican is now reaching out to the digital generation with the creation of their very own YouTube Channel as a way to keep viewers up-to-the-minute with all the activites taking place  in the Vatican as well as Pope Benedict XVI’s initiatives, ceremonies and interviews with world leaders.

This has become the biggest reach into cyberspace on behalf of the Vatican and it is being done due to “the capacity of the new technologies to foster and support good and healthy relationships and various forms of solidarity.”

Nonetheless, the pope did point out to users that they should not become too obsessive with the new technologies because it could eventually lead to social isolation. Instead he encouraged them to try to maintain real relationships and not loose contact with the outside world.

All the same, the pope is quite convinced that the new technologies can be of great use to counteract the negative messages attacking the pope and the Church that are virally spreading in the world wide web.

The Vatican affirms the social networks such as Facebook, MySpace and YouTube  “are bringing about fundamental shifts in patterns of communication and human relationships…. These technologies are truly a gift to humanity and we must endeavour to ensure that the benefits they offer are put at the service of all human individuals and communities, especially those who are most disadvantaged and vulnerable.”

The Vatican’s YouTube Channel is currently available in four languages: English, Spanish, Italian and German. To view ABC’s newscast on this news, watch this video.

400 senior- level decision-makers defined online video as the ‘top priority’ for digital marketing budgets. As we know online video proves to be quite effective and the impact on brand awareness and branding can be great.

The study backs this statement up by showing the importance of online video in business’ strategic plans. For example, the top three results for digital marketing anticipated focus regarding the different online ad formats go as follows: online video scored a total 66.8%, followed by social media with 41.6% and search with 34.1%. That’s more than 2/3 of respondents who voted for online video.

However, I consider this small table below as the most important data provided by the survey:

Basically, more marketers are embracing the medium and results clearly depict the rivalry between traditional and online advertising.

In short, marketers are planning to use online video in their mix for 2009 and beyond.

This is good news people!

This guest post was written by: Manuela Tangredi 

The recent financial crisis is rapidly expanding to real economy causing a decline in consumption and production growth and thus a cut-down in advertising budgets is to be expected.

On the contrary this week, eMarketer, a market research firm, predicted that in America online advertising will continue to expand even during the recession. Similarly, online advertising spending is estimated to increase by 8,9% in 2009, less than what was forecasted before August, but still encouraging. Search advertising will probably lead with the highest spending growth (14,9%), rich-media ads will grow by 7,5%, and display ads by 6,6%.

Online advertising should suffer less than other channels and that’s probably because it is more interactive and trackable than any other ad format, thus making it less speculative, as The Economist put it (November 29th issue). Moreover, web marketing is able to reach different objectives at the same time: generating brand awareness and recall–stimulating consumer’s preferences and loyalty.

We have a reason to believe that in Europe there is even more room for expansion for new media marketing especially considering that online channels are far from exploiting their potential and they still represent a relatively cheap marketing strategy.

Excitement in the sector is driven by the huge opportunities represented by video advertising and social networks. Still these new forms have been difficult to exploit so far: Video Ads easily reach consumers when placed next to user-generated contents (YouTube-style), however I believe some kind of monitoring should take place in order to decide which kinds of videos display your ads. Alternatively, ads may be displayed next to professionally produced videos (ie: Hulu video site, available only in the United States).

Equally so, social networks like MySpace or Facebook generate interest by making preferences circulate among friends who most likely are to trust one another and also have similar tastes. It’s also true that users participate in these network in different ways for more than just looking for things to buy.

There is no doubt marketers are experimenting these channels at a fast pace and it mostly due to the fact that difficulties in exploiting them are making them quite affordable so far.

YouTube Insight as we know, provides detailed statistics about the videos that you upload allowing you to see how often your videos are viewed in the different geographic regions, as well as how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time.

Today, YouTube Insight has gotten slightly better. And just as Google’s Official Blog puts it, it now enables you to see if your video is ‘hot or not’.-

Search Engine Land gives us all the scoop on the new ‘Hot Spot’ feature extension that Google has rolled out to improve the already existing video service.

The Hot Spots tab in Insight plays your video alongside a graph that shows the ups-and-downs of viewership at different moments within the video. We determine “hot” and “cold” spots by comparing your video’s abandonment rate at that moment to other videos on YouTube of the same length, and incorporating data about rewinds and fast-forwards.

So basically, the Hot Spot feature detects the exact spot on your video that’s attracting the most audience and what it is that’s making them tune into your spot. The tool comes in quite handy for viewers, companies as well as advertisers. We all know that a cool, successful video will spread virally throughout the Internet and reach massive amounts of people.

On the other hand, advertisers and corporations can measure the efficiency and impact of the content of their videos through the statistics provided and determine  whether the same is useful and relevant, and isolate the specific scenes that need to be changed as to retain viewer’s attention as much as possible. Let’s hope producers can now hit the jack pot with this new element.

Check out the new feature under the “Hot Spots” tab within the Insight Dashboard.

IKEA promotes its new campaign dubbed ‘Come into the Closet’ by welcoming users into their website which looks like a video but functions as an online catalogue at the same time.

The site is http://www.kominigarderoben.se/. Once in, you find yourself in a sort of open stage scenario displaying a repertoire of Ikea closet items together with surreal characters who spice up and enliven the experience by dancing to the beat of funky remixes.

Each scenario has a different selection of furniture and upholstery and presents different plots. Situations vary from super heroes and an old couple, to a pair of funny guys looking smart but wearing no pants, just socks…pretty funny stuff.

As you pass from scene to scene, items change, music alters, beat is different and characters vary. Underneath the main window on the screen, you are given three products to choose from that when clicked separately, they set-off the item code, name and description of the specific product.

The feel and look of the site is very slick and fresh. Although the site’s main purpose is to show off their line of products, it still manages to leave space for the user/consumer to interact with it making the affair ever so entertaining. It’s even possible to play with the characters by moving the mouse or perhaps talking into your computer mic, which will make them move accordingly.

What a nice way to combine pleasure and well…budget allocation.