The survey results reveal a couple of things – the line between personal time and business hours is blurring, most of us are available around the clock and so the tools we use, and when, reflect that. Second, these tools are gaining traction in business and continue to do so. The more we communicate and demonstrate their value, the more quickly they’ll be embraced. You can get more details here: http://www.facetime.com/survey08/socialnetworking/

For instance “Fifty People, One Question” from New Orleans was very, very cool by Benjamin Reece. There is just an amazing community on both Vimeo and Viddler of amazingly talented filmmakers and creatives that are just waiting to be tapped.

Media of any sort is all, and always, about telling a story – who you are, why you matter, what value you bring to the table. Anything less is noise. Cute animal behavior doesn’t necessarily influence human behavior, particularly if there’s money involved…

Casey

I have to agree with Pedro–that YouTube is so much more than what it immediately might seem to be and that context can make a world of difference. For example, I’m thinking of the Lip Dub Flagpole Sitta that Connected Ventures did, (http://www.vimeo.com/173714). Suddenly they were on the map for me and in one fell swoop they entertained, gave you an idea of their culture, how well they worked together and collaborated and at the same time you experienced some of the power of Vimeo, one of their products.

Demonstrating the possibilities and the differences is key, as you suggest. One of my coworkers thinks that the only successful business videos are the ones that show humor (skit or spoof sort of thing…like the Mac/PC ads), whereas he probably has never seen some of the other types of applications such as that Google keynote or perhaps a successful interactive executive interview. He just hasn’t had the chance to see and believe. That’s what is so great about video though!

But I don’t agree with this segmentation of what people see, expect or recognize in Youtube. Youtube is not just about having the chance to witness great speakers – in fact, a video with a dog and a duck can portray a certain reality with more accuracy than any other, more professional content. Because user-generated spoofs or pranks or showing your own, intimate details to everyone is a valid way of broadcasting yourself, as is also an excellent way to understand those people. In fact, “personal content” represents most of the produced content in the platform…

I would rather convince them by explaining what is the tool about, how you could use it and showing different examples of how it’s being used – whichever they might be…

Cheers,

Pedro

This points to needing to work on the story. If presented in a way that it touches the person you’re trying to convince, they’re more likely to jump down the rabbit hole after you, no?

Learn your audience. Learn about what matters to the audience and then tell them a story that shows how social media/internet marketing/web 2.0 can make that happen in this new way.

We market messaging and social media tools for internal enterprise use. I make a point of asking clients to consider what content they provide now to staff and why it’s not working as they’d like. If no one’s reading emails or going to the intranet, our tools will help, BUT they need to sanity check their content and make sure it’s actually relevant to people receiving it.

The same is true of YouTube, blogs, wikis, forums.. The topics and content need to be compelling in some way for it to produce any results or improvements to employee engagement.