RonAmok!

Three months ago, I posted a story called The Traditionals and The Adaptors. In it, I described the plight of a Traditional — a woman who just couldn’t get her mind around the use of a free tool such as YouTube. She had issues with the behavior of a video embedded within her web page — you know, where instead of just ending, YouTube makes some “recommendations” for other “similar” videos? Well, she wanted that behavior gone, and refused to budge from her position, no matter how many times I walked her through the pros and cons.

She held out for another solution. Members of our tech team experimented with Google Video, and found that it acted differently than YouTube — sans any recommendations at the end of the video. The team created a mock-up, demonstrated it to her, and she approved it. From a marketing perspective, it doesn’t matter that nobody will ever find this video on Google Video, but at least it looks like she expects…or does it?

Did I mention that this conversation started three months ago?

This week I was drawn into an email thread involving yet another problem that she had with the video. The thumbnail picture, the one that people click-on to make it start streaming? She hated it.

Was it a blurry frame with no relevance? Was it confusing to the viewer? Nope. It was a picture of the presenter, the woman who speaks during the entire video. Now I’ve seen images lifted from videos that just don’t look good, but not in this case. The presenter is smiling, looking at the camera, and it looks great. If I had to judge the thumbnail based on what it’s supposed to do — compel a viewer to click on it — it gets an “A.”

But no. My Traditional wants the picture changed. I have no idea what she wants to replace it with, maybe a boring PowerPoint slide, but she is negotiating with the tech team to change the thumbnail to something else.

Perhaps she’s right. I mean this is the Internet. People are much more likely to click-on the image of a bullet-ridden PowerPoint slide than the smiling picture of an attractive woman, right? That sounds like solid marketing to me…don’t you think?

Oh, and did I mention that this conversation started three months ago?

Having your company adopt New Media technologies is hard. Your company must take some risks, to experiment with new ways of communicating. Your Marketing Department needs to craft messages that are more human (like the thumbnails of people!) and less corporate (death by jargon-filled PowerPoint).

But that is your job, the job of the New Media Evangelist, to spread the new word of marketing throughout your company. The question is whether or not you can spread that word before the Traditionals burn you at the stake:-)

Tags: YouTube Video Corporate Strategy Traditional Google Video thumbnail ronamok New Media Evangelist

In June of 2005, podcasting took a major leap forward when iTunes 4.9, a mainstream desktop application, supported podcasts. And although the word “podcast” has yet to become a household name, today’s podcasters can thank Apple for the majority of their audiences, simply because the company added a feature into its popular music package.

The technology of RSS could use a similar boost. Most web-based publications have already enabled their content to be subscribed to via RSS, yet the masses still have no clue what that little orange square with white markings actually means.

But what if the ability to subscribe to RSS Feeds was incorporated into a popular mainstream desktop application? What if, instead of learning a new tool, mainstream users only had to learn a new feature in a tool that they use every day? If such an event happened, RSS might head toward meeting its full potential.

Well, step back ladies and gentlemen, that time is now. With the release of Microsoft’s Outlook 2007, RSS has the potential to escape from the microcosm of early-adopters and join millions of normal people.

This is what it looks like:

As you can see, the mail-folder now lists “RSS Feeds.” By right-clicking on this folder, a pull-down menu appears with an option to “Add a New RSS Feed.” Simply copy and paste a feed into the resulting field and you’re subscribed.

But the tool doesn’t stop at simply adding RSS feeds. It also helps users share them with its imaginatively named “Share This Feed” button.

With a single mouse-click, one can send an RSS Feed to another Microsoft Office 2007 user, who’ll get a message that looks like this:

By clicking on the “Add This Feed” button, the recipient can “one-click subscribe” to the referred RSS Feed.

David Meerman Scott, the author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR, has just come out with a new ebook called The New Rules of Viral Marketing: How word-of-mouse spreads your ideas for free. I love the term “word-of-mouse,” because it describes perfectly the way viral distribution happens. People love passing hyperlinks onto one another through email, so doesn’t it make sense that if passing along an RSS Feed was just as easy that they’d do the same thing?

As corporations begin migrating to Microsoft Office 2007, RSS, just like podcasting will finally hit a tipping point — graduating from an obscure little orange and white button, to a productivity tool that is widely accepted by normal people.

As the New Media Evangelist in your company, are you ready for it?

Tags:Microsoft Office 2007 David Meerman Scott RSS RSS Feeds Sharing Feeds