Tag Archives: youtube

Social Speech Podcast, Episode 12: Mitchell Beer

Mitchell Beer has been a leader in conference communcations for more than a quarter of a century. His firm, The Conference Publishers, reports and repackages conference content – keeping it useful and relevant long after the closing gavel.

How does that change in the social media era? In this episode, Mitchell tells me how conference reporting is evolving to take advantage of everything from YouTube to Twitter. And along the way, we gain some insights into how speakers and speechwriters can help their messages find a prominent place in those reports… and in the ideas participants take home with them.

Let your fingers do the climbing… and the opting out.

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Two enterprising folks dropped by the Yellow Page Group corporate headquarters in Montreal and built a small mountain of more than 500 unwanted Yellow Page directories in front of it… and interviewed a YPG rep brave enough to defend the indefensible.

(How enterprising? One is Aimee Davison, who is currently blogging about doing 100 interesting jobs by the end of the year. The other is Kyle MacDonald, whom you may remember as the guy who traded a single red paper clip for a house.) (Not all at once. He traded steadily up.)

There’s a lot to like about this video, but let me single out just one thing: the fact that the corporate rep is there at all, and is allowed to make her case. That ultimately makes the piece far more effective and persuasive; you hear the pro-Yellow Pages argument, but see it contradicted by the video evidence the video-makers gathered.

The staggeringly bogus “only one per cent of Canadians opt out” argument might be my favourite moment, though. That number might well be accurate. But…

  • Given how little effort YPG puts into promoting their opt-out web page, and the fact you have to keep renewing your opted-out status, I’m pretty impressed that it’s that high.
  • And ask yourself: how high would it be if people had to opt in using the same process?

To opt out of getting the Yellow Pages:

What’s your favourite piece of user-created content from the Canadian election?

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This campaign may have been slow off the mark on the Web 2.0 front, but it’s picked up steam quickly – and user-generated media is one of the places Canadian social media is gaining traction. This is my favourite of the bunch (it speaks to my partisan roots), but there have been solid creative entries from people on all sides.

So what’s your pick so far?

A gift to parents everywhere, from SNL

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If you’re a parent with kids under, oh, ten or so, then Saturday Night Live has just delivered the vengeance you’ve been waiting for on Dora the Explorer.

Animated at a gorgeous three frames an hour, written by stunned gerbils and voiced by telemarketers on helium, Dora was the bane of my existence for a solid year. Woody Allen once said his parents’ values were God and carpeting; Dora’s are candy and stickers. There is no torture more horrific than sitting through it, bleary-eyed, at some ungodly hour of the morning while the kid who kept you up all night watches happily.

Now, somehow, miraculously, SNL has managed to channel nearly every evil alternate voiceover I’ve had playing internally during the show. One exception: “Row so Boots can get away from the crocodiles! Row faster, please! Faster! Faster! Oh, no! Now Boots is dead, and it’s your fault! I bet you’ll row faster next time!” I’d pay good money to see that on screen.

(Come to think of it, though, Dora isn’t the kids’ show I most want to see pilloried. That honour goes to Jay Jay the Jet Plane, a CGI cartoon whose writing made Dora sound like the proceedings of the Learneds. But that wasn’t what made me cringe, nor was it the little “educational” bits at the end: “You ever wonder why things fall? Gravity! Think about it! Bye!” It was the whole creepy look of the thing: human faces grafted onto the front of aircraft. You’d think the producer saw the escape scene in Silence of the Lambs and thought, “You know, this gives me an idea for a children’s show.”)

YouTube meets The Man

I just posted at the Social Signal blog:

I had a great conversation on Saturday night with Kate Trgovac on Sean Holman's Public Eye Radio. The topic was Petro-Canada's foray into the video-sharing world of YouTube, a project Kate got rolling for them before moving on to her new gig. (The videos purport to explain why gasoline prices are so high.)

A good time was had by all… and something Kate said struck me. She likes the initiative, but finds the Petro-Canada videos themselves to be too corporate.

She's right – and on many levels.

Read the rest here.