Tag Archives: comment

First off, thank you to Brian for allowing me to do a guest post on Bub.  Last week I contacted Brian to solicit some advice on how I could get the word out about a little video I recently released on YouTube.

A contest video.

First, let me preface by saying that I’ve never entered a video contest before. The opportunity cost just didn’t make sense – taking time out from other work to essentially create a free commercial for someone and then shamelessly self-promote it in hopes of winning a gift certificate (?) Didn’t seem worth it.

Then I came across this contest sponsored by Lash Allure MD. There’s a $100,000 pot at stake – which, needless to say, is much larger than most other online video contest winnings. Immediately, my mind was racing about the web content I could fund with 100k. No more brand or studio pitches in 2010? I’d be in heaven.

The best part (or, in some cases, the worst)? The winner is NOT chosen based on a subjective judging process. The system is clear: the person with the most “votes” wins. Each YouTube star rating counts as one vote, and one comment, per user, per day, counts as a vote. Simple, quantifiable. And yet, a little unfair for those who don’t have massive YouTube followings.

So I decided to enter. First with my own video, and then after realizing that I would never win on my own regards, I teamed up Olga Kay, a YouTuber with about 70,000 subscribers. To incentivise people to help, we decided to offer up $10,000 of the prize money to dedicated commenters. Every day for 20 days, we pose a new question in the annotation on the video. Answer the question, and you could win $500. $500 to twenty people = $10,000 total giveaway.

Shameless.

It’s now Dec. 12th – only 8 days before the contest ends. We are currently in 2nd place, behind a witty YouTube blogger with a big following, but with the a little nudge here and there from the right people, we could definitely win the grand prize.

We’ve received several little endorsements from friends – including tweets from Ryan Higa and Dave Days – and brought on a new, third partner – Phil DeFranco.

We are asking for your help because this isn’t about making money to put in a savings account. It’s a viral contest, and as such, Olga, Phil and I want to put that money toward advancing our own web content initiatives.  Not to mention that we would still give away $10k (and a few other little surprises) to our commenters.

It’s hard for me to ask any favors of anyone, but in this case, I’m swallowing my pride.

So, please, if you have a chance today (and for the next 8 days) – rate and comment this video here —> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=df2_CZCfAaE – and RT if you can

Oh, and for all of you business owners out there looking to hold promotional video contests – take a cue from Lash Allure MD. By judging a video contest on ratings and comments, rather than on the video content itself, the company is benefiting from the self-promotional efforts of people like me as well as the engagement and interaction of potential customers who are rating/commenting on the videos. Smart.

by Brian Solis

BackType, a social search, bookmarking, and network around comments, is now available within FriendFeed. Now you can easily add all of the comments you write directly to your FriendFeed account.

The team also rolled out several new features.

Alerts: BackType Alerts delivers an e-mail update, in real time, daily, or weekly, whenever a subscribed search term is mentioned in a comment. You can also monitor your alerts via RSS or through the alerts tab in your BackType Dashboard.

Twitter: Users can setup auto or manual posting of comments to your Twitter stream.

Widgets: If you’d like to display your comments or the results for key words on a Web page, profile or blog, BackType also released three widgets.

Developers: BackType rolled out a comprehensive API for developers to extend the functionality of tracking, aggregating, and presenting disperesed comments in other integrated applications and services.

BackType is a new service that brings blog post comments back into the spotlight. BackType allows you to search keywords across the blogosphere to uncover important conversations that may require our participation, or at the very least, provide you with insight into critical community perspective. You can also search all comments by a particular person and date range to create a snapshot of someone’s area of focus, bias, or expertise.

BackType connects us not only to the comments that are important to us, but also to like-minded thought leaders and the posts that compel them to share their thoughts, in addition to extending the conversation thread by publishing related content on their own blogs.

We use BackType in conjunction with social reputation and expertise platform, SezWho.

For a deeper look at Backtype, please visit PR 2.0.

Connect with me on:
Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pownce, Plaxo, Plurk, Identi.ca, BackType, Jaiku or Facebook

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by Brian Solis, deeper analysis and review available at PR 2.0

Conversations continue to splinter throughout every new blog post, micromedia community, network, lifestream and aggregated community across the Social Web. While some services are attempting to aggregate and host these conversations through a personal, customizable dashboard supported by yet another complementary social network, the truth is that they only continue to fragment our attention as well as our ability to consistently participate in every community where our contribution may be beneficial.

Through participation, we earn relationships and hopefully build authority by contributing helpful advice, information and insight. We also learn more about the subjects in which we’re interested, creating a deeper understanding of the dynamics associated with not only the subject matter, but also the community view and reaction to it. In the process, we establish and cultivate our online brand, reputation, and associated expertise that is only fortified through every new piece of content we publish and every comment we share.

Social platform services such as SezWho (which is running on PR 2.0 and bub.blicio.us) are formally packaging our expertise through the aggregation of our comments and the ratings our insight as defined by other members of each community. Through SezWho, for example, we can build our own online dossier that presents a comprehensive list of our thoughts and ideas as contributed in blog posts, comments, forums, and other related Web sites.

The process of listening isn’t only relegated to the research and analysis of individual reputations. Listening is also instrumental in the creation of new communications and service initiatives as well unearthing the specific conversations that matter to your brand – for gathering data and also discovering opportunities to respond.

Introducing BackType, a service that I believe, is navigating conversations back to the blogosphere.

BackType is a new service that brings blog post comments back into the spotlight. Whether you’re managing an online reputation management (ORM) or an online monitoring system (OMS), BackType allows you to search keywords across the blogosphere to uncover important conversations that may require our participation, or at the very least, provide you with insight into critical community perspective. You can also search all comments by a particular person and date range to create a snapshot of someone’s area of focus, bias, or expertise.

The new service is built upon a social framework that is also, yes, a social network. We can create a profile that, as usual, portrays our persona in a way that hopefully contributes to our strategically crafted online brand.

BackType connects us not only to the comments that are important to us, but also to like-minded thought leaders and the posts that compel them to share their thoughts, in addition to extending the conversation thread by publishing related content on their own blogs.

When you log on to BackType, you can search comments or find and follow people that are worth tracking. Each time you hit your dashboard, BackType provides an aggregated view of the comments made by your peers to stay connected to and learn from their activity.

Perhaps most notably, you can bookmark, share, and also reply to comments from the dashboard to immediately add your views to each and every related conversation and also incrementally contribute to your personal and professional credibility.

Connect with me on:
Twitter, Jaiku, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pownce, Plaxo, FriendFeed, Plurk, Identi.ca, BackType, or Facebook