SocialNext

Hulu: No Respect; Loads of Content

Big shock! The blogosphere hates the new name of the new NBC / News Corp. YouTube competitor, Hulu.

Why? Well apparently Hulu means “butt” in Malay and Indonesian and “cease” and “desist” in Swahili. OMG!111!11

You have no idea how many times my friends and I talk about funny videos we’ve seen in Swahili. As soon as Hulu launches these conversations are sure to get awkward.

But the bottom line is if Hulu comes out with a stable service that is easy to use people will start respecting them real quick. Here are a few simple reasons:

Saturday Night Live
Family Guy
The Simpsons
The Tonight Show
Late Night with Conan O'Brien
Heroes
30 Rock

People want to see clips of these shows. Look at these Family Guy clips. Or these clips from SNL. They have view counts in the millions. Content is king and Hulu will have TONS of it. It's never a good idea to dismiss a competitor with so many weapons in their arsenal.

Romney Asks for User-Generated Ads

MSNBC’s First Read is reporting that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is launching a user generated ad contest via JumpCut.com.

I hope they watch the submissions closely because this is nothing short of playing with fire. While they’re hoping for positive ads they will undoubtedly get many negative ads as well that, even if removed, will be reposted elsewhere on the net…all with official looking “Romney for President” imagery.

Don’t they remember the failed do-it-yourself ad campaign for the Chevy Tahoe that resulted in angry anti-SUV / pro-environment ads? When viral marketing backfires it can get really ugly. I hope the Romney campaign is prepared for the potential fallout.

Anatomy of an Attempted Viral Video About Barry Bonds

Many content creators just make a video, put it on YouTube and hope it goes viral. It’s tough. There’s a lot of stuff out there. This is why I try to make videos about something people can identify with.

Case in point: Barry Bonds breaking the all time home run record. Personally I don’t like Bonds and I know I’m not alone. So I wrote a video (performed by my friend Ryan) about how Bonds signed a deal with the devil to get the record. Here’s the strategy I employed (the video is below):

1. Have it ready: We made the video over the weekend before Bonds broke the record. I uploaded it to YouTube and MySpace as private. When Bonds broke the record I just made it live.

2. Keep it short: It’s only a minute long. The longer the video the harder it is to go viral in most cases.

3. Unique delivery: A puppet Satan helps make it stand out from the crowd.

Here’s what I learned:

If there is an event that is building up to one moment (like the home run record) it is better to create something for the buildup rather than the moment. We’ve been talking about Bonds’ pursuit of Hank Aaron’s record for almost a year. If we had written a video about that the video would have legs for a lot longer. Even if the video we made goes viral all over the place it still wouldn’t get as many views as it would have over a several month period.