Building the “reusable video” player

I thought i’d share some pilot innovation work that I have been involved in with a guy called Bill Wells from 2 dot 0.

This all started from a conversation over lunch we had earlier this year.

The basic idea was that in my previous role as Corporate Web Manager, we always had conversations with people about video hosting options along side a video player tailored specifically for the local authority. Not a unique problem, in fact quite a common one i imagine. However the issue for me was that i couldn’t justify the costs associated with video storage solutions when sites like youtube, vimeo, blip etc offer pretty good solutions either free or very low cost. The other issue was that as a local authority it is unlikely that we are going to spend thousands of pounds on the creation of new video content regardless of the quality due to capacity and skills.

So the conversation went on for a good hour or so and ended up with me basically asking for a solution that did the following:

What i’d like is a player which has the ability to pull content from any source, youtube or vimeo or a traditional video storage platform – I’d also like to add value by providing a feature that allowed me to layer content, questions etc over the top to gain additional benefit from the original content. I’d like to be in a position to reuse our existing video archives and repurpose them, or use other public material from either central government or other local authorities providing the content was reusable”

I was keen early on to see how this could benefit and enhance the digital engagement offering as we could reuse community created content and layer questions over the top to gain some additional targeted feedback whilst someone was watching the video itself, instead of after the event.

So let me share what the early beta product looks like and how it might fit within a local authority situation.

Firstly it is worth checking out the original video offering that i suggested  – a video created by our road safety team on biker safety called “a day out in Devon”. The original youtube video is below:

NB: if you can’t watch youtube on your machine or via your network you will not be able to view either video.

Now as this is in beta, it isn’t yet available for embedding in other sites (to my knowledge). But this is the version which contains a number of questions at particular points as well as a scrolling “news” item which could be fed dynamically from the corporate site.  It is important to remember that this player is pulling the content directly from youtube when viewed and is simply providing a container for questions and feedback collection.

Below i a couple of screen shots of the video with a question displayed over the original video. (click on image to enlarge)

The following image explains the concept visually – it is also available as click through on the video at 1minute 17seconds in. (click on image to enlarge)

To see the video and questions in action, check out the link below.

• Video – a day out in Devon  – with questions

What we get at this point time is the data submitted by those who watch the video – This is complimentary to the “comments” section within youtube which could contain generic feedback and observations which could in fact drive the questions in the first place.

What is also interesting and in my opinion probably the killer application, is the statistics side  – What we are able to see is the actual behaviour of the viewer. So we can identify whether or not someone watched the whole video, part of it or none of it.  We are also able to tell whether or not they paused the video and when and layered with the questions, we can start to understand when in a video a good time to ask questions might actually be.

The following image is a graph from a single film view (click to enlarge).

• Green – 45 degree lines – normal play
• Yellow – vertical – fast forward
• Blue – horizontal – pause
• Horizontal axis – real time
• Vertical axis – time within the film.
• Content watched summary on the right – green = watched

The opportunities and intelligence this presents in terms of use and take up of video content is quite huge and the potential to reuse video content across the public sector means that we can start to see some content as shared services.

In its simplest form it adds value to existing content as it allows the owner to obtain additional statistics and seek specific feedback about particular parts of a given video.

I’m not a sales person, nor do i have any personal or vested interest in this succeeding, however I do personally see many opportunities within the public sector for this and i’m not going to pretend i know your business and tell you how you could gain value, but what i will say is, if you have video stored somewhere and you want to know how to gain extra value out of it now, this is something you should explore.

I’m probably not doing this any justice at all, but it isn’t my role to sell this, i am simply sharing something which i am personally quite excited about and can see this transforming how local government and the public sector use video content online to gain feedback and engage with people.

I’m going to continue to look at how this can be integrated into some of our digital engagement offering, but at the moment we are still in the early stages and as such don’t have any real life “live” examples. Fingers crossed.

In the meantime, i’d be interested to hear what you think of this idea.

Consumers vs Citizens – Democratic Society, Four rules for councils’ democratisation work

I’ve just seen an excellent presentation by the Democratic Society on “Four rules for councils’ democratisation work”. It has got me thinking about a few things so i’m going to share some random comments and observations:

First and foremost, we need to remove these “titles” (Consumer, Customer Citizen, Service User etc) and start to focus on PEOPLE. We can use the titles only to help guide us in our method and approach, but we should stop referring to People in those ways as it only confuses us and the people we engage with.

In Local Government we need to recognise (and most of us do) that People have different roles when interacting or engaging with us. They can be either be a consumer of services via websites or contact centres, face to face etc OR they can be citizens who we need to involve  in the design and shaping of what those services look like and feel like in the first place.

Organisations need to refocus to ensure that People to People connections and relationships are understood. This will inevitably have a huge transformational impact on the way we structure our services and how we involve people as well as the internal structures and networks that exist, not just in a single organisation but across the public sector as a whole.

Ok, random thoughts over – check out the presentation and see what you think?

 

 

Getting my head around Digital Engagement

I have been thinking for some time now what digital engagement could actually look like, so i thought about creating an approach to firstly help me understand what i actually go on about most of the time in real practical terms, plus allow others to see how it could work and what things people would need to think about the way in terms of skills and equipment etc.

Now before i start, this is not rocket science, this isn’t revolutionary, it is one of many approaches and i have created some visuals around it to help explain this further to my colleagues.

I am starting from a point which assumes that a given organisation is already planning an “offline event” of some kind, as this tends to be my first entry point with colleagues. This approach merely adds value and potentially increases the chances of involvement, participation and most importantly feedback and opinions (well i believe it would anyway).

The following diagram illustrates (simply as it is) the steps involved and i will explain it as well just to add some additional context.

(If you click on the image it should go full size)

Now the reason i needed to create this very simple diagram is to help me explain the steps or stages and the process involved in adding value to existing events or even community events.

1: The Offline Event
This could be anything, the key challenge is to create an environment which allows people to talk and have conversations. The biggest change though is to proactively encourage social reporters to video, take photos, live blog etc about the vent itself and then publish those online either via sites like YouTube, Vimeo, twitter, Facebook, Flickr, WordPress etc.  If you are unsure what a social reporter is or does then take a look at David Wilcox’s Blog who does excellent stuff in this area.

Another key aspect to this bit is promoting discussions through the use of hash tags (e.g. #theevent), promoting the reuse of the content that had been created and encouraging people to talk, discuss and devise opinions around it in their own online networks. This may require some council staff to join new groups as individuals to listen and or feedback relevant information (based on a social contract with the group).

2: Online Communities
This isn’t about the council or a particular organisation creating new online spaces for conversations to happen, this is about allowing people to have the discussion wherever they feel comfortable.  Their own online Ning networks, or Facebook groups or local NetMums forum. It really doesn’t matter providing they can access and reuse the content from the event. Now the challenge is listening and collecting this conversations that happen across the web. There are many ways in which this can happen and i’m not going to cover the details in this post, but using RSS, google alerts, Facebook search etc can support this task.

3: Social Media Sites
Providing content via the social media tools and sites that exist will allow others to reuse it, discuss it, provide feedback on it and encourage their friends to do the same.

This approach is about adding value to existing offline activities and or events. I would recommend that once your organisation develops good practice and learning around online engagement and you build a relationship with communities online you can start to reduce offline activity or perhaps get to a point where you can stop doing it for some engagement altogether.

Google Wave – are we “waving” goodbye to the old school

The much talked about Google Wave will be available later this year and the preview demonstrated at Google I/O event has got me thinking and after watching the video (below) there are a number of opportunities for the public sector, here are three areas where i feel we could gain real benefit, with this type of new functionality.

• Emergency comms – with email, web publishing and IM all interconnected. Communicating to a wide audience goes beyond your “contacts” list and can essentially reach the world in an instant.
• Community engagement – comments/conversations on blogs or other sites will be sent to me in my inbox and i can reply via my inbox. This would help those people who want to re-use content on various platforms and enable those people to capture all feedback and collate these and pass the conversations from one platform into another to facilitate wider community or network involvement (this coupled with the conversation playback facility will transform collaboration)
• Integrated access to colleagues / people on mobile devices (mobile and flexible working) this changes the landscape of mobile and flexible working in my opinion.

I for one am really excited by the prospect of seeing how this can allow people to work, collaborate and communicate more effectively……

It won’t solve everything, but it can teach us a new way in sharing and collaborating together.

Well done Google.

The increasing impact of social media on the political landscape

I am not going to write formally about my views on politics in general but with Americans voting in Barack Obama for what is being hailed as a historic and landmark event in global politics, i feel i need to mention a few things and ask one of two questions.

It has been widely recognised that one of the key support tools Obama used during his campaign were the new and social media platforms that are available. These tools were simply not as widely supported before so their reach did not generate the same effect this time round. What is interesting about all of this, is i believe that politics and elections across the globe will never be the same again.  That for me is a good thing, because living in the UK i don’t think i have ever felt part of the US Elections as i have done this time round, due to the social networks that i belong too and the different means in which the media has been presented and shared across the world, for some reason, i felt i also wanted to vote, that is very powerful considering i am over 3000 miles away.

Jeremiah Owyang posted “Snapshot of Presidential Candidate Social Networking Stats” on the 3rd November which showed the following stats

Facebook

Obama: 2,379,102 supporters

McCain: 620,359 supporters

Obama has 380% more supporters than McCain

YouTube

Obama: 1792 videos uploaded since Nov 2006, Subscribers: 114,559 (uploads about 4 a day), Channel Views: 18,413,110

McCain: 329 videos uploaded since Feb 2007 (uploads about 2 a day), Subscribers: 28,419, Channel Views: 2,032,993

Obama has 403% more subscribers than McCain

Obama has 905% more viewers than McCain

Twitter

Obama: @barackobama has 112,474 followers

McCain: @JohnMcCain (is it real?) 4,603 followers

Obama has 240 times more followers in Twitter than McCain

But if you look today (5th November) there is already an incredible increase in followers and supported for Obama. The main questions i have though is will these media tools still be used as pro-actively now that he has been elected?

The thought occurred to me, as i am sure it has with many people recently, can this be replicated in the UK for our general elections, or even local elections?  well i doubt it, whilst we (general public) seem to be fed more and more information by the media about the personalities and celebrity of current MP’s, it doesn’t quite seem the same to me, we don’t really vote for individuals, although “the leader” does play a part. Tony Blair being a great example of this. But the reality is we still after all is said and done vote for a “party” and a “view”.

Chris Reed posted on this very subject and highlights 4 examples of how it could be utilised by UK politicians  – he writes:

1) Motivating the supporter base. Preaching to the converted remains important. They’re the ones who help get the votes out on the day

2) Fundraising. We haven’t seen the levels of individual donations that the US elections rely on, but given recent ship-based discussions I predict that the parties will have to tap more voters (i.e. not just party members) than ever before in the next election

3) Policy development and argument. The internet is basically a pub. It’s where people talk, and clever people listen. Sometimes it’s an early warning system. Sometimes it’s an echo-chamber. But it provides unrivalled access to what people are actually thinking. Political parties of all shades should take note, and tweak their policies accordingly

4) The personalisation of politics. Rather perversely – being friended by a politician can sometimes be akin to being “followed” by a celebrity on twitter (@stephenfry anyone?) All politicians are looking for that “personal” touch. Using social media wisely can help to make individual supporters feel special, and, when used appropriately, can also help answer critics’ questions in a sincere and honest way.

In relation to the impact of social media on the US Election, it is hard to demonstrate exactly what impact is has had, but if you understand how social media and social networks are used then it can start to demonstrate the potential for increased communications and dialogue with people. A recent news release in Science Daily highlights research that Dr. Paul Haridakis, associate professor of Communication Studies at Kent State University is doing where he states “Many people, will watch videos and use traditional media like TV to acquire political information about the candidates, but they also are going to the Internet and using social networking sites to see who people they know support. The information gleaned from their social networks may be the information they find most credible and persuasive”  This basic level of peer to peer confirmation was validated in our recent consultation with young people, where they said social networks are places they meet and hang out with their friends. We are in a society where consumer empowerment is becoming increasingly more accessible and this will only get more pervasive as time goes on.

The impact of your friends views and the fact that by there nature social media tools are global it does raise some interesting questions about external influence from peers around the world on an individuals choice Dahna M. Chandler’s blog – Getting Social Media Savvy recently posted Social Media and the U.S. Presidential Election: What if the World Could Vote for US President?, This website shows an amazing result in favour of Obama:

Barack Obama        87.3% (758,041 votes)
John McCain           12.7% (110,103 votes)

So why such interest in the US Election? Is it because we all do really care who is in charge of one of the most powerful countries in the world, or is it because the tools we now use on a daily basis, which connect us to the lives of people who actually do need to make a choice and that in itself inspires our interest. Or is it something bigger, something more social.

The US Election has done a great things for social media and social media has done great things for the US Election, but has it changed the world, have we all started to realise more and more that we are truly one community connected by our interests and that our geography is no longer a barrier to networking. Has it also made big business and future political leaders sit up and take notice of the power of consumer/citizen engagement. Martin Bowling guest posted back in October on searchenginepeople How The US Election Is Changing Social Media, Online Rep Management & The World where he tsalks about 3 keys things that have occurred.

1. The partisanship/overtly political statements that people are so willing to put out there without regard to online reputation management issues
2. The effect of partisan/overtly political comments on the relationships that people have worked hard to form online and finally
3. The transformation of twitter from a simple conversation tool to a full blown memetracker

If you want to see how much social media “stuff” is out there just for the election then Jarrett Martineau has posted Social Media Mania and the US Election: the Best Links & Resources

I am still left with the question, “will it all continue?” after reading all the websites i have read in the last few days about the impact, it would be a shame to loose the momentum that it has now gained from this event.

Finally, we do seem to be entering a period of change, lets hold on and ride the wave.