Unlikely Videos Go Viral

Why would a 2-minute video (created by the Canadian forestry machinery maker Hakmet) of a machine cutting and splitting tree trunks go viral with more than 3 million views? Is it the hypnotic combination of lilting music, buzz saw noise, and captivating visual rhythm? Probably.

It reminds us of another hearty industrial company’s viral video success: Blendtec’s (@Blendtec) “Will it Blend” campaign. The video below of an iPad being destroyed in a blender has more than 13 million views. Wow.

Amber Mac‘s (@ambermac) article “The 5-Video Work Week: How to Build Your Brand On YouTube” in Fast Company’s Co.LEAD (@FastCoLead) offer tips on what makes a video successful:

·         The briefer the better; 60 seconds is best

·         Content that’s useful to the viewer

·         Keep fresh with regular updates

Read this in full.

Rico Andrade’s (@andrade_rico) article “The Rise of the Explainer Video” in TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) suggests reasons to create overview videos:

·         Increase press coverage

·         Help your fans evangelize your product

·         Improve the SEO of your site

·         Repurpose them everywhere

He says the best explainer videos answer the question “How does this product fit into my life?” or “Why should I use this?” before they answer “How does this work?”.

Read this in full.

Also see our previous blogpost “The 3 Qualities That Make A YouTube Video Go Viral.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you produce riveting videos for your brand.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Why Branding & Reputation Are So Important

57% of US consumers say that they’re increasingly checking product labels to see what company is behind the product they’re buying, and the same proportion say they get annoyed when it’s not obvious what company is behind a product, according the study The Company Behind the Brand: In Reputation We Trust by Weber Shandwick (@WeberShandwick). Roughly 2 in 5 US consumers also say they hesitate to buy products when it’s not clear what company makes them, and that they do research to learn about the companies that make the products they buy.

Our study identified 6 New Realities of Corporate Reputation. Each reality serves as a reminder to business leaders that they cannot view their company’s reputation and their product brands as separately as they once did. Aligning and integrating both optimizes their respective strengths to achieve strong business results.

1.    Corporate brand is as important as the product brand(s).

2.    Corporate reputation provides product quality assurance.

3.    Any disconnect between corporate and product reputation triggers sharp consumer reaction.

4.    Products drive discussion, with reputation close behind.

5.    Consumers shape reputation instantly.

6.    Corporate reputation contributes to company market value.

“In this fast-moving information age, consumers can now readily connect the dots between the brand they buy and the company behind the brand,” says Leslie Gaines-Ross, Chief Reputation Strategist, Weber Shandwick. “Whereas it has long been known that a strong brand shines a light on a company’s reputation, it is now clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that a strong company reputation adds an undeniable brilliance to the brand.”

What impacts consumers’ opinion of a company?

·         Word of mouth (88%)

·         Online reviews (83%)

·         Online search results (81%)

·         News sources (79%)

·         Company websites (74%)

·         Awards and rankings (63%)

·         Leadership communications (59%)

·         Advertising (56%)

·         Social networks (49%) (are companies not embracing social media in a way that fully resonates with the public?)

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you identify blue ocean strategy for your brand.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.; especially the Branding and Marketing/Public Relations tabs.

A Video About a Poster Masks a Bookstore's Promotion

This video, highlighting the history of the WWII British government poster “Keep Calm and Carry On,” has gotten nearly 1 million views in less than a month. The original war slogan was all but forgotten until a poster was discovered in 2000 in a box of books bought by Barter Books (@BarterBooks), a large second-hand bookshop in north-east England. In a bit of alchemy, the store has turned those 5 words into word-of-mouth gold.

Also see our previous blogpost “The 3 Qualities That Make A YouTube Video Go Viral.”

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you strategically communicate your brand message.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Common English Bible Advances in Best Seller Status

The new Common English Bible (http://CommonEnglishBible.com) is #7 in unit sales and #10 in dollar sales on the CBA Bible Translation Best Seller list for the month of April (http://cbaonline.org/nm/documents/BSLs/Bible_Translations.pdf). This marks the fourth month the Common English Bible (Twitter @CommonEngBible – http://twitter.com/CommonEngBible) has been on the Unit Sales list (moving up from #10) and the first month it’s appeared on the Dollar Sales list since its release last fall.

“The broad acceptance of the Common English Bible by scholars, consumers, and book sellers is gratifying,” says Paul Franklyn, PhD, associate publisher. “It confirms our decision to create an academically rigorous yet naturally understandable translation for 21st century English readers; a translation from the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek that’s built on common ground from the bottom up.”

The Common English Bible’s popularity has soared since it was first released last September. In addition to being a repeat best seller,

·         it was named one of the top 10 religion stories of 2011 by leading journalists of the Religion Newswriters Association

·         people are printing its verses in calligraphy when they LIKE the Facebook page http://facebook.com/LiveTheBible

·         a Lenten PowerPoint® presentation of nature scenes in vivid color photography combined with scripture verses from the Common English Bible has been viewed, downloaded, and embedded more than 10,000 times (http://CommonEnglishBible.com/CEB/LentDownloads and http://slideshare.net/CommonEnglishBible)

·         200 bloggers are participating in the “Common English Bible Change Your Heart and Life” blog tour (http://CommonEnglishBible.com/CEB/blogtour) through Pentecost Sunday in May (Twitter hashtag #CEBtour – http://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/%23CEBTour).

·         the Common English Bible’s video “Who Does God Love” (vimeo.com/CommonEnglishBible) has registered more than 1,000 views and blog embeds (see above)

·         the Common English Bible text, including the Apocrypha, is available to search for free online at Bible Gateway (http://www.biblegateway.com/versions/Common-English-Bible-CEB/), YouVersion.com (http://www.youversion.com/versions/ceb), and the translation’s website

·         more than 6,000 people subscribe to the email Common English Bible “Verse of the Day” delivered daily to personal email inboxes from Bible Gateway (http://www.biblegateway.com/newsletters/)

·         and churches are using the translation to read through the Bible in a year (e.g. http://www.fourthchurch.org/bibleyear.html).

The Common English Bible is a collaboration of 120 Bible scholars and editors, 77 reading group leaders, and more than 500 average readers from around the world. The translators – from 24 denominations in American, African, Asian, European, and Latino communities – represent such academic institutions as Asbury Theological Seminary, Azusa Pacific University, Bethel Seminary, Denver Seminary, Princeton Theological Seminary, Seattle Pacific University, Wheaton College, Yale University, and many others.

The Common English Bible is written in contemporary idiom at the same reading level as the newspaper USA TODAY—using language that’s comfortable and accessible for today’s English readers. More than half-a-million copies of the Bible are in print, including an edition with the Apocrypha. The Common English Bible is available online and in 20 digital formats. A Reference Bible edition and a Daily Companion devotional edition are now also available. Additionally, Church/Pew Bibles, Gift and Award Bibles, Large Print Bibles, and Children’s Bible editions will be in stores soon, joining the existing Thinline Bibles, Compact Thin Bibles, and Pocket-Size Bibles, bringing the total variety of Common English Bible stock-keeping units (SKUs) to more than 40.

Visit CommonEnglishBible.com to see comparison translations, learn about the translators, get free downloads, and more.

The Common English Bible is sponsored by the Common English Bible Committee, an alliance of five publishers that serve the general market, as well as the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) (Chalice Press), Presbyterian Church (USA) (Westminster John Knox Press), Episcopal Church (Church Publishing, Inc.), United Church of Christ (The Pilgrim Press), and The United Methodist Church (Abingdon Press).

For a media review copy of the Common English Bible and to schedule an interview with Paul Franklyn, please contact Diane Morrow, dmorrow@tbbmedia.com, at 800.927.1517, x106.

Taking the Long View

This article in The Economist (@TheEconomist) explains how Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon (@amazon), values innovation and risk-taking. It begins with the example of Bezos’ major investment in “a gargantuan clock” being built inside the Sierra Diablo Mountain Range in Texas by The Long Now Foundation (@longnow). This 10,000-year clock, designed “to be a symbol, an icon for long-term thinking,” will tick once a year, its century hand will advance once every 100 years, and its cuckoo will come out on the millennium.

Mr. Bezos’s willingness to take a long-term view also explains his fascination with space travel, and his decision to found a secretive company called Blue Origin, one of several start-ups now building spacecraft with private funding. It might seem like a risky bet, but the same was said of many of Amazon’s unusual moves in the past. Successful firms, he says, tend to be the ones that are willing to explore uncharted territories. “Me-too companies have not done that well over time,” he observes.

Eyebrows were raised, for example, when Amazon moved into the business of providing cloud-computing services to technology firms—which seemed an odd choice for an online retailer. But the company has since established itself as a leader in the field. “A big piece of the story we tell ourselves about who we are is that we are willing to invent,” Mr. Bezos told shareholders at Amazon’s annual meeting last year. “And very importantly, we are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.”

...[Criticism does] nothing to sway Mr. Bezos, who is convinced that rapid technological change creates huge opportunities for companies bold enough to seize them. “There is room for many winners here,” he says. But he believes Amazon can be one of the biggest thanks to its unique culture and capacity for reinventing itself. Even in its original incarnation as an internet retailer, it pioneered features that have since become commonplace, such as allowing customers to leave reviews of books and other products (a move that shocked literary critics at the time), or using a customer’s past purchasing history to recommend other products, often with astonishing accuracy.

Read this in full.

Also see Bezos' long view approach in "Bezos team finds Apollo 11 rocket engines on Atlantic floor."

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you set your leadership vision and take advantage of technology to advance your brand.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Innovation and Leadership tabs.

Encyclopædia Britannica Stops the Presses

A publishing mainstay capitulates to electronic technology. In The New York Times blog Media Decoder (@mediadecodernyt), Julie Bosman (@juliebosman) reports that “after 244 years, the Encyclopædia Britannica (@Britannica) is going out of print.”

Those coolly authoritative, gold-lettered reference books that were once sold door-to-door by a fleet of traveling salesmen and displayed as proud fixtures in American homes will be discontinued, company executives said.

In an acknowledgment of the realities of the digital age — and of competition from the website Wikipedia — Encyclopædia Britannica will focus primarily on its online encyclopedias and educational curriculum for schools. The last print version is the 32-volume 2010 edition, which weighs 129 pounds and includes new entries on global warming and the Human Genome Project.

“It’s a rite of passage in this new era,” Jorge Cauz, the president of Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., a company based in Chicago, said in an interview. “Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The website is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia.”

Read this in full.

According to the Financial Times (@ftmedia), "The emergence of the Web decimated sales of Britannica. From a peak of 120,000 sets sold in 1990, sales fell sharply, with just 8,500 sets of the 2010 edition shipped."

A.J. Jacobs (@ajjacobs), who read the Encyclopædia Britannica from beginning to end and lived to write about it in The Know-It-All: One man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World, says,

...the [printed] Britannica encouraged serendipitous discoveries. Look up Abbott and Costello, and you might be lured in by abalones or Absalom, who died after his luxurious hair got caught in a tree.

...physicality has its rewards....For decades, the Britannica served a symbolic purpose. Fill your living room shelf with encyclopedias, and you were announcing, "Yes, we are an intellectually curious family." A mounted moose head, but for the brainy.

Read the obituary he wrote in full.

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you navigate the revolutionary changes occurring in 21st century publishing.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.