The 3 Qualities That Make A YouTube Video Go Viral

Simply Zesty (@SimplyZesty) / Simply Viral (@simplyviral) scouted this TED (@tedtalks) talk of YouTube (@YouTube) trends manager Kevin Allocca (@shockallocca) speaking at a TEDYouth (@TEDYouth) event on the 3 reasons a video goes viral:

·         Tastemakers: when influential people discover new videos and introduce those videos to their followers

·         Participation: when viewers of a video become motivated enough to produce another version of the video

·         Unexpectedness: when a video contains surprises, especially in a humorous manner.

Allocca says over 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

Also see our other blogposts about viral videos:

What principles have you identified that contribute to a video going viral? Write your comments below.

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you strategize your brand’s social media communication.

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

Listening to Books

In the literary magazine n+1 (@nplusonemag), Maggie Gram (@maggiegram) writes about the wonder and love of listening to audio books.

Audio books are good for people driving cars because they are good at occupying part but not all of one’s attention. For me this is also true of regular books: I am a profoundly distractible reader, like a raccoon tasked with doing something tedious in a vast field of shiny objects. But while when I’m trying to read a regular book my focus takes a sort of oscillating form—now I’m reading, now I’m distracted, now I’m reading again—with audio books it’s more like sustained equilibrium. Maybe 60 percent of my attention is going to the Audio book; the other 40 percent is absorbed by something else. The exact balance shifts, but most of the time I am actually doing both things.

This is part of the appeal. Since the 1980s there have been more sighted people than blind people listening to audio books, and most of us have done so because we were also doing something else. Audio books are good for long trips. They are also good for housework, although they can be drowned out by a vacuum. I started listening to audio books because I was reading for my first set of graduate-school qualifying exams. My list of books seemed endless, and I thought that listening to some of them on mp3 might solve the problem of having too little time to read. Or rather, too little time to both read and run. With audio books I could do both at the same time.

The possibility of reading while also doing something else produces one of the stranger phenomenological characteristics of audio book reading: you can have a whole set of unrelated and real (if only partially attended) experiences while simultaneously experiencing a book. You live in two worlds at once. My first audio book was Flo Gibson’s recording of The Mill on the Floss, which, by the way, is one of the very great audio books: the sound is scratchy, but Gibson’s voice is confident and almost conspiratorial, warm and intimate and pleased to be recounting a story she knows you will be glad to have heard. I listened to it running by the Charles River with earbuds in my ears, and three years later I still associate certain spots along the Charles with scenes from the novel’s Dorlcote Mill. I also remember exactly where along the Weeks Footbridge Lucy Deane marveled at how beautiful Maggie Tulliver looks in shabby clothes. I think of it whenever I pass that spot, which means I think of it most days.

Read this in full.

We love audiobooks at Somersault (@smrsault). Contact us to help you produce and market your book(s) in audio.

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

A Growing Trend: Retailers Perfuming Stores

Will attractive aromas spritzed in the air be able to save bookstores? According to an article by Robert Klara (@UpperEastRob) in Adweek (@Adweek), a growing trend among diverse businesses (including retail, hotels, funeral homes, retirement villages, medical and law offices) is secretly scenting the air customers breathe to get them to buy more.

At a time when brands have already fine-tuned everything from their store color palettes to employee dress codes to the music thumping through the speakers, scent — the sole remaining sense that can directly influence how a customer regards a brand — is becoming an increasingly important instrument in the marketer’s toolbox. Given that smell is the most powerful and emotional of all the senses, the bigger surprise might be that it’s taken brands this long to wake up to smell’s potential.

...Environmental psychologist Eric Spangenberg of Washington State University says, “The technology has advanced to the level where anyone can do it.”

...Brands want their customers to be in such environments because, as research has shown, even a few microparticles of scent can do a lot of marketing’s heavy lifting, from improving consumer perceptions of quality to increasing the number of store visits.

...Brands that use the technology have a singular aim: to put people in the mood to spend. “Pleasant, subtle scents lift our moods and impact buying behavior,” says Donna Sturgess (@donnasturgess), president of Buyology (@BuyologyInc), a neurological marketing firm based in New York. Brands that have found the right ambient scent, she says, “have seen results as high as double-digit increases in brand preference.”

Read this in full.

Also see our previous blogpost, “Life-Like Mannequins Inspire Real-Life Shoppers.”

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.

Finding Your Book Interrupted ... By the Tablet You Read It On

Julie Bosman (@juliebosma) and Matthew Richtel (@mrichtel) write in this New York Times (@nytimesbusiness) article about the many ways tablets – by providing too many options – can distract people from concentrating on the books they’re reading; fragmenting their experience or stopping it altogether.

Email lurks tantalizingly within reach. Looking up a tricky word or unknown fact in the book is easily accomplished through a quick Google search. And if a book starts to drag, giving up on it to stream a movie over Netflix or scroll through your Twitter feed is only a few taps away.

That adds up to a reading experience that is more like a 21st-century cacophony than a traditional solitary activity. And some of the millions of consumers who have bought tablets and sampled ebooks on apps from Amazon, Apple, and Barnes & Noble have come away with a conclusion: It’s harder than ever to sit down and focus on reading.

Read this in full.

The article focuses on apps and email being distractions, but we also ask the question, “When do you think the digital features and creative apps of an enhanced ebook cross the line from augmenting the book reading experience and become a distraction and interruption? Write your comments below.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you plan and execute your ebook publishing and marketing strategy.

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

SXSW 2012 Preview

SXSW (@sxsw) (pronounced “south by southwest”), the annual Austin, Tex.-based festival of interactive ventures, music, and film, runs March 9-18, for another year’s presentations on innovation in technology, music, cinema, and new business platforms that will attract more than 20,000 attendees. SXSW Interactive runs March 9-13, focusing on books, publishing, and new media technology.

Panel presentations and discussions include “The Future of Lifestyle Media,” Making a Grand Entrance: How to Launch a Product,” and “The Present of Print: Paper’s Persistence.”

Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly) editors Rachel Deahl (@DeahlsDeals) and Calvin Reid (@calreid) are moderating two panel discussions:

Publishing Models Transforming The Book, will examine how conventional publishing industry business models are being rearranged and reinvented, and how books and book content are being offered to consumers in the digital age. The panel features content entrepreneurs like Brian Altounian (@BrianAltounian), CEO of Wowio.com (@WOWIO) (announcing the rebranding of itself as Studio W), and Swanna McNair (@swannamac), founder of Creative Conduit. Also on-hand will be Molly Barton (@MollyBBarton), director of digital publishing and business development at Penguin (@penguinusa) / Book Country (@Book_Country), and Jefferson Raab, creative director at The Atavist (@theatavist).

And Reid will moderate the panel Discoverability and the New World of Book PR, organized by Austin based book media relations veterans Barbara Cave Henricks, founder of Cave Henricks Communications (@CaveHenricks) and Rusty Shelton (@RustyShelton), owner of Shelton Interactive as well as Hollis Heimbouch (@heimbouch), vp and publisher at Harper Business (@HarperCollins). The panel will examine book marketing and promotion at a time when physical bookstore shelf space is declining and more books are being released.

Read this in full.

Also see our previous blogpost “Discoverability in the Digital Age: Personal Recommendations and Bookstores.”

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.

Electronic Mini-Books & Longform Articles

In this article, senior writer and book critic for The New York Times (@nytimesbooks), Dwight Garner (@DwightGarner), spotlights Kindle Singles (submission policy): “works of long-form journalism (‘well researched, well argued, and well illustrated between 5,000 and 30,000 words’) that seek out that sweet spot between magazine articles and hardcover books. Amazon calls them ‘compelling ideas expressed at their natural length.’” Garner calls them “boutique mini-books” that may create a new genre: “long enough for genuine complexity, short enough to avoid adding journalistic starches and fillers.”

Amazon hardly has a monopoly on this novella-length form. Digital publishers like Byliner (@TheByliner) and The Atavist (@theatavist) are commissioning articles of this length that can be purchased and read on any e-reader, or on laptops or phones.

...Amazon offers 70% of the royalties to its Singles authors....So far Amazon has issued more than 160 Singles, at a rate of 3 per week....Barnes & Noble offers similar material in its Nook Snaps series, Apple has Quick Reads  on its iBookstore, and Kobo has Short Reads....

Read this in full.

See our previous blogposts, “Ebooks are the New Pamphlets” and "In the Year of the Ebook, 5 Lessons From  — and For  — News Organizations."

Also see paidContent’s (@paidContent) "E-Singles: ‘Journalism’s Extraordinary Challenges In An Entirely New Place’" and “Guide to E-singles”).

In keeping with the idea of short-form books or long-form articles (however you look at it), Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) has launched Christianity Today Essentials, a new series of “natural length ebooks,” described by editor-in-chief David Neff (@dneff) as content “longer than a longish magazine article, yet significantly shorter than the typical print book.” He says, “The format allows you, the reader, to go deeper and learn more than you could from a magazine article, without committing the time or money demanded by a full-length book.”

Leadership Network (@leadnet) is beginning a new series of “natural length experiences” under the brand Leadia (@leadiatalk). “Each piece is limited to 10,000 words and has live links to audio, video, and websites.” A Leadia app is available for iPhones and iPads.

And Patheos.com (@Patheos) has started Patheos Press, a “publisher of original ebooks.”

Capturing long-form content online is another aspect of this trend. Services such as Longreads (@longreads), Longform (@longform), and The Browser (@TheBrowser) help readers save and organize in-depth material on the Web.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you successfully navigate the world of digital publishing.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially see the list of self-publishers in the Publishers tab.

AP Gives Itself a New 'Look'

The Associated Press is talking up a new “visual identity system,” to be rolled out over the coming months (a historical retrospective of AP logos is shown above with the new logo on the right).

The global news network says the look and logo are designed for the digital era and are supposed to unite its various offerings as part of a “master brand” strategy. AP called this the first significant change in its look in 30 years. The first use is on its new AP Mobile news app and AP.org website (@AP). According to its brand introduction (pdf) document, the new visual identity system brings to life the AP values of “integrity, action, and independence...and creates a distinct footprint in the media marketplace.”

AP President/CEO Tom Curley says in the announcement, “We have world-class content and world-class products and now we have the world-class look to go with them.”

The system expands the range of colors and designs available for use in AP products and services. The logomark recognizes the past stencil pattern while the logotype is black with a red underscore, both in a white box. This design is by the firm Objective Subject (@ob_sub), which says the red underscore, dubbed ‘the prompt,’ “evokes AP’s emphasis on editorial rigor and precise and accurate approach.” It goes on, “We retained the original logo’s stencil lettering, which embody the gutsy and adventurous personality of an international news organization.”

The Associated Press Stylebook (@APStylebook) is considered to set the standard in journalistic (and public relations) spelling and grammar.

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you establish or update your logomark to convey your brand’s true identity.

Be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Religion News tab.

In a Flood Tide of Digital Data, an Ark Full of Books

In this New York Times (@nytimestech) article, technology writer David Streitfeld spotlights a wooden warehouse in Richmond, CA, where copies of printed books are being stored in the hope of preserving literature in case of a digital catastrophe.

Forty-foot shipping containers stacked two by two are stuffed with the most enduring, as well as some of the most forgettable, books of the era. Every week, 20,000 new volumes arrive, many of them donations from libraries and universities thrilled to unload material that has no place in the Internet Age....

“We want to collect one copy of every book,” said Brewster Kahle, who has spent $3 million to buy and operate this repository situated just north of San Francisco. “You can never tell what is going to paint the portrait of a culture.”

As society embraces all forms of digital entertainment, this latter-day Noah is looking the other way. A Silicon Valley entrepreneur who made his fortune selling a data-mining company to Amazon.com in 1999, Mr. Kahle founded and runs the Internet Archive (@internetarchive), a nonprofit organization devoted to preserving Web pages — 150 billion so far — and making texts more widely available.

But even though he started his archiving in the digital realm, he now wants to save physical texts, too.

Read this in full.

If you’re a book lover like we (@smrsault) are, bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.