Skip links

Performancing

Main navigation

YouTube

Avoiding the Legal Perils of Video Blogging

by

YouTube LogoBlogging is increasingly becoming a multimedia activity with more writers also adding images, audio and video to their sites.

But while video blogging, or vlogging, is a great way to reach out to a new audience and engage your existing audience in a new way, it brings with it a whole new set of legal risks and challenges that have to be overcome.

This is not only because you’re working with a different medium, but because you’re working with different hosts and using different systems to get your work out there.

In short, even if the laws don’t really change that much when you make the jump to video, the practical realities do change a great deal. If you’re not ready for them, you could be dealing with having your videos muted, pulled offline or even losing your whole account.

Here’s a few quick tips for avoiding the biggest legal pitfalls when it comes to video blogging. [Read more…] about Avoiding the Legal Perils of Video Blogging

5 Tricks To Help You Optimize Your Video for YouTube

by

Fun fact: YouTube is the second largest search engine. For some reason, this absolutely blew  my mind. The more I contemplated this very fun fact, the more I realized that it does make sense. People search for music videos and funny videos on YouTube all the time, and I know that I use YouTube far more than search engines like Bing or Yahoo. As someone interested in business, I couldn’t help but wonder: Are businesses taking full advantage of the YouTube platform?

[Read more…] about 5 Tricks To Help You Optimize Your Video for YouTube

“Fair Use” and Publishing Media for Blogs and Videos

by

Lately I’ve been building videos of my dives in the Philippines for a SCUBA blog and one thing I’ve noticed is that it is becoming harder by the day to find a video service that recognizes fair use for ambient audio tracks. Sure there are always the royalty free audio selections but most of the “good stuff” are from records, independent label or not. Youtube started this, removing audio from edited videos despite the credits. Facebook is doing this as well. The subject of “fair use” can be scrutinized on and on.

In its most general sense, a fair use is any copying of copyrighted material done for a limited and “transformative” purpose such as to comment upon, criticize or parody a copyrighted work. Such uses can be done without permission from the copyright owner. Another way of putting this is that fair use is a defense against infringement. If your use qualifies under the definition above, and as defined more specifically in this section, then your use would not be considered an illegal infringement. [source]

So if I use only a partial track from a song, that’s considered fair use? If you’ve been editing videos and posting one man acts on your blog, what experiences have you had with material being taken down? Look, I’m not here to challenge the policy. I just want to initiate a discussion on what can and cannot be done. The reality of the situation is that on the web, the actual practice seems to overshadow the real policy.

Understanding Social Media Traffic

by

Online communities have been around since the dawn of the Internet, even before the World Wide Web made its appearance. People have used computer to computer communications for the same reason they’d use a telephone or, prior to that, the postal service – to interact with each other across distance. Today, what appears to be an emerging market, social media, is actually not new at all. Sites like Facebook, YouTube, Myspace, Digg, Twitter and others are all actually evolutions of the founding ideas that the Web was based upon. We’re just beginning to get good at connecting people with each other and only now are business people realizing the untapped potential of interacting with their customers on the more personal level that social media provides.

If you run any kind of business venture online you definitely need to have a social media presence. One of the big ways to gain traffic these days is through social bookmarking services. These include sites like Digg where users submit links or stories. Those submissions are then voted on by other Digg members.

Digg
Image via Wikipedia

The higher the number of votes, the higher that article or site rises in within the Digg ranking system. Links that Digg members love can get massive traffic sent to that particular site so pleasing Digg users is definitely a good thing! But be careful, because there is also a phenomenon known as “the Digg effect” where a site will take so much traffic that it actually crashes. That’s not hard to imagine when you realize Digg gets over 236 million visitors annually.

Reddit is another social bookmarking site that focuses on news, rewarding users who submit particularly popular links with karma points. A site called del.ico.us takes an approach that encourages people to comment on each others links and build a strong sense of community. With this site, a wiki adds a more collective slant to the offerings and it’s become a real source for viral Internet memes and other popular Web items. These are only a handful of the social bookmarking sites available to those who want to dive into the social media sea of opportunities.

The thing you need to remember is that with social media sites, the key word is social. You do not want to leap into these communities and start flinging your links and promotions around. You need to keep in mind that like any community, and social media sites are very much communities, there are those who are obnoxious individuals and there are those who add value. To gain a true level of popularity, you need to add value. Find out what’s hot and offer bookmarks that others in the community will love. Leave valuable comments and feedback for other users. Make friends and use the social angle to your advantage by creating a positive reputation for yourself and your business activities. For those who match their business acumen with polite, constructive social interaction, there are no limits to the success that these social media sites can bring you.

If you find yourself confused, do what you’d be advised to do in an unfamiliar situation offline. That’s right, ask others around you for help. Learn all that you can about each community that you participate in and show that you care about more than simply the next visitor or sale. Positive word of mouth is what you want from social media, you want people to spread your links based on their own desires rather than because you harassed them into it. Pay attention to emotional cues that people give off in online communication and if you sense people are becoming annoyed, immediately back off and try something else or even apologize. You need all the help you can get to keep your site attractive to visitors and the more popular folks in the social media scene can either help or hurt your reputation and the traffic that goes with that reputation.

It’s not that difficult to succeed when it comes to social media and using social bookmarking sites. By letting common sense, fair play and the same politeness you learned in grade school be your guide, you’ll find that it’s an easy, efficient and productive way to do business on the web. And you might just have a lot more fun than you bargained for finding your way towards the success you’ve been wishing for.