Communications

Online video might be effective, whether people watch it or not

/ Katja Reuter

A study based on multivariate testing conducted by Treepodia seems to show that not only shoppers who view a product video buy at a higher rate, but surprisingly also those who choose not to watch the video. This article suggests that online video serves as a trust factor. Users might associate it with believe and investment in a product.

The results on the best way to display video are also interesting: adding a simple link to video from any given page, led to a 5%-15% video view rate, while a video player embedded on the same page delivered 10%-35%.

Neil McBean from RivalSchools who we’re working with on our video project pointed me to the study and to Zappos successful use of video demos online.

Currently one of my favorite online videos is Google’s piece on Gmail Priority Inbox. They truly have found a way to turn even a basic feature like this into an enjoyable thing to learn about.  Watch it

Short Attention Spans for Web Videos – NYTimes.com

/ kristinemoss

The New York Times reports:

After watching an online video for a full minute, 44.1 percent of viewers will have clicked away, according to Visible Measures. But an outsize slice of that loss occurs in the first 10 seconds, during which 19.4 percent of a video’s audience defects.

Read more at Drilling Down – Short Attention Spans for Web Videos – NYTimes.com.

Twitter, revisited….would we or should we use it? Here are 11 Commandments to ponder.

/ leslieyuan / 1 Comment

I read a short article this morning about the fact that the Department of Defense issued its social-media policy, and essentiall gave it the thumbs up.   The article goes on to discuss rules of engagement for employees’ use of social media, or lack thereof.  The author puts forth The 11 Commandments of Corporate Tweeting and while these are focused on the use of Twitter in corporate America, I think the 11 are straightforward and rational, and would apply to our setting as well.  A few of them are listed below.

– We can articulate the company vision in 140 characters or less, minus PR puffery and cliché.

– We are willing to give credit to cool, innovative, or thought-provoking ideas, even if coined by someone else.

– We are willing to challenge a potentially destructive position even if our position generates criticism.

Email vs RSS subscriptions: 12 to 1

/ kristinemoss

Inbound marketing software provider HubSpot published some interesting stats on blog subscriptions. Analyzing data from 605 of their customers with blogs (mostly small- and medium-sized businesses), the average email subscriptions for these blogs were 12 times more than the average RSS subscriptions. In a breakdown by industry, the medical / biotech sector shows an even greater ratio of email to RSS subscribers. While not entirely surprising, this data sample further underscores the value of utilizing email as a tool for disseminating blog and open forums content. (CTSI Virtual Home is in the process of evaluating tools for converting RSS feeds into email subscriptions.)

Researchers test ‘Google Wave’

/ Katja Reuter

Recently we mentioned ‘Google Wave’ in the post “Google Wave: Next generation communication & collaboration tool” which is expected to be released later this year. Even though it is not designed for the specific needs of science, some researchers are testing how it might serve their work purposes. Biochemist Cameron Neylon from the University of Southampton, UK, was among the few who could access Google Wave prior to its release. In a recent interview with Nature, Neylon makes clear that Google Wave is still a complicated application. Nonetheless, according to him there are some plausible benefits that could help transform the way researchers communicate, document their results and collaborate on manuscript preparation.

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As a summary, Google Wave could be “used for collaborative authoring, to speed up writing papers and grant applications”. It’s also possible to “create automatic programs that buzz around the document, annotating it in ways that are hidden from the human reader. The automated programs, or ‘robots’, make it possible to link to related scientific documents; mark up text so that, for example, protein names are automatically linked to a protein database”. Researchers can “pull in data from elsewhere and create live graphs that update as the data change”. As a result, scientific manuscripts would no longer be “static”, but could be “converted to the format of a published paper, updated over time and retain all that annotation”.     

In addition, Neylon mentions “scientists could share their experimental processes in a way that’s hard to do at the moment. For example, as data come off a laboratory instrument via a computer, a program could insert them straight into the document” and “another program could visualize those data”. Researchers could “control, monitor and observe an experiment” and “share that wave with someone else as a template for their experiment”.

 

Is Distance Dead?

/ Katja Reuter

Is the Internet changing our world into a “borderless society” or are geographical distances still relevant when it comes to social interactions? Jacob Goldenberg and Moshe Levy at Hebrew University analyzed Facebook users and the location of email messages to find out more. In their article “Distance Is Not Dead: Social Interaction and Geographical Distance in the Internet Era” the researchers raise doubts about the “Global-Village-Theory”. They come to the conclusion that the importance of physical proximity in social interactions is a “stronger force” than ever. It seems people prefer to send messages over shorter distances – they mostly connect online with those they know off-line.

For more details view the original article or the blog post on the subject in Technology Review, which also talks about “why we have gone so wrong in thinking that the world is getting smaller”, the “six-degrees-of-separation experiments originally performed by Stanley Milgram with letters and later by Steve Strogatz and Duncan Watts using e-mail”.