As the world’s favourite online video sharing site, YouTube is under constant pressure to keep up with the ever more ambitious demands and needs of its users. The latest major development was announced last Friday at VidCon2010 when YouTube revealed that it would be supporting videos shot in 4k. This is good news for the more serious filmmakers out there, as it means videos hosted on YouTube can be viewed on much larger screens without loss of quality.

This playlist demonstrates the power of 4K (select ‘original’ in the video quality dropdown menu), but beware, you’ll need ultra-fast broadband to watch them at full quality. YouTube’s official blog post on the new announcement was also quick to point out that this development won’t really affect your average YouTube user, due to the cost and size of the equipment needed to film in 4K.

You are the Weakest Ad, Goodbye

In an effort to boost its advertising revenues, YouTube is planning to introduce skippable ads later this year. A recent article in The Telegraph revealed that “the new system will permit users to skip the pre-roll adverts that are embedded in videos. Advertisers will not be charged for any adverts which are skipped.” This move will put pressure on advertisers and creative agencies to come up with more appealing and better quality ads in order survive the screening process, which can only be a good thing.

Potential advertisers may also be interested to know that Google is now offering campaign insights for YouTube, making it easier to track their effectiveness with more powerful data beyond the usual click-through and impressions stats. Here’s a little video explaining how it works:

We’ll Make You a Star

In other news, YouTube has announced a grant programme for its partners, which aims to “act as a catalyst by infusing additional funds into the production budgets of a small group of YouTube partners who are at the forefront of innovation”. This could prove fruitful for companies wanting to use YouTube for creative Social Media campaigns. But you’ll need to already be something of a video whizz to qualify; partners are selected on current video views, subscribers, growth rate, audience engagement and production expertise. 

YouTube in the Palm of Your Hand

Three years after launching YouTube Mobile, the online video giant has risen to the growing demands of the iPhone generation for mobile-friendly Social Media with a series of improvements to its mobile platform. These include increased speed, an enhanced user-interface geared towards touchscreen mobile devices, plus additional interactive features such as creating playlists and favouriting videos direct from your device.

Sing with Susan

And if all that juicy YouTube news hasn’t got you rushing to hit the record button on your Flip, this is guaranteed to do the job. Britain’s Got Talent diva Susan Boyle last week launched a YouTube-based talent search, giving one lucky person the chance to record a duet with her on the next album. All you have to do to enter is hit the ‘Audition Now’ on the dedicated Susan’s Search YouTube page and upload a video of you singing Silent Night. Go on, you know you want to.

IBM have tackled this issue in an innovative way with their Blog Muse tool, described recently on Gigaom as:

“…a kind of social recommendation system for blog posts in which users say what they want to read about, other users then vote on those suggestions, and the most popular topics get distributed to those most likely to want to write about them…”

Sadly this tool is currently only available to IBM bloggers via an internal system, but with the wealth of analytics and trending tools available, there’s nothing to stop any company or individual blogger putting a similar process in place to inform their blogging schedule.

If you read Roger’s recent post on Informed Creativity, you’ll have seen our Social Media Planning slidedeck, which outlines C&M’s approach to content planning. And as far as blogging is concerned, it’s not a million miles away from IBM’s technique.

From my point of view, as the person who drives the creative side of content planning, it helps to pinpoint more general content themes for each client, around which to write specific blog posts. This not only gives a focus for the analytics that drive topic ideas and keywords, but helps to ensure a good balance of content on an ongoing basis.

These themes are obviously different for every client and industry, but here are some of the recurring ones as a guide:

• PRACTICAL: Deconstruct industry practices, offer advice/recommendations
• EVENTS: Identify and write about key industry events/conferences. Live tweeting from events can also be made into post-event blog posts
• CASE STUDIES: Interviews with key customers/clients – this could be via an embedded video or podcast, or a plain old-fashioned written piece
• CHALLENGES: Respond to common industry problems, encourage customers/potential customers to interact
• NEWS: Staying on the pulse of related online content and commenting on high profile news pieces/articles, adding your own thoughts on a subject via blog posts/tweets
• SURVEYS: Encourage customers and general public to participate in area/event/topic focused online surveys and use the results to create blog posts and stimulate conversation
• STAFF: Individual blog posts by employees with more personality (i.e. ‘The team recommends’, opinion pieces, fun stuff)

There are plenty more I could include, but you get the picture. Once this content framework is in place, we use our analytics and trending tools to identify the best subjects to blog about at any given time and the best keywords to focus on within those broad themes.

Our blogging guide tells you more about this content planning process, as well as lots of other useful tips on blogging in general – including what to write about and how to get your blog noticed once it’s up and running.

Remember that a good post doesn’t have to equal a long blog post, in fact short and sweet is often the best way to ensure that the whole post gets read and isn’t dismissed as ‘TLDR’ (thanks, @Jake_Doran, for that gem). Many blog posts these days simply consist of a Social embed (Flickr slideshow, YouTube video) with a little bit of an intro – and there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as it’s useful, relevant and interesting to your readership.

And whether you decide to blog daily, weekly or monthly – stick to a consistent publishing schedule so that your regular readers will know what to expect and you will know exactly how much content you need to be producing in your planning cycle.

If you follow these simple principles, you should never find yourself asking “what shall I blog about today?” or plucking random subjects out of the air.

The thumbnail that accompanies this post was adapted from a photograph by FarleyJ on Flickr.

He doesn’t personally have any sway over the future of said profile, but was interested in my opinion, from a Social Media consultant perspective, as to what I would do with it if tasked – which I was more than happy to provide in return for a rather large portion of raspberry and white chocolate ice cream.

The issue at hand is that the BBC has dozens, if not hundreds, of Twitter profiles for its many different departments, programmes and publications – from @bbchealth to @r4today to @BBCHistoryMag and goodness only knows what else. But there is no catch-all ‘voice of the BBC’ profile bringing the myriad aspects of the corporation together.

Clearly the @BBC profile – which already boasts over 19,000 followers and has been listed 864 times despite never having said a thing – would be the natural home for an over-arching BBC profile, but how on earth to meaningfully squeeze so much output into a single Twitter stream?

There must be other large companies out there in a similar situation, so I thought I’d share our over-dinner musings and my suggested solutions in the hope that they may be of use, or at least provoke some further debate on the subject.

The Twitter Overlord Option

One way to collate ‘the best of the BBC’ on Twitter would be to give someone the job of wading through all the various BBC Twitter streams on a daily basis, re-tweeting or syndicating the highlights as they happened. To cover the global timezones and evening/weekend tweets, it would really need to be more than one person and whoever you employed would have to have a pretty comprehensive understanding of the BBC in order to make informed choices about what content to publish. This is possibly the most high-maintenance way to go and not necessarily the most appealing job position in the world either.

The Intrepid Reporter Option

This version would involve a person, or team of people, being responsible for reporting news and views from inside the BBC via Twitter, but not necessarily using content from its other Twitter profiles. Although a less labour-intensive option, you would invariably end up losing a lot of the individual personality that would shine through from utilising a wider bank of tweeters’ content.

The Personal Recommender Option

Another alternative would be to set the editors of the individual profiles up on a multiple account enabled Twitter client such as HootSuite or TweetDeck, from which they could opt to publish the best of their output to @BBC as well as their own profile. This would require a fair amount of set-up and administration in getting all those people on board and suitably briefed, not to mention a reliance on those individuals’ discretion to provide the best content and not abuse their publishing privileges. There would clearly need to be an overall editor to monitor content and reply to relevant interactions, which could become a fairly mammoth task in itself. You could simplify things by choosing only the most popular Twitter profiles, or those considered to be most emblematic of the BBC – but again this is fairly subjective.

The Randomiser Option

This is my personal favourite, partly because it’s the least time-consuming and also because it removes the potentially partisan influence of curators/editors and would instead present a ‘lucky dip’ style snapshot of what’s going on across the BBC. There would be a little bit of development involved in setting up a random content generator fed by all the different Twitter streams, but once it had been set up the profile could virtually run itself. The potential drawbacks are that you would end up with a one-way soapbox style Twitter stream void of any conversational aspect (but then many of the other active BBC Twitter profiles are also guilty of this) and may miss really important news.

I’m sure there are other ways around this problem and I’ll certainly be mulling on it further (we’d be interested to know your thoughts too – especially if you work for the BBC), but these seemed to me the most practically viable and creatively appealing when put on the spot about it. Whatever the BBC decides to do with its @BBC Twitter profile, I really hope they hurry up and do it soon – because the current tumbleweed situation doesn’t look good. Needless to say we’d be delighted to get on board and help the BBC resolve their Twitter quandary, especially if there is ice cream involved.

We’ve come a long way in the marketing industry since those misogynistic days, and watching the series has made me appreciate the kind of creative job I do even more. I was especially tickled by a scene in the second episode, where one of the male characters is giving a new PA the grand tour, and tries to encourage her ambition by saying that a few female copywriters do exist, even if only to write about ‘Lady’ products.

Thankfully noone at C&M is about to imply that my contributions as the token girl in the office should be so restricted, but it does raise an interesting (if out-dated) point about how all our brains are wired differently and sometimes suited to different tasks. Whether it be a male/female, radical/traditional or experienced/freshfaced combination – every member of a creative team will come to a campaign with a unique mindset and that’s exactly why it’s so important to bounce ideas around rather than working in isolation.

This is really just a ‘note to self’ that the best creative ideas are the ones we come up with as a team, all guns blazing, and that different perspectives are a good thing. As an agency on the cutting edge of this new thing called Online PR, there are no hard and fast rules or tested theories for what we’re doing, and we need to keep our heads together to make sure we’re crusing in the right direction.

That’s why every campaign we do kicks off with an ‘all hands on deck’ ideas-generating session. Thanks to the brainstorm-friendly C&M retro sofas (another leaf we took out of the 1960s Ad Man book) these are invariably pretty productive. Gotta love them vintage sofas. Now all we need is for everyone to follow Roger’s lead with some old-school snappy-dressing and we’ll be away…