How Social Networking Is Helping TED Change the World

I've recently joined the TEDxSanJoseCA team as a volunteer to manage social media, starting with the Facebook page. I'm excited and honored to be involved with this organization because I believe so much in the value TED brings to the world.

(I blogged just a year ago about attending my first TEDx event, The Power of TED — Pay It Forward.)

TED is a nonprofit that started out in 1984 as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, and Design.

The TED mission is quite simple: Spreading ideas.
We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world. So we're building here a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world's most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other. 

And thanks to the popularity of social networking for sharing these amazing ideas and the ease and power of communicating via video, TED has taken the world by storm with the TED website, annual TED conference, TED Active, TEDGlobal, TEDx, TED Talks, TED Fellows, TED Prize, TEDEd, TEDIndia, TEDWomen, TED Salons, TED@, TED Open Translation Project, TED Books, and TEDYouth. (I'm sure I missed a few, but you get the idea...)

To give you an idea of the reach of TED, this TED Talk from 2006, "Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity" is the most viewed at almost 16 million views. Many other talks have 7, 8, 9, or 10 million views.



I am committed to my local volunteer work, but I was also searching for a broader community with which to connect and learn, and TED with its current library of 1400 talks and local TEDx events, meets that need.  There is so much truth in this quotation:

http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/edmund%20lee

Social networking makes it possible and actually quite easy to connect both locally and around the world with kindred souls who are on this mission of changing attitudes, lives, and ultimately the world. You can join TED communities on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+,  LinkedIn and tumblr.

Because making the world a better place has become a core value of mine, becoming involved with TED via my local TEDx organization and surrounding myself with dreamers, doers, believers, and thinkers is where I need to be, and social networking is the conduit enabling me to do that, daily.

Repost from IBM Social Business Insights Blog: Video captioning (Part 2 of 2): Win/Win for accessibility and search engine optimization (SEO)

  Earlier this year I started blogging for the IBM Social Business Insights blog as part of a team of IBM Redbook Thought Leaders. I'll be reposting those blog posts here on my personal blog. Video captioning (Part 2 of 2): Win/Win for accessibility and search engine optimization (SEO) was originally published on August 8, 2012, and is owned by IBM. I recommend checking out the IBM Social Business Insights blog for some compelling and though-provoking content.

Video captioning (Part 2 of 2): Win/Win for accessibility and search engine optimization (SEO)

 

By Holly Nielsen, Social Media Manager and Webmaster, Human Ability and Accessibility 

In part 1 of this two-part series, we reviewed some of the statistics supporting the skyrocketing usage of video, for both personal and business use. Now let’s get to the heart of why you’re missing out if you’re not captioning your videos. 

Captioning videos for accessibility  

Have you ever tried to watch a video without speakers, or with your sound off? Annoying, isn’t it? You might be able to catch a little of what’s going on, but you know that you’re missing most of the action. People who are deaf, hard of hearing, non-native language speakers, using mobile devices, or in a noisy area run into this problem constantly. It’s estimated that the majority of videos on the Internet are not captioned, and therefore inaccessible to these audiences.

The National Association of the Deaf (NAD) defines captioning at its most basic level:

Captioning is the process of converting the audio content of a television broadcast, webcast, film, video, CD-ROM, DVD, live event, or other productions into text and displaying the text on a screen, monitor, or other visual display system. 

There are two elements to making videos accessible.

• The first element is the captions themselves. For a full explanation of the requirements for creating captions, see the IBM web accessibility checklist Checkpoint 1.2a: Captions, or the WGBH, NCAM Guideline H: Multimedia.
  Captions can be open or closed: Open captions are burned into the image, similar to subtitles, which the user cannot turn off. Closed captions are a separate data stream that is synchronized with the multimedia. The user can turn these captions on or off. (IBM has developed an enterprise-level research technology, IBM AbilityLab Media Captioner and Editor, which automatically creates open captions and transcripts.)
• The second element is a text version (often called a transcript) of the video content. The IBM web checklist, Checkpoint 1.2b: Audio and Video (Prerecorded), describes the requirements for creating a text version of the content that can be accessed by anyone. It was created as a way for blind or visually impaired users to access the visual information, and for hearing impaired or deaf users to access the audio information in the content.
  A full text alternative describes everything that is happening in the video. In addition to the visual information, the text alternative also includes a transcript of all dialogue, and also textual representations of all of the video, audio, and interaction from the video.

Videos that include both captions and a text alternative can reduce or eliminate barriers to rich media access for many potential users.

The sweet spot: Where videos, accessibility, and SEO meet

Where does SEO fit into this picture? Right here. After all, if your customers can’t find your videos; they can’t view them. And if search engines can’t find your videos; they can’t rank them. But after you’ve captioned a video and included a transcript, you’ve now created exactly what the search engines require for indexing – making that video searchable – impossible to do with an uncaptioned file. Both users and search engines can search for and find keywords from your video; enabling video SEO.

SEO has been around as long as there have been search engines, web sites for the engines to search, and site owners wanting to increase traffic to those sites. It’s constantly changing as search engines evolve and become more sophisticated. Video SEO is a relatively new, but growing field, and will continue to gain in use and importance as Internet users continue to watch videos and new video captioning legislation is signed into law and enforced, such as the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010 in the United States.
As a competitive advantage, captioning your videos is a winning strategy – both for promoting your messages, products, and services to a much broader audience by enabling more of your customers to find your content, and by making the content accessible to all of your customers, regardless of disability, device, or native language.

Repost from IBM Social Business Insights Blog: Video captioning (Part 1 of 2): Win/Win for accessibility and search engine optimization (SEO)

Earlier this year I started blogging for the IBM Social Business Insights blog as part of a team of IBM Redbook Thought Leaders. I'll be reposting those blog posts here on my personal blog. Video captioning (Part 1 of 2): Win/Win for accessibility and search engine optimization (SEO) was originally published on August 7, 2012, and is owned by IBM. I recommend checking out the IBM Social Business Insights blog for some compelling and though-provoking content.

Video captioning (Part 1 of 2): Win/Win for accessibility and search engine optimization (SEO) 

By Holly Nielsen, Social Media Manager and Webmaster, Human Ability and Accessibility 

In this two-part series, we’ll look at the exploding growth of Internet video, and how captioning your videos can make them search engine friendly and available to more potential customers.

Let’s face it. We’re becoming a world that documents our every waking moment with video, and shares that video with our social networks.

Video started out as a medium that only the professionals could afford and had the skill to use. Technology evolved – shrinking in size and cost so that every smartphone and most cell phones now include a video camera, and we’re all amateur videographers.  

Who’s watching web videos?

Not only are we creating video content, but we’re watching it too, all over the world. A few examples:

• Pew Research Center reports that “More online Americans are using video-sharing sites — and they are doing so more frequently. As of May 2011, 71% of online adults reported watching videos on a video-sharing site such as YouTube or Vimeo.”

• comScore, Inc. noted in 2011 that Internet users in Germany, Turkey, Spain, and the UK watch an average of at least 30 minutes a day of online video.

• An article by Forbes about the explosion of online video in Latin America reported that in "March 2011, more than 80% of all Internet users in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and Chile watched online video;" in fact, 4 out of 5 users watched an average of 8 to 11 hours of online video during that month.

YouTube is the world’s largest video repository, and as of July 10, 2012, the latest statistics were remarkable:

• 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
• Over 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month
• Over 3 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube
• In 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views or almost 140 views for every person on Earth

Businesses are embracing video

Businesses, both business to business (B2B) and business to consumer (B2C), have jumped on the video bandwagon, with good reason.

According to an article on Business2Community, watching a video can have an impact on the bottom line of your business, especially as high-level executives flock to video channels:

• According to emarketer.com, a majority of business people surveyed by Forbes in October 2010 said they watched more video currently compared to the previous year.
• Virtually 60% of respondents said they would watch video prior to reading text on the same webpage, and 22% said they generally liked watching video more than browsing text for examining business information.
• 75% of all executives said they watched work-related videos on business websites at least once a week, and more than 50% use YouTube to watch those videos.
• 65% of U.S. executives surveyed by Forbes in October 2010 visit a vendor’s website after viewing a work-related online video.
• 53% conducted a search for a vendor, product, or service for more information and 42% made a business-related purchase.

Invodo has collected a plethora of statistics supporting how video drives conversion and traffic for retailers, including these:

• 52% of consumers say that watching product videos makes them more confident in their online purchase decisions. When a video is information-intensive, 66% of consumers will watch the video two or more times. (Internet Retailer, 2012)
• Product videos play a key role in consumer purchase decisions, citing a 9x increase in retail video views at the start of the 2011 holiday season. (MediaPost, 2012)
• Visitors who view product videos are 85% more likely to buy than visitors who do not. (Internet Retailer, April 2010)
• Retail site visitors who view video stay two minutes longer on average and are 64% more likely to purchase than other site visitors. (Comscore, August 2010)

So now that we’ve confirmed that the use of video as a communication medium will continue to grow, we’ll look at where accessibility and SEO intersect when it comes to videos, part 2 of this two-part series.

 

Video Mania: Resistance is Futile

Some days I'm not sure what's going to take over our brains and world first:

• inspiring and uplifting quotes Photoshopped onto photos of beautiful scenery or cute animals and kids

or

• funny videos

Today I'm voting for videos to take first place for world and cerebral domination — have you seen the latest YouTube statistics?

• 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
• Over 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month
• Over 3 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube
• In 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views or almost 140 views for every person on Earth

 Regardless of your sense of humor — ironic, wacky, snarky, slapstick, dark — it's guaranteed you can find a video that will make you laugh. (A slight detour here — an interesting article that actually spells out 10 different humor types in dating profiles.)

Here are two videos that grabbed my attention today, and tickled my funny bone, as the old saying goes.

The first one is fiendishly clever. Clemenger BBDO created a vending machine to test how far humans will go to get a free snack. And the resulting video is somewhere between a evil, mad-scientist-type experiment run amok and impromptu performance art.


The second video that had me laughing out loud is this (scripted but still funny) video of two men who attempt and fail miserably to resist singing along with the annoyingly catchy Gotye song, "Somebody That You Used to Know". Come on, don't deny it — you sing it in the car too. :-)



So what type of humor and videos make you laugh out loud all by yourself, or are so perfect that you share them with all of your social networks?

The Power of TED — Pay It Forward

I've been a TED fan for the last couple of years. (If you've never heard of TED, check them out asap — you won't believe that you didn't know about them before now. Verbatim from their website and in a nutshell: TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader.)

I find so many of their videos informative and interesting, and I'm always attracted by the passion the speakers have for their topics. They caption their videos (making them accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing), so they work well in my accessibility social networking.

My friends (face-to-face and on Facebook and Twitter) have been listening patiently as I've gone on and on about how moved and inspired I was by spending a very long (but wonderful) Saturday at TEDx San Jose, California a couple of weeks ago.

I'm still processing, but I'm in awe — such smart, passionate people with the most creative ideas — and all of them striving to make our world a better place with their "Pay It Forward" ideas. There was not a single boring second — which I have to say has never happened to me at a conference before. It was inspiring just being in the same space as the speakers, and getting to meet and talk with them at the after party at the very elegant Silicon Valley Capital Club in downtown San Jose — just wow.

I've been ruminating about this blog post — unable to decide how to best articulate the experience and how I felt moved and changed by it, and just found this video that I have to share that says it all.

  
I used to play a game with my kids when they were small. After an adventure, I would always ask them what their favorite part or thing was. They were never happy only picking one, so I'd let them pick their top three or four. And I find myself in the same position — unable to share my single favorite speaker; but while enjoying all of them — able to select the top six that resonated the most with me. I'm taking a wild guess that if you spoke with 100 different event attendees, you'd get 100 different lists. 

So here is my list of speakers who moved me the most, in no particular order:

• Doug Dietz — A designer for GE Medical Systems who made the entire audience cry along with him as he told us about his epiphany on how to design large, scary scanning systems so that they weren't so scary to children, with the impact of dramatically decreasing the need to sedate children for scans.
• Angela Zhang — A high school senior who loves to learn, won $100,000 for her science project idea, and may very well have discovered a cure for cancer.
• Jim Fruchterman — A funny self-described geek who created a great accessible technology for people who are blind, and now runs a charitable tech foundation.
• Manoj Saxena — The general manager of IBM Watson (how could I not look forward to meeting him), and a brilliant philanthropist in his own right.
• Preetha Ram — A brilliant college dean who left academia to create a program that uses the power of peer collaboration, gamification and social networking to help students who are failing in school be successful.
• Diana Reiss — One of the world's leading experts on dolphin intelligence who proved that dolphins are self-aware. She was also an advisor on the film, The Cove, and I've offered to help her with her social media campaign to stop the killing of dolphins in Japan. (I hope she takes me up on it.)

I can't wait until next year! :-)