Opinions, Conversations, and Spam

I’ve been studying commenting and conversations throughout the web’s vast collections of social communities, forums, blogs, and entertainment destinations. There seems to be 3 main categories that comments fall under, “link bait” by social media marketers and bloggers, “one sentence jobs” by amateurs, and “spammers” that devalue the experience for everyone.

Link bait refers to people that offer their professional opinion in a paragraph or two on the original content, and add their link as bait in hopes of driving readers back to their web destination, and to increase their page rank on Internet search engines. The primary motivation for doing so, is to build upon their reputation, build brand awareness, and become a trusted thought leader in their respective industry.

Some amateurs engage in a minor way with the content they read, listen to, or watch, but post just a few simple words such as “great post”, “what a great listen, thank you”, or “great video, very entertaining”. This group of people typically doesn’t have any ulterior motive, wants to offer their support (or non-support), but don’t really immerse themselves around the conversation.

Spammers are the worst kind of people online (well next to sexual predators), their main intent is promote their products through a guerrilla strategy. Sexual enhancers and porn sites tend to be a large focus for this group. I would think that comments like these get little or no attention, and likely don’t offer much success towards their marketing mix. Some positive results must be evident, otherwise time wouldn’t be wasted on these efforts. Personally myself, along with 99.4% of others, we have learned how to mentally filter out irrelevant, impersonal junk like this.

While commenting has come a long way to engage a passionate crowd of people, and extend experiences through two way dialogs. An ever growing fragmented web is emerging, so improved connection utilities will need to provide a richer experience for the conversational social web to enjoy, and derive tangible value from.

Two Special Days Coming...

For those of us that live in the north-east part of North America it feels like the snow has just melted away, and the hot summer sun is about to unleash its heat on us. Annually, two big days always remind me that summer is here, July 1st (Canada's birthday) and July 4th (America's Independence Day).

We would like to wish everyone living in both Canada and the US, very happy holidays. Enjoy the fireworks and celebrations this upcoming week, but please party responsibly.

If anyone shoots a very cool and entertaining video related to these special days, send it to us so we can enjoy it as well (and we may even feature it on our site).

Screw Quantity, It's All About Quality

We've been developing some great relationships with new video creators over the last few weeks. We're earning respect from creators, because we won't feature videos on the site without there being entertainment and production value in the content. Call us the pickiest video upload site on the web, if you so desire we don't mind (in fact we encourage it).

We stated from day 1 that we would only feature cool video entertainment, and we stand by that statement 7 weeks later. We won't give into growing our video network fast just so that we have thousands of videos, and viewers in a short period of time. Our team has seen video sites come and go using this strategy, and we certainly won't give into sacrificing quality for quantity.

We have only accepted 33 videos to date (and many multiples of that number have been rejected), but we are proud of our video core which we are establishing. We have a goal to feature at least 100 videos on the site before we begin to really market, and promote our destination throughout the social web.

We have also removed many of the minor "beta bugs" from the site, and have our viewers and creators to thank. We are now set to embark on complimenting our video sharing platform with an integrated utility/service platform, to benefit the growing number of people working within the digital media industry. We will give more details as this development comes to fruition over the summer.

As always, please contact us with any ideas, feedback, or questions that you may have.

Homepage Re-Design and Site Update

We are proud to announce that our homepage has been given a make over. It's now organized in a more user-friendly way. Perhaps most notably, we took down our animation, but the masterpiece can still be found here if you have a Facebook account.

We've been coming across creators and videos that want on our site, but we won't budge on our vision which is to only provide quality web video entertainment. We could have several hundred videos in our network, but that would make us like all the other online video sites, which is not our goal.

We have been stuck at 28 videos for a week or so now. We expected to grow slow because are a picky video site, but we would like to be ideally adding 10-20 videos/week. We are now forming strategic alliances with online video influencers, so growth should pick up as we move into the summer season.

We will continue to wait until we have at least 100 - 200 videos (down from 200-300), before we send the site into a viral frenzy through our hard launch, generating media and viewer attention. We continue to make minor tweaks in our feature set, as we successfully move deeper into our beta period.

We expect in August or September to really unleash something unique, to benefit people not only in the web video space, but throughout the entire digital industry. This will be our flagship service (currently we are limited to aggregating video content), and provide a very useful utility for people in the social media industry.

Unleashing Your Videos Is Faster Now

We promised creators that we would bring a solution to the site, where videos could be unleashed very fast to save time. We have been testing this out over the last week or so, and are now comfortable to say that it works great. Creators: Test it out here.

Your Originality Sucks

Have you been hearing this (see blog title) lately from other web video sharing sites that you upload to? Or maybe something like, sorry, but we already have similar videos on our site, so your video has arrived too late (and you guessed it...we don't want it). Or maybe your video was live on a site, and then all of a sudden it was taken down because their rules and guidelines changed.

Whatever the case may be, we (www.UnleashVideo.com) are hungry for new videos. So if some of your videos are going nowhere in a hurry, get an account with us, and find a new home for your top rejected content.

We are doing our best to create a fun and social web video platform for many to enjoy, help us build something remarkable, meaningful, and special for the web audience to enjoy.

Do You Want An iPod Touch?

Who doesn't want an iPod Touch, whatever you may want to use it for, this sleek device can pretty much fulfill them all.

We have just introduced an incentive program for our current creators, and ones that we accept in the near future. If you are friends/connected to top web video creators (like yourself), leverage your relationships with them to earn a sweet iPod Touch for your video, music, and photo collections.

Here's how it works:

1. You need to be a video creator on our site. If you aren't already, get an account, and become one now.

2. For every creator you invite and we approve, you get 5 points. Get to 100 points (or 20 approved creators) and you will score a 8GB iPod Touch or a desired product of your choice. Let us know which creators you have invited, so we can award you your points as we authorize new accounts. We will keep you updated often, so you will always know your point total.

3. This incentive program is only effective until August 31, 2008 (so don't wait, connect with your creator pals, and start racking up your points ASAP).

For you maven and super connected creators out there, if you hit at least 200 points we will award you with a 32GB iPod Touch, or an even more valuable product (up to $500 USD) for your personal benefit. This is just one of the ways we want to engage with you, to become a special part of our site's family. Help us, and we will thank you by treating you to a product that's specifically useful for your life.

Don't forget to connect with creators on your social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and Linked In, to increase your chances of hitting the elusive 100 points.

If you aren't a top web video creator, but know someone who is, spread the word to them, they will thank you later!