The 4 C’s of successful multimedia

1. The 4 C’s of successful multimedia Stephen Masiclat Director, Graduate Program in New Media Management The S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications Syracuse University

2. Other titles I considered • Multi-tagging for multimedia • Optimizing multimedia for the web • From Image to Web Object • Flickr has fckd you

3. Meta-tagging. . . not so much • The 4 C’s of successful online multimedia are • Context • Connection • Customer-centricity • Cheap cost

4. Context means. . . • . . . media are situated within a series of web structures • html or xml • served by databases • has a presence that is calculated

5. The technology of online Context

6. meta data ≠ clear context • Images or video are separate and distinct from the words that represent (or tag) them, and since semantic analysis is currently easier than image analysis, the words that count more. • Renee Magritte began visual exploration of the distances between images, concepts and the words we associate with them. . .

8. Things are even more difficult now • Problems like semantic distance and polysemy cloud the way we understand* pictures as web and contextualizing objects. • understand=[organize, categorize, relate, describe, use, ascribe meaning(s)]

9. What’s in a word? • Let’s develop a semantic map of a word: green.

10. Green (apples)

11. Green (holiday)

12. Green is anaphrodisiac (?)

13. (give me some) Green

15. Green Light

16. (it’s not easy being) Green

17. Green (architecture)

18. Green (energy)

19. Green (technology)

20. Green (party)

21. Green (policy)

22. All these pictures are green

23. A student-generated semantic map of green

24. A student-generated semantic map of green green [G]=[n30, k51] k max= 435

25. A student-generated semantic map of green The map or graph of possible contexts for a word like green is too large to be accurate. Therefore, we layer on additional data layers like external page links

26. Green is tricky . . .many words are • So we measure other proximate data (like well-structured text, captions and meta-tags and inbound text links. • Meta data alone won’t do it • The degree of semantic correlation is measured with statistical tools similar to Cronbach’sa

27. So we structure a good deal of text around the media data <video>. . . • Page <title> • Meta data (keywords and descriptors) • Proximate text structured in <table> and <div> and, in HTML5, <figcaption><hgroup> and <summary> tags

28. . . . and measure of the semantic distances between terms • High correlation with semantic difference is taken to mean useful, high-quality data. • A large number of terms, repetition, low correlation coefficients are signs of low-quality data.

29. Context through SEO No jargon! No excessive technical detail Words that your audience uses

30. The second C.Connection. . . through links. . . • When people link to your video in a contextual way, it improves your PageRank score. • πT= πT (aS + (1-a) E) • Wandering through several photography sites I found <a href=“http://www.myphotosite.com/myNewsPhotoPageX.htm” > a great photograph of Kermit the Frog.</a> It’s actually a photo of a kermit toy, but the setting makes it a poignant. . .

31. Connections

32. . . .and through contextualized links • In addition, if many people link to the page, add comments and link-backs, the page becomes a large* validated referrant. • Do you remember the Google bomb?

33. Connected multimedia is: • Video people react to and comment upon. • Content people can freely use to help make a point. • Available for a long period of time from a stable source (a permalink)—it stays connected. • A subset of your total online portfolio or YouTube channel, photoblog or flickr-type page.

35. The 3rd C. Customer-centric • Communicators interested in communicating ensure people can get to the media in a sensible way. [Dervin] • People get to media from sources they trust. [Pew] • They trust their friends • They look at the video their friends recommend • They look at the video and stories that are e-mailed to them

36. Customers have gravity • Video travels best over social networks or through trusted sources. • People generally don’t look for video news, they assume it will come to them. • —from Lee Raine, Director of the Pew Internet Project

37. People use news as a social currency (1) • 72% of Americans who follow the news at least now and then say they enjoy talking with friends, family, and colleagues about what is happening in the world • 69% feel that keeping up with the news is a social or civic obligation • 50% say they rely on the people around them to tell them when there is news they need to know

38. People use news as a social currency (2) • 57% of internet users share links to news stories • 30% of internet users get news on typical day through their SNS use • 13% follow news organizations and journalists on SNS • 6% get news via Twitter feeds

39. 37% of internet users are news contributors / disseminators

40. Customer-centric, it turns out, means letting people post, re-tweet, point to and otherwise use the video stories you create. • So how do you make a living?

41. The 4th C. Cheap • The problem of realizing value for work is systemic. • The mass audience is gone, and with it, the multiplicative power of mass distribution. • The audience that’s left is a large collection of very small niche-interest groups that are geographically disparate.

42. You can’t rely on Chris Anderson • News isn’t amenable to long-tailed cost-recovery • Freemium won’t work without a means of converting sporadic users into regular users with an up-sell path. • You need the ability to pool content with other providers to create critical mass of content that can be shared and embedded. You need a content distribution network.

43. Can you rely on yourselves? • Can NPPA develop a content distribution network? • It’s like AP, but allows regular people to syndicate content on social media sites, as well as online news organizations to syndicate to their sites.