There’s already a good selection of brand commercials on YouTube: there’s a high definition service too. If you were running a commercials agency, wouldn’t you put some budget into YouTube? If only as a hedge against falling broadcast audiences - and with the potential to earn larger production fees on long films.

How long before we see broadcast tv being used to trail long ads on YouTube? It’s a technique that’s already been used by advertisers like the Army (who also offered mobile video, iirc). The idea that TV may not be the prime channel, that it’s just feding others, will make some old Madison Avenue & Soho admen rotate in their graves.

The world’s changing, and fast.

You’d think that folk starting social businesses would get past the technology & think about what their users expect - should a start-up be fortunate enough to have any users… Last year Rapleaf upset some folk when early adopters felt their privacy had been violated. Rapleaf reacted quickly, and a crisis was avoided.
This year, socialminder managed to stir up the privacy storm.

Two things to note.
1 The storm raged faster & more intensely this time around, as Twitter spread the ‘news’.
2 Early adopters have different expectations from later mass users… they’re probably *more* sensitive to privacy abuse. (I’ve no science to back this up, just years of watching

socialminder (& indeed rapleaf) aren’t doing anything that Plaxo et al get up to - but the mass user perhaps doesn’t manage their network reputation as sensitively as tech-savvy early adopter types. That’s a challenge for any savvy startup in this area - early adopters are (probably) a vital part of your launch strategy. Their feedback can iron out many bugs & unintended design consequences.

Technorati Tags: privacy, startup, spam

Think of your audience, and help them through the pitch - you’re going to throw a huge amount of information at them in a very short space of time, so help them out! Point 3 - “Leave them wanting more” for example. You can’t say everything that’s you’d like, so don’t try. Leave stuff out. If you’re smart, leave out stuff that your audience will want to ask about - and that you have great (short) answers on.

(Thanks to Hugh MacLeod & Twitter for the heads up)

Whuffle has been part of my web experience since the early days of Fast Company London in 97/98 (FC London was the vortex that drew me into this working life) - pitch in, share ideas, expecting only shared knowledge, thanks and companionship in return. But the network built a decade ago still pays back.

I hope that Project VRM may offer something similar - we’ve had the whuffle talk - and folk are involved because, well, because it’s a cause we believe in. I’ll be interested to see the reactions to 20 minute conference talk - with added VRM - in Delhi next week. It’s very interesting to see how readily the ‘old’ marketing economy is thinking about VRM - there’s an article by Doc Searls, Alan Mitchell & Iain Henderson in this month’s IDM Journal (text for members only, I’m afraid).

Very, very useful to know.
(tho frankly not the most exciting news of the week

So is 2009 going to be the year in which we get a technical breakthrough, that changes Web 2.0 from being a technical achievement into being social & commercial?