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

2Other titles I considered

• Multi-tagging for multimedia

• Optimizing multimedia for the web

• From Image to Web Object

• Flickr has fckd you

3Meta-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

5The technology of

online Context

6meta 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. . .

7

8Things 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)]

9What’s in a word?

• Let’s develop a semantic map of a

word: green.

10Green (apples)

11Green (holiday)

12Green is an

aphrodisiac (?)

13(give me some) Green

14

15Green Light

16(it’s not easy being)

Green

17Green (architecture)

18Green (energy)

19Green (technology)

20Green (party)

21Green (policy)

22

All these pictures are green

23

A student-generated semantic

map of green

24

green [G]=[n30, k51]

k max= 435

A student-generated

semantic map of green

25A student-generated

semantic map of green

The map or graph of possible contexts fora word like green is toolarge to be accurate.Therefore, we layer onadditional data layerslike external page links

26Green 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’s a

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.

29Context through SEO

No jargon!No excessive technical detailWords 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= π T (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?

33Connected 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.

34

35The 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

36Customers 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

37People 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

38People 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

News participators

25

17

119

3

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

Comment onstories

Post links onSNS

Tag content Create news Create newstweets

% o

f in

tern

et

us

ers

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?

41The 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.

42You 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.

43Can 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.