After busy Lunar New Year, Republic Day (India) and Australia Day celebrations here’s a chance to unwind and relax. The video above is from the Imaginary Worlds Festival. It features a collection of animated film shorts telling stories set in weird and wonderful universes. Some of the films are a little weird and some are downright crazy, but they are all wonderful. Enjoy.

Here’s a bit of fun and a not too bad example of some post-production sfx too. Enjoy.

Sometimes it seems like the owners of social programs believe that their consumers have all the detective skills and deductive reasoning of Sherlock Holmes. It appears that they purposely go out of their way to hide them.

Findability is the most important factor to the success of any digital media, whether it be a corporate web site; a Facebook page or an online video series. With an ultra-bagillion web pages, a gazillion social media sites and bujeezillion minutes of online video uploaded each day, making it easy for your consumers to find your program is an absolute must. Even if you have superb, dynamic content that is not only relevant but timely, it’s still easy to get lost in the maelstrom of data available online. Here is the first of a series of tips to help both you and your consumers find one another:

Who Links Wins

It may seem like stating the obvious but actually linking to your social programs on your main web site is a magnificent help to improving your findability. That said, you’d be surprised how many times I’ve seen Fortune 500 companies completely ignore this basic step. And then they wonder why their Facebook page only has a handful of fans.

Your brand has resonance. Your advocates will actively seek out everything you’re doing so they can be part of your brand experience. Make it easy for them, but also make it easy for your casual users to join your online community. The more opportunities you give them the greater the chance of turning them into advocates.

Don’t make them wade into the deep-linking jungle of your web site. The links need to be as close to the top tier of your site as possible and repeated as often as you can possibly get away with it. If you have lots of programs that doesn’t mean you should clutter every page with every link, but at least offer a link to a portal site where your programs can be easily found.

Also link to every platform you’re using, not just the main ones. I’ve seen major social campaigns provide links to Facebook and Twitter and completely ignore their YouTube channel, even though they have a hundred videos hosted there. Ideally every platform should also link back to every other platform, even if it’s just through social media icons. That way you can offer your opportunities more opportunities to engage at every stage of your program. Start with a video or twitter and guide them to your Facebook page and micro-site, and then back again. Any social program should be an exercise that is always in perpetual motion.

Linking from your social platforms back to your main web site or micro-site can also help with its search engine optimisation. High profile sites like Facebook and YouTube offer a lot of ‘juice‘ and can be excellent ways to improve your ranking

Here are some further tips:
Tips to Improve Your Social Media Findability (Pt 2)

Sherlock image courtesy of dynamosquito

Slider image courtesy of Okko Pyykkö

Here’s a great trailer for a documentary (still in post-production) about how the introduction of 20,000 bicycles over 20 years has transformed the impoverished city of Rivas, Nicaragua.

What happens to an impoverished developing nation town when you flood it with 20,000 bicycles? You lift three times that number of people out of poverty. Pedals for Progress and founder David Schweidenback have been shipping used American bicycles to Rivas, Nicaragua for the last two decades and the transformation has been incredible.

– The Bicycle City Film

You can donate to the film-makers to help them complete the film.

Is anyone else as freaked out by this as I am? Especially the bit where there are like five cobras threatening to strike. This guy is too busy cleaning to even notice them. Wow. This guy is a legend.

Wow! Just…wow. Machinima: the future of film-making

Woohoo!

Some great information here about how to get lots of eyeballs watching your video. Just remember, there is no formula for guaranteed success but there ways you can improve your chances

If you’re wondering how to utilise online video as part of your marketing strategy, then you only need to look as far as the Old Spice The Man Your Man Could Smell Like commercials, featuring Isaiah Mustafa, for a textbook example of how to do it.

It’s more than just having entertaining content. It’s more than then audience asking ‘how the *bleep* did they do that?’ Those features just encouraged the audience to watch it more than 12 million times on YouTube. It’s the followup that’s the biggest coup here.

Not only did Old Spice produce more tv commercials with similar wit and ‘how did they do that’ content. They then proceeded to take the strategy online and have a conversation with their audience. All in the same ‘tongue-in-cheek’ style:

The ad agency, Wieden+Kennedy, produced these video replies for a range of social networking sites including Twitter, Facebook and Reddit. Of course, as a result, the coverage was exponential as people forwarded, retweeted and upvoted.

So, as always, if you wish to have success with online video then not only do you need to provide value-packed content with loads of rewatchability. You need to consider that video not as a one shot, quick-sell but as an introduction to a longer and more meaningful conversation.