Amy Gahran: Can Anyone Stop Viral Spread of Colbert Tape?
Amy Gahran at Poynter wonders what news organizations can do once news footage - like the scathing roast of President Bush by Comedian Stephen Colbert - goes "viral".
No. And the whole point is that it can't be stopped . At some point we need to have full disclosure of the political processes at work in this country. Stephen Colbert is just a start.
The first of three eight-minute Colbert clips had netted over 600,000 views on YouTube before it was pulled for copyright infringement and was #1 in most viewed. #2 and #3 were the rest of his segment with over 400,000 and around 300,000 views, respectively. Shorter clips were at #6 and #17.
Although I am saddened to see that those were all pulled off YouTube where I could "see" the word spread by checking the view counts, I can understand C-SPAN's approach. It went viral - they wanted to make sure they got some love out of that.
However, I would have preferred that they work with all of the sites that posted video to get links back to the C-SPAN site (one of the two reasons given for posting on Google Video). I would have expected a majority of people who posted clips to be open to that.
The second reason - avoiding allegations of bias - would have been a little stickier to manage.
Looks like Robert Cox is working on the logistics of how this could work in the future.
Actually, the point of my article was not to ask how news orgs could bar the door after the horses have fled the barn, but rather to see if there's any way that news organizations might leverage or benefit from footage that goes viral.
Going viral from Expertise Marketplace - Professional Service Firm Marketing Blog
One of the pleasures of Internet marketing is the incredible uptake of even the most simple new marketing message. Sure, we've all been jealous when we hear from our professional services bretheren that a snippet of Internet video has gotten [Read More]
About BL Ochman B.L. Ochman, Managing Director of Emerging Media for Proof Integrated Communications, the digital marketing arm of Burson-Marsteller, has been helping Fortune 500 companies strategically incorporate new media into their marketing mix since 1996.