A colleague, John Markow, and I were discussing how to explain to people what features a piece of media should have to make it useful socially on the Web. We came up with this a long time ago and neither of us have written anything about this.
But I'm still regularly telling folks about this, so I though I could write it down once and for all.
Basically, we came up with five features a piece of media (the "object" below), say a photo or video, that will help it go out and socialize across the Web.
2) Link-able – the permalink
3) Comment-able – let folks comment on everything, build engagement
4) Embed-able – a key thing for me is that there is only one instance of the object, wich folks can them emed anywhere
5) Feed-able – some form of feed in which not only does this object show up, but that it's accessible right in the feed.
And that's it.
Bonus
Karl Long, when I told him about this, added Remakable. Indeed, if the piece of media is krap, no amount of socializing features will help.
And an case-study
In February, I received an email from a fellow colleague mentioning a video of a designer of the smallest Bluetooth headset Nokia had ever made, the Nokia Bluetooth Headset BH-804. The product page supposedly already contained the video.
I searched for the video on the Nokia.com site. No luck. I managed to find the product page but could not see the video. D'oh, it was hidden in a Flash button!
The image to the right shows where it is in case you go looking for it.
When I clicked on the button, I realized that for me to point to the video, I've have to give instructions, sine there was no direct link I could use.
Of course, since it was playing in a Flash player, and the video was stored on the Nokia.com servers, there was also no way for me to embed the video anywhere.And let's not even mention commenting or catching this video in a feed.
This video was basically stuck where it was put. Not social at all.
What we did was take this video, popped it into the Nokia Conversations YouTube channel. Being YouTube, the video was now search-able, link-able, comment-able, embed-able, and feed-able. We also promoted it with a post on the Nokia Conversations site, and put it into the right column video panel.
Ok, so, maybe the content wasn't so remarkable or interesting: To date, it has only received three thousand video views and two comments. And the article had two thousand views (half of which led to a video view) and one comment. But it was interesting enough that the three comments are quite enthusiastic and six sites thought it worthwhile to embed the video.
Not bad, eh?
And this story illustrates well the five (plus one) features for socializing media. Right?
Thanks for the hat tip.
Is something on the way here?
Heh, no. Just writing down something John and I had discussed long ago and really never documented publicly.
Indeed, John had been a fountain of many good concepts I like to push on folks.