OK, even if you conceded that a large portion of these stats are people watching other people eat sandwiches or pull off Jackass-like stunts, the leftover is still enough to convince you that you've got to have some presence on YouTube.
4 billion videos are watched worldwide on YouTube daily.
Every second, one hour of video is uploaded to YouTube.
24 hours of video is uploaded every 24 seconds.
9 months of video is uploaded every two hours.
A decade’s worth of video is uploaded every day.
Every 10 days, a century of video is uploaded.
Absolutely mind-boggling, although with content like this, it's hard not to believe that the stats wouldn't be higher. OK, we have a personal connection to this one, but still.
Thanks to Avin Narasimhan for this video and commentary. We'd comment ourselves, but he seems to have nailed it already.
Fantastic piece from Post Secret that has been making the rounds recently, which asked people on the street one simple question: what's your secret? Complete strangers, often pouring their hearts out on camera with little prodding or prompting. Reminds me of the Kleenex 'let it all out' initiative from 2007, where in similar fashion a stranger on the street was able to elicit emotional, often heart wrenching stories from people who seemed as if they were just waiting to tell someone what was inside of them but never found the right moment until that exact second.
Questions arise all the time these days around new definitions of privacy, with some wondering why on earth people would be so willing to share personal information with the world while to others it is simply second nature and the way life is (for example, some love foursquare and actively exploring other location-based services, while I'm sure for others sharing that real-time/location info is weird or even scary). Not surprising in a culture that is bringing about huge shifts in the way we use and think about technology.
But even bigger than that, to me stuff like this is a reminder of something so simple about humanity, something that transcends technological shifts or an ever changing culture. Whether it's online or offline, young or old, man or woman, have and always will find something emotionally gratifying and soul replenishing in the simple act of sharing something meaningful with another human being. Whether it's the simple act of letting others know how you're feeling at that moment, to a picture you took last night while out to dinner, or a deep secret that you may have been holding for years, the sharing of story and meaning, regardless of what form it may take, is something that is so fundamentally human from the time when man first walked the earth to now as we traverse our digital universe.
Not that that's "new news" really, but we often get so caught up in the latest tech advancement or new shiny toy of the day (remember the rush to "just be there" in second life? Or the current fixation on AR as a tactic often without the answer to "what's the goal/reason for us to use this" is figured out) that we lose sight of the simple human motivations that underlie them. People connecting with people, putting some of themselves out there in the world, contributing to the culture we are all a part of. Simple yet powerful-- feeling like you matter, that your thoughts matter, that someone cares enough to want to know them. The true meaning of communication (and yet so wildly different from the way marketers describe the business of "communications" and "messaging").
But finally it feels like some are understanding a brands role in that human model of communication. One fantastic example recently of a brand that fully understands this need is Google, and their recent initiative to help us send holiday greetings to relatives and friends who may be less than connected, and still prefer the sentiment and old-fashioned warmth of snail mail. I love that one of the techiest of all tech companies is the one that brought this to us, that found a simple way to help us share and connect, even across the seeming technology disconnect between grandparent and grandchild, technophile and technophobe.
It's an uplifting example to me of a shift from a focus on messaging to a focus on meaning (as Ross smartly pointed out). Scary as it might be for a brand manager, sometimes the more we can get the brand out of the forefront and just provide people with things that are meaningful, and which allows people to create meaningful things with others, is when we are doing our jobs most effectively.
Maybe it even calls for a reevaluation of the very idea of 'brand equity' and 'brand value': should those terms be defined in the future by the value you create for people and in culture (or at least make those variables part of the equation), rather than fully the value it creates for the company?
