YouTube is working on a Partner Playbook, chock full of tips to help their partners build their audiences, optimize discovery and maximize views.  At a YouTube Partner MeetUp in New York on June 16, 2011, Ryan Nugent from the YouTube Next Up Lab presented a draft of the Playbook.  This is part four in a series presenting tips gleaned from Ryan’s presentation of the YouTube Partner Playbook.  The other parts in the series include Online Video Optimization Tips, Analytics & Insight Tips, and Online Video Programming Tips.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

YouTube is working on a Partner Playbook, chock full of tips to help their partners build their audiences, optimize discovery and maximize views.  At a YouTube Partner MeetUp in New York on June 16, 2011, Ryan Nugent from the YouTube Next Up Lab presented a draft of the Playbook.  This is part three in a series presenting tips gleaned from Ryan’s presentation of the YouTube Partner Playbook.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

YouTube is working on a Partner Playbook, chock full of tips to help their partners build their audiences, optimize discovery and maximize views.  At a YouTube Partner MeetUp in New York on June 16, 2011, Ryan Nugent from the YouTube Next Up Lab presented a draft of the Playbook.  This is part two in a series presenting tips gleaned from Ryan’s presentation of the YouTube Partner Playbook.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

YouTube is working on a Partner Playbook, chock full of tips to help their partners build their audiences, optimize discovery and maximize views.  At a YouTube Partner MeetUp in New York on June 16, 2011, Ryan Nugent from the YouTube Next Up Lab presented a draft of the Playbook.  This is part one in a series presenting tips gleaned from Ryan’s presentation of the YouTube Partner Playbook.

Creating great content is, without a doubt, the most important ingredient in the recipe to YouTube success.  However, even if you have the best content on the planet, nobody will see it if you haven’t optimized it for discovery.  Ryan Nugent of YouTube’s Next Up Lab says, “50% of the work is making a great video and the other 50% is what you do when you upload it.”  Here, we lay out some helpful rules and guidelines for optimizing your content, as outlined in Ryan’s presentation of the YouTube Partner Playbook.
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Do your homework

No matter where you find your developer, you must always do your homework. Asking for client references is always a good start, but you usually don’t know who the references are, so often developers will give you their personal friends, or “friendly” clients and partners. Try to dig deep into the relationship between the provided reference and the company and ask for specific examples of work the development company has performed for the reference, some problems that may have occurred during various projects and how the developer responded to those problems.

Always research any work samples that the developer has given you. Just because you receive a link, or screenshots for an application that the developer has produced doesn’t necessarily mean it’s actually their work, nor does it indicate the developer’s true level of involvement with it. Often developers put games/apps as a part of their portfolios that they’ve collaborated with other companies on, so try to understand their level of involvement with critical apps listed in their portfolios.

Several years ago I hired a developer to create a Facebook game that my company was working on at the time. During the first few conversations while addressing creating scalable applications, the development company told me that they once built a game that supported over 3 million monthly active users. After our game entered its beta phase, we noticed major performance issues when the application received too many simultaneous players. I decided to purchase the application’s historical data that the developers told me had over 3 million MAUs. When I saw the data I was shocked to find out that the app they mentioned never got anywhere close to 3 million users, in fact its highest MAU count was slightly over 100k. Websites such as www.AppData.com provide paid access to historical user trends (MAU & DAU), so I could have saved a lot of money by purchasing this data early on in my development partner selection process.

Evaluate the Company’s Processes

You can minimize the chance of failure by hiring a company with mature design, development, project management , and QA processes. This is particularly crucial when working with offshore development teams, which further increases your chance of failure if solid processes are not in place. This does not mean that a company with less mature processes is less capable of delivering your project, but it does help you to reduce the risk.

A good way to check the developer’s understanding of your needs is to ask specific questions and hear the developer’s input. Typically developers that say they can do everything, without outlining potential risks and problems, are just trying to close the sale rather than understand the full extent of your requirements. A project that is taken on without full understanding of the specs is often destined for failure. Take time to evaluate the personnel that will be involved with your project, particularly the lead developers, designers and project managers (years of experience, qualifications, list of projects under the belt…). It’s also a good idea to ask about which project management, qualify assurance and communication tools and applications the company uses to engage with its clients.

Once your application reaches its BETA phase and is close to launch, a heavy load of quality assurance will need to be performed. As the client you will be involved, but you don’t want to take the time to personally diagnose every single bug. A nightmare scenario is a developer that hands off a partially functional app over to you and expects you to perform all of the quality assurance yourself.

Avoid Agencies that don’t add value

There are many digital agencies out there that can connect you with the right level of talent for your needs. Agencies typically don’t have full time design and development staff, but instead connect you to development resources that are a part of their network. This means that you have to be very wary of agencies that simply act as outsourcing shops without adding any value to your project, especially if their development partners are located offshore.

Agencies that don’t offer a consultative approach are typically acting as outsource shops, meaning that they take on your project and charge a mark up on top of whatever they’re paying their development partners. This increases the cost of the application without adding any additional value to justify the added margin. Look for agencies that help you refine your idea, outline problems and offer solutions. A good agency will a solid understanding of your application, the market and can connect you to the right resources no matter what gaps your game/app may possess (analytics, game design & development, distribution, etc).

Structure Proper Contracts & Agreements

At the end of the day this is business, and you need to be properly protected from a legal standpoint. When structuring your agreements with developers make sure that the milestones and payment terms are clearly outlined. Try to make sure that payments get released only when developers hit certain milestones (e.g. alpha phase with a fully functional avatar and combat system). Also try to incorporate some refund terms for when time sensitive milestones are not met, as well as if the application does not function properly.

Don’t forget to make sure that a well outlined scope of work document is in place shortly after the contract is executed. You want to have a clear roadmap of all the features and milestones in place before jumping into the design and development phases. This is a mistake junior development teams often make, paving way for ambiguous milestones and throwing off the timeline and budget for the project.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Parents of kids who like to surf on the Internet might be able to breathe a little easier. The popular children’s television network Nickelodeon is raising its voice to educate kids on digital bullying. Nick, the popular TV network for kids ages 2 to 14, began an on-air public service campaign today. The campaign features some of its stars offering advice on what kids can do when confronted with hostile texts, emails or Facebook posts.
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The South by Southwest (SXSW) Conferences & Festivals is a social activity that offers a unique convergence of original music, independent films and emerging technologies.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

What is Yammer and Why You Should Use It

Launched in 2008, Yammer is an enterprise social network; this means that unlike other social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter – which are designed for public use – Yammer is designed for private communication for members within a given organization. It is a social network for businesses and companies. What’s so useful about this? The basic set up is free, easy to use, and, perhaps, most importantly, it provides a private, manageable, and secure online space for businesses to communicate. If your board room created a social networking site, this is what it would look like. For more about why you should be using this tool, check out 6 Things You Can’t Do At Your Office Without Yammer.

How to Get Setup with Yammer

If you’re creating a Yammer account for your business, you’ll need a valid company email address. You’ll be sent a confirmation email and then you can log into the Yammer system.

If you’re being invited to join a Yammer network, you’ll receive an email from the network’s administrator; follow the link, and you’ll be directed to Yammer’s main page.

After feeling strangely comforted by the Facebook-like blue and white colour scheme, look to the top right corner of your screen. Here, you will find a “getting started” box that will lead you through several initial steps including, completing your profile, adding your photo, inviting others to join your network, joining groups, and getting Yammer desktops or mobile Apps.

When creating your profile and adding your photo, remember that while Yammer looks and feels like a typical social networking site, it’s a business environment. Pick a work place appropriate user name and a photo where your face is visible.

Feeds

Officially, Yammer refers to all communications that take place on the site as “Yams”. Yams are sorted into various feeds. A feed, if you’re new to social media, is a way of grouping certain kinds of messages.

Your main feed is made up of the Yams from the people you’re following and the groups you’re in. To post your own Yam, simply pick whether you are posting an update, question, link, poll or event, and fill in the necessary information and press update. People are able to “like” or reply to your post, and you are able to do the same with other people’s posts within your network. Every message in Your Feed has a button marked “more”; this will allow you to view a thread of conversation or bookmark a thread.

To the left of your screen, you can choose other feeds – or other ways of organizing the Yams which show up on your home page.

• Sent- Allows you to sort Yams into only the messages you’ve sent.
• Received- Shows all the yams @addressed to you
• Liked- A list of the Yams that you’ve liked.
• Bookmarked – A is the list of yams that you’ve marked as favourites.
• All – Will filter all non-private Yams within your network
• Groups – Will show Yams posted to your groups.

Like Facebook and Quora, Yammer has a private message function. This allows you to communicate with a specific user without having to share your thread with the whole network. Private messages, as their title suggests, are in fact, private and cannot be viewed by your followers or groups.

Hash Tags

If you’re coming from other social networking sites such as Twitter, hash tags (#hashtags) won’t be new. A hash tag allows you to organize messages, find topics, and find people. Because Yammer is used for work, hashtags are an essential tool used to identify what posts are about. While some tags are Yammer wide, most will be generated by the needs of your business or company. For businesses, it’s a good idea to put together a glossary of tags specific to your Yammer network. For new users, it’s important to understand the hash tag vocabulary of your company’s Yammer network to help you communicate effectively, but also to find information quickly.

You can also choose to follow a tag when it appears in your feed by clicking the “follow” button. This means that you’ll be notified anytime there is any activity that involves that tag.

Groups and Communities

You can only join a Yammer network through invitation; however, within a Yammer network you can create or join groups and communities. On Yammer, a group is a way to communicate within subsets of a network. For example, you might have different groups devoted to particular projects or work areas, allowing the people within this group to communicate within a smaller and more specific “inner” network. You can also make groups private in order to focus conversation on a particular topic.

Communities, on the other hand, are external groups. They are networks which allow you to communicate with people outside your internal Yammer networks such as customers or partners.

For employees wishing to create a group, first take a look at existing groups to get a feel for the kind of groups on the network. Are there non-work related groups (perhaps, a group hockey pool)? If so, it’s probably okay to create non-work groups. If there aren’t any non-work specific groups, it’s a good idea to contact your employer to assess their comfort level with different kinds of groups in their network.

Email Alerts

Even if you’ve only been on Yammer a short time, you’ll want to immediately adjust your email settings or you’ll find yourself bombarded by notification emails.

To adjust your email settings, go to “Account Settings” and chose notifications. You can toggle with the various notification settings to meet your needs. One very useful communication feature is to choose to receive a “digest” of message activity. This will send a daily or weekly email that summarizes the day’s notification activity. It’s a great way to keep track of messages, but not overcrowd your inbox.

Following/Liking

Yammer allows you to choose to follow people or hash tags; however, following on Yammer is slightly different than other social networking sites. First, you can only follow people within your network, and only people from your network can follow you. When you choose to follow someone, you are choosing to view messages from them in “My Feed”. Following is not like a “friend request”. If you choose to follow someone, it isn’t automatically mutual, and if someone chooses to follow you, you don’t need to approve the request. When following someone or being followed, only public messages from groups and feeds will appear in “My Feed”. Private messages and groups remain private.

You can also choose to “like” a post by clicking the “like” button. While this can be a convenient way to communicate that you’re watching a thread or message, be wary of allowing yourself to slip into personal social media habits. Yammer is a workplace network, and as such, make sure you “like” messages pertaining to you, and don’t use it as a lazy replacement for a more lengthy response.

Apps

Yammer has a mobile app for iPhone, Blackberry, and Androids. It’s a relatively straightforward application that allows you to post on Yammer by sending SMS’s from your mobile device.

Yammer also as a desktop application that allows you to use most of Yammer’s features off your desk top, including directing messaging, posting to groups, and following people or groups.

There are also a series of Apps (Links, Questions, Leaderboards, Polls, Events, Charts) that allow you to see all the posts of a certain category from your network. For example, if you click on the “Links” App, you’ll get a list of all the links posted in your network.

How do you delete your account?

No longer part of an organization? To delete your account is easy; simply go to account and click “delete account”. However, if you’d like to also delete any messages you posted while part of that Yammer network, you need to sift through messages and delete each one manually.

Yammer Etiquette

Yammer can be a very useful virtual communication tool; however, the challenge for users is to remember that it’s a professionals setting. Because it looks and feels like other social networking sites, it can be easy to transfer bad Facebook or Twitter habits to Yammer. Some tips to help avoid this:

• Proofread your posts. They don’t need to be rhyming couplets, but grammatical errors don’t impress anyone, particularly in a work setting.
• Get a feel for your network and the kind of language that’s appropriate. Some networks may be relatively casual, but others might not be. Until you see someone else use one, resist the urge to pepper your posts with smiley faces.
• Be aware of your commenting and “liking” habits. In the same way it isn’t appropriate to drop in on conversations in an office, it also isn’t appropriate to get involved with threads that don’t pertain to you.
• Remember that public posts within the network are written records. If you’re upset about an issue, wait five minutes before posting.
• Private messages are a great way to communicate with a specific co-worker, but if you find a conversation veering away from work, take it to a personal social networking site.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Wired Safety Image: woodsy/sxc

Today’s kids are growing up in a world where the Web is part of their everyday lives, social networking sites have always existed and buying music online is as common as browsing record stores once was for their parents. But the more your kids explore online, the more they are at risk from predators and the more they put your PC and privacy at risk.
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.