Together We Can Make a Difference

Max Kalehoff in his blog post Consumer-Generated Ads Will Disrupt Existing Production Models evaluates impact of this emerging phenomenon on traditional media production / ad service agencies.

Issue of user-generated content (including online forums, blogs, videos) has begun becoming part of Non-profit/social justice organizations work. Some high profile groups like Amnesty International, Witness, Human Rights Watch and others have expanded their use of YouTube and working to expand their outreach and/or share user generated content on specific campaign.

Recent example include Close Guantanamo campaign by Amnesty International. Make Some Noise - Amnesty International. Close to 100 video clips in various languages (most less than a minute long) are posted on YouTube. It does manage to provide visibility to voices of ordinary people.

Responding to this emerging trend Witness started a pilot project on Global Voices (as a subset of the functionality of their forthcoming Human Rights Video Hub) some time in September 2006. This page allows users to “Watch and comment on human rights video from around the world curated by WITNESS”. Commentaries along with these clips on Global Voices add extremely useful context and some analysis while users what these clips. Thus Witness is using some what different model than used by Amnesty International in their Say ‘Close Guantánamo’ on camera! initiative.

Use of this medium is no longer limited to English. During last quarter of 2006 Farsi Tube was launched in the U.S. FarsiTube is a video sharing community targeted towards Iranians, and has all kinds of videos about Iran and Iranian culture.

There are many video sharing services in Korea. It will be interesting to find out how these sites are impacting social and political discourses.

According to China Daily report (February 1st) “almost half of China’s Internet users were found to be focusing in on video-sharing websites. There are hundreds of websites offering webcast and podcast services in Chinese. Tudou.com is considered to be the most popular video-sharing site.

In short any evaluation of user-generated content must include all such global initiatives.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 27th, 2007 at 9:13 am and is filed under videos, YouTube, political campaigns, non-profit, online marketing, digital marketing, humanrights-videos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.