Funny or Die, a Will Ferrell-fronted comedy video site, has received plenty of coverage around its launch, more around his involvement and their intro clip, “The Landlord” than around the user-contributed content, which has been more tepid. That said, there is an onslaught of theme-based video-sharing launches, based around humor, non-profits, tech, etc., which brings up a familiar scenario- What if the audience that YouTube has aggregated fragments right as marketers finally figure it out? The struggles that agencies are going through trying to adapt creative to the online video platform will only be compounded when assets will have to be adapted to different formats, channels, tagging systems, and communities in addition to figuring out appropriate length. Clearly many of the start-ups around today will not be around to witness this additional shift, but as marketers focus on the “what?” in a message, they should also be anticipating a much more complicated answer to the “where?”. Oh, and the same thing is happening to social networks as well, but I’ll save that for another post.

Our CEO, Pete Snyder and Project Manager Kaitlyn Wilkins co-authored a great piece in iMedia Connection today. Dealing with the media’s questionable use of social networks after the Virginia Tech tragedy, it raises some very hard questions about appropriate use of people’s online information. A good read on a difficult topic, and hopefully it will cause people to think twice before making public personal profiles in the future.

Great article “Wonderful World of Wikis” over at Read/WriteWeb, which gives an overview of the many different flavors of social reference tools. One interesting point made at the end is that social networks are a type of Wiki, though limited in user input to an individual’s profile. I think that the announcement by WetPaint that they are adding social media tools to their product, showing the inverse to be true as well, points to a growing trend of Web 2.0 convergence. For social reference sites to be viable, they must have an active community that ensures the validity and value of the content. Conversely, for a social network to be a success, they must make it easy for members to provide worthwhile information to other members. Add to this equation the development of Wikia Search, and this convergence will potentially have a huge impact on marketers.

This, of course is entirely new ground for brands, as striking the balance between providing marketing speak and valuable, balanced information. What will most likely happen, however, is that brand information will be provided at a much quicker pace by consumers, both pro and con, than brands can adapt to participate in the conversation. Though the impact of an unflattering or inaccurate Wikipedia profile today is significant, it will pale in comparison to the damage that can be done as these types of sites proliferate and a potentially large share of the search market migrates to a user-indexed product. The challenge will be navigating a slew of protocols that are implemented to prevent abuse by those who would look to “game” the system. While the threat of such behavior is definitely real, companies can be an extremely valuable source of information to these communities once they look at these platforms as another way to talk with the consumer versus just marketing at them.

Interesting how video-sharing has transformed the face of romance- we did a quick snapshot of Valentine’s on YouTube, and here’s what we found:

Highlights
We found that people were utilizing video sharing extensively:

– Over 1200 Valentine videos were added on the 14th, the vast majority of which were video ecards of widely varying quality. Some were the standard slow song + hearts + scripted “I love you”, while more original directors took advantage of the snow to scrawl out their messages.

– 5 Marriage proposals were contributed, bringing the total to 254 on the site, ranging from CG animated productions to balloon fly-bys, to more awkward productions.

– Interesting twists on the traditional for single users – one user fished for Valentine suitors with a rendition of “As Time Goes By” that garnered almost 60,000 views, over 450 comments and 20 video responses, while another user volunteered to be any single persons sweetheart via a personal email message, which generated a whopping 609,366 views as of this writing and over 2500 users took her up on her offer.

– Viral marketing pieces for Nokia and Siemens (set in the future) under the premise of being wedding proposals did not fare as well as their organic brethren, generating just under 3600 views for Nokia (in 11 months) while things look a bit better for Siemens which was viewed just over 6500 times since it launched Valentine’s Day.

iMedia Connection: The Snickers Factor: When Buzz Turns Bad - Thanks to iMedia for giving us this opportunity, and we’ve received a lot of great feedback so far on the piece, which is due to the great work the team here at NMS did in pulling the report together. I also wanted to emphasize a couple things in the article to be clear.

First off, the main angle was about how Snicker’s media strategy made it easier for their critics to attack them, and how that could be avoided in the future by other marketers. Why the creative offended people and whether or not Masterfoods would have been better off addressing the issues involved instead of selling product and promoting the brand is well beyond the scope of the article.

Second, the “five years ago” statement might have been an underestimation- the best comparison I’ve heard to date is to the Miller Lite “Catfight” spot, and that aired in 2003. Though it might be more valuable to the hypothetical question as to what the reaction to the “Mechanics” spot would have been if it featured two women, I think the fact that Miller was able to overcome the controversy and actually expand the schedule of the spot in the face of similar criticism is a testament to the growing influence of the consumer.

Second Life to start selling “Real Life” last names (OReilly via CNET)

Online Bartering Gets a Foothold on the Web (NYT)

YouTube adds Brand Channels (AdJab)

Friendster: On the Rebound (Business Week)

Google to take over TV, World (ZDNet)

Business 2.0 pushes aside the (somewhat overused) Web 2.0 moniker in favor of “The Next Net” when profiling 25 companies that are changing how we look at, use and think of the internet. They not only cover some of the standard “Web 2.0″ darlings such as Digg, YouTube and Technorati, but also highlight other great companies like Last.fm, Zimbra and Fonality. The article is well worth taking a look at, particularly in order to get to know some of the lesser known names on the list.

Jaffe Juice (via Clickz) talks about a recent effort over at Bolt that resulted in the creation of “Consumer Generated Music” in which members voted on every aspect of the song’s creation. The song will be distributed, at first, via social networks such as Facebook and MySpace.

This is a great example of consumer generated content, but its not the first time (ok, maybe for a consumer generated song). I’ve heard tell of podcasters, fiction writers and website creators using collaborative methods (i.e., wikis, blogs, etc) to create content.  Granted, its not the large-scale that the Bolt song is, but it just shows that collaborative creation is happening in big and small ways.

Great article over on ZDNet about the  cost of “Social Freeloaders” - the majority of Social Network/Social Bookmarketing/Web 2.0 users who are contributing to a site, but are watching/reading/listening to others contributions.