Craving for personal touch

    Since I rediscovered YouTube for myself, I've been posting quite a bit about its' life and community. It also made me think back to the beginning of Web1.0, it's growth, transformation, development over time and finally Web 2.0.

I am not sure if everyone experienced this, but when e-mails and forums gained strength and became a day-to-day thing, replacing hand written letters and in a lot of cases phone calls - a lot of people, especially older generations started to panic. The notion was the fact that people were distancing themselves and using all these "digital" innovations, losing real contact - in general communicating less on personal level.

I have to agree that most of us got caught up at first in all the e-mail hype and started to get too lazy to pick up phones.....
but this is not true in regards to the current situation.
"Add to friends", "Comment", "Subscribe", "Share"......I can go on - we can't wait to get in touch and connect with users, viewers and customers. Sharing our thoughts and getting updates on how our friends are doing, building business contacts and joining communities became an everyday MUST for most.
More importantly is that this drive to communicate doesn't stop on on-line, it progresses into the real life.
There are multiple get-together - weather flash mobs or conferences - that people attend to meet in person and get the feeling of the community.
This post was greatly influenced by a video of a Flash Mob done last year at the Planet Hollywood in Vegas. It was organized by a quite a few vloggers I've mentioned in a previous post (ShayCarl, LisaNova, KassemG...etc). This video is really a representation of how an on-line community can translate into the real world, which plays an important role in sustaining that community. This particular Flash Mob is only one example of numerous gatherings and events that are being organized regularly by users not only on YouTube but other networks. To be honest, this video makes me feel warm and fuzzy because in a lot of ways on-line community is very accepting of everyone and a lot of people from just confused kids to aspiring artists have a chance to find their voice and create amazing content other can view and discuss.
As if this post wasn't long enough - I feel it is important to throw in a little psychology in it as a conclusion. At the end of the day - humans are always looking for a place/group to belong to - it is our nature. Therefore, even when Internet offers us a comfortable setting of our homes to talk to others, we will always strive for personal contact. On-line communities offer an amazing place to start networking/sharing with many opportunities for communication that is never limited to on-line!

Viral Videos - it can bring you up or plunge you down.

Viral videos present an amazing opportunity for companies or even individuals to get viewers, customer, followers and just in general get the word out. A couple of days ago I started thinking - is there a such thing as a bad viral video? For a second, I thought - how can viral video be bad? I mean, if it gained so much attention and went viral isn't that the definition of success?-No. In recent months I've been exploring YouTube in more depth - it's community and the way things work. One thing I saw multiple examples of is - fake viral video can seriously harm company's image.
They definitely can gain a lot of attention but most of the fake viral videos, especially if company tries to cover it up - is frowned upon by most YouTubers. Some of the most prominent influencers (mostly vloggers) on Youtube actually devote quite lot of time discussing these videos and making fun of them at best.
Sarah Perez wrote an interesting blogpost Fake Viral videos: Is this Good Marketing? talking about this very topic and demonstrating a few "viral failures".
I believe that if a company decides to make a viral video they should be cautious about the reaction it will evoke and be prepared for the fact that they will not have any control over how it will be interpreted and discussed.
Furthermore, I think every company needs to identify itself. They don't need to shine a huge logo of the company throughout the video but  a link to your website at the end of the video can be a good idea. This way you may avoid people getting frustrated thinking you are trying to TRICK them.