I recently participated in a LinkedIn discussion and I wanted to open it up to the world (or anyone who wanted to read or contribute to it).  It is partially edited so it reads better in a blog format.  I thought what John Clarkson commented back was brilliant.  What do you think?  Any brave souls out there?

What’s the “State of the Industry” for corporate video and creative services?

As the recession lingers on I believe that most companies are continuing the trend of downsizing their corporate video and creative services departments. Those areas are always considered dispensable by corporations when the economy goes sour and the last to recover. What do you think? Are companies hiring? If so, what types of positions?

Social media’s value is that it is created and communicated by the people for the people. If you look at newspapers, broadcast television, and FM/AM radio, it is now well understood they worked well if you wanted to hear one point of view. It was also great if you didn’t want to provide your viewpoint or ask your questions back to the communicator. Let’s face it; it was great because it was all we had. Now communicators all over the world have extremely powerful communication tools to have a conversation with practically anyone of their choosing for next to no cost. Companies are likely downsizing the creative services departments because they aren’t seeing a direct ROI. Why aren’t they seeing an ROI? I’m not sure this works in all cases of course but maybe where we get ourselves in trouble is I don’t personally think a creative services department should always be a 100% dedicated “support organization” to others.

The reason I say that is people will come to you with what they want to throw your way but if what they throw your way isn’t valued by those consuming the content, you won’t have long term value, or a long term career. Instead, I’d be interested in hearing if anyone has focused a portion of their team on finding a problem and using their creative organization to pitch solving a real world business problem so you not only solve problems given to you, but you also help identify and offer a solution to those problems you have helped identify or address from people “in the field”. High profile projects are nice because they get you exposure to those who may promote you or sign your paycheck. However, if those giving you projects provide you a subject matter that content consumers don’t want or need, your services are wasted and you are looked at as a department that can be eliminated when things get tight. By the way, shouldn’t businesses always make smart decisions regardless of whether times or tight or not?

Social media can also provide its own problems when communicators create or produce content that doesn’t solve or help a real world need. Social media is full of babies and animals doing cute or funny things, people tweeting about what they are having for dinner, and professionally produced content is full of dry and boring content (let’s face it these tend to be the stereotypes). Whether it is professionally created or not, I think if your creative department solves a real business problem, makes it engaging, makes it usable, measurable, and informative, you have a winning combination of long term employment and success.

Has anyone stopped being a service organization that provides what the customer wants 100% of the time, and started being a partner with the business to solve real world business problems? If so, I’d love to hear more and any lessons learned.

John Clarkson • Amen to that! Could we say: What’s Expired is being a “mailman” (the commodity provider, delivering other people’s messages for them without regard to value to the enterprise), What’s Tired is being a “letter-writer” (the artisan, trying to pretty-up up other people’s messages, then delivering them, in hopes they will have some value for the enterprise), What’s Wired is “building the new post office” (the entrepreneur, innovating apps, data bases and information fields to solve problems, and demonstrating value to the enterprise)?

Ladies and gentleman when you think “D-Day” you probably think of the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944  right?  There appears to be another D-Day and nobody is storming beaches but rather Internet users are storming off to reddit.com (a popular Digg clone) and declaring war on the site and its founder.  Before we get into the war of the geek kind lets start with how this all started.  On August 25, 2010 when people started flooding to the Digg site to preview the release of the newly redesigned site they were angered to find many features its hardcore fans loved had been removed and the front page no longer had sites from individual users, but rather from large mainstream  publishers.

A week ago today Digg 4 launched and what a week this has been for Kevin Rose, the Founder and Chief Architect (and at the time of launch, acting CEO) of Digg.com.  Kevin has been a popular Internet celebrity and someone I follow very closely and blog about often.  The longer I’ve lived the more I’m finding everything tends to be cyclical.  Disney calls it the “circle of life” and I think they are onto something.  In 1990 when Apple was being bailed out by Microsoft, who would have ever thought that in 2010 Apple would be the company everyone talks about and have $40 billion cash in the bank?

Two weeks ago everyone was blogging (including myself) about Kevin’s iTV rumors being announced at today’s Apple keynote.  Fast forward two weeks and would you have believed that Kevin Rose would become one of the most despised people to his previously loyal Digg followers?  Just look at the picture below which is a line for a Diggnation live taping which features Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht where they talk each week about stories they have “dugg” on the “social news website digg.com”.

Diggnation Line

One week you are one of the most popular people on the web and the next what seems like a legion of geeks now hate you.  Easy come, and easy go, but can Digg and Kevin Rose come back from this enormous backlash?  Digg users are voting up, or digging stories from Reddit.com and the homepage is littered with stories from its competing site.  The circle of life happens everywhere around you so enjoy the highs and do everything you can to survive the lows.

A few months ago LeBron James announced he was leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers to join the Miami Heat.  When he announced his decision many of his fans in Cleveland turned on him and some were so angry they went in the streets to burn his jersey.  Let’s stop and think about this for a second.  Want to know who your real friends and fans are?  They are the ones who stay by your side when everyone else is turning against you.

People tend to like you as long as you do what they want you to.  They like you when you have something they can benefit from.  They like you when you do something outside the box but when it fails they will be the first to berate you over it.  Kevin created Digg and at that time the site was something revolutionary.  I like Digg’s new design and I can understand user’s outrage over having mainstream content appear directly from the sites as opposed to being submitted by users.  When Facebook did its latest redesign, many users also got very vocal.  If nothing else I respect people with an opinion but give people feedback with as much grace as possible.  Elbert Hubbard famously said “to avoid criticism do nothing, say nothing, be nothing”.  What Kevin and lots of other Internet entrepreneurs have now hopefully learned is do everything you can do make your users happy.  I think Digg is trying to fix the issues being brought up to the best of their abilities so good luck Kevin and the Digg team.  Hang in there…

Didn’t know YouTube is keeping track of my video streaming speeds.  If you want to see what your speed is and how it compares to mine (above) you can do so via http://www.youtube.com/my_speed.

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What we learn: the Kindle 4 is super thin and Kevin has “medium sized” hands.  Will the Kindle survive?

For anyone who doesn’t use Twitter you may not have seen this but I thought what Tyler was asking was pretty logical.  @BiggerMarbles pointed out others have wondered the same thing and below is a good answer which explains why Batman can’t fly.

For some reason my Google language changed recently to some very strange language.  Even stranger I’ve been somehow getting by but I finally needed to actually read the navigation of an item so I decided to change it back to English.  In doing so I was presented with the options below.  See anything odd in the screenshot below (besides my language)?

I’ll give you a hint, no OK I’ll just tell you…Elmer Fudd and Hacker!?!?  Upon changing my language to Elmer Fudd I get the following…

Then I found the Google search button changed from “Search” to “Hunt wabbits”.  Google, what are you going to do next?