By now I feel that Susan Boyle requires no introduction, but just in case you were on a vacation on the moon in the last two weeks, HERE’s what EVERYBODY is talking about. (YouTube has disabled the embedding of the video, so I can’t show it here. I’ll get to this annoyance later…)
A Tribute to Susan Boyle (CC)
I’m not sure if you looked at the statistics for this YouTube video, but when I’m writing this post it has already more than 10 Million views, less than 2 weeks from the time it first aired on “Britain’s Got Talent“. The “original” video has more than 33 Million views by now.
Susan Boyle’s story proves a lot of things that got nothing to do with video and this blog. If I may quote Jeff Pulver, who helped drive Susan Boyle’s video over the Internet, “Susan Boyle’s video reminds us to be humble and not to jump to conclusions and not to judge”.
The Importance of Video
But let’s discuss the Susan Boyle case in general. Imagine that the producers of “Britain’s Got Talent” would not have uploaded the Susan Boyle video on YouTube. In fact, imagine there wasn’t a YouTube at all. This may seem like science fiction, but 4 years ago that was the reality. Now suppose British people, amazed by Susan Boyle’s performance, wanted to share her great singing with the rest of the world. What would they do?
Well, I can remember those “good old days”. MP3 recordings of live performances, from live shows as well as TV shows, such as “American Idol”, were being forwarded by e-mail and distributed through P2P networks like fire in a hay stack. This may have been sufficient to carry the “buzz” across the globe, but would an MP3 recording, be it as high quality as it may, would have captured the Susan Boyle story?
Because the Susan Boyle story, just like most of our day-to-day interactions, is a perfect mix of video and audio: image and sound. To quote Jeff Pulver once more, Susan Boyle “brings out an emotion that is just not felt in many of our everyday lives and her video shares the humanity in it all with regard to what happens when someone you least expect opens their mouth and can really sing”.
I think Susan Boyle’s case is a good example of how video enhances an experience that might have been pretty great with audio only. In fact, I am sure that if I offered someone, a few years ago, the ability to see Susan, instead of just hearing her, he might have told me this is quite unnecessary. And yet try to send someone “just” an MP3 version of Susan Boyle singing (available on her MySpace page), and see how bad the response will be. Video takes the whole thing to a different level, where “just” audio will never be able to compete.
The Power of UGC and Social Media
Another interesting thing about the Susan Boyle story is the way the story got distributed. The first people to pick it up were bloggers, embedding the video in their blogs. This started a linking frenzy on social media services, such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as the old faithful e-mail, and Susan Boyle was everywhere. When the traditional media outlets noticed the story and aired it, Susan Boyle was not “news” anymore. “Old media” was beaten by “New media”. Or in this case, “New media” distribution channels made a segment of an “Old media” show become “New media”. This is what Jeff Pulver calls “Now media”, the fusion of Old and New media.
Source: Geek&Poke.
People tend to disrespect user generated content (UGC) websites such as YouTube for their reputation as hosts of useless videos. But in fact, I doubt that bloggers and people around the world would pick up the video, if it was appearing on an official TV channel website. YouTube is regarded as “neutral”, as a “video sharing” website, not affiliated with any commercial interests (even if in many cases this is not true). In fact, the latest trend in YouTube is users posting videos of themselves watching Susan Boyle’s video.
Of course, this story will contribute significantly to YouTube’s reputation as a music videos hub. One might wonder though why YouTube continues to allow users to disable the embedding feature on their videos, thus hurting both the virality of the videos and the use of their infrastructure by bloggers. In my view, disabling embedding is like shooting yourself in the foot, but maybe YouTube know better.
Susan Boyle’s life will never be the same. In the upcoming weeks she may turn out to be the biggest YouTube sensation ever (knocking out such “hits” as shoes getting thrown at President Bush and Obama’s election night victory speech, not to mention the most popular YouTube video of all-time, “Evolution of Dance“); She may, or may not, win “Britain’s Got Talent”; She may, or may not, return to anonymity in a month or so.
But the “Susan Boyle story” will not be forgotten for a long time. She will be the topic of various research work, numerous presentations, endless marketing pitches, and lots of talk shows (with or without her participation). Personally, I think Susan Boyle’s most important role was to stop everyone from talking about Twitter, Ashton vs. CNN and the other “hot” trends. If it also taught us a few things about the importance of video and the power of UGC, I consider it a bonus.
Tags: buzz, Facebook, Jeff Pulver, MP3, MySpace, New Media, Now media, Old Media, P2P, social media, Susan Boyle, twitter, UGC, YouTube
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