After filming a couple of videos of my 4-year-old singing and dancing recently, I was faced with a decision that I think a lot of parents have thought about in this era of social media. That question, of course, is: Should I put this cute video of my kid on YouTube?

As I’m sure is the way all parents feel, my daughter’s videos are the most damn adorable videos ever created, hands down. Never have I been as moved by a rendition of “A Whole New World” from “Aladdin” in my life. These would get five million views easy, I thought after watching them for the first time. After immediately feeling compelled to send the videos to family members, I realized the videos were too large to email from my phone, so I had to decide if I wanted to upload them to YouTube, and if so, whether or not to set the videos to private.

Having read a recent New York Times article about parents, such as the father of David from the beloved “David After Dentist” video, cashing in on their kids’ viral videos, I imagined what life would be like for my family if my daughter’s videos blew up and she became a minor internet sensation.

According to the Times story, if YouTube’s reps think your video might go viral, and you give them permission, they’ll run ads alongside your video and share more than half the revenue with you, sending you a check each month. David’s family has made upwards of $100,000 on YouTube ads alone! That’s a college tuition plus some, I thought.

My mind continued to drift, as I imagined starting a whole “Bella Remixes Disney Classics” channel, selling spin-off merchandise, booking TV morning shows, watching the imitation videos (and $$) pile up, etc. The possibilities to capitalize on the popularity of one viral video are endless, as proven by how the ”David After Dentist” video exists today (see above) – there’s a “DAD” (David After Dentist) logo, a “click here to see David’s new video of him playing football!” ad, and a David After Dentist website link. A two-minute video of a kid confused by the effects of anesthesia led to a mini media empire.

On the other hand, while 15 minutes of YouTube fame isn’t exactly the same as TV series or movie fame, as a child of the 1980s, I couldn’t help but think of all the child-star-gone-bad stories, from Macaulay Culkin to Corey Feldman to Lindsay Lohan. Again, a 45-second video clip is different than “Home Alone,” obviously, but at the same time, the risk of having your child being spotted as “that one kid” and being uncomfortable with the recognition stuck with me. So I stopped daydreaming and decided against keeping the video public.

Who knows, maybe she’ll get mad at me in a few years when she sees David or that one little girl whose Nicki Minaj cover video went viral recently enjoying their acting or music careers. Have you had similar thoughts after shooting a potential viral video of your kiddo?

My dream is that someday, every piece of film, video or photography ever made in the world will be instantly available online. We’re not there yet, but YouTube is a great start.

I’m keenly interested in history and culture, and I love comparing the way things were 20, 50 or 100 years ago to the way we do it today.  The contrast between a Beyonce video and Rosemary Clooney doing “Mambo Italiano” fascinates me. I like watching things from the 1950s, looking at the culture that existed in this country at the time I was born. I like watching things from the 1920s and 1930s, wondering how my parents were shaped by the folkways that were current during their youth. (And wondering some more about how those folkways indirectly shaped me, through them.) Does my dad’s sense of humor have anything to do with the Bing Crosby-Bob Hope “Road” movies that were hugely popular during his teens?

Here’s a 50th reunion of the soldiers who fought in the Battle of Gettysburg. Here’s 17-year-old Mary Tyler Moore as a dancing elf in a TV appliance commercial, her first big break in show biz. Here’s an 1894 Edison film of native American dancers in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. That one was filmed right around the time my great-grandfather arrived in North Dakota from Norway.

I amuse myself by finding obscure items to watch. They can’t simply be obscure for obscurity’s sake — they have to be something I’m legitimately interested in watching. But if fewer than 1,000 — or even 100 — people have watched the clip, then I count it as a weird sort of moral victory.

For every “Dick in A Box” with 30 million views, there’s someone who thought the world would be interested in seeing how they made Chevrolets in 1936. And you know what? I am.

Woman - shocked, embarrassed, drenched – exits the fountain, and exits the television screen if you’re watching the security tape that captured the whole event. Mall security watches the tape. Someone with mall security decides to post a video of the video – an important distinction – onto YouTube.

Within a week, the original clip is viewed more than 1.8 million times. Then the woman appears with her attorney on Good Morning America, and she says she’s considering a lawsuit. The woman is Cathy Cruz Marrero, and she just may replace Ted Williams, the man with the golden voice, as Biggest Viral Celebrity of 2011. She may also be known as the woman who killed viral videos.

If Marrero can argue the YouTube video and subsequent attention caused her emotional distress, she may have a case. (I’m no lawyer, but I feel like crazier claims have gone to trial.) And if that precedent’s set, what’s to prevent anyone who’s ever been unknowingly taped slipping on ice or falling down stadium stairs or taking a line drive to the crotch from lawyering up? Could the law then become no video may be posted to the Internet without the subject’s consent? Would these viral videos then be considered not-so-intellectual property?

My gripe - and I imagine yours, too – is that Marrero has brought most of the attention directly onto herself. It’s unlikely anyone would’ve recognized Marrero by the video alone. Instead, she raised her hand and made the national media rounds, each time playing the traumatized victim with performances worthy of Tara Reid comparisons.

Remind me again – can a plaintiff claim insanity?

It should be interesting to see where this one goes. I hope Marrero somehow finds humor in the situation and walks away like any other decent human would’ve in the first place.

Apparently, YouTube started offering two versions of Campaign Tools (free and paid) back in June. The standard kit includes a channel, moderation and Insight analytics– standard fare for YouTube accounts. The paid kit includes promoted videos, call-to-action overlays and TV ads online, allowing candidates to deepen their engagement and strategic messaging with voters.

One of the key twists in candidates using social media– YouTube especially– is smaller campaigns (ex. county commissioner, state senate) have gained national attention. In fact, some campaign ads have hit viral status. YouTube has become the ultimate platform for political exposure.

That’s not always a good thing.

Here are some of the most noteworthy political ads to go viral this election season. (Note: View totals were taken from candidates’ actual YouTube accounts. In many cases, these videos have been reposted by other accounts.)

Who: Basil Marceaux, Tennessee gubernatorial candidate
Views: 399,401
Key message: “I want you to put me in this building, the capital, behind me here, so I can do my issues and make you’s all freer than you were yesterday.”
Impact? Marceaux finished fifth (among five) in the Republican primary election with 3,505 votes (or 0.5 percent).

Who: Jerry Labriola, 3rd Congressional District candidate in Connecticut
Views: 1,818
Key message: “Look down. Back up. You’re in Washington with the man your congressman should be like.”
Impact? TBD. Labriola earned the Republican nomination to face incumbent U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro’s (D, CT – 3rd District) in the midterm election.

Who: Dale Peterson, Alabama Agriculture Commission candidate
Views: 1,849,652
Key message: “Alabama ag commissioner is one of the most powerful positions in Alabama, responsible for $5 billion. Bet you didn’t know that. You know why? Thugs and criminals.”
Impact? On Saturday, Peterson finished third to narrowly miss the Nov. 2 runoff election.

Who: Christine O’Donnell, candidate in Delaware’s U.S. Senate special election
Views: 100,588
Key message: “I’m not a witch. I’m nothing you’ve heard. I’m you.”
Impact? TBD. O’Donnell will face Democratic candidate Chris Coons on Nov. 2.

_

Here’s what we know with viral videos: Clever works. Clever piques our interest. Clever gives us something to talk about at the water cooler. But does clever work with political ads? Please take to the comment section.

There’s been a lot of buzz recently about Justin Bieber becoming the king of YouTube, surpassing Lady Gaga for most viewed video ever. The music videos for Bieber’s “Baby” and Gaga’s “Bad Romance” have each hit 250 million views – an astounding number – and those aren’t the only music videos currently in YouTube’s all-time top 10. This begs a few questions. If there is a renewed interest in music videos, why doesn’t MTV go retro and start playing them more regularly again? Are reruns of shows like Teen Mom and My Super Sweet 16 really a better ratings alternative than videos from today’s most popular musicians?

Many people like me who grew up watching hours of music on MTV can name the first video the station ever played on Aug. 1, 1981 – “Video Killed The Radio Star” by the Buggles. I’m guessing many teens these days don’t even know MTV stands for Music Television. So what killed the video star?

I suspect the answer is the on-demand world we live in where people can watch anything they want online at anytime. But we may be seeing a revival … also thanks to the Internet. Technology is allowing musicians to create quality videos and other content much quicker and cheaper than ever before. And, while MTV continues its refusal to air anything but bad reality TV most of the day, YouTube is making a push to fill the void — refocusing its music page to bring music discovery and recommendation to the forefront.

The new music page will feature the most popular music videos, special curated playlists, unsigned acts and even a new live concert series called Unstaged, which  will include interactive elements, such as the ability to control camera angles and real-time voting on which encores the artist will play.

The thing that was previously missing when simply watching your favorite videos on YouTube was the ability to discover a variety of artists, so this is a big step in the right direction. The new platform also should provide opportunities for savvy musicians to pump out regular content beyond music videos. Here’s hoping a resurgence in fresh music content might even lead to more music on Music Television again someday.

graffitianalysis.com

notsonoisy.com

Zhestkov.com

plusoneamsterdam.com

………. this is just weird

12ozprophet.com

improveverywhere.com

Do you have a recent fave?

Ever heard of Batting Stance Guy?  If you’re any kind of baseball fan, you’ll appreciate his uncanny ability to mimic the stance and swing of pretty much every major leaguer since the ’80s.  And even if you don’t know the difference between Torii Hunter and Catfish Hunter, you’ll appreciate his story as a great example of how technology, social media and a bit of creativity can turn something that probably made his buddies laugh at happy hour a few years ago into a growing Internet sensation.

In fact, Gar Ryness, aka Batting Stance Guy, has taken what he calls “the least marketable skill in America” and marketed it well enough to make money.  I’m guessing he can’t match the bank accounts of the players he imitates, but you have to give the guy credit.

He got his first bit of notoriety when one of his buddies took a video camera and filmed him doing impressions of Boston Red Sox players.  They cut it into a short clip, posted it on YouTube and sent a link to Bill Simmons at ESPN.com (a big Sox fan).  When Simmons called it out in his popular online column, things took off in a big way – beginning with the blogosphere and social networking sites and culminating with major stories in places like The New York Times, ESPN and MLB Network. 

Now, his videos have been viewed more than a million times on YouTube, he’s got his own Web site at battingstanceguy.com, he’s selling Batting Stance Guy merchandise, he’s being invited by teams to make appearances and you can follow him on Facebook and Twitter. And believe it or not, he was even hired by Sony to impersonate players while wearing electrodes to help them make their MLB 2009 video game more realistic. 

Do yourself a favor and check out some of his work, such as World Series Walk-Off Homers.  All of you fans here in Minneapolis will particularly enjoy his Minnesota Twins compilation, which ends with his impression of Kent Hrbek, fat Kent Hrbek and fattest Kent Hrbek.  Good stuff.

An editor’s note appended to George’s post points us to an Ad Age article in which Simon Dumenco points out the obvious: If Twitter and Facebook and YouTube don’t start actually making money soon, these social media institutions are going to run themselves into the ground.

As a communicator who makes his living in large part by helping people understand what all this “social stuff” means to them, you might think I’d be shaking in my loafers about the impending doom looming on the horizon of Silicon Valley. You might think I’d be fearing a chorus of “I told you so” from the skeptics who didn’t want to bother with anything more social than a comment-box form on a Web page. And you’d be mistaken.

If Twitter died tomorrow, my job wouldn’t change one bit, and if it did, it’d probably be for the better. Because helping people use Twitter is a small part of what I do. The bigger, more meaningful part is helping people understand how the values to which social media gave new life — openness, creativity, sense of community, listening more than you speak, making meaningful connections with relevant people — should inform what they do day to day. If Twitter were to die, those ideas would live on, and I’d have an easier time persuading people that the principles of social media are far more powerful than the tools that put those principles into action.

When George proposed the end of the honeymoon phase with social media, he wasn’t wrong — but he was focused on just one piece of the puzzle. Specific tools like Twitter and Facebook are the sizzle, entirely susceptible to fading out once the heat dies down. But the steak — the substance of social media, the part for which the honeymoon phase won’t end anytime soon — is composed of the communities, the connections, the human contact we make every day through social media platforms. 

You — you blog readers, you microblog followers, you video watchers, you photo uploaders, you status updaters — you’re far more meaningful to me than the sites on which we’ve connected. If any one of those sites dies out or becomes so overrun with spammers and other clutter that it becomes worthless, I’m not going to sever my connections with you; I’m going to seek out the next best way to stay connected with you. Whether you’re my customer, my colleague, my prospect, my key reporter, my close friend or my favorite social media microcelebrity, you’re the steak.

This concept took user generated content to a whole new level. Not only did users create their own videos and upload to the site, but they were judged, selected and invited to participate all because of their interaction with this powerful channel – changing the audition process as it exists. For Carnegie Hall, it offered an entirely new audience the opportunity to participate through the audition process, by playing in the Orchestra, or by attending the live event. For the selected musicians, it was the opportunity of a lifetime, as most probably wouldn’t have attempted to make it through Carnegie’s doors on just any old regular day. For YouTube, it took the videos off the webpage and created a truly interactive experience for all involved. Plus, the site received more than 15 million page views from people in more than 30 countries. Not a bad deal for advertisers.

The intersection of YouTube and Carnegie Hall is just another example of the endless possibilities available to companies and brands through new media channels like YouTube. Not to mention, the opportunities it creates for individuals to realize their dreams. So dust off the old horn or strings, record yourself playing a ditty and upload it to YouTube. Who knows- maybe you could be the next Yo-Yo Ma?