New research indicates that the long-held promise of TV/Internet convergence is gaining traction, albeit slowly. Leichtman Research Group data shows that just over 24% of all U.S. homes have a Web-to-TV connection, while 5% of adults are watching YouTube and Hulu on their TV screens each week.

Leichtman data measured homes with Web-TV connections via video game and Blu-ray systems, as well as compatible TVs. Add in homes that can connect with a TiVo, Roku player or computer, and the amount is estimated to come in just north of 24%.

Leichtman research shows that while 5% of adults watch Web video on the TV weekly, the figure is just 1% on a daily basis. Since game consoles are so widespread, the viewing is largely among young men. Among men ages 18 to 34, 16% are viewing Web video on the big screen weekly via a console, Blu-ray or compatible TV.

The findings come from a survey of 1,250 U.S. homes.

Research from the Yankee Group shows that 23% of homes with an HDTV set have the ability to link the Internet to that screen. Still, only 5% of all homes are watching Internet video on TV.

There have been suggestions that the opportunity to watch video from YouTube, Hulu, ESPN360, CBS Sports and a slew of other sites on a large TV screen could prompt people to cancel a cable or satellite subscription.

But Bruce Leichtman, who conducted the research, said that’s unlikely. The people with the Web-to-TV devices are likely to covet the typical run of TV channels and be willing to pay the price to keep a subscription.

A New York start-up company called Boxee is jumping into the mix.  Boxee bills its software as a simple way to access multiple Internet video and music sites, and to bring them to a large monitor or television that one might be watching from a sofa across the room.

Some of Boxee’s fans also think it is much more: a way to euthanize that costly $100-a-month cable or satellite connection.  

The software, which is free and available for download at www.boxee.tv, works on Mac and Linux computers, and on Apple’s set-top box, Apple TV. A version of Boxee for Windows PCs is being tested among a limited group of users.  Boxee gives users a single interface to access all the photos, video and music on their hard drives, along with a wide range of television shows, movies and songs from sites like Hulu, Netflix, YouTube, CNN.com and CBS.com.

The most ardent Boxee fanatics — almost all of its 200,000 early adopters seem to have turned into online evangelists for the company — then connect their computers to their living room televisions.

The challenge for the cable industry is how they grapple with the fact that this is in some way a substitution for some of the things they do.   So will this replace cable subscriptions?  I doubt it but it will certainly be interesting to see how many homes this influences in years to come.  Services like Boxee will come into the mix but will be used to supplement the entire television viewing experience. 

Face it we are a society now that demands content be accessible whenever and wherever we wish.

Robin Donovan will present “ReBranding a Library” at Plattsmouth Public Library March 17, 2010.

Will will make a presentation titled “Your Digital Resume” at the 2010 YP Summit. According to a recent CareerBuilder.com study, 45 percent of companies screen candidates using social media tools. It is no secret that employers check Facebook profiles for embarrassing, drunken photos. Beyond eliminating embarrassing photos, there are many proactive strategies that you can employ, at little or no cost, to set yourself apart from your career competition. You will learn how to fill your Google search results with glowing references, positive recommendations and numerous examples of your work and thinking. Learn how you can use the power of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, SlideShare, Flickr and a variety of other social tools to promote yourself and create a must-hire social resume.

William’s public relations and social media initiatives have been recognized by the PRSA. He has spoken about social media for many organizations and businesses including the AIM Institute’s Infotec 2009 and the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce Annual Executives Meeting.

According to Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch, YouTube just announced that they will be expanding closed captioning support for all videos on YouTube and rolling out an auto-captioning feature on videos featuring the English language.

Woah.

The implications of this move are extremely interesting. Think about the possibilities, and what this does for Google, online content, search, and extending your online global audience.

Google will launch a service that automatically adds English subtitles to a video, if English is the language spoken in the sound track. That alone is impressive. Speech to text recognition software has been around for a long time, but for Google to have something in their pocket that they feel is good enough to add to public user videos means that they have something highly versatile. Of course, they say it will need input and scrutiny from the video owner, but that’s just a little way of asking for help in making sure they index your content correctly.

Online content wins, because previously, there was no easy and automated way for spoken words to be found in online search unless there was a video transcription. Now Google is going to attempt to do it automatically. Even if they only get it 50% correct, there’s a tremendous opportunity for them to have a handle on a significant amount of content that their competitors do not. This increases the public’s ability to find relevant information, and it also increases Google’s ability to sell contextual advertising.

Finally, when you pair what Google is already doing with offering live website text translation into different languages with auto-captioning, you have the opportunity to instantly expand one little English language video into a globally understandable piece of video content. Without doing anything more, people across the globe can find your video content via search.

Again. Woah.

Keep watching this topic. If it works, this could stir up the competitive search landscape if Bing isn’t close to doing the same thing. Another notch in organizing the world’s information indeed, Google.

Scott will make a presentation titled “SOCIAL MEDIA: like networking on steroids” at the Midamerica Direct Marketing Association luncheon on March 3, 2010.

Social media like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are so popular and powerful that they can be used to help sell products, services, almost anything – even the people who use them. Consider their popularity: If you Google “social media” you get 163 million results. Heck, “candy” generates only 110 million results.

And their wide use: Facebook has 400 million users, which is a larger population than any country except China and India.

We can use the social power of social media for self-promotion and meeting our professional goals, Scott Rowe, partner in charge of interactive planning and strategy at Bozell, told the March 3 luncheon meeting of the Mid-America Direct Marketing Association. “It’s like networking on steroids,” Rowe said. “Just think of this giant community and the number of people you can communicate with.”

When I first moved to Omaha from the Northeast many people asked me if I’d taken leave of my senses.  And maybe at the time I had.  Never having lived outside of the Northeast before I admit to being somewhat sheltered from any knowledge of what it was really like to live anywhere else.

What struck me almost immediately was a variation in weather patterns that had a huge effect on my mood.  When you woke up in Connecticut and it was raining – you were in for a rainy day – or two – or three – as much as a week.  In Nebraska that’s rarely the case.  There have been many days when I’ve headed into the office with full rain regalia, hunkering down for the dreary day ahead.  And quite frequently by the time I’d read my initial influx of e-mails the sun was shining high in the sky.  Other days it took as long as until lunchtime before the sun poked through the clouds and dried up all the rain.  An entire rainy day is just not all that common – not to mention a rainy week.

Then there were those cloudy and dank days in the Northeast.  No real threat of rain but no chance of sun.  We had whole weeks of that sometimes.  When that happens in Omaha, the population is totally nonplussed.  They’re just not used to it.

And when you combine this sunshine phenomenon with the fact that we are at the western most edge of the central time zone – which means we hang onto to our sunshine longer into the night – we could take the crankiest Northeasterner and turn them into a purring pussycat!  Just look at me!

When I first raised this point with my colleagues they said I was crazy.  “Omaha doesn’t have the most sunshine by a longshot” they anxiously pointed out.  That’s true.  Omaha has 60% sunshine and Hartford only 4% less at 56%.  Doesn’t seem as though it would make a huge difference – but it does.  And as far as those places that have as much as 90% sunshine like Yuma, Arizona.  I have no desire to fry an egg on my sidewalk during the month of June – Omaha is plenty hot enough for me!

So you’ve been publishing your blog in order to get some helpful information out there into the hands of those who might need it.  Then a commercial web site decides that they like your voice and are interested in republishing your blog.  That’s great.  But beware of one critical thing.  The tendency to want to increase your frequency of posting is understandable.  You want to keep up with their other bloggers and add as much value as possible.  Just be careful that you don’t lose your voice.  The reason they’re republishing you in the first place.  And make absolutely sure that your posts are relevant – don’t force it.  Try ramping up slowly and don’t post anything that is not true to your original blog “brand”.

If you’re just realizing that this whole social networking thing is something you want to pay attention to, you’re a little late to the game. Additionally, if you think it’s the Holy Grail of advertising and marketing you need to put down the kool-aid you’re drinking. I’d say we’ve hit the spot where we can just consider it part of, well… networking, marketing and advertising. The key thing is, just like in anything else, you need to understand the medium or you’re going to look like a fool.

These observations were inspired when I got an email from someone I don’t know asking me to become a Facebook fan of a company I’m not familiar with. Now, this is a legitimate company with a legit fan page. There are just several things wrong here.

• I got spammed
• They asked me to become a fan of theirs, after having spammed me
• I am not a fan of spam
• They tried to write informally, as if we’d met or I knew them
• They had messed up formatting and funky characters in their email, which I assume is a copy/paste problem. So they obviously don’t test their messaging on multiple email clients, computers or platforms. Note: if it doesn’t look right in Outlook on a PC, you might want to fix a couple things.

So instead of becoming a fan of theirs, I am considering a few options.

• Create an anti-fan page on Facebook. “Can this rotting banana get more fans than Company X?”
• Promote said fan page to everyone I know who may have been spammed by them as well
• Get more fans than they have (they currently have 296)
• Show them that using the tools wrong can yield undesired results online

What will most likely happen, though, is that I won’t do anything. Typing this up is enough effort.

The other undesired result of their attempt at promoting their business and trying to build their fan base, however, is that I will never become a fan of their business. I will recount this story if and when I ever hear their name. I will want nothing to do with them.

Facebook is a place (for me at least) for me to interact with people I actually know and brands/companies that I actually am a fan of. It’s more personal, and although not everyone does, I have some criteria for letting you into my little Facebook world. Had their message started out by introducing themselves, explaining why they were sending me a message, and then suggesting that I check out their site or Facebook page for more info, my reaction would have been completely different. I would have probably checked out the site. Unlikely that I’d have become a fan, but the opportunity for me to engage their services in the future would have still been an option.

If a stranger comes up to you and asks you to declare publicly that you guys are buddies, how likely are you to do so?

Yeah – me neither. Sorry, Company X – not a fan.

Your blog is finally becoming established and you’ve started to notice that one individual is making comments fairly regularly. Perhaps you’ve scored your first fan.  But how engaged is this contributor if the main purpose of these frequent comments on your blog is really a thinly disguised opportunity to site that individual’s own blog.  That contributor is what I refer to as a Blog Hog.  They don’t really care about what you said – they want your readers to read what they’ve said.

So what do you do about a Blog Hog?  Well if the blogs compete directly for commercial dollars that’s a battle in the making.  But if they’re both informational blogs hoping to help folks in general – oh well.  If you feel that it somehow compromises your content you can always contact the other blogger and ask them to back off.  Or maybe you should just hawk your own blog in comments on theirs.  Either way you should feel flattered that someone thinks your blog is the way to help them capture readers of their own.

Granted, when you chose Marie Osmond as your spokesperson you had no way of knowing her son would lose his battle with depression and plummet to his death.  Nevertheless, I would suggest that you pull those “perky” “chirpy” little TV spots and allow her the ability to show the necessary decorum during this difficult time.  For your own sake if not for that of Marie or her fans. These spots are not currently helping your brand.

Let’s face it.  Anyone who knows Marie enough to be positively influenced by her is certainly aware that her son died tragically.  And they probably have a little soft spot for her.

Your continuing to run these upbeat, bordering on giddy, spots is really in poor taste (sorry for the pun – I should take my own advice).  It shows a lack of sensitivity and caring.  And what is one thing we expect from the company that Marie endorses?  What is the price of entry for the company that will help us reclaim our lives and look our best?  You said it – caring!  How can I believe that you care about me when you clearly don’t even care about Marie?

And I need to know you care about me if I’m going to trust you.