It’s almost the end of the work week! You’ve been working hard, attending meetings, answering phone calls and, in general, being fine exemplars of what it means to be a business professional. In celebration, here’s a compilation of links that you might have been too busy to notice.

First, kudos to Lincoln Group of Schools for capturing the human side of their students in their 65th birthday video:

Now, without further ado, some of the interesting stories floating around the Interwebs this week.

• How For-Profit Colleges Can Save Themselves—and Higher Education (The Atlantic)
• Imagine America Foundation’s Adult Excellence Award Offers Funds to Underserved Non-Traditional Students (Imagine America)
• Are We Ready To Support Online Learners? (Inside Higher Ed)
• Program Integrity Regulation Q&A (Department of Education)
• University bids for students on Groupon (Chicago Tribune)

Regardless of the industry, brands are often tempted to repurpose their television advertisements or promotional talking-head videos as online video. To a certain extent, this type of thinking is understandable. After all, who wouldn’t want to maximize the return on an investment in video content by putting it everywhere they can?

Don’t do this. Or, at least, if you do happen to do this, don’t expect them to get a lot of views or engagement.  Almost every piece of consumer technology invented in the last fifteen years has been devoted to helping consumers get what they want, when they want it and usually without advertising messages.  Do you really expect those empowered consumers to start searching for the same advertisements that most aren’t paying attention to on television right now?

Don’t be ashamed to admit you agree. I’ve worked in advertising for years and I’ll confess I can’t stand watching advertisements. With the exception of one 30-second spot that never fails to make me laugh, I can’t think of any television advertisement that I’d waste my free time watching online. How many do you want to watch? Admitting that different mediums require different types of messaging isn’t a sign of a weakness. It’s the first step in social media recovery.

So, without further ado, I present the following videos. Drawn from the realms of both business and healthcare (and one that’s just plain cool), they should make you envious. They don’t all have view counts over a million. All but one of them didn’t have a creative agency involved in their production. But these are your competitors when posting a video online and, hopefully, provide a bit of inspiration to do something different.

Lab Romance

View Count: 68,048

(more…)