Updates from Zazoom

Buzz60 recently hit the red carpet for Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential, where Bryan Cranston gave us an exclusive on how “Breaking Bad” will reach its conclusive ending this summer after five successful seasons on the AMC Network. AMC, in turn, picked up the video for its blog.

Maxim Magazine recently held a contest for its 16th anniversary commemorative issue, encouraging readers to vote their favorite celebrity as Maxim’s ‘Sexiest Cover Girl of all Time.’ Actress Jennifer Love Hewitt beat out a slew of other celebs like Jessica Alba, Mila Kunus, and even Olivia Wilde to win the title. Buzz60 just had to pass it on. After our host Kristina Behr filed this report, Social Media Coordinator Mallory Johns, sent out a tweet to the starlet and her over 506,000 fans. Love Hewitt returned the favor, retweeting it to her adoring fan club. The little tweet that could picked up a total of 64 retweets, 2619 clicks of our story across Twitter, and over 400 video views directly attributed to that one tweet. Thanks J. Love!

Buzz60′s Patrick Jones combs the Internet’s infinite supply of videos to bring viewers the funny, weird, shocking and just plain entertaining. This episode of Best Viral Videos of the Day features an adorable goat’s first bath, a puddle jump dare gone way wrong and a fan distraught over the trade of football player Wes Welker. Within its first five days of release, Patrick’s video garnered an impressive 1.2M views on AOL alone.

When it was first posted on September 20, 2011, the Zazoom team was justifiably proud of this story – smart, funny, edgy, entertaining. But nobody could have  imagine it would surpass 1M, 2M, 3M and now 4 million views on YouTube including over 5,300 likes and 2,300 comments…and its still growing! 

Chris Fralic

Zazoom’s unique knack for engaging audiences was on display at Digital Hollywood New York, where our Chief Revenue Officer Steve Bradbury was recognized for creating a standout model for industry forums. At two panels, Bradbury delivered his unique style of moderation to a new audience, and won the support of Venture Capitalist Chris Fralic. In a post entitled “The Best Conference Panel Format Ever” for his blog Nothing to Say, Fralic writes: “He asked the panelists for potential topics beforehand, and as we arrived he handed us a list of 20 numbered questions/statements…. After very brief  introductions, he asked each panelist to pick any question and then Agree or Disagree and explain why….We ended up covering 8-10 of the questions that were most interesting to the panelists, and the feedback and engagement from the audience was really positive and made for an engaging session.” We’re with you on that one Chris, in the end, engagement always wins.

Professor Peter Shaplen defined a recent assignment to his journalism students as “among the most challenging questions facing media today.” The challenge to his class at the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University: Can media outlets attract a younger demographic, and make a vibrant business model at the same time? He first directed the students to a short list of alternative digital websites that included Buzz60.com. “I told them to go beyond Jon Stewart and (Stephen) Colbert,” he said.  Shaplen adds that his biggest goal is to ignite interest in news programming among young people. “They don’t trust what big legacy media companies do,” he said. “They prefer short-form content with attitude, like Buzz60.”  We’re with you, professor!

Buzz60 is delighted to have been named a featured AOL homepage partner. It’s another sign that Buzz60′s insightful, entertaining and timely content resonates both with AOL’s editors and its audience. Buzz60 joins established national brands WSJ, Entertainment Tonight, Martha Stewart and HGTV in the homepage’s prime promotional position.

A whole new audience got to see our Parenticity host Dawn Siff when she appeared as a guest on “Anderson Live” to talk about Lenore Skenazy’s unsupervised playdates. Dawn came out in support of Skenazy’s Free Range Children philosophy, saying it’s good parenting to make your kid ready for the world. Check out some behind-the-scenes shots and Dawn’s reflections on the day at the Parenticity blog and watch her below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDlRkIyXcHM

Weatherman Todd Gutner of Boston’s WBZ stood tall during a recent forecast. A summer storm was passing his area when lightning struck the TV station, taking out power. Gutner never wavered, continuing his weather report in almost total darkness. The lights started the slow process of returning as the silhoutted Gutner exclaimed he would keep on going no matter what. Well, with a display of courage like that, Buzz60 just had to pass it on. So our host Patrick Jones filed this report. Within minutes, Gutner tweeted our P-J. Bros for life!

Recently, US Olympian Rickey Berens found out that he would be swimming in the Olympics via Twitter. His reaction was one of joy and complete shock – and one that can only be captured on social media. Zazoom was one of the first media outlets to produce a story on all of this. In addition, Zazoom’s own Patrick Jones tweeted Ricky Berens about the story and received a response from Ricky himself: