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Digital Presence & Marketing Strategy

Optimizing with Video!

I had a client ask about marketing with podcasts or video. I did some research and this is what I found – not new news, just some help.

1. Make the video quality stuff. If it’s not good, it’s probably not going to be worth the time invested.

2. Put the site name in the video. (Not all video farms allow links.)

Here are a few sites you can share your video with:

youtube.com
myspace.com
google.com
spikedhumor.com
revver.com (this one pays you)
metacafe.com (this one too, but I’m yet to make a dime on it)
stupidvideos.com

Here are a few websites to propagate your video:

digg.com
milkandcookies.com
reddit.com
stumbleupon.com

Do any of you have anything to add?

4 replies on “Optimizing with Video!”

I think you need to dig deeper with this client.

Why are the considering this?

How do they plan to use it?

What is the intended outcome (what do they want their audience to do?)

Who is their target audience?

Does the target audience even visit sites like YouTube or even use products like iPods that are usually the key to a podcast?

Forget the discussion about how to do it and go back to the why? Begin with the end in mind. Answer all these questions and you may find that “marketing with a podcast or video” is a complete waste of time and energy.

Excellent response Russ Page. I had similar thoughts at first. Then, while on a business trip to Door County, WI, I read an article in a Southwest Airline Magazine about what YouTube and other “video farms” have done for certain “entrepreneurs”. It talked about some of the success stories that have come about because of this underground sounding board. I was shocked.

Later that same week, I saw an awards show on TV that highlighted the “Best Podcast of 2006”. Some “nobody” was featured, I think her name was Brook Brodack. One of her videos was viewed a million and a half times — she landed a Hollywood contract to produce television content. I began to think, “Am I in the right industry?!”

After reading your comment, I google’d “youtube success stories” and found this:

Morning Edition, June 28, 2006 · YouTube, the wildly popular video-sharing Web site, was an underground phenomenon just a few months ago. Now, with millions of viewers and millions in venture capital, YouTube is entering into a deal with NBC to promote the network’s programming on the site.

Like most Silicon Valley success stories, YouTube started in a garage. Founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley got frustrated when they were trying to share video with friends on the Internet and found the process too complicated.

They officially launched YouTube in December 2005. So far, they’ve raised more than $11 million in venture capital. The site is so popular that about 60,000 videos are uploaded to it each day. Fifty million videos are posted on the site at any given time, Chen says… ” (phrases bolded for emphasis). Woah Nelly!

So, I guess, in answer to the question about Why? How? What? and Who? – both of us, and millions of others, have found a few answers and a fairly new use for podcasts to creatively advertise our businesses.

I think sometimes it’s easy to look at YouTube and think what they did is easy or replicable, and it is, but . . . it isn’t as well.

Steve and Chad did a lot of things right from the very beginning because Revver was also around when YouTube was first around, but you don’t see Revver getting purchased for $1.6 billion.

YouTube was a huge hit from the beginning because it was easy to use whereas sites like Revver made you download a piece of software in order to upload video.

YouTube made it easy to share the videos through email and by actually placing them in a blog with a small snippet of code that they provided. What I’m getting at is people always talk about viral videos as though it’s some thing you just do, but YouTube actually had the system in place that made it easy for a video to become viral. That lead to traffic and more users, which led to more and more attention in the news, which led to more and more users, which led to getting the attention of CBS, NBC and others, which led to a buyout from Google.

Google is the king of search, and nobody had a great solution for searching video, and YouTube provided this element because of the tagging system and because of the volume of videos they had. So Google was the natural company to acquire YouTube. Google is now the king of video search.

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