People who don't want to
be on YouTube because it's too
crowded, it reminds me of the old
Yogi Berra line "nobody
eats there anymore because it's too crowded."
Its like, right. So there's a hundred
seven million unique visitors a month to
that go to YouTube, and they're watching
somewhere north of sixty five videos a
month on average
and if you don't want to be
found or seen, I guess that's
OK, you may be a hermit and that
could be a legitimate business
model for you , but for most of
us
it's like wow, how do I get
my story told in that kind of environment.
And the real challenge is, and this is why it's
hard, is that currently there's about twenty
hours of new video uploaded every minute and
you've got a lot of competition. So in order
to get found and then get
shared, which is really the success formula,
you need to first of all optimize your video so
that it's found when people are doing a
search and then you've got to involve
yourself with the community.
You've got to be somebody that they
know and they feel like, "you know
that was a great video, Im going to send it on to
my friends." And that combination of optimization
and engaging the community is really the successful formula.
There are disadvantages to YouTube.
I, for one, would love to have
the kind of a Web analytics that
I can have on a website and
you can get Google analytics with YouTube but
only if you're a branded channel. In the
meantime , you get YouTube
Insight for free and that gives you some
information that useful , but is certainly not
the kind of a robust information that marketers
really want. So, that would be
one area that I would love to
see more improvements in and frankly the
other thing is is I think YouTube was
afraid to be a sort of a
direct response
kind of medium and a lot of marketers, if
you can show me the lead, "why
am I doing this now?"
Now, there's a lot of legitimate ways to use
videos earlier in the branding cycle
in the awareness cycle, in the product
preferrence cycle where you can then
harvest it later. But yeah, there's a lot of people who
would like to make a little more direct.
I had the delightful pleasure of
introducing/interviewing the producer of Monty Python
who had put up a YouTube
channel strictly for defensive purposes all he
wanted to do was make sure that people
werent ripping off their content and uploading
for free and one of the mechanisms
that he thought he could do that
with was having his own channel with high
quality content
so it wasn't grainy, you don't have to go
somewhere else to get the bootleg version
of some Monty Phython bit - come to our channel.
And then as sort of afterthought
they did a direct to buy link at
the bottom of the video. So,
if you like the video, you want to
buy the CD, click here and go to Amazon
Sales went up twenty three thousand percent on
the click to buy. So for those
direct marketers who are saying, "yeah but YouTube
doesn't," it's like
go read the case study on Monty Python
because it is beginning to become a
direct response mechanism for appropriate products.
So it works for anything for sale on iTunes,
it works for anything for sale on
Amazon
I'm expecting that e-commerce platform to expand
and grow over the years
but yeah YouTube is worth a
second look, even for direct response marketing
I think one of the most important
trends in search is YouTube.
It is the second most popular search engine
on the planet. Google is number one ,but
there were 3.6 billion searches conducted
on YouTube last month, which
makes it the number two search engine. So, if
you say "oh, no no no the second
search engine is Yahoo search" or "Bing is
coming on strong," is like yeah
that's true too - but YouTube is
not to be ignored.
It is too large to try to
add an asterisk and say,
"Yeah, but that doesn't count."
So I think the importance of the
of social media and video strategies forum
that was held here concurrently with search engine strategies
is sort-of recognition
is that yeah the definitions may
be moving around a little and it may
not be as precise and narrow
as we remember it from five years ago,
but that's the way the markets growing
and you need to understand search and
you need to understand video and you need
to understand the interaction between the two
of them and guess what? You could come
to one place at one time
and get sessions on both subjects