MeHype: People-Powered Video Blog

Recently, I came across an interesting question on LinkedIn that grabbed my attention at the end of a long week. This question helped me to summarize the thoughts of my week, one that involves all of these terms in some fashion or another. I am sharing it in hopes that you will take the time to answer it as well.

Q: Have you noticed that there is jargon explosion in marketing? I want to have a better understanding of what some of the terms we use mean to prospective clients? So what do you think of immediately when you hear the terms:

• viral marketing
• web marketing
• interactive agency

Here are my answers:

Viral Marketing - a social occurrence whereby an online community adopts, shares and consumes some content (text, audio, video, data) that affects an action favorable to some brand, no matter their product or service. It is virtual Word of Mouth Marketing.

Web Marketing - the combined technology available for marketing activities by one brand that can include a wealth of technologies, including: blogs, microblogs, widgets, social networks, social applications, etc.

Interactive Agency - A group of creative individuals interested in affecting change through the use of technology, psychology and social action by utilizing techniques defined as viral web marketing.

Original Post: http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=138947

Online-video viewing has really reached critical mass, as more than 75% of all U.S. internet users watch online videos at least every now and then; almost 45% are watching every week and 12% view them daily.

Photo: Stephanie Diani

Mike Vorhaus is president of Magid Advisors for Frank N. Magid Associates and can be found on Twitter.

But it's not just about who is watching -- it's also what they're watching. We did a study for Metacafe and found that the top 10 types of online video, according to consumers, range from user-generated videos, to news, weather, movie clips, etc. What's notable is that eight of the top 10 most-popular video genres are short form.

It turns out the small screen and shorter length can be just as compelling. More than a third (37%) of short-form video viewers find that content equally or more entertaining than full-length shows on their TV set. And while 9% of online-video viewers say they watch more TV live on their TV set due to watching online video, 20% say they are watching less live TV on their set due to online video viewing.

Original Article: http://tinyurl.com/asv7yv

Although this article was written back in February of this year (a lifetime in the Social Media timeline) I think that many companies/brands interested in Video Marketing, specifically Viral Video Marketing, will find this list helpful. Be sure to check out the video links, these are some of the more successful videos out there that experienced high levels of "virality" due to the content and packaing. Enjoy! - Tyler@MeHype

When Judson Laipply posted his six-minute "Evolution of Dance" video to YouTube in April of 2006, he didn't advertise it at all. One month later, someone noticed his frenzied moves and e-mailed it to a friend. That friend e-mailed to other friends and more than 100 million views later, the rest is history. "It was all just pure luck" Mr. Laipply says.

Fast forward three years, and viral video sensations are not so easy to come by. As the amount of video online has exploded, it's harder than ever – and it was never easy – to break out. To launch his sequel dance video last month, Mr. Laipply partnered with PeopleJam Inc. and found a sponsor, Saveology.com LLC, to pony up tens of thousands of dollars for marketing. Even so, after more than six weeks, "Evolution of Dance 2" is hovering at about 4 million viewers so far – a metric that the first video hit within a few days.

Of course, there are still the occasional lightning-strike hits, such as the home video David After Dentist of a boy recovering from a dentist visit that attracted nearly 10 million views in two weeks with no marketing. But for most videos, standing out in the crowd is a tricky balance between trying too hard and not trying enough.

"If you just upload to YouTube, it's like dropping a grain of sand on the beach," says Ian Schafer, chief executive of New York ad agency Deep Focus. "But it's weird, you can't just blast these out as a press release. People need to feel that sense of discovery when they come onto it."

The key is to master the art of subtle marketing. Disingenuous marketing, such as Trident's unsuccessful viral video campaign for a fictitious TV show, are quickly dismissed by Web-savvy audiences.

Experts say that there are three important factors in creating a sense of discovery in a viral video campaign.

Great Content

It goes without saying that content of the video has to be worth being discovered. Many popular online videos are short – under three minutes – and have some elements of cognitive dissonance. Excluding celebrity videos, many popular videos are deliberately bizarre juxtapositions, such as HotForWords – a woman in a low-cut blouse talking about etymology.

In the fall of 2006, Tom Dickson, founder of Utah blender manufacturer Blendtec, donned a white lab coat and blended a rotisserie chicken, a McDonalds Extra Value meal, a bag of marbles and a rake. The video got picked up by the news aggregator Digg.com, and within a week it had attracted more than 5 million views.

Since then, Mr. Dickson has blended everything from an iPhone to a TomTom navigational device, and built a following for his regular "Will it Blend?" segments. "We're not creating advertising," says Blendtec Vice President George Wright. "We're creating something people want to watch." He says that Blendtec's videos have been viewed more than 200 million times.

Build a Fan Base

Huge audiences – such as the 15 million who have watched more than 200 people freeze in place at New York City's Grand Central Station – don't often materialize overnight.

Charlie Todd, the founder of Improv Everywhere, which staged the Grand Central video, began loading his troupe's videos onto YouTube soon after the site launched in 2005. He has staged more than 80 events – such as the No Pants Subway Ride 2009 – and posted most of them on YouTube.

"We have a pop-up at the end of the video that says 'Click here to see all of our other videos and subscribe,'" Mr. Todd says. "That's one thing that everyone should do on YouTube." As a result, Improv Everywhere has 105,000 subscribers who receive notifications whenever he posts a new video.

Mr. Todd also promotes his videos to bloggers, and he spends time reading blogs to see which ones would likely be interested in a particular video. But he prefers to do his promotion anonymously, usually by e-mailing a tip to a general blog address. "I think that's probably better than tracking down the e-mail address of the person who runs the blog and will get irritated," he says. "Just send it in and say check it out."

Search Engine Optimization

It's also important to make sure your video can be easily discovered through YouTube search. "You have to put in dedication and time," says Aaron Zamost, spokesman for Google Inc.'s YouTube. "People don't know how much work uploaders put into this stuff."

Mr. Zamost said videos should have clear titles, an accurate description and appropriate keyword tags so that they can appears correctly in a YouTube search. He also suggests using YouTube Insight to figure out which blogs are directing traffic to your video and where your viewers live – so, for instance, if your video is popular in Brazil you can add a tag for Brazil so it will pop up in searches there. "People are using these tools on a daily basis to optimize their videos," Mr. Zamost says.

It's also part of the YouTube culture for videos to piggy-back on each other's success. If a video is popular, YouTubers often race to create 'video responses' that will then appear next to the popular video. A great example of that is a video highlighting a glitch in an Electronic Arts' video game that appeared to show a pixelated Tiger Woods walking on water. In response, the gamemaker posted a video that showed the real Tiger Woods literally walking on water – which attracted a far bigger audience than the original video.

Mr. Schafer of the ad agency Deep Focus says he often recommends his clients take the low-risk piggy-back approach. "We attach ourselves to content we know will travel," Mr. Schafer says, "instead of creating something with the hope that it might."

That way he can be sure that his video will be discovered – which is the whole point.

Write to Julia Angwin at julia.angwin@wsj.com

Original Post: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=112789

By Philip Leigh

Most everyone agrees that future video advertising will be significantly different. At least five changes are likely. 

1.  The advertising market will shrink for several years. Digital media projects that five years from now the aggregate advertising spend will be smaller than it was last year. Total advertising revenues from all modes in 2013 are projected at $245 billion as compared to $285 billion in 2008. Internet advertising will gain share from 8% to 22%.

The Great Recession of 2009 is leading sponsors to radically alter long-held assumptions about the marketing and advertising uses of media. In short, advertisers will face new competition from their own sponsors as sponsors increasingly use the Internet as a direct media channel to customers. They'll allocate a greater share of marketing budgets to enrich their own Web sites as interactive, lead-generation properties. Similarly, they'll intensify focus on their own email marketing and employ embedded video and related forms of Digital Media in press releases, product promotions, and corporate communications.

2. Video will migrate to the Internet. Cable and satellite networks are evolutionary dead-ends that cannot hope to match the innovative pace enabled by the Internet.

Consumers are learning to get unlimited Internet access at their TV, most commonly by attaching a laptop computer. The computer's onboard WiFi links over a home network to the Internet thereby transforming the laptop into an Internet Gateway for the TV. A remote mouse and keyboard provides a lean-back viewing experience 15 - 20 feet distant from the screen. While the uninitiated sometimes assume the set-up is too complex, numerous instructional videos demonstrate that it is easier to connect a laptop computer to the TV than it is to attach a TiVo or cable set-top box. 

An estimated 10 million Americans watch Internet video on TV monitors via computers. Ultimately it is an intermediate step leading to either (1) browser-centric TVs or (2) TVs, or devices similar to the Apple TV, with their own Apps Store or Yahoo-like widgets. The store would be like the iPhone one, except that its (typically free) applications would enable Web sites like Hulu.com and YouTube to be watched on TV.  

3. Product promotion will replace product advertising. The Internet will redefine product promotions to fit into a larger context. Historically product promotions were nearly synonymous with product advertising. The applicable marketing budget was allocated to the agencies and buyers responsible for the creative work and media placement.

Increasingly, sponsors will incorporate their own use of the Internet into product promotion. By enriching their websites, press releases, email marketing, and corporate communications with Digital Media they'll trigger transactions and generate leads in activities that bypass the traditional advertising industry. 

4. Ad rolls will become shorter.  There are three reasons why Internet Video advertisers will be able to justify accommodating consumer interest in reducing time devoted to disruptive commercials.

First, is the avoidance of ad-time allocations for local network affiliates or cable operators. For example, sites like Hulu don't need a local TV affiliate to stream shows over the Internet. This frees-up about four to five minutes per hour. Second, unlike DVR users, viewers of streamed Internet Video cannot fast-forward through advertisements. Third, Internet Video can employ non-disruptive interactive overlay ads.  As a result, the typical hour-long TV show on Hulu takes only 48 minutes -- including six minutes of ads.

5. Advertising industry bypass will promote interactivity. Web sites with the highest "click-through" rates are engaged in triggering transactions. Examples include Amazon.com and iTunes. This is partly because visitors show up to shop, but it also partly reflects good behavioral targeting of ads for suggested merchandise based on the visitor's prior purchases. 

As sponsors gain experience using Internet media to connect directly with customers, they'll also concentrate on inducing transactions. Thus, as an indirect consequence of bypassing the advertising industry, sponsors will learn how to increase click-through rates, thereby advancing the state-of-the-art for interactive advertising.  In short, Internet advertising and Internet retailing will overlap.

See comments to the Original Post.

Philip Leigh is president of Inside Digital Media, Inc. Contact him here.

If you are a business owner looking to expand your current marketing message with some new, flashy tools you might want to wait. These days - with the current economic environment (recession anyone?), changing business legislation & regulation, and decreasing buddgets - business owners need to market their businesses while paying attention to what their customers are saying more and more.

Marketing (and Advertising for that matter) has changed dramatically in the last few years, with the increased popularity of Social Media and User-Generated Content, it has become more about what people say about you then what you say about yourself. Gone are the days of one-way communication (company sends out press release > news media read it and post in print, on radio, on TV > customer consumes media message > takes action) instead we have launched ourselves whole-heartedly into a "conversational marketing" age; where customers and brands engage online and offline to discuss products & services, to improve on benefits & features, and participate in the success/failure of companies globally. 

Now this isn't the newest idea out there, it is simply an old one repackaged for the 21st century: Customer Testimonials and Word of Mouth.

Susan Gunelius wrote an excellent piece about "Making Customer Testimonials Meaningful" for the Entrepreneur magazine in 2008.

Here is an exerpt: Using customer testimonials in your advertising, marketing materials and on your website is a common practice. If your customers are saying great things about your business, then why not publicize those positive testimonials for the world to see?

Not so fast: There are two main problems with customer testimonials--overuse and legitimacy. Testimonials are used so often that they have lost some of their value. Furthermore, prospective customers don't always trust the truthfulness of testimonials. How do you make your customer testimonials stand out from the crowd and make them more meaningful for your prospects? To create effective, meaningful customer testimonials, they must be:

1. Authentic - must be believable, authenticate with pictures/names of real customers
   
2. Quantifiable - add meaning by adding hard numbers (money saved, time saved) into testimonial quotes
3. Specific - tell prospects exactly what's in it for them, dont be vague or open-ended
   
4. Diverse - use a variety of testimonials from different sources about different experiences and benefits
5. Approved - Always obtain approval and written permission to use any customer's testimonial.

In short, don't leave room for guesswork when it comes to your customer testimonials. Leverage the role of your loyal and best customers by asking them to provide testimonials. Make sure your customer testimonials are verifiable, and specifically tell prospective consumers the benefits of doing business with you. If your customer testimonials are honest and trustworthy, then people will respond to them--which translates to positive results for your bottom line.

Here's an idea: Try making your Customers into Celebrities! A recent Forbes.com article from Helen Coster and Lauire Burkitt discussed how big brands such as Dell and Marriott are doing just that with much success:

In Dell's new "Take Your Own Path" advertising campaign, Duckett is featured as one of several small business owners whose personal tales are supposed to inspire potential customers to use Dell. Print and Web ads prominently display Duckett and other entrepreneurs, including Lonely Planet guidebook founder Tony Wheeler.

Dell hopes the ads will lead prospective customers to its Web site, where videos of these entrepreneurs and their stories are featured. The computer company, ramping up its global small and medium enterprise division, has used similar campaigns in France and India, using local entrepreneurs it refers to as "heroes" on billboards, in print ads, and on Web video.

These apparently aren't the times for slick models or celebrity pitch-people. Dell is among several companies that are putting their own clients and customers--typically highly vetted, telegenic ones--in advertising around the globe. Through this new talent pool, marketers hope to connect to prospective customers, hone in on a specific demographic--and take the focus off their very large businesses at a time when people are less trusting of big companies.

If common consumers are becoming less and less trusting of written testimonials, given the amount of professionally-produced content out there disguised as actual customer content, then perhaps businesses would be better served with video testimonials. Online Video marketing allows your most trusted customers to share their opinions, ideas and comments about your brand/product/service in a way that isn't easily faked. Being able to hear someone speak about your company, share their "view" of your product/service, and show what they love/hate most about their experience with your brand is invaluable in today's fast-paced marketing environment. So next time a customer calls with a compliment (or a complaint) think about asking if they would record video about it for you to share with others. Maybe even sponsor a video contest or project with a company like MeHype, and reward your customers for their time & effort. Got Something to Say?...Say it on MeHype!

Original Post: ClickZ/Search Engine Watch - Liana Evans

There's a lot of debate around whether social media marketing can be measured. There's also a cauldron of bubbling issues around exactly what companies should measure when it comes to social media marketing.

Should we measure brand lift? Traffic? Conversions? The number of blog subscribers? Yes, yes, yes, and yes!

Social media can be measured, but measuring isn't the same for everyone. Just like there's no cookie-cutter social media marketing strategy for companies to purchase and implement, there's no simple off-the-shelf answer for measuring your success with your social media strategy. It can be a combination of numerous measurements, both automated and manual.

Sometimes an Excel spreadsheet can be your best friend when it comes to measuring your social media goals.

Everyone Claims to Know What to Measure

Many SEOs will tell you that you need to measure the number of links you attain and the traffic that comes in from people clicking on those links. While that can be a decent measurement of success, it's only one piece of a huge social media puzzle.

You can measure, and should be measuring, so much more beyond acquired links and traffic. As my fellow social media measurement colleague, Katie Paine says about measuring "hits" -- HITS basically are How Idiots Track Success.

Social media marketing strategies are so much more than acquiring traffic and links from "socialized" content that appear on blogs, or videos that appear on YouTube and are promoting on sites like Digg, Mixx, or Reddit.

These are merely tactics. If you don't have a strategy that includes goals and measurement about these implemented tactics, then it's as if you're doing nothing.

Last week, I watched as much as I could of a live seminar from someone who claimed to be a social media ROI expert.

The trouble was, all this expert kept saying was that you need to measure ROI in social media. He never once gave an example of something that could truly be measured.

This "expert's" presentation was frustrating (just as much as Rebecca Lieb found another "expert" to be). It's doubtful anyone could benefit from such vague information. Yes, the ROI needs to be measured, how else can marketers justify their efforts in the social media space?

Look, many experts claim that you need to measure "this" and "that." Honestly, you may not need to measure "this" or "that." What you might need to measure is something entirely specific to your own thoroughly planned out marketing strategy that is so far away from the "this" or "that" that if you measured them, you'd have no clue if you were really being successful.

However, there are general concepts around social media you can use to come up with measurements and gauge whether your efforts hit the mark. They don't just revolve around monitoring or just around Web site analytics.

Most of the time it's a combination of pieces of monitoring data, pieces of Web site analytic data, and a lot of manual data your team needs to collect and put in an Excel spreadsheet.

The Four I's of Social Media Measurement

"Marketing's New Key Metric: Engagement" by Brian Haven of Forrester Research identifies four areas of engagement that can be measured. Engagement is the name of the game when it comes to social media and measuring successes and failures.

• Involvement: Just how involved is the community you're engaging with? Are they visiting your site? Are they subscribing to your blog? How many video views do you have? Did they request information from your site or from a member of your team?
• Interactions: How are your efforts working in the way of gauging interactions? Are fan visits to your fan page increasing? Have those fans started conversations? How many replies to a post in a forum have you received? How many comments are your blog posts getting?
• Intimacy: Intimacy demonstrates the level of comfort/love/hate your audience feels with your company brands, products, or services. How much user generated content such as videos, photos, blog review sites or even threads in forums are being generated around your company? How many ratings are you receiving? What is the sentiment of your ratings or product/service comments?
• Influence: Just how much influence are your efforts (or those of other influencers) having on your strategy? How willing are people to recommend you? Did you get a brand awareness lift with your efforts? Are influencers sharing their opinions and are they creating user generated content around your products/services?

There are many ways to measure the four I's, such as counting up the number of comments on your blog posts each week and figuring out a ratio that would be "successful" to tracking how far a link was created and spread through Twitter. But you also can't forget to look at monitoring and measuring data and tie that into the full picture as well.

Web site traffic tells you a piece of the story. For example, asking your customers how they heard about you, your product, or your service when they request information or buy a product is one simple way to track your social media efforts. Although it may not be the most reliable, it will put in place another piece of the measurement puzzle.

Monitoring data can be just another piece. Some monitoring tools, like Techrigy and Radian6, can help you track influencers, as well as the spread of viral media that you might have disseminated to the public. They can help you chart and graph this type of information.

Lastly, don't forget to tie in your resources and expenditures. Just how much did all of this cost you to implement, and were those efforts worth the success or failure?

There's no simple solution to measuring success or failure in social media. It requires a lot of understanding of your efforts and how your audience will engage with you.

Don't limit yourself to counting up links, looking at traffic spikes or looking how many retweets you received -- there's a whole world of metrics. It could be a combination of a few that help you understand just how successful you can be.

Original Post: ClickZ/Search Engine Watch - Liana Evans 

A new Equation Research survey of 1450 marketers revealed that the end of world is approaching, or at least the end of the old, stuffy traditional marketing world. The old guys (and girls) have finally got it! They no longer look for their customers to be sitting static in front of their TVs, or listening to monotone radio ads while in the car, or even (gasp! can it be) reading the newspaper...they are looking for their customers where their customers already are, using Social Media. According to the study, nearly two-thirds of those surveyed have already dove into Social Media, integrating the popular technologies into their marketing plans.

Here's a summary:

• Big 4: Facebook, Twitter, Online Video and Blogs are the most popular social media tools. None are being used in isolation (anti-social media) - on average there are 5 to 7 other social media tools being actively used or dabbled with by marketers at the same time. 
• Got Cash?: While traditional media still accounts for the lion-share of advertising budgets: online, search and social media as a group are approximately one-third of the current spend. For smaller companies, this figure increases to over 40%!
• 2010: The Next Odyssey: Looking towards next year, brand marketers forecast a shift in spend towards digital tactics, feeling the areas most likely to increase will be Social Media (60%), Online Advertising (53%), Search Engine Advertising (49%) and Email Marketing (41%)

As more and more companies/brands begin looking into Social Media integration consider those tools that you are using currently. Do you welcome brands into the conversation? What brands are you already socially interacting with through Social Media? Are they doing a good/bad job? What could they improve? How?

Courtesy of the San Fransisco Examiner.com - Sarah Browne

We are pleased to release the final numbers for our Travel Channel Contest, which was created to let you MeHype-registered Video Producers to show off some of your talents and previous works, while helping us to test the system and create interest. We truly appreciate all the entries (even the ones that we couldn't approve due to inappropriate content, intellectual property infringement, etc.) and hope that you will continue to participate in our upcoming and current video projects.

Coming in at First Place with 72 total video views is TimesUpTV (known to his friends as Alex Reiter) for his piece "No Regrets", an excellent piece about the splendor of Paris, France, branded forAir France airlines. Alex is $1000 richer for his efforts, and we hope that he enjoys the win! You can learn more about Alex and his video production company at www.alexreiter.com or www.timesuptv.com.

Congratulations to Alex and his partner for their win in this contest, their hard work in spreading the word about MeHype, their video and earning some excellent view totals. Don't forget to exercise your social muscle when marketing an "approved" MeHype video for any of our contests, our Corporate Sponsor projects or even just to spread the word.

This is the definition of MeHype - virtual Word of Mouth Marketing; using your personal and professional social networks to spread the message about MeHype, about your video talents & projects, and any associated MeHype sponsors running video projects. If you have any additional questions about how to become more successful with MeHype, don't hesitate to contact us directly: info@mehype.com.

Congratulations again to Alex Reiter (and mystery partner) for their excellent video and win! Keep those entries coming!