Social Marketing 2.0 - YouTube

What is YouTube?

YouTube is a online community that allows its users to share video with others. Anyone can register with YouTube and upload, watch and share movies for free. Users can give any videos a 1 - 5 star quality rating and post comments for other users to see. This allows users to decide whether content is worth looking at.






Interesting stats:

• YouTube is currently one of the top 5 most visited sites online!


• More then 65, 000 new videos are uploaded every day!


• Over 200 000 000 (two hundred million) clips are watched every day


• Its growth far exceeded other online communities such as myspace, facebook, blogger and e-bay and is one of the largest Social networks online!

Leverageing YouTube to generate business?

While a majority of the videos posted on YouTube are posted by amateurs looking for laughs a good Internet marketer will find that YouTube can be used to drive traffic to websites and generate business. This traffic is very inexpensive. The use of YouTube is free! so the only investment you will need to make will be producing the video and a bit of bandwidth needed to upload your video.

Step By Step

1. Create an account - Go to YouTube.com and register with YouTube.
2. Make a video worth watching - While it is true that there are thousands of badly made videos on YouTube that have generated thousands of hits, having a good video that other users will want to share with friends will have a huge impact on the end result. Not only will it generate more views (if marketed well) but it will also increase your conversion rate (number of people that watch your video and take the desired action e.g. buy your product, click on your link etc.)
3. Choose your keywords - YouTube uses search to allow users to find content that they are looking for. It is important that YouTube knows exactly what your video is about so it can bring it up on the result page of relevant search queries. Spend some time making a good list of keywords, the more the better. YouTube has a keyword refinement feature that, as the name suggests, will allow you to refine your keywords and and get the most out of your efforts.
4. Customize your channel - Spend some time creating a custom profile and your own custom channel information. You should also create at least one group and a playlist. This will allow people to find you when they search for channels, groups or playlists.

Movies that work

• Funny - "Funny" is one of the most searched words online. Internet users like to laugh. By having a funny video you increase the chance of viewers sharing it with their friends. Funny movies, have mass appeal and have the potential to go viral. The below link is an example of a funny video advertising Chicken Mc nuggets. Macdonald's created a competition where users could create an advert for their "new" chicken Mc nuggets and this is the winning entry. Example 1 This video has just under 1.8 million views as of this moment.
• Demonstrative - Sometimes a simple demonstration of your product or service can be very effective as a selling tool. This often wont generate the same volume of hits as other types of videos but they will often have a good conversion rate. The below link is a good example of a product demonstration. Example 2
• Interesting - If you can spark curiosity in your viewers through your YouTube video, there is a good chance they will visit your site to find out more.
• Instructional - A how to video is often very affective. The below link is an example of aninstructional video. It has just over 1 million views as of this moment. Example 3
• Shocking - Shocking videos have a big audience online. More so in video form then in writing on someones website as the video proves that the shocking thing is actually true. The below link is an excellent example of a shocking video clip. This particular video spread around the Internet and caused quite a stir. It has almost 7 million views as of writing this article. It was produced by a company that produced bluetooth headsets. Viewers flocked to their site where they were told the video wasn't real... but look at all our products anyway. Example 4
• Sexy - Everyone already knows this point, Sex sells. It can however negatively affect your brand if don in a tasteless way. Before using this, make sure your product lends itself to this kind of video and do it in a tasteful way.

Creating a YouTube video
Brainstorm

Start by having a look at what other people are doing. Find videos that are marketing similar products or are using similar styles to the one that you have in mind. Once you have a few examples, sit with the relevant people in your organization and come up with an idea. Keep in mind that short movies do much better then long movies. 1 - 3 minutes is ideal.

Write a script

Once you have a direction for your YouTube video, spend some time writing it out. This doesn't have to be the exact script that you will use, you may come up with ideas as you go. This is a guide that will help you to keep moving in the direction you want.

Filming

This is no different to filming any video:

• Make sure you have good lighting. This radically affects the quality of the end product. Position your lights so as not to cast shadows etc.
• Select the location that will best suit your video.
• Use a tripod to support your camera. Nothing looks more un-professional then a shaky hand.
• Make sure you have good sound quality. Don't just rely on the sound of your camera.

YouTube formats

There are limits placed on your YouTube videos. They cant be longer then 10 minutes and they cant be bigger then 100 megabyte in size. It is therefore important that you chose the correct format to allow small file size, as well as good quality.

YouTube supports various video formats: .WMV, .AVI, .MOV, .MPG

YouTube recommends

• .MPEG4
• 320 x 240 resolution
• MP3 audio
• 30 frames per second

This gives the best size to quality ratio and streams the best on YouTube.

Watch this article for updates

Social Marketing 2.0 - Social bookmarking

What is social bookmarking?
In a nutshell, social bookmarking sites are places people go to share bookmarks, news articles, and websites of interest. When you 'tag' a site you can add comments and reviews to the page you are tagging. Websites like Digg, Furl, and Del.icio.us allow anyone to post anything they've found, heard, like, dislike, etc. This can be an extraordinary opportunity for website owners.




If you look at the top left of this page there is a button to 'Bookmark' this blog. Anyone who visits any post on this blog, has the opportunity to share it. If 5,000 people were to visit your website, and out of them just 100 decide to bookmark your page. Thats creates alot of exposure! And it can cause a snowball effect. More bookmarks = more traffic = more bookmarks etc.

How to make it work for you
It all depends on your content. It's very easy to get people to view your page, the hard part is getting people to like your website and motivate them to share it. The only way to do this is to create a page filled with helpful and informative information or alot of fun. Spend time creating a page that adds as much value to your visitors as is possible. Whether you offer advice, entertainment (jokes, stories etc) or services. This is extremely important. You can do every trick on this blog and more, if the visitors you are getting don't get anything out of your site, you are unfortunately doomed to fail. Most people who have websites believe in what they do, however what is important is how the viewers perceive the site. Do they find it useful, helpful, informative, interesting, fun, etc? Do they want to come back and tell their friends? That is, at the end of the day, what makes the difference.

Social Marketing - Microsites & Competitions

Social marketing in essence is word-of-mouth. Its about creating excitement and buzz around your brand and generating referral business. Word of mouth marketing has always been the most powerful form of marketing. People are far more likely to make a buying decision based on the advice of a friend then they are to make a decision because of an advert they saw on TV. With web 2.0, the power of word-of-mouth is taken to another level. The 'new consumer' is more connected then ever before.

Godfrey Parkin refers to social media marketing as 'the new PR'. In his new book, Doing business digitally, he talks about using competitions and microsites to tap in to social marketing. This is an example he gives in his book.

“Honda was one of the first companies to explore social marketing. The best selling car in the US is the ford's F150 pick-up truck. And it has been in the top slot for more then thirty years. At number two is another truck, the Chevrolet Silvarado. The Toyota Camry occupies the third slot and the Honda Accord is in hot pursuit at fourth. Car companies believe in capturing the the hearts and minds of consumers at a early age, because the first car you own will very likely establish you as a brand loyal customer for at least a couple more purchases in your life. So if you want to maximize the lifetime value of a customer, get to them early. All car manufacturers want to get teenagers to desire their entry level vehicles – those cars targeted at first time buyers, which are frequently paid for by parents. Honda's problem was that there was little awareness of its entry level vehicle, the CR-V, among the target population, and no cachet among those who did know of it.

The first thing Honda did was to examine the things that mattered to the target mid-to-late teen population, how they communicated and what they shared. They then decided to change the pronunciation of CR-V to 'Crave'. They built a microsite to host a competition that challenged people to upload a photo of their 'favorite crave' to the site, along with a few lines about why they craved it. In the process, they captured names and contact details. The top half of the branded competition contained of thumbnails of the images submitted. If you moused over an immage, it expandedand also provided the name of the submitter and his or her comments about the image. Visitors could, with one click, vote on how much they liked each entry. The competition board was covered in images of dogs, food, girlfriends, boyfriends, exotic destinations, sports teams and cars of all makes. Every entry was available in the depths of the site. Visitors could click a button to see a screen filled with the most recent entries, but only the most popular stayed on the home page leader board.

Something remarkable happened. Those who had uploaded an image told friends and family to go and look at it and vote for it. When they did so they were inspired to upload their own image and tell etheir friends and family about it too. So they wrote about it in their blogs and on their MySpace pages, they provided links to the competition microsite and tagged in on their social bookmarking sites such as Digg and del.icio.us. The microsite started getting top rankings on Goggle. The traditional media found the story fascinating, and the competition featured on radio and television talk-shows and news broadcasts, locally and internationally. Virtually every newspaper in the country wrote articles about it. The micro site cost Honda a few thousand dollars, yet it generated tens of millions of dollars in free publicity. Ic captured thousands of potential sales leads and it boosted brand awareness among the target population to levels never dreamed of. In 2007, from out of nowhere, the tenth bestselling car in the US was the Honda CR-V Honda didn't need to offer a car as an incentive to enter its competition. The reward was participation and the ego satisfaction of having your creation on the leader-board.”

That is what social marketing is all about. And I'm sure you will agree, if you get it right, it can be an extremely valuble to your business.

Creating a competition:

Know your market
Make sure you know exactly who your target population is and what they like before you start planning the competition. The more you know about them the more specific and effective your competition will be.

Define the rules

Set out a clear list of rules around your competition and how it will work. What do participants have to do to enter (give contact details, submit a picture, perform a task etc.) How do they win (vote, random draw etc)

The site
The idea of competitions, like the Honda example above, is to immerse your target market in your brand. Make sure the site is very well branded and put together professionally!

Do it right
Competition encouraging user generated content is inexpensive and, if done correctly, can produce results that no traditional advertising campaign could ever dream of producing. Because it is so inexpensive, the temptation is to slap a site together. If you want to succeed in web 2.0 PR, you are going to have to take some risks. Spend some money getting it done properly.

Market it
Let people know its there using all the other techniques on this blog. People don't automatically swarm to your site just because you worked hard at it. You have to tell them about it. Use social networks, forums, SEO etc. to get the word out.

Read the book
Read Doing Business Digitally by Godfrey Parkin a couple of times before you start. It is available at all major book stores

Search engine marketing - Contextual advertising (Pay Per Click)

PPC on SERPs

It isn't easy to be on the firs page of a natural search but you can ensure you are on the first page by placing adverts with the search engines. All major search engines have a sponsored links section where you can place an advert. When the keywords you nominate are used in a search, your advert is displayed. You only pay the search company when your link is clicked.




Other PPC opportunities

You don't only have to advertise on the search engines result pages. You can chose to have your adverts displayed on the websites of other online publishers. Google has thousands of partners that provide placeholders on their sites for Googles adverts. Google AdSence will find pages to display your advert that are aimed at your target market. For example, you want to advertise your online shop that sells yoga equipment. Google will find sites relevant to that topic where it will display your advert. Maybe a blog or website on meditation, stress relief or health. Your advert wont be shown on a site about panel beating.

Choosing your triggers

Three in four searches use three or less keywords. These key words are often very expensive and not targeted. Longer keywords are searched much less but those who use them have a much better idea of what they are looking for and are much more likely to be interested in what you are offering. Decide whether you would rather bid on keywords short keywords or long-tail keywords. You can also bid on your company name.

Developing a PPC campaign

Heres a step by step overview on developing your own PPC campaign

Research: Collect as much info as you can about your target market. Research your competitors too. Then make a test campaign that will run for a few weeks. Try as many different things (keywords, landing pages, adverts etc.) as you can so you can see what works for future campaigns.

Evaluate: Watch your campaign carefully. Examine your keywords, landing pages, adverts etc. and decide what worked best.

Expand: After evaluating, expand on the elements that were most effective and drop the elements that did not perform. Increase your budget till you hit your targets.

Monitor & Enhance: Monitor your campaign closely. Continually fine tuning and tweak it. Tweak keywords, adverts, the effectiveness of your landing page and your conversion funnels. Make sure you are not wasting money anywhere.

Search Engine Marketing - Natural SEO

Search Engine Marketing:

Search engine marketing is a great place to start. Unlike mass broadcasts, where you send your message to millions of people and hope someone out there is interested, the people that see your site on a search engine are looking for what you are offering.

There are 5 components to search engine marketing:

• Natural search engine optimization (SEO): The pages that are displayed in a normal search.


• Contextual advertising: Pay Per Click advertising that ensures your page appears in the sponsored links section.


• Paid inclusion: Ensures the search engines index your page your site often


• Conversion enhancement strategies: Ensures that the visitors you do get on your site take the desired actions.


• Web analytics: Allows you to measure the effectiveness of your search engine marketing campaigns.

Natural SEO
There is more information online then anyone could go through in a life time. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo! And MSN, help you sift through the clutter and find what you are looking for. About two thirds of your websites traffic will come from a search engine. It is therefor vital that you use them to your best advantage.

When you register your site with a search engine they send software bots called spiders that collect all the relevant data and key words from your site. The search engine then indexes every site using over 100 different characteristics and ranks the page according to how good the content is relative to the query. Most people never look past the first 5 results so it is important that your site is up there. To be in the top 5 results out of thousands of sites related to any key word means you have to be one of the best in your field. A key word is a word or phrase used to describe the content of a page. It is used buy searchers to find pages that can solve their problems and by you to help them find your site. A search engine will derive keywords from a number of places including:

The content of the page
The description and meta tags assigned in the code of the page
The anchor text of inbound links to the page
The description of the page in web-directories

Step 1 - Identify keywords
Stars by identifying words that searchers would use if they were looking for your products/services. If you had a South African based company that offered an E-business solution your keywords may be something like: E-business software, E-business software solution, E-business management system, E-Commerce solution, E-Commerce SA, E-Commerce South Africa etc.

Step 2 - Apply keywords
Once you have a good list of key words ensure your site is filled with them. Keep in mind that spiders can only read text. They cant read PDFs, videos, pictures etc. Here are some places you can put keywords .

• Your sites text. Use them as much as you can (without sounding ridiculous).


• Your links. Make sure that the spiders know exactly what the link is all about. e.g. Instead of saying For more information on our stock control system click here say - Click here for more information on our stock control system.


• Your sites title, description tags and URLs


• Put keyword rich alt tags on all images, videos etc

Make sure that when a search engine visits your site it knows exactly what each page is about. When you are confident that your site is ready for the spiders you can move to the next step.

Step 3 - Register
You need to register your site with an online web directory. dmoz.org/ is the only one you need to wory about.

Step 4 - Introduce yourself
Next you register your site with the search engines. They cant find you if they dont know you exist. For google, go to www.google.com/addurl/. For Yahoo! Go to submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request. For any others just find their “submit site” page.

Step 5 - Generate links
Next you need to generate inbound links from quality pages. You have to have a good link strategy that identifies websites you would like to get inbound links from and a plan to get them.

• Approach sites that you would like links from and ask them to review your site. Your site may be useful to their own sites viewers.


• Advertise on high traffic sites. Make sure the click able part of the advert is a key word and create a description of the destination page.


• Place comments on forums or blogs that deal with issues related to your site. Put your URL in ether the comment or in your signature.


• Create your own blog that links to your site. Make sure you use all these techniques on the blog too.

New Marketing (Marketing 2.0)

The Internet is transforming the way companies do business. Web 2.0 has turned the world of marketing upside down. But how do you leverage this new way of thinking to grow your business? For the next week or two I will be focusing on practical ways to reach consumers using web 2.0.

We are starting to see a new trend these days with all of the Web 2.0 applications out there. The Internet has reached critical mass allowing social networking sites to catalyze the evolution of marketing on the web. Research shows that in history, conventional advertising has never been more ineffective. There has been a power shift. The power no longer lies with 'marketing professionals', it has been shifted to the consumer. Godfrey Parkin, renowned e-marketing pioneer and author, describes the new consumer in his latest book (Doing Business Digitally), as "an individual that has been so information-empowered by digital technologies that he or she has become far less vulnerable to the blunt instruments of traditional marketing".

New Mediums
It is important to familiarize yourself with the new marketing tools of web 2.0. Websites like del.icio.us, flickr, digg, YouTube and newsvine are a few examples of new channels to reach customers. These types of sites serve as portals to people everywhere and are delivering media in the form of pictures, blogs, video clips, and feeds. By understanding how these sites work, you can leverage them to reach your market in ways that were not possible before.

New Ideas
Companies are now able to divert from traditional 'one-way' mass broadcasts to the new model of interaction and consumer engagement. The old marketing tools such as press releases and banner adverts are still in the mix but now there are more creative ways to get the word out. Companies are leveraging buzz marketing to increase product anticipation and target a specific demographic. Video clips, news, and pictures can now be released through social networking sites in order to gain brand equity and increase product awareness. While these are just examples, you can see the potential here and how new ways to market products and services will evolve every day. We have yet to see all of the ways things can be done and getting creative is now a requirement.

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Here are a few 'e-marketing' techniques:

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Search engine marketing

Social marketing

Online advertising

Email marketing

I will expand on each of these in my next posts.

Web 2.0 & the New Consumer

Web 2.0 is a term describing the trend in the use of the World Wide Web and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing and, most notably, collaboration among users. These concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services such as social-networking sites, wikis and blogs. The term became notable after the first O'reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but to a change in the way end users use the Web.

The new way consumers are interacting with each other through the internet allows companies to activly hook in to word of mouth marketing in a powerfull way. This is done via social networking, blogs, podcasts, RRS feeding (and other forms of many-to-many publishing).

In the opening talk of the first Web 2.0 conference, O'Reilly and John Battelle summarized what they saw as the themes of Web 2.0. They argued that the web had become a platform, with software above the level of a single device, leveraging the power of the "Long Tail", and with data as a driving force.

O'Reilly provided examples of companies or products that embody these principles in his description of his four levels in the hierarchy of Web 2.0-ness:

Level-3 applications, the most "Web 2.0"-oriented, only exist on the Internet, deriving their effectiveness from the inter-human connections and from the network effects that Web 2.0 makes possible, and growing in effectiveness in proportion as people make more use of them. O'Reilly gave as examples: eBay, Craigslist, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Skype, dodgeball and AdSence.

Level-2 applications can operate offline but gain advantages from going online. O'Reilly cited Flickr, which benefits from its shared photo-database and from its community-generated tag database.

Level-1 applications operate offline but gain features online. O'Reilly pointed to Writely (now Google Docs & Spredsheets) and I Tunes (because of its music-store portion).

Level-0 applications work as well offline as online. O'Reilly gave the examples of MapQuest, Yahoo! Local and Google Maps (mapping-applications using contributions from users to advantage could rank as "level 2").

Non-web applications like e-mail, Instant messaging clients and the telaphone fall outside the above hierarchy.

The idea of "Web 2.0" can also relate to a transition of some websites from isolated infomation silosto to interlinked computing platforms that function like locally-available software in the perception of the user. Web 2.0 also includes a social element where users generate and distribute content, often with freedom to share and re-use. This can result in a rise in the economic value of the web to businesses, as users can perform more activities online. Others have provided additional definitions of Web 2.0:

“…the philosophy of mutually maximizing collective intelligence and added value for each participant by formalized and dynamic information sharing and creation.”

"…all those Internet utilities and services sustained in a data base which can be modified by users whether in its content (adding, changing or deleting- information or associating metadates with the existing information) how to display them or in content and external aspect simultaneously”.

Web 2.0 Characteristics

The characteristics of Web 2.0 are:

• Rich user experience
• Social networking
• User participation (Upload and share photos, videos, content etc.)
• Dynamic content
• Metadata
• Web standards and scalability
• Cascading Style Sheets to aid in the separation of presentation and content
• Folksonomies (collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging)
• Three further characteristics that are associated with web 2.0: openness, freedom and collective intelligence by way of user participation

Technology overview
The sometimes complex and continually evolving technology infrastructure of Web 2.0 includes server-software, content-syndication, messaging-protocols, standards-oriented browsers with plug-ins and extensions, and various client-applications. The differing, yet complementary approaches of such elements provide Web 2.0 sites with infomation storage, creation, and dissemination challenges and capabilities that go beyond what the public formerly expected in the environment of the so-called "Web 1.0".