Hey, hey! I hope you guys took a break for lunch. I did not which means I will be REALLY personable in about two hours. I apologize now. Up on stage Zach Rodgers is moderating Rachel Scotto, Baljeet Singh, Ian Schafer, and Terrence Kelleman. I wonder if they’re as cold as I am? Because I’m about to snuggle up to Barry Schwartz who’s sitting in front of me and I’m not so sure he’d appreciate that. But…I’m thinking about it. I need a Snuggie.
Terrence is up first to talk about what his company has done on YouTube. I have a feeling fun videos are about to be unleashed.Terrence says his company designs all their products themselves. They’re about mind design. I’m about being a jerk. The first video he ever made was for a magnetic bracelet. It went viral in a month and they were featured on the main page of YouTube on December 21 . They got 2.7 million views and 3k sales within three months. It doubled the amount of sales they had the previous year. It was amazing to see how powerful YouTube was for finding people who were buying, not just watching.
He talks about a video for Mighty Wallet. The videos allow them to tell the type of story you would tell someone in person. They created videos telling people how they could make them themselves. It was a good way to engage their customer base.
Did you set out with video thinking about branding or a direct marketing focus?
Terrance: Video has a natural tendency to let you see the things that are kept out of focus. They’re a small company so people are interested in the story. Video lets them tell their story outside of using a blog.
How have you used advertising? Google introduced Promoted Videos on YouTube. Are you using it?
Terrance: He’s been using it for six months and it’s very effective for them.
Baljeet (works for Google): It’s a recent and young product but it’s demonstrating results for all types of advertisers. He appreciates Terrance plugging his products without him having to do . [Hee] As advertisers, if you want to promote your content and make sure it surfaces, it’s a good channel. They’re seeing 10-15 cent CPC and millions of paid click per week.
YouTube has two types of advertising initiatives – one for SMBs owners and one for larger brands. Is that fair to say?
Baljeet: It’s pretty fair to say. They try to match their ad offerings for what users are doing on their site. They come to the home page, they engage with the site, etc.
Ian, how are you thinking now?
Ian: He thinks in the last couple of years people have tried to lend scale to online video advertising, which scales differently than TV. The same way that YouTube has millions of dollars worth of content, it’s hard to reach everyone simultaneously. They’ve seen t he market gravitate towards commodity. When it comes to advertising on, around or in between videos, that practice has gotten pretty automated. There are lots of ad networks that make it really easy. If that is your goal with online video advertising, everything’s pretty much been done on that to date. There are two ways to go with it. One is the Inventory Buy, which is so easy. The other part is the gateway it provides toward deeper engagement. Nothing begets a deeper engagement than video content. The type of content in the video begets different kinds of engagement. [I love him for using the word ‘beget’. I never get to use that.]
Rachel: The metric most people are familiar with is video stream. She thinks people should move beyond that. What does the video stream mean? For the most part, it’s a video start. She wants to move towards an engagement analysis. She puts it into three levels.
- Video Stream
- Milestones – Video Start, Video Completion
- Advanced video tracking – look at users’ behavior – fast forwarding, replaying, etc.
What are the video sites that give you deeper engagement?
Rachel: It’s up to you and your analytics tool to track those kinds of metrics. When you host the video, you have your tool that can track. When they syndicate out to YouTube, they have partners who will report numbers back.
Terrance: They’re looking at deeper metrics. On YouTube they use the Watch Rate to see if users are becoming uninterested and dropping off at a certain point. He uses it as a learning tool to go forward and decide what worked and what didn’t.
Rachel: In addition to evaluating the content of the video itself, you can learn how to space the ads in your video to optimize it for drops.
What do you guys think about the social chatter that happens around video content?
Terrence: They have an intern that does nothing but respond to people’s comments. It’s a full-time job. It’s a rule for customer service to go out and respond. They get a lot of enthusiasm.
Ian: Social media is a great distribution channel for content.
Are there certain things that make videos more shareable? Is it worth thinking about the celebrity factor?
Ian: The question is, which is more relevant? Is it more relevant to have a celebrity promoting a video or to be in social media under high velocity? He thinks its the latter. The Chatroulette Piano Guy serenades people on a piano completely ad-libbing a song about them. The reactions on their faces are so priceless and his lyrics are so funny that its gotten millions of views on YouTube within a week. That video has spread so far, so fast that a few days ago a wild rumor was swirling that he was Ben Folds.
What’s important to measure in social media?
Rachel: Volume and Engagement Metrics. You want your video out there to as many people as possible. With engagement, you want to measure how much of the video someone has consumed. If it’s a trailer or a clip from a movie, your goal is to get it out there in front of as many people as possible. Volume is a sufficient metric at that point. You also want to consider video product costs, as well.
Baljeet: What are the biggest sources for your views? There are lots of tools to help you determine that.
What analytics tools do you use to track?
Rachel: She uses Omniture. There’s also WebTrends, CoreMetrics, Google Analytics, etc. They may not always have out of the box reporting, but you can build custom reports.
