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A Taste of Viral – How This Video Unintentionally Got So Popular

June 23, 2011 By Sam Beamond Leave a Comment

Recently, in the video marketing realm, I shot a quick spontaneous video of a guys bike outside my office. He had a rather unique license plate holder that was a little comical. It featured a scrolling LED “ticker” underneath the plate area, that allowed you to display whatever text you wanted. I’ll let you watch the video to read it for yourself.

What was interesting about this video is that after posting online, it received over 1,200 views within the first 24 hours. Not only that, the video was very poorly shot (by myself I might add). I didn’t take much time to think about how to shoot it, I used my iPhone 4 to take the video and inadvertently had my finger partially over the lens for some of the video. As someone who pays attention to detail, I seriously gave myself a slap on the head for that!

Typically, product review or event-type videos published in a similar manner receive between 300-400 within the same time period. Questions soon began building in my head as to why this particular video warranted this amount of attention in such a short time period.

I realize that we’re not talking hundreds of thousands of views here, however, there is a distinct high number of views when compared to past videos published with the same process.

That process being, uploading to YouTube, linking from a FaceBook fan page and finally posting on a Tumblr blog.

Here’s the video, watch it, then review the notes below:

The following is a list of possible causes for this “mini-viral” effect, and a few things that we might learn from and can apply to your video marketing efforts.

  1. The video clip was comparably short – I’ve read more than once, that you need to engage your audience within the first few seconds of the video playing to achieve a high number of views. This video clip has a 40 second total duration.
  2. Non-salesy - The video had a zero salesy approach, I wasn’t reviewing a product or talking about a special offer. It was purely “for fun”.
  3. Funny/comical - The license plate ticker had some comical text written in it. It made for a lighthearted look at a product relative to the industry

Have you had a similar experience with a video published online? What did you learn? Have anything to add to my list here, maybe you can teach me something?

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Filed Under: Internet Marketing, Online Video, Social Media Tagged With: ,

Online Marketing Summit – Minneapolis Roundup

June 10, 2011 By Sam Beamond 1 Comment

It was great to have the opportunity to attend Online Marketing Summit earlier this week for Day 2 and the Social Media Workshop on Day 3. It was unfortunate that the workshop was reduced to half day, but that’s ok. Generally speaking, the event appealed to me with its serving up a variety of topics and discussions that i could identify well with having had my hand many different online channels for several years. From social media, to paid search to email marketing, OMS had something for everyone.

On top of the insightful sessions, I had an awesome time connecting and reconnecting with fellow industry peers from the area.

Aaron Kahlow did a great job putting the event together and engaging us all.

I’ll attempt here to give a quick overview of the days I attended.

Day 2 – June 7, 2011

The day began with Gina Debogovich, Senior Community Manager of Best Buy, giving us a run down of how Best Buy have been successful in the social media campaigns. I believe, their success has not only been because of their involvement, but is largely driven by their willingness to participate across the board. Essentially, everyone engaged in social media is a marketer to some degree as they are publicly representing the brand online.

The next session I chose to attend was led by Lee Odden, I hadn’t heard him speak before, but had heard a lot about him. Now I know why. He really knows his stuff when it comes to SEO and Social Media and really spoke to my interests giving me an insight into areas I can develop. His presentation style certainly helped keep attendees engaged.

I’ve recently began experimenting with QR Codes both in print ads as well as signage. It was good to learn more about them in Angie Schotmuller’s session. I appreciate your time Angie after, talking over my specific ideas!

In the afternoon I attended the Social Video Marketing, Social Email Marketing sessions, along with Integrated Marketing Success with Adam Proehl. Adam shared some great tools for analytics and testing, and although they are probably beyond what I have the capacity for right now, they are certainly intriguing and warrant a closer look. A few he shared were:

usertesting.com

feedbackarmy.com

fivesecondtest.com

theclicktest.com

The last couple of sessions that I attended were SEO Best Practices with Chris Aburime, who offered some great advice on using title tags on sites with hundreds of thousands of pages. While the closing panel discussion warranted some interesting takes from various angles, that included, Kim Albee, Marie Lettman and Julie Heltunen. My main take away from this discussion was how to segment your social media (personal) from social media (business). The simple approach of using Twitter and LinkedIn for business and saving FaceBook for personal seemed to make a lot of sense.

While I attended these sessions in person, it was fun to “virtually” attend the other sessions by following other attendees on Twitter and monitoring their Tweets. This was an unplanned bonus, that i’ll use again no doubt!

Social Media Workshop

June 8, the last (half) day of Online Marketing Summit, was a lot different to previous event days. The attendance was much smaller and split into two workshops to choose from. I chose “Managing your brand within Social Media Outlets” with Julie Heltunen and Amy Kilgour. The setup made for great discussion surrounding social media outlets, included, FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Hootsuite and blogs. Various levels of social media experience in the room. Julie and Amy did a great job of keeping the discussion alive and providing something for all levels. I will certainly be maintaining a connection with them.

While writing this it occurred to me that there will likely be several “round up” type posts across the web from the summit, it would be great to aggregate them here, to learn what others got out of the event.

I’ll begin with a post from SpyderTrap here.

Know of any others? Post them in the comments below, thanks!

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Filed Under: Blogging, Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Online Advertising, Online Video, Reviews, SEO, Social Media Tagged With: , , ,

How to Get Stereo Audio Output on iPhone 4

May 2, 2011 By Sam Beamond 1 Comment

I made an interesting discovery this past weekend that I wanted to share with you regarding recording video on the iPhone 4.

As you will likely know, the iPhone 4 comes equipped with the wonderful ability to shoot video in HD. The video quality is truly amazing for a phone. The biggest caveat for me has been the lack of stereo audio to accompany the wonderful video. In today’s age, this is unacceptable (in my opinion).

I realize that we are talking about a phone here, but the lack of stereo audio, is as big a downer as the lack of any video recording functionality on the first iPhone. Clearly this is a marketing ploy to encourage an upgrade when iPhone 5 hits the shelves later this year, that I expect will almost certainly have this capability.

When I first got the phone, I was hopeful that I could use it to shoot some quick clips both personal and business related, but the lack of stereo audio has reduced my enthusiasm for this. Since then, I have researched at length to find an external microphone that could possibly split the mono channel into stereo, but to no avail.

Enter the “Splice” iPhone app I used for the first time this weekend as an experiment for a client. I debated about using a regular video camera, but as a “pro bono” project, I didn’t have the time to spend editing after the fact. A quick search on Apple’s app store revealed “Splice” as a free app that enabled video editing right on the phone. After downloading the app, I found it really simple to use. I spent about 3 hours shooting the 1 minute video in three sections: Intro, Meat and Close.

Once I had the content together, I was able to open up Splice and import all three clips. I opted for the default transition (a fade effect) and exported the finished clip in a matter of minutes. The final step was to upload the video to YouTube in HD via the 720tube app. Done.

I was pretty pleased with how the editing and uploading process panned out, simple and quick. But better than that, when reviewing the clip online, I found that the audio was playing back in stereo! I couldn’t believe it, somehow Splice also converted the audio to stereo, what an awesome finishing touch.

There you have it, should you want to create a video clip with stereo sound from your iPhone 4, you can do this easily with the Splice app.

Do you use your iPhone 4 for video? Will you give it a whirl now that stereo sound is a possibility? Let me know if the comments below.

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Filed Under: Internet Marketing, Online Video, Reviews Tagged With: ,

Benefits of the YouTube Partner Program

April 28, 2011 By Sam Beamond 1 Comment

If you are a brand that intends to use video as part of your marketing strategy (which you should), I would absolutely recommend joining the YouTube Partner program.

What is the YouTube Partner Program?

The partner program was created by YouTube to allow video publishing companies to monetize their channel, providing them with more creative options to improve their channel visual appeal, while at the same time allowing YouTube to also make a little money from your video views. The program utilizes Google AdSense (which you must sign up for), to display ads on on your channel/video page’s as well as “in video”. Furthermore, as a YouTube Partner you can participate in the promoted video advertising program, enabling you to drive more video views on a CPC platform.

How do I Join the YouTube Partner Program?

YouTube’s partner program is absolutely free to join. There is a list of program requirements posted on the YouTube site here. These are somewhat vague, indicated that you need to be consistently producing video content and have a large following/views. However, I would encourage you to apply anyway. You are not penalized for applying and being refused, so in the event of you being turned away, you can always apply when you have more video content available on your channel and more video views. I have in the past been approved a YouTube Partner program with less than 10 videos and only a handful of views.

What Are the Benefits of Participating?

If you are not looking to advertise on your YouTube channel, there are a couple of other great reasons to join.

  1. Multiple opportunities to place your own banner ads on your channel that can be linked to an external website. These banners reside in three places:
    a. Head banner across the top of the page – 960 x 150 pixels
    b. Left banner part way down the channel page – 300 x 250 pixels
    c. Profile banner shown on your video pages off the channel page – 170 x 25 pixels
  2. The second big advantage is the ability to add “in-video” links to external sites, again this can be used to link up your own site and land viewers on a page relative to the video. For example, you could show a product demonstration video on YouTube, then link the viewer to the store page for that product on your website where they can easily purchase. Note, non-YouTube Partners can only use the video web link option to link to other videos within YouTube. As an internet marketer, it is almost a must to be able to direct channel viewers to your website in an effort to convert them to customers.

How are you using online video to market your business?

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Filed Under: Internet Marketing, Online Advertising, Online Video Tagged With:

‘Unrelated’ Related Videos on YouTube

November 28, 2010 By Sam Beamond 2 Comments

Ever wish you could get rid if those random videos that YouTube deems ‘related’ to your content, that show up on the right of the screen? There’s no official way but here’s a quick hack.

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Filed Under: Internet Marketing, Online Video Tagged With: , ,
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