A few days ago I found the inspiration to play music again. Staying in line with what I’ve said previously, I am going to make some more “personal posts” in this blog. Although completely irrelevant to some of you out there, it helps my view count on YouTube, plus, perhaps, shows that there is more to me than just tutorials and bashing posts. hehe..

Please comment on YouTube if you feel like it. I open up so that you can get back at me if I ever stepped on your toes. Every comment counts…. literally… And in line with the other YouTube experiments I am running right now, it is pretty cool to see how much comments count. (plus a million other reasons for posting this video, which is clearly just a symptom of my extreme desire to stand on a stage in the future… hey… my moma tells me I can sing… )

As you all know, I don’t care too much about rules when I test the boundaries of what is doable in the online environment. Today, I got busted in one of my attempts to create a viral video. Here is the story.

Showing signs of becoming a viral video

I saw a clip about a boy who hit back on a bully. It was a very engaging clip and I most sincerely thought that it had the potential of going big on YouTube if remixed into a more aggressive format. I was correct. In 24 hours the clip had 643 organic views, and in 48 hours it had 4100 something views, and thus showing an exponential growth curve, indicating that it was about to blow up.

As you can see from the curve below it is showing a viral pattern, meaning a positive acceleration. (If a video turns viral this curve will eventually turn into an S-Shaped curve as it moves towards filling the quota/population share of its full potential.)

I had optimized the title of the video so that it would turn up for searches about bullying and getting back. As I have a pretty well visited and linked YouTube account, it didn’t take long before my video started showing up in searches.

This optimization also showed some initial results in the insights available for your YouTube vids. YouTube shows what keywords and searches you show up for in your insights section of each video or in your admin/my videos section.

How I did the remix

I basically downloaded the clip you can find here about Casey being bullied and striking back. Then I downloaded a tune called Bully by Eminem from YouTube. I used iMovie to detach the sound from the Eminem video and attach it to the Casey video. I posted three commenting slides, “What every bully should think about”, “Daang, let’s see that again” and “Thank you Casey!”.

The first copy was to set the right frame of “revenge” yet tap into the bully motion of the online environment. The second one was to pitch the video to the aggression within youth. Celebrating violence can really make anything go viral. Sadly enough. The last one I wrote in order to get back to the core message, also making the video possible to share for people who do not enjoy watching violence, but who do want to support those who are bullied.

I then optimized the video in the title, the description and by posting it into a much less popular category – education – in order to get it on a toplist fast if it would show signs of growing. This is a trick that should not be forgotten. Don’t put your videos in the entertainment category. There is simply too much competition there.

Anyhow, here is what I ended up with.

Bully

Violation of Community Guidelines

Third day of my test and I receive a message from YouTube with the following text:

Regarding your account: jesperthegreat

The following video(s) from your account have been disabled for violation of the YouTube Community Guidelines:

• Casey Strikes Back – Think twice before you bully someone next time – (jesperthegreat)

Your account has received one Community Guidelines warning strike, which will expire in six months. Additional violations may result in the temporary disabling of your ability to post content to YouTube and/or the termination of your account.

Sincerely,

The YouTube Team

Naturally I wonder what in this video would be against the Community Guidelines. Yes it does include violence, but there are loads of other videos on YouTube that are a lot worse. It might be that I used Eminem’s copyright protected song, but that might not be it either as Eminem is one of those artists that don’t have that many restrictions on their content. I am not too sure what exactly was the reason, but it might as well have been the hostile comments posted. Sadly I didn’t have time to take a screen dump of them but they were basically about “he should have stomped his head as well”, calling out for Casey to finish his bully off.

About the content published on YouTube

One thing I do know is that it was not my content to start with, however I optimized it and remixed it. It was not my music to begin with, it was only a remix. Perhaps this is why they removed it. I suppose it was a close call and that this penalization is generated by automated algos, rather than from a person viewing and disbanding the content.

This is what YouTube wrote:

A reason for concern – YouTube censorship?

The only problem I see with YouTube’s action is that they seemingly remove content that is ok:d by the users. They are taking on a role where they decide what content is inappropriate or not. They didn’t remove me because of copyright problems, that looks differently. They removed me because the content was offensive. However, I didn’t get a single dislike on the content.

As you can see from the screen dump above, the video has 36 likes, 0 dislikes, 19 comments and 5700 views. Within 48 hours. That seems like a pretty popular content rather than a very offensive content. I will ask YouTube about this and see how they respond.

Do they impose censorship although the content is not offensive to the users? Can violence be liked, and not offensive? I am unsure about the consequences and the analysis at this moment, but I will continue to update this post the more information I get.

Creating a viral video – lesson learned

Lesson learned. I have to continue searching for my 1 million views video. This one truly had the potential, but next time I’ll try to put some content up there that has a better structure and that also complies to YouTube’s guidelines.

What can you learn from this little experience I had. Basically two things.

1. YouTube organic marketing (unseeded) works if you focus on keyword optimization and building your YouTube channel over time (I’ve spent 1 year on mine) although the content you post isn’t related to the previous content on your channel.

2. Always post your own content… but that one is pretty simple for you as that is normally all that you do. However, try to include what is being hot right now on YouTube in your content so that you engage people. Perhaps not as direct and violent as I did right now, but get within the groove and you’re be more successful than if you just post your commercials.

There are several things you need to consider before putting money into a YouTube channel for your business. The first and most obvious question you have to answer is “why do it at all?”. For me, YouTube has become a great HUB for sharing tutorials which I find difficult to explain in writing. The problem, as we all know, is that people really hate reading long blog posts. Regardless of how well written they are. Thus I write this blog post… hehe…

This shall be seen as an overview and I will probably dig into everyone of these topics as I go on making tutorials. Just wanted to keep it all in one place. If you have any questions I’ll try to find the answers. Please comment and give your suggestions below.

#1. Why use Video at all?

Well… I won’t go further into the topic than writing a couple of ways in which you can utilize video to simplify stuff.

1. B2C – Product reviews and user generated tests
2. B2B – Tutorials, best practices and demos
3. HR – Recruitment and storytelling about you as an employer
4. CSR – Production, logistics and distribution
5. IR – Quarterly reports, words from the CEO
6. Press/Com – News broadcasts showing the “other side of the story” and EPK’s

If you got a challenges making your point come across, video has the answers to many of them.

#2. Reasons to consider YouTube Marketing

But for a company there are a variety of reasons you should consider using YouTube for your marketing campaigns. Here are the three I find the most valuable:

1. Distribution and hosting purposes
2. SEO and branding purposes
3. Technology and integration purposes

1. Distribution and Hosting purposes

Basically, you should make it as easy and cheap to host video online. Streaming is expensive and hosting video is as well. Why pay for it when you can do it for virtually no money at all on YouTube. Don’t fall for the old argument of YouTube delivering poor quality. Even TV ads are usually delivered in SD whilst YouTube offers you HD at no cost.

Yes, there is a limitation of 10 minutes per video if you are going to run it without any pro-account features, but c’mon… Seriously… if you can make a compelling enough video to have users wanting more after watching it for 10 minutes, then they are more than willing to click the second, third and fourth part of your cut up video in the related videos section.

Distribution is also a no-brainer. Why the heck spend millions on building your own embed player, streaming format and platform, when you have millions of users who already know how YouTube works. They are comfortable with embedding the format and the platform is already integrated with Facebook, Twitter and many other such social platforms which make video a lot more “shareable” from the get go. Don’t spend unnecessary money on stuff that gives you poorer results just because you’re a pixel fascist with to much of a IT budget.

Give the users what they want, and remember the bottom line.

2. SEO and branding reasons

Why the heck do I put SEO and branding in the same reason bullet for? Well, because they are highly related. How many of your brand search results do you “own” on the first page of your SERP in Google? How many do you “own” in the YouTube SERP?

Users search for information about you. Regardless if you are a B2B or a B2C company. You need control and one of the best ways to gain control of how your brand appears in search results is to actually be visible with indexable content in the most popular search engines out there.

This does not only mean that you should be present in Google, Yahoo and Bing, but also in YouTube and Facebook. Then, using SEO skills, you should interlink these online instances in order for them to rank 1 through 10 in Google, Yahoo, Bing, YouTube and Facebook. That’s what search engine optimization is all about. Not only making sure you rank number 1 for a specific keyword, but make sure you dominate the whole SERP for that specific phrase.

Through the sharing of video on YouTube, you have a much higher likelihood of appearing in blogs with YOUR content rather than with other peoples, home made stuff, which makes the internal mob go lawyer up. Modern online branding is about sharing easily accessible content so that you become the main source of information about yourself. Easy enough right?

3. Technology and integration purposes

YouTube has a wonderful API. They have a chromeless player which you can use and they have a video editor that you can all integrate into your own website or online project. This means that even those of you who really dislike the raw flavor and easy to use interface of YouTube, can mess it up all on your own, and still get the sharing and distribution benefits of the YouTube community.

There are several creative and new ways of using YouTube as well. If you contact your local Google office I am sure they can help you out a lot. I love Tippex use of YouTube and the fun game usage of StreetFighter. The limits are next to none and if you’ve got the creativity, the technology is there to support it.

#3. Proper settings for a YouTube video

You should play around a bit on your own but I have found the following settings on my videos to render the nicest outcomes.

• 640×480resolution or HD 1280×720pixels
• Do not change the frame rate of your video
• MPEG or MOV is the best, then WMV and AVI
• Up to 15 minutes (for some even longer than that)

#4. YouTube channel design

There are many ways and best practices on how to design a YouTube channel. What can be said as a pointer is that you get extra space above your channel if you get a branded channel in which you can put your own HTML, banners or navigation alike elements.

• Channel is 960 pixels wide and thus anything bigger than that will show up as the visible background
• Use web safe colors so that you can fill out what ever is on the sides with the background color available from YouTube for those who use sick browser resolutions

#5. How to Market your Videos on YouTube

There are several ways in which you can market your business through YouTube. When I say market, I mean ways in which you can create creative concepts that you then PAY to get to their audience. Marketing is still about one to many and you usually pay for both the relevant and the irrelevant receiver of your message. Marketing also gives you the control to decide the message of your campaign prior to its launch. In contrast to social media, or organic/viral use of YouTube, this kind of promotion is less target/goal driven and more “brand control” driven. Here are a few suggestions:

1. Buy a branded channel and drive traffic from banner ads
2. Seed/spam your videos to the top of searches by using seeding networks
3. Post your videos on your blog, Facebook page or website to utilize already existing traffic
4. Add your video link to your external newsletters footer or “video” section
5. Add friends that make the same type of videos as you do and invite them to subscribe
6. Submit your video to Stumbleupon and Mixx

#6. How to leverage YouTube and as a part of Social media

YouTube in itself is not a very social media. Yes, it does allow for sharing and commenting and reviews, but it isn’t very social and engaging in it’s creation before you make it social. This is where many companies go wrong with regards to YouTube marketing. They spend too much time considering how many people have viewed a specific video rather than spending time on how many have interacted with its contents.

How to create a YouTube video suitable for Social media

1. Anchors – signs, colors, half baked one liners and songs that the users can pick up in their own videos
2. Challenges – always put a question in there that helps people react with their own videos
3. Bottom third’s – a message in the bottom third of the video
4. Preroll – a little introduction where you ask a question for the user to think about when they watch the video
5. Last frame – put a call to action in this last frame such that the user knows what to do next
6. Use of surroundings and knowledge of interface – point to the subscribe button when talking about how to subscibe, point at the comments or on banners you want them to notice or click, by doing this you are not only directing the user, but you are also helping inexperienced users find their way, always end with a note about “if you’re watching this video embedded on a blog the pointing didn’t make much sense… goto youtube.com/namename to have a look at what I’m talking about”
7. Links and annotations that lead to other related videos on YouTube

#7. How to update an old video on YouTube?

My tweep @beantin has written an excellent post about how to update your videos on YouTube when they have gone old or outdated. The only thing I would like to add to his “best practice” manual is to always include a reference to your YouTube channel in the end of your video with a text such as “To watch updates, new videos and messages, please subscribe to our youtube-channel”. Or something with a little bit of a better copy… hehe..

We’ve just released one of the new Halebop videos for Christmas on YouTube. How do you feel we’re catching the xmas spirit?

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We launched some TV commercials with our client Halebop the other week. These videos are now available from the Halebop YouTube channel. I will get back at you with more on how we re-launch the Halebop brand in later posts. For now I’ll just leave you with the videos and a “this is just the beginning” for the future

When I look at marketing technology I have some things that I cannot do without:

• It should be fun
• It should be user friendly and accessible by most people
• It should be easy to measure
• It should be easy to share
• There should be a clear funnel from attention to attraction to purchase

YouTube has been yet another video website for many years. It has never been the best one, but it has, for most of the time, been the biggest one. It is just lately though, that they have changed the platform to actually suit the modern web and marketing environment that we’re living in, online today.

YouTube on YouTube.com

In the beginning, YouTube was a website located on YouTube.com. Sure, you could quite early embed the videos onto your own web platform, but the website YouTube was structured for viewing videos on YouTube. There were categories, there were video comments and ratings and there were quite sophisticated ranking models for search in the early days.

Google bought the thing and started indexing it in its Universal Search. For most this is quite a logical step as we sometime search for video material and possibly want it to be mixed with other stuff on the topic. But still, the YouTube.com platform didn’t change. It was still the same. Wanting users to search the website, or browse through the endless videos on the platform.

This is kind of odd as YouTube has known that about 80% of the video views occur elsewhere than on YouTube. Perhaps they were scared that people would stop using YouTube if they would change it. Possibly, they were low on staff and high on maintenance. Possibly they just didn’t care. The latter would be strange though as YouTube didn’t make any money. They bled insanely. So at least they needed to find a way to monetize on the fact that people were not visiting YouTube when watching the movies provided by YouTube-users through the platform.

YouTube goes Social

Then something happened, and it happened earlier this year. YouTube finally started making some changes. Not only in the most surprising way, when it connected to Facebook (considering it’s owned by Google), but it also started making changes to its analytics, to its embedded video formats and to its search/disposition.

YouTube started turning into a hub for social objects rather than a website. Think about it. First they added the new logged in view. In a very short period of time, and with out a lot of fuzz, YouTube turned from this:

Into this:

Never mind I am logged in on the second one of these images. It is quite the radical change and you really need to think about it when YouTube makes a change like this. They have adapted to the way the users use their website. The no longer rely on that people come to their website to browse categories. They believe people have a purpose when coming to the website, they believe that people subscribe to other peoples feeds, that they are given links, that they are interested in what other people they are interested in are doing, rather than just what is popular to the general crowd.

In a sense, YouTube has shrunk the scope of YouTube.com whilst they have opened up both its business model as well as its platforms to new ways of sharing. They have adapted to a dynamic, vibrant and social web rather than letting it exist in the static, navigational way a website works. It has become a resource hub, rather than being a website.

So why is this good for Online Marketeers?

Well, it is not if you are used to buying yourself out of trouble. But it is really good if you are creative. Even buying yourself out of the problem needs to be done creatively on YouTube nowadays. You can choose to cheat, naturally, but if you don’t, then you have to engage yourself in the websites content in order to become noticed. You cannot simply advertise yourself out of the mess, but you actually have to put something on the platform worth noting.

When I say that YouTube has turned social, I mean just that. As a marketeer you have no chance in marketing yourself on the YouTube platform any longer unless you choose to engage with the same means all other users are engaging. Videos, comments, likes, sharing.. … social stuff.

YouTube need not to worry as they are working with their branded channels, special access to neat analytics through integration with Google Analytics and other such things which makes marketing worth while. They are turning their business offer into something actually interesting for business. This wasn’t the case previously.

Annotations, linking videos together, subtitles and indexation, prominent placements of links, their wonderful API… all of which makes a digital creative go boner and a digital business developer to actually see a value in video production.

Business from YouTube

Now, the last statement in the last paragraph might meet some objections so I will argue why I believe that YouTube is better suited for business now that it has turned social.

First of all, your content has the ability to reach far beyond the static of website embeds. Even though discussion was previously made possible through comment fields, and sharing of links on social networks and blogs, it was a lot of hustle to do it. You actually needed a blog or a website in order to embed the stuff. Adding the post to wall functionality of comments, likes and all other interactive stuff you do on YouTube makes it spread a lot more easily and naturally. Thus the inbound reach of a YouTube video is greater today than previously, even without considering its content.

Secondly, using annotations and transcripts you can actually prompt the user to actions which was previously not possible. You can use the bottom third to push messages and you can use layovers to create call to action which suits the social web a lot better (as it is based on dialogue) than the old version of YouTube.

Third, and possibly most importantly, you can now measure and follow where your videos are being shared. Where is the discussion going on about you and your brand. Where do they use your tutorials as reference material and how can you in turn use these people to run your errands… I know… I shouldn’t say that… but that is really where all the dialogue turns to green. How can you make people talk about you in the way that you want them to. It is NOT about you wanting them to promote your offer. But IT IS all about making them talk about you in a way which is valuable to you.

Do they link to you? Do they use the latest version of the video? Do they spread rumors or facts?

Previously, you didn’t know this as dialogues weren’t on the web, but offline or in e-mail or on forums where YouTube embeds weren’t possible. But as you can measure it all from the YouTube interface it is finally easy to integrate into your other business practices.

I feel my arguments are pretty weak today… but I see increasing traffic from YouTube to my website. The traffic I get do all that I want them to on the website. I don’t even have to tell them. They read a lot of my blog posts, they sign up for everything, they visit my “contact me” page and some of them write e-mails to me asking questions. I think I will better structure the business value of YouTube in another post cause my inspiration just died…

Please add to this post below in the comments…

//Jesper

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Most of the time I do not only feel a bit crazy, I get told I am. That’s why I find peace in watching these kind of video clips to make me realize that what others might think of as insane, actually is what makes me sane. Change is nothing that comes automatically. It is something we have to work to achieve. I cannot work without change and I have always hoped to change some part of the world for the better. In times where I find a lot of friends working their asses off, I want to give them the hope that inspire their inner voices to continue strive for change.

No matter how difficult it might seem. Never use your brain to solely decide what is the right path. Use your stomach as well. Dare to take decisions as it is the decisions that will invoke your gut to respond. Dare to be brave. Dare to get fired if that is what it takes. If you have kids, then inspire them to dare where you didn’t.

So. Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble makers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.

“and while some may see them as the crazy ones, I see genius..”

Have anyone else been exposed to YouTube’s new ad format? Well, basically it goes like this. You search, click a link and then expect to see the video right away. Sadly, you are now put on hold for a few seconds (30s max) and have to watch a commercial. Luckily this doesn’t play out for every video you watch, and I haven’t seen at what frequency they are going to use this, but I sure as hell hope they charge BILLIONS for it as it really f**ks with my user experience.

Alternative 1 – Flashvars CPC

I don’t think any ad format that interrupts user experience will be good in the long run. They should work with dynamic annotations and cpc within videos. Allow for the use of flashvars so that the advertisers can make interactive video-formats and CPO deals. Naturally, the marketeer would have to pay for this as a service, but I think most would as the limits… well there are no limits to what you could do with such a system.

This actually worked before YouTube put a stop to it. Was one of my favorite “creative” tactics for YouTube videos.

Alternative 2 – Ad rating

Put a section where you only display ad-videos and make it a contest. The users will then like/dislike the different videos. This would create a toplist of commercials. I am sure that companies would pay a small sum each month to be added to a list like that.

Alternative 3 – Related products

Now, the long tail on YouTube is fantastic. We know they can index the content of a video by looking at what they did over att Google video. Why not put related products that are relevant for the video itself. For poker, put poker products, for fashion, put fashion products. Not on the side, but as a part of the main content area. Especially as you are working with flash and annotations you could create a “product annotation” where an advertiser puts in a link to an xml-document listing products for different places in the video. That way you could actually buy the dress that someone is wearing by clicking it, or adding it directly to your purchase basket.

I guess that is about it for now, but there are no limitations on how YouTube easily could monetize if they would just move away from the traditional display ad format. I guess this format was produced in order to be able to push advertising to the 80% of the views that are not taking place on YouTube. I wonder what Facebook will say when they find out that Google earns money from ads on their platform haha..

//Jesper

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Something that Digg removed as the best way to rally your fans, has now been made available on YouTube. Today they launched the “Post a bulletin” feature which enables you to post a message to the walls of your subscribers. This is excellent. Now it actually make sense invest money into building subscribers to a channel as you get a direct way to notify them when you post new material or when you have updates.

Perhaps this is one further step in the way to increase the social features of the YouTube platform. They have until recently been limited to interaction on pages, but has launched network features in both the connection box as well as the way they promote videos watched by your friends.

I am looking forward to the next step in YouTubes iteration towards becoming a real social platform.

5 ways to use YouTube bulletins

1. Promote a recently uploaded video
2. Communicate with your subscribers about some specific message in the video content
3. Create competitions where users shall find stuff in existing videos
4. Enforce call to action in your videos
5. Get feedback from users on your videos

Please continue in the comments field.

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… would you stand up and walk out on me?

What would your fans, followers and readers do if you happened to do something a bit off? Would they stay or would they walk out on you? I think this is the most important question to answer when you engage with your customers in online environments. What can you do for them, so that they don’t walk out on you if you were to fuck up.

Cause just consider the power you get when you’re down and you can “have a little help” from your friends. How do you translate this sense of belonging to the way you communicate with your customer?

Cause everyone needs someone, or something to love, and why not let yourself be that someone or something to someone else?

An unnaturally short post by my standards, but I feel like Joe does it better then anyone. You can see his words are sincere, you can see that he is a true original, you can not only hear what he sings, but you can feel it. That is what you have to translate into your communication so that even when you REALLY need to say something (like when you release a new product), people listen cause they appreciate how you say it.

Cause in the modern world of the Internets, we all could use a little help from our friends. Now go out there and get some!!

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