Marketing Technology Blog

Many people don’t realize it, but YouTube has some basic analytics for you to track your videos. If you’d like to be able to see who is embedding them and how many plays they’ve gotten, it’s fairly simple utilizing YouTube’s Insight tool.

First, login to your YouTube Account and select one of your videos. You’ll notice an Insight button on the right sidebar:

Next, select Discovery and you’ll find a menu of options:

Select Embedded Player and you’ll be met with a list of all the sites the video was embedded on and how many views it received there:

This is a great tool for a marketer! If a site picks up one of your viral videos, this is a great way of tracking not only the sites that are interested – but the sites that are carrying a bit of traffic. You can also download these statistics via a CSV file.

If you’ve not seen CommonCraft “In Plain English” videos, I’ve written about them in the past here and showed off many of them. Lee Lefever and team have a simple means of explaining issues that are sometimes quite difficult to represent graphically. In this presentation, CommonCraft attempts to explain Social Media.

There are quite a few omissions from this presentation that I believe are critical to social media when it comes to businesses and how they can interact with consumers. This presentation speaks largely to social media sites being a referral network, but there is so much more:

• Social media, especially with regard to corporate blogging, provides a medium for content to be efficiently and effectively identified, indexed, and presented by search engines.
• Social media enables individuals to naturally group, organize, find and communicate with one another effectively. It’s also a fantastic medium for making people and ideas findable as well as enabling viral marketing.
• Social media incorporates important underlying technologies for integration, aggregation, syndication and promotion of people, products, services and companies. It’s a platform that enables communication as its never been enabled before.
• Social media will enable people and companies to closely monitor their reputation and authority.
• Social media isn’t always as positive and nice as the video, either. There are losers. A negative criticism of a company (perhaps one of the ice cream shops is scrimping on it’s scoop size) will travel like wildfire, having severe repercussions for companies that aren’t up to snuff.

There’s much more to social media than the story that’s told by CommonCraft. This video was published in May of 2008… I’m looking forward to future CommonCraft videos on the topic. It’s hard to criticize a group that does such a fantastic job, but I needed to share some criticism… after all, Social Media has provided me a platform to do so!

When I was working with clients on direct marketing, the formulas were fairly simple. Figure out who and where your customers live, then find prospects just like them. Execute, measure, refine – then do it all over again.

Social Media is a different, and perhaps that’s why companies tend to shy away from it. The results aren’t as predictable. There’s usually little or no examples of it done right nor are there opportunities to sample a few to see how the rest react.

Social Media is something your company needs to dive into headfirst, and then react and move with the audience. If you trust your products and services and you really want to reach out to the masses, then there’s no better opportunity like there is today. The companies that are standing back waiting, or worse – trying to copy others – are the big losers.

Paul at Buzz Marketing wrote a great post the other day, Market to Change Customer Behavior, not Attitudes. Customer behavior can be affected, but companies have to be able to duck, move and hit when they need to. It’s not a game of chess, it’s a street fight.

Customers are challenging you on their turf, not yours. When you win, you win big. But if you don’t show up or, worse, you lose the fight in front of other prospects and customers, you’re going to walk away empty-handed.

So which direction do you take to the pot of gold? Simply put, you don’t look for a direction – you just start down the trail. Social Media is about the road less travelled, not the path that’s been beaten to death.

What are you going to do about it?

• How many social networks do you and your employees participate in that are led by others (even by the competition)? Any regional networks?
• How many new social mediums are you experimenting with. Does your company have a Twitter account? A YouTube Channel?
• How many regional events do you participate in… or better… do you lead? Do you bring other experts in to help your customers in areas that you don’t have expertise in?
• Does your company blog? Do your customers? Do your employees? Why don’t you know?

Here’s a simple one to try. Put up a Twitter account for your company and have a list of people that monitor it. Every time you add content to your site, automate an announcement to Twitter. You might be surprised by how many folks are interested!

Stop planning. This isn’t something you can wait to create a perfect plan on… this is something you need to execute on. Today. Now.

Progress continues! Pat Coyle and I have been working with the great talent (Tim and Curtis) over at Innovative on enhancing the website dedicated to the bid for the 2012 Super Bowl here in Indianapolis.

The Super Bowl Committee is being led by Mark Miles, President of the Central Indiana Corporate Partnership. Mark is doing an exceptional job already, readily adopting web technologies to inform and enlist the support of the community. This ‘version’ of the website reflects the goal – we now have the following features:

• Videos are both displayed in a player and being converted for use on YouTube so that we can go viral! Be sure to show of your pride and display the video on your blog!
• Mark is dedicated to leading the charge transparently – so we’ve got the committee to adopt blogging to provide the community with updates on what the team is doing and how they can help. Compendium Software has stepped up to support the move and provided accounts to leverage their state of the art corporate blogging application!
• Conversations from around the web are being sought out and displayed on the home page so that you can join in! It’s essential that we provide a means for the community to join in the conversation, whether or not it’s positive. The committee isn’t simply dedicated on getting the Super Bowl, but they want the communities input on how to make it the best Super Bowl ever.
• Using Yahoo! Pipes, I built a complex plan that outputs and filters the latest articles from our local news and media partners when they write about the 2012 Superbowl. This is so that we can also provide up to the minute news and show the local media support for the bid as well!
• ExactTarget has also come to the aid of the committee and provided an Account where we’ll be pushing News Alerts and Newsletters out of! Be sure to Subscribe! We’re going to work next on integrating the feeds and the blog into email using ExactTarget’s API

All of this after 8PM and on the weekends! It’s enough to tire a guy out – but this is too important an opportunity to pass up!