YouTube and Video Marketing - Glenn Gabe On Making An Impact The Web 2.0 Way

As many of you know, I heavily focus on Rich Media Marketing, especially the use of video marketing to support online campaigns. I'm also confident that most of you have heard of Youtube! :-) I'm in the middle of a large Buzz Marketing campaign right now and as part of our marketing efforts, we uploaded a video trailer of the campaign to the major web 2.0 sites for user-generated video. I thought I would write a post about it to share some of my findings.

YouTube (and web 2.0 sites like it) are powerful mechanisms for viral marketing. That said, you still need eyeballs viewing your video clip and it's getting harder to accomplish as more people are adding content! I'm sure everyone has experienced someone forwarding a YouTube video via email, or watched a YouTube video in a blog. My guess is that the video was ridiculously funny or disturbing...you know something that grabs your attention. That leads to the question, "Can YouTube (or sites like it) really help promote your marketing campaign? Will people watch it, like it, and pass it on?"

I refer to YouTube frequently in this post, but there are several user-generated sites for video like DailyMotion, Google Video, Yahoo Video, etc. My question obviously applies to these other sites as well.

Let's get back on track...We launched a Buzz Campaign last week that uses my video marketing platform (Heighten) as the platform for the campaign. Visitors can watch video-based clues over a certain time period to try and win a prize worth $4000. As part of the campaign, I edited a video trailer that was uploaded to the top web 2.0 video sites. Also, we provided a way to download the trailer from the campaign website.

So, what are the results? Which site or mechanism works best?

Here is a quick rundown:

YouTube - 28% of the views
Our Downloadable Trailer (on the Campaign Website) - 27%
Daily Motion - 26% of the views
Google Video - 13% of the views
Yahoo Video - 5% of the views

So it seems that YouTube is the winner (at least for our campaign) and that providing a downloadable video trailer on our campaign website was a smart move. The hope of course, is that the people that downloaded the trailer passed it around via email (we kept the file-size down to under 4MB). And of course we want the web 2.0 sites to fuel some viral marketing with the ease of their forwarding process or the ability to post the video elsewhere via copy and paste.

It should be interesting to see the final numbers for our online marketing efforts when the campaign is done. What I can tell you is that our online marketing mix is resulting in a high level of website activity... For example, yesterday's activity just doubled our best day of the campaign...

GG

The Difference Between Bzz Marketing, Viral Marketing, and Word of Mouth Marketing

You might be wondering, "Aren't they all the same thing?" The quick answer is no...and you are about to hear the longer answer in my post. If you are in marketing, I bet you've heard someone talking about WOM when they really meant Bzz and then heard someone else a few minutes later talk about Viral Marketing when they really meant Word of Mouth Marketing. Am I confusing you yet??

In an earlier post, I explained the two major categories of Word of Mouth Marketing (from my perspective), the first being Organic WOM and the second being Amplified WOM or WOM as a Campaign Driver. Now I will go a little deeper and explain the difference between Bzz, Viral, and Word of Mouth. I was recently speaking with an owner of a growing small business that used these three terms interchangeably. I was curious, so I asked him what he thought the difference was between the three. He gave me a "Tony Soprano" stare for a few seconds (which actually felt like 10 minutes) and then asked me, "Well, Mr. Web Marketing, what is the difference?" So, #1, I'm glad I'm still alive and #2, I wanted to create this post to clarify the difference!

Bzz Marketing is when you are trying to make a big splash, wow people, excite them about a product or service and get people talking. I'll start with a comical example. Remember when Fabio was hired to ride in the front seat of a new roller coaster at Busch Gardens a while back? That stunt actually made a bigger splash than expected, since Fabio was hit in the face by an unsuspecting bird during the ride. The bird was collateral damage, but it ignited a lot of coverage... Was that good bzz or bad, I can't tell. I guess if you are a bzz consultant, it was probably good! Another example would be hiring actors to walk around Penn Station in New York City singing This Land is Your Land and handing out business card cd's holding a video of the latest and greatest minivan. It will definitely grab people's attention, but it probably won't last long...

Viral Marketing is a little different. It typically happens online and spreads like wildfire across the web. The goal is to get a marketing message out and enable people to send something along to their friends, coworkers, family, etc. They can post it in their blog, email it to their friends, IM their coworkers, etc. I have seen firsthand how viral marketing can impact a campaign. One of my clients received over 922,000 visitors in a relatively short amount of time, which also spurred over 6500 orders. How did this happen, you ask? The link to the flash video site that I built was posted on blogs across the blogosphere. It was amazing to watch the posts increase over a short period of time.

Word of Mouth Marketing is more organic, happens both offline and online, and is the goal of almost every marketer these days. This is where an initial word of mouth conversation happens and the spark ignites a web-like path. For example, my friends and family typically come to me with questions about the web or computers in general. If I recommend a product or company that I've had good experiences with, I let them know. They, in turn, might explain this to their friends at work, who might also tell their spouses at home, who may tell their sister or brother that...."there is a guy at work who knows someone really into technology that recommended ABC product." Is this true, yes, did it start with a casual conversation over a family dinner, yes, does that person really know that I'm a technology fanatic or credible, no...but that's how a typical word of mouth path gets started. Add the web, which enables you to spread information like no other medium, and boy have you got a dynamo called WOM! Now, I didn't mention the best ways to harness the power of WOM...that's for another post. Sorry.

One Part Bzz, Two Parts Viral...
The last point I wanted to mention is that you can combine Bzz Marketing, Viral Marketing, and Word of Mouth Marketing. For example, the site I mentioned above that received over 922,000 visits used an attention grabbing set of video clips on the website, offered forward to a friend, but also leveraged company fans/influencers to get the word out. To read more about the differences between Bzz, Viral, and WOM, definitely check out Grapevine, a book written by BzzAgent founder David Balter. It's a great read and also has a chapter focusing on the major differences.

So, when you are at your next marketing meeting and someone incorrectly uses Bzz Marketing when they mean Viral Marketing, you can jump all over them! ;-) Have fun!

So Now It's Called WOM!

Don't we just love acronyms?? WOM, SEO, SEM, PPC, CPM, CPC, blah, blah, blah...

WOM has been around since the beginning of time, however, there has never been such a powerful catalyst for WOM like the Internet! I think everyone that’s been involved with online marketing has seen the powerful effect of WOM in one form or another, whether it’s a blogger sending thousands of visitors to your site or a viral component like forward to a friend that helps drive traffic (and hopefully sales.) Since word of mouth has become so hot, I thought I would elaborate on the two main forms of WOM (from my standpoint).

Organic WOM
This is, “Glenn buys a laptop from Dell and tells every client he has about how great the laptop is. He loves the widescreen display, its durability, and reliability”.

This is the purest form of WOM and it’s what every company hopes to achieve. Now add the web, which fosters communication like no other medium today… You can blog, IM, post to forums, communicate with people thousands of miles away in a nanosecond. It's a world where one blogger can influence thousands of people with two lines of text.

In my experience with helping clients build and execute WOM campaigns, the key question is, “how do we harness the power of web-based WOM?” Are we ready for the extra traffic, the questions that need answers, the pressure on our fulfillment system, etc? It’s scary for some customers, especially small businesses, that don’t have enormous budgets. I’ve had to “turn off” a few campaigns over the past year due to the excessive traffic and pressure on customer service and fulfillment.

In order to help clients launch organic WOM campaigns, I have created a structured process that enables me to research the business topology, understand my clients’ customers, and build campaigns that help generate quality traffic yielding long term customers. I will be posting more about organic WOM in upcoming weeks so please check back.

WOM as a Campaign-Driver
So we’ve all seen media-based WOM sites that try to entertain us as well as help spread the word about a product, brand, or company. There are some great examples out there…the Dell DJ Ditty and Orbit’s Friends of Bright to name a few. Coming from a multimedia background, I definitely see the value in utilizing this type of WOM to help the performance of a marketing campaign. Don’t get me wrong, organic WOM rules in my mind…however, to help generate sales for a specific campaign, I’m all for creating viral content that hopefully informs and educates people, but that also sells. Heck, I just wrote four webisodes for one of my clients that uses a fictional character to help sell video content! The webisodes are funny, entertaining, but also provide special offers to visitors, provide portable web-video, and provide the opportunity to visit the fictional character’s blog (and to even communicate with him.) These types of campaigns are shorter, more targeted, and simply tap into the viral nature of the web to get more people to the site. And, if you've done your job correctly, you should see a nice bump in sales.

I believe in both forms of WOM, depending on my clients’ goals and expectations. Organic is what we all aim to achieve, but WOM as a campaign driver can sure help a specific campaign succeed.

More about WOM in upcoming posts...So go ahead and be the poster child for WOM and go tell someone about this post! ;-)