TubeMogul just released a recent report analyzing Facebook Video Advertising where they took a look at 25 major video advertising campaigns that ran identical videos within Facebook ad units and also ran similar click-to-play video ad units on various publisher sites. The sample compared resulting cost, viewing-time and  spans over 60 million cumulative views. Here are some important findings from their report with some of my own opinions intertwined in their results:

Why should you care about video on Facebook?

Facebook is one of the top-ten video sites in the world without even trying to be. According to a report by Comscore, Facebook was the 5th largest video site in April in total videos played coming in above dedicated video sites like CBS Interactive and even Hulu.

According to the study done by TubeMogul, Facebook also delivers some of the most engaged viewers online. Their study found that Facebook leads all other discovery sources in terms of minutes-watched per view.

Overall, it found that completion rates for Facebook ads were roughly 5.5% to 9.5% higher than identical videos run in display units on outside publisher sites. The Facebook virtual currency (or in-game video ad) also had the longest average view time, at 54.7 seconds per view, followed by the Facebook in-banner, at 48.6 seconds, the third-party in-banner, 39.6, and the Facebook interstitial (i.e. preroll video ads), at 11.2.

It’s no surprise to me that the interstitials had the shortest view time because most viewers if given the option to skip them and get to the content they were originally trying to get to…will skip them. Even though in most cases they are much shorter than any of the other video ad formats here.

3/4 of Facebook ad units sampled have a lower average cost per view than comparable offsite display. Virtual currency ads were also the big winner here at 30 cents on a cost-per-view basis. That compares to $5.27 for Facebook app in-banner ads, $1.06 for Facebook’s sponsored video unit, and $1.07 for stand-alone video ads on other sites.

Other interesting stats

Viewers were more likely to share videos in Facebook’s virtual currency and app in-banner ads with friends on Facebook or Twitter at 1.5% – 2% than video ads on other sites which were less than ½% for offsite video ads.

The click-through rate on the virtual currency ad was also highest, at 5%, versus just over 3% for video display ads on third-party sites.

Herein lies a problem for marketers

So you may be thinking “Wow you get a lot of bang for your buck with the virtual currency, where do I sign up?” Not quite so fast. While social games like Farmville have a monthly audience of over 70 million this may not be the right demographic for your product, service or brand. So research the social game carefully before placing a video ad campaign. Also be wary that many of these game developers break the rules and allow gamers to click play on a video ad multiple times just to rack up points.

So while the numbers may look impressive make sure you know your audience and research the game first. Is the virtual currency model in gaming the next big thing for video advertising? Are you REALLY getting an engaged viewer or are they just clicking through because they think that will earn them more points? What do you think?

Recently I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Maruxa Murphy for the Video Marketing Telesummit. It was a lot of fun talking about the usage of animation for online marketing applications and having a great discussion on the topic.

There are 11 other interviews done with some outstanding video peeps representing different specialties of online video marketing. The others interviewed for this series include: Michael Koenigs of Traffic Geyser, Perry Lawrence of AskMrVideo.com, Andrew Lock creator of the podcast “Help My Business Sucks!”, Josh Anderson of Internet Business Ideas Inc, webinar expert Stephen Beck, David Frey of Marketing Best Practices, video newsletter expert Michael Yost, Will Franco of jiveSYSTEMS, Joshua Aikens of Flixify,  Michelle Cox of Metacafe (who I’d also interviewed a couple years ago) and video blogging extraordinaire and all around great guy from the Boston social media scene Steve Garfield.

If you are interested in checking out the series it runs from 6/14 – 6/18 (my session happens to be on Friday 6/18 from 1-4pm EST). Register to listen to the entire series or just one session for FREE.

Here’s the description of my session for the event.

Eric Guerin

“How To Grab Your Customers By The Eyeballs And Keep Them Glued To The Screen Through Fun And Effective Animated Videos For Your Business”

Eric Guerin has over 15 years experience in the visual communications field working for marketing firms in and around Boston MA. Eric started his own company, Adelie Studios, in 1999 with the mission of providing an integrated solution to customer’s print and web design needs.

Here’s what you’ll discover in this presentation…

• Discover the 2 types of video animation that is often overlooked in video marketing today
• The easiest and most unique way to position your products in your video marketing strategy
• The #1 way you can grab your audience’s attention in the first 5 seconds of your video
• Why 53% of your current viewers are NOT watching your entire video (and how you can immediately change these stats to your favor!)
• 3 superstar tips to getting your videos viewed by your intended audience again and again
• How to create high-converting videos without your talking head in the video
• The single most powerful way to get more views to your videos
• How Google Site Maps can get your videos dominating Google searches within hours
• 3 major reasons your audience will want to pass on your animated video
• The fastest way to get your audience to see your animated videos through your email marketing campaigns

Register to listen to the entire series or just one session for FREE.

Recently I created an intro for the podcast and they invited me on to the show to talk briefly about short form online video versus podcasting. Then they profiled the Telly Award winning video we created through JCSI for OpenPages as an example of what we do. The lunch at Burton’s Grill was absolutely amazing and the conversation was great. Enjoy this while you eat your lunch…I know I did.

TubeMogul recently completed a research case study to find exactly what the title of this post asks: what social media site refers the least fickle viewers? They sampled 6,763,690 video streams over three months referred by links from Digg, Facebook and Twitter to come up with the findings. I’m going to highlight a few of the real key points to talk about but here’s the link to read the full results from their research report.

Results from TubeMogul

The results (below) are surprising: on average, viewers referred by Twitter tend to watch a video the longest (one minute, 58 seconds), compared to Facebook (one minute, 14 seconds) and Digg (58 seconds).

On average, audiences clicking on video links from Twitter watch a video 36.91% longer than viewers referred by Facebook and 49.98% longer than viewers referred by Digg.

My Analysis

This is an interesting study and the numbers are intriguing but there are a few things that the study doesn’t take into account.

Separation of social media sites & social bookmarking sites

I would have liked to have seen Twitter and Facebook (possibly even MySpace and LinkedIn too) go head to head and Digg go up against other bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon, etc. My reason for this is that typically you are more connected with people on social media sites than on social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking sites are cluttered with millions of links people are sharing with others they may not even know. So it’s a less direct form of sharing than say Twitter or Facebook where you (usually) have a more established relationship with the possible viewer clicking your link. Most bookmarking sites have a lot of users who are lightly “browsing” content and clicking on something that may sound interesting but then quickly clicking away if their interest isn’t peaked. On Facebook for instance if I share a video, only people who have some sort of relationship with me are going to see it and are therefore more likely to watch more of the video. So it would have been nice to see a comparison of apples to apples.

Yes its video…but what is the content?

This may seem like a stupid question but if 75% of the videos profiled were of a cat playing the piano…what does that actually tell you? It would have been great to cull out the user generated content and just focus on videos that have some sort of at least a vague marketing purpose, whether its a direct sell on down to the nebulous but humorous branding video. I realize this is nearly impossible to achieve, however including all that user generated content as part of the research definitely skews the numbers. Let’s face it…if you upload a video of your dog barking at the TV – you don’t really care how many people watch it to completion but if you put a branding video online with a call to action – that’s information you want to know.

Time of day comparisons

Just like email marketing where you have better days of the week or times of day to send your email to get ideal open rates or click through rates, social media works much the same way. It would have been interesting to see over a three month period what days of the week and hours of the day had higher engagement rates.

What the numbers tell me

Ultimately the numbers don’t matter. Well…they matter but its a giant brush stroke of the entire social media space, not necessarily YOUR demographic and how THEY are engaging in social media. So you have to keep this in mind when you delve into these numbers. If the key demographic you market to is predominantly on MySpace but you are just sharing your video link on Twitter because this research report told you to – you could be missing your mark.

Personally over the past 3 months, SmartMarket Media has had better engagement rates from LinkedIn (2 minutes 35 seconds) followed by Twitter (2 minutes 32 seconds),  Facebook (1 minute, 40 seconds), (StumbleUpon (0 minutes, 45 seconds) and Digg (0 minutes, 37 seconds). Obviously we have a much smaller sampling (hundreds of visitors rather than millions) but it just goes to show you need to know your customer base and engage where they are engaging.

What do you think? What do these numbers tell you?

So this is a bit of a departure from the traditional 5 Question Blog Interviews I have done in the past…but for good reason. Matthew Mamet is Director of Product Marketing at PermissionTV and because of the cutting edge work they are doing with online video (and our nearby locations) we decided to do a video version of the 5 Question Blog Interview and to utilize the interactivity of the PermissionTV Platform Player. So without further ado…please enjoy.

Question#1: For those who are unfamiliar with Permission TV, can you briefly describe what you do?

Question#2: What specific features does the Permission TV platform offer to help enhance the viewers experience and the businesses opportunity to measure viewer engagement?

Question#3: The race to monetize online video is rapidly increasing among different advertising networks and video sharing sites, some are doing it well others are doing it poorly but everyone is struggling to find a model that works. In your opinion, what do you see as the future for monetization of video online?

Question#4: You recently launched the parody web site “I Want My Viral Video.com” poking fun at how some people view viral videos or their “online video strategy”. What was the impetus behind building this site and what kind of response have you received so far?

Question#5: What is the one hint or tip you could share that most companies getting started with online video fail to realize or include or factor into their overall online video marketing?

Bonus Question (surprise!): What can you share in regards to PermissionTVs new product offerings and what you are working on now?

Mike Langford, CEO of Tweetworks, was kind enough to invite me to participate as part of a panel discussion about social media for the Metro-West Chamber of Commerce. I was joined on the panel by Mike and two others; Cappy Popp of Thought Labs and Jeff Cutler of JeffCutler.com

The title for the panel discussion was “Linked in – How to Increase Sales” however given all of our diverse backgrounds with using social media in all different ways, it quickly evolved into a broader discussion about how we use and recommend using social media for business.

Jeff had some great recommendations for finding the “pulse” of online conversations going on around your company online and using Google Alerts to find those conversations. Mike had a great analogy of how social media is really no different than going to a Chamber networking mixer. Cappy’s reminder that in social media you need to “give” if you want to “receive” to build a brand following falls right in line with Mike’s analogy too. Networking online using social media is virtually the same (other than the technology) as networking in person. It’s all about building relationships.

I’ve shared Mike Langford’s video recording of the panel discussion. Although the still on the video looks like I am about to break into song…I assure you that doesn’t happen. I wouldn’t torture my blog readers with my horrible singing voice. Enjoy!

This past Thursday I got the opportunity to guest host a video podcast with Matthew Mamet of PermissionTV. Every Thursday they run a live show called PTVLIVE focusing on news, product releases and events with online video.

This was all new to me. I’m usually behind the camera or if in front of it, have a few takes to get the content right. Going live was definitely a little more stressful as evidenced by my “ums” and “errs” at the beginning of the show. But after a while I fell into a groove and was able to relax and enjoy the experience.

We covered some pretty interesting topics including integrating videos in your email marketing campaign, test driving the GoodMail Email Marketing Platform’s integrated video feature, discussing how much of a typical online video is actually watched and some big news for Visible Measures which now tracks videos at MySpace.

All in all this was a really great experience for me and the folks over at PermissionTV were fantastic. You can subscribe to their podcast through iTunes or watch weekly live at PTVLIVE. As promised I have given my 5 star rating on iTunes for this great podcast. Check out the full podcast below:

Zak Barron knows EVERYTHING about email marketing. Alright I could be exaggerating a tiny bit but he is the local email marketing expert for Constant Contact in the New England area and he definitely knows his stuff. He runs frequent seminars on email marketing, interactive training workshops, and industry specific programs. I have had the pleasure of doing a few combined seminars with Zak talking about combining online video and email marketing. I asked Zak if he would be interested in taking the hot seat for one of my 5 Question Interviews and without further ado, here are his answers:

Eric Guerin: I’ve heard Constant Contact’s deliverability to ISP’s (Internet Service Providers – i.e. Comcast, AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, etc.) is one of the highest among ESP’s (Email Service Providers like Constant Contact)…how are you able to maintain such a high level of deliverability?

Zak Barron: Good question Eric. Constant Contact currently has a deliverability rate above 97%. This is a key metric for ESP’s that anyone looking for an email marketing service should look at when making their decision. It’s very easy for a company to say, “We have 97% deliverability” so make sure you ask if that is the ESP’s number or a 3rd party number. Constant Contact uses an outside unbiased 3rd party called Return Path to evaluate our delivery rate. The reason that we are able to maintain this high deliverability rate is because we require all of our customers to use permission based email lists. We have built personal relationships with postmasters at many ISP’s, and they know that we share the same contempt for SPAM email, this also greatly impacts how the ISP’s view Constant Contact as a large sender of email messages.

EG: You mentioned permission based email lists, can you briefly explain what the importance of an “opt-in email list” is and why you would NEVER want to buy an email address list from another company?

ZB: It is critical to a business that it only use email to communicate with those whom have given their permission to receive emails from that business. Given that statement there are 2 levels of permission; implicit, and explicit. Implicit covers anyone that you have a prior business relationship with, but you might not have told them that you are going to begin sending them email campaigns. Explicit permission means that you are actually setting the expectation when you collect the contact information of a customer, or prospect, that they will be getting email campaigns. The main reason that a business needs to build it’s list in this manner is the issue of SPAM. Over the years consumers have become very weary of who they provide their contact information to, and how they react to messages that they have not asked for in their inboxes. With many email clients allowing their users to report unwanted email as SPAM, the ISP’s are able to track the reputation of senders and penalize them if they get to many SPAM reports/complaints by not allowing them access to their(ISP’s) customers inbox. The point is that a purchased or rented list will get tons of SPAM complaints, certainly enough to be noticed by the ISP’s. A business that insists on this practice will find themselves on industry wide “blocklists, or blacklists” which will directly affect the businesses ability to get email marketing campaigns out the door.

EG: That relationship with your contacts is really the key to a successful email marketing plan. Speaking of relationships, how does Constant Contact engage online and build community for their users?

ZB: At Constant Contact we are all about community, and to that end there are 2 ways that we do that, one is with the Constant Contact Connect Up! user community, and the 2nd is the Constant Contact Cares4Kids program.

Constant Contact’s ConnectUp! user community was designed as a forum to share the entrepreneurial energy and passion that drives small businesses and organizations. The community provides a host of tools and technologies that enable you to connect with your peers, exchange ideas and find answers to your questions about email marketing, online surveys and small business issues in general.

As a paying Constant Contact customer, you can bring email marketing and online survey tools to your favorite eligible community organization-at no cost to you! Through Cares4Kids you can help an organization reach new donors, publicize their good works, plan events-and use their precious funding to carry out their mission. It all starts with one quick application.. More than 900 worthy organizations have received free accounts on behalf of Constant Contact’s Cares4Kids program.

EG: Where does Constant Contact see the future of email marketing headed particularly with more and more people using mobile devices to open and access their email?

ZB: If you would have asked me this a year ago, I would have told you that it was going to affect open rates in a major way. The tracking mechanism that CTCT uses is a small image in the body of the HTML email. So this means that all text based email clients are tough to track. With the release of the iPhone, and many other mobile devices that can read HTML, I see open rates actually improving and becoming more accurate, as most smart phones will be switching to the HTML platform.

EG: What is the one hint or tip you could share that most people doing email marketing fail to realize or include in their email marketing campaign?

ZB: I think one of the biggest mistakes that a lot of email marketers make is that they fail to set the proper expectations at the outset of their email relationship with their customers and prospects. Being clear as to the content and frequency of the messages you will be sending is vital. Instead of saying “sign up for me email newsletter” say “sign up for my monthly newsletter.” Half of the battle in email marketing is validating your place in your recipient’s inbox, and setting/managing expectations is key to that validation.

EG: Thanks Zak!

One of the things I like to do is go to LinkedIn and answer questions and take part in different discussions that are going on. It’s a great way as a business owner or specialist to show their expertise, take part in interesting conversations and build stronger networking relationships.

I recently was shocked to see people using the discussions on LinkedIn…to give a sales pitch. Some of them were advertising webinars but most were direct sales pitches starting with a question like Do you want to save your marketing dollars and revolutionize your online marketing? which after you clicked on it was a big sales pitch about how awesome this marketing firm is and how they will revolutionize your online marketing.

Out of the 20 “discussions” appearing on the first page, 18 were direct sales pitches either about events or services offered by these companies. The thing I really found disturbing about this was that it was a marketing group on LinkedIn. These are people that are supposed to help other businesses with communication and engaging online if the title from the above “Discussion Topic” is any indication. This may be a news flash but one sided communications are not discussions.

Having a discussion is all about sharing your knowledge, appropriate links and opinion with others. It’s about engaging. However using the discussion area as a personal bulletin board to advertise your services is not only tactless…it’s also destroying the art of conversation within your social media group. This comes down to moderation by the Group Owner to make sure that people are using the discussion area to actually have discussions and not diatribes about how great they are but think about this for a moment – if everyone within your LinkedIn group is shouting BUY FROM ME! YOU NEED ME! in the discussion area…who is left listening?

Instead of shouting how great you are, show it by engaging in meaningful conversations and letting your obvious expertise shine through. People probably aren’t going to hire you because you say you’ll deliver amazing results. They’ll hire you because through conversations and relationship building discussions you clearly show that you know your stuff and have built up the trust so they can rely on your brand.

What are your thought on this? I’d love to hear from others about their experiences and get a discussion started here about your experiences with this, how you’ve dealt with this or how you think this can be fixed.

There is nothing better to me than getting to meet many of the people I have conversations with online in person. Social Media Jungle event organized by Jeff Pulver was no exception. There were around 120 or so attendees and he was able to assemble some of the areas best social media thought leaders to lead some amazing discussions. Here are a few quick observations of mine from various speakers at the event:

Jeff Pulver – “ Sometimes You need to be Vulnerable”

The organizer of the event kicked it off and had some great thoughts about connecting with people as people…social media isn’t a numbers game although that is how some people would make it out to be. He also assesses his relationships online regularly and has recently removed around 3,000 “friends” from his Facebook profile. He regularly assesses those that he is connected to – do they engage in conversation? Have they brought something to the relationship in the past year? If the answer is no, then he removes them.This example was to stress his point that it’s all about building relationships and you have a “social” responsibility to define yourself as a person. People don’t interact with brands – they interact with the people behind those brands. Connect with people AS people. So being vulnerable is the secret to success in social media.

Another interesting prediction Jeff brought up – He believes in less than 18 months Twitter will be sold for between 2-4 billion to either Google or Microsoft. We shall see…

C.C. Chapman – “It isn’t a numbers game. The human side of social media”

In C.C. Chapman’s presentation he built upon Jeff’s presentation focus by suggesting that you should disregard quantity of followers, friends, etc. and just focus on building trust. “Don’t forget your human. Be yourself.”

Richard Dale – “Twitter as the universal information stream: What if the Twitter stream told us every time a can of soda is sold?”

Raised some interesting questions about Twitter becoming more than it is. Will it have accounts you have to pay to follow? Will there be automated feeds to tell soft drink distributors to restock a vending machine? Automated traffic updates?

Laura Fitton – “Social Media for Social Good”

Laura talked about getting social media involved with charities such as WellWishes because she was passionate about clean water. She also brought up Twestival which hosted over 200 simultaneous TweetUps to raise money for clean water projects. The main thing she stressed is that the influencer is the idea and not the person behind it.

Justin Levy – “How Small Business can use Inbound Marketing/Social Media to Help Increase Their Business”

Justin talked about how he is part owner of Caminito Argentinean Steakhouse a steak house in Northampton MA and how he has cut their traditional ad revenues by up to 90% and had 12 consecutive months of increasing revenue – all because of social media. He also shared an acronym he made up: HELP which stands for “Hustle, Engagement, Learning and Passion.” He also added “S” for “Strategy” which is how social media “HELPS” his business continue to grow.

Chris Penn – “It IS a numbers game – thinking about what numbers actually matter”

Chris is a stats geek which I love (being one myself). His whole topic was based around “what numbers matter?” and it comes down to basic grammar the verb. Verbs carry the action in a sentence. What measurables in your statistics have verbs? You just need to define what actions are in your statistics to find what your truly valuable statistics are.

Stephen Dill – “Social Media Lessons Learned: From the perspective of a skeptical Online Marketer”

Stephen started by talking about the misconception that people feel they don’t have the time for social media. He then quoted Laura Fitton of Pistachio Consulting (who spoke earlier) as part of his presentation that “Twitter is Google Juice”. He stressed the importance of “benchmarking” on Google to measure the effectiveness of using Twitter. Stephen was competing on Twitter with a famous Confederate General who also had the same name as he did (having a famous horse jockey who won the Kentucky Derby I could empathize with his struggle). He stressed that rather than fall into the misconception that social media was a time waster, you should realize that the real power and reason behind using social media is the technology of search.

Leslie Poston -”Bringing Generations Together For Success In The New Millennium”

Leslie had a great presentation about generational engagement in social media. Her greatest point was the need for real mentoring. For “Gen Yers” to help the “baby boomers” embrace the possibilities of social media and the tools that are available as well as the “baby boomers” to help the “Gen Yers” to understand concepts and strategies they may not have learned growing up completely in a digital world.

Matthew Mamet – “Using online video to strengthen your relationship with your online community.”

Matthew talked about how social media in general is a noisy place to have your discussion but that video helps to change that because people use video to change their mood. He also had stats (again I’m an admitted stats geek) that 86% of people use video to change their emotional state. It just goes to show how an effectively produced video can reach your audience by utilizing emotional triggers.

Thanks also go to Joe Cascio, Doug Levin, Jason Jacobs, Leah Busque, Steve Garfield, Alex Chriss (also the event’s host from Intuit), Maria Thurrell and Mike Langford for sparking some other great conversations not mentioned here and to Jeff Pulver for putting on a great event!

Increased Click-Through Rate Statistics When Using Videos in your Email Marketing

How Much of a Typical Online Video Is Actually Watched?