The SOPA / PIPA Bills & What They Could Mean for Your Business
Let’s say you have a website and you post regularly to a blog. At some point someone (not affiliated with your company) randomly posts a comment on one of your blog posts mentioning another company or linking to a video about that company on YouTube. Then that company mentioned sees the comment and isn’t happy about it. Rather than engaging in a conversation in the comments to defend their brand position or asking that the comment be removed; they have the power to shut down your ENTIRE domain. Sound like censorship? It is.
The Protect-IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) are bills which would give corporations and government the ability to censor websites on the net. Both of these bills had, at their heart, good intentions. However both bills are so horribly written with vague definitions of piracy that basically ANY website including any form of user-generated content could be at risk of being shutdown. Think of Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. and the implications these bills could have on the way these websites fundamentally operate if passed into law. All of these websites rely heavily on user generated content. SOPA /PIPA would completely alter the way Americans would be allowed to use the Internet. Key word in that last sentence is “allowed”.
It also presents a nightmare for web hosting companies which will be forced to police all of the domains that are hosted by them. Let’s say you own a boutique baby clothing store and you had a post about how babies do the cutest things on your website blog and someone posted a link of their baby dancing to a top 40 song. If that top 40 song’s recording company were to claim that this content were piracy, your web hosting company would have to shut down your ENTIRE domain as soon as the complaint was received. There would be no pre-shutdown notification email and no friendly ‘please remove this from your site’. The next day you’d wake up and like flicking off a light switch – your entire website would be gone.
Companies such as DreamHost where the Adelie Studios website and blog are hosted, have over 1.2 million domains that are hosted by them. If this layer of enforcement were required because of the liability they’d be forced to take on, you can all but say goodbye to affordable web hosting. DreamHost has their own response denouncing the bill and the negative effects it would have in their blog post “Don’t drop the soap, drop SOPA!”
As a small business producing niche animated content and marketing animations for the web, both of these bills are incredibly frightening to us. Fight for the Future produced a great little animation (which we are always fans of people using animation) to explain and illustrate the way these bills could potentially censor the internet. Check out their animation below.
SOPA comes up for a vote on Tuesday, January 24th. To find more about the SOPA & PIPA bills yourself and to see what actions you can take, visit: http://americancensorship.org/
Buzzworthy Wednesday: Adventures of Captain Inbound: Episode One
Originally published on the Inane Ramblings of Eric Guerin Blog.
This week’s Buzzworthy Wednesday is an animated video created by HubSpot for the “Adventures of Captain Inbound: Episode One“.
Full Disclosure: I may be a bit biased here since I was the writer and animator on this project. While I tend to be hyper-critical of my work (is any creative person not?) I am more impressed with the strategy behind the branding video carried out by HubSpot.
They didn’t just create the video and throw it out to the whims of the internet, they had a plan. In the word’s of the Episode “Guru” of David Meerman Scott “Create exceptional content that people will want to share, and point the world to your virtual doorstep.”
So the video was posted on their blog, they built a custom landing page for the series to reside (oh yes…there will be more), started a fan page on Facebook and launched a Twitter account for Captain Inbound. Practicing what they are preaching. The video was also mentioned as a great example of how “Content Rules” on the MarketingProfs blog today by Ann Handley. Enjoy!
Viewer Engagement with Facebook Video Advertising
Have you considered Facebook video advertising units as part of your online video marketing strategy? If you haven’t (or didn’t know it was an option) here’s some statistics to consider.
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?
What social media site refers the best video viewer engagement?
Social networking and bookmarking sites are a critical part of any online marketing effort utilizing video because you need to get your video seen where your key demographic is spending time online.
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?
Metro-West Chamber’s Social Media Panel Discussion
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!
Online Video Driving Automotive Recovery
In a great article recently published on the Online Video Insider by Eric Franchi, some great statistics and insight were shared which are particularly timely given Chrysler’s and General Motors’ recent bankruptcy announcements. Perhaps as they pick which road to take the companies future on they should reassess their level of participation in social media and particularly online video.
Here were a few of the highlights from that post for the automakers to keep in mind and my thoughts on these suggestions:
“83% of new vehicle buyers visit video focused Web sites prior to purchasing a car. This means 31% viewed videos on brand, product or company sites; 24% on auto-specific Web sites, 11% on YouTube; 7%, Yahoo Video; 7%, news sites; 6%, MSN Video; 4%, MySpace; 3%, Facebook; 3%, AOL Video; and 3%, other.”
These numbers from a recent Google sponsored study highlight a few really important factors that automakers need to keep in mind regarding online video and how viewers are searching and researching online. I’d be willing to bet that in a short amount of time YouTube, Yahoo Video, Facebook, etc. will garner a much larger piece of the viewership.
“Don’t skimp on production. A full one-third of auto shoppers watch the video content on the product site.”
So once you have the viewer engaged with a demo of the vehicle, why not lead them to other videos of the same vehicle they are looking at instead of (or maybe in addition to) pages of text information? Maybe it’s crash tests…shown from different angles? Maybe keeping something fragile like an egg inside safe during the crash? You can get really creative here but the object is to keep the viewer engaged and on your site.
Think about Blendtec and how they engaged their viewers by showing them real simple demonstrations of how their blender worked by blending ridiculously common things. Many of those interested viewers became brand loyalists for them.
“Investigate the broader video opportunity. Brand and auto-specific sites only make up slightly more than half of the automotive shopper’s online experience. Creating a presence on YouTube and other video destinations will help round out the plan.”
Why stop there? While video sharing sites like YouTube are a place that I think the automakers MUST have a presence, what about Facebook, LinkedIn or smaller automobile enthusiast user groups? The automakers could use these brand enthusiasts and interested buyers for research and development. They could find out what features and options people are REALLY looking for in a car. Let the group members participate in the design of new cars, show them videos of new concepts as they are created based on the group’s input and get feedback from the group. Imagine that kind of empowerment could turn them from potential buyers into the automakers brand evangelists.
David Meerman Scott wrote an outstanding post on marketing ideas for the automakers reinvention outlining 5 simple things GM could do to accelerate their hopeful rebound. I hope GM and Chrysler read his post because it had some great ideas. Automakers will be under a watchful eye with their marketing budget, so doesn’t using a tiny portion of their bloated television advertising budget to put a creative online video and social media plan together just make sense? Obviously I think so…what are your thoughts?
Welcome to the Jungle: Quick Notes from Jeff Pulver’s Social Media Jungle Boston 2009
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!
How do people discover videos online?
Once again TubeMogul has released some pretty awesome statistical analysis regarding how people find videos online, from embeds on blogs to video search engines. For a two-month period, they recorded inbound URLs for a sample of over 35 million video streams from six top video sites. But which sources drive the most video views? For the full report from TubeMogul Industry Analysis, continue reading here. Here are some of the highlighted statistics that I found truly interesting:
45% of viewers find a video by direct navigation to a video site (i.e. going to YouTube and searching or clicking around the featured or related videos).
No surprise here given that over 10 hours of video footage are uploaded to YouTube every minute that going directly to the video sharing sites and searching would be the top method of finding videos.
In terms of individual web sites referring traffic, no single source dominated, here are the top 20 individual referrers:
| Site | Share of Video Referrals |
| 7.19% | |
| yahoo | 2.12% |
| 1.93% | |
| myspace | 1.55% |
| digg | 1.49% |
| stumbleupon | 1.13% |
| msn/live | 0.92% |
| blogspot | 0.78% |
| aol | 0.43% |
| 0.29% | |
| truveo | 0.22% |
| flurl | 0.21% |
| blinkx | 0.19% |
| ask | 0.19% |
| comcast | 0.16% |
| 0.15% | |
| wordpress | 0.15% |
| cnn | 0.12% |
| wikipedia | 0.11% |
| ovguide | 0.06% |
However, since there are a limited number of players in certain areas online, TubeMogul was able to infer that:
- 11.18% of all traffic comes from search engines
- 3.66% comes from social networks
- 3.19% comes from social bookmarking sites
- 0.63% derives from video search engines
- 0.05% is directed from Email/IM
- 80.88% makes up the rest of the referred traffic…of this mix it is almost completely made up of blogs from the thousands of different blogs they scanned.
Here are the really interesting facts here:
Digg beats StumbleUpon by nearly 0.4% for video referrals
I wouldn’t have guessed that. When I share videos on both social bookmarking sites my traffic from StumbleUpon is nearly triple the traffic I receive from Digg. StumbleUpon is my #4 traffic source for the website (which of course does include my blog posts) bringing in 9.97% of my site traffic while Digg is my #10 source of traffic (also including my blog posts) accounting for about 3.85% of all my site traffic. About half of my bookmarks are for videos while the other half are for blog posts (possibly even this one will end up on both). Of course this is just me and I am not profiling over 35 million videos for my statistics.
0.05% is directed from Email/IM
This I find staggering to be so low. One of the easiest and most cost effective ways to get people to share your videos is through email marketing – particularly to an existing base of people who have opted in to receive your email newsletter. In a recent post about integrating video into your email marketing campaign I found that there was a significant 175% increase in click-throughs when video content was included in an email campaign. It sounds like a lot of people are missing the boat on this possible distribution channel.
Blogs sourcing most of the 80.88% of all referred traffic in this sample.
To those trying to make a video go viral, this should be telling you to reach out to relevant bloggers who could help you tremendously with the push for video views.
0.63% derives from video search engines
This is bad news to the ever increasing number of online video search sites that seem to keep popping up promising to help your video go viral or supposedly helping you search. With less than a 1% take, that doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence. I’ve long held that most of these sites have very little value to the online video producer – this study just proves my theory.
So the real take-a-way here…
…is engaging bloggers to work with you by sharing the video with them. If nearly 81% of video traffic is coming from blogs it only makes sense to try and engage relevant bloggers to share your video. The other real key that isn’t really discussed is to make sure you optimize a video’s meta-data to ensure it can easily be found by those who are searching.
Discussing Social Media with…Eric Guerin
I had the pleasant opportunity to be interviewed for a blog post by Danny Brown, the owner of Press Release PR, providing search engine optimized press releases and SEO-friendly content for the Web 2.0 world, and a vocal advocate of social media PR. Below is a snippet from his blog post with a link to the full interview on his blog. Enjoy!
Discussing Social Media with…Eric Guerin
A little while back, I sent out a request via Twitter asking if anyone would be interested in being interviewed for a discussion on social media. With the medium meaning so many different things to so many people, as well as how it can be used, I was interested to hear the views of the people I connect with.
Darwin’s Theory Applied to Marketing
How Marketing Firms, Designers and Business Owners Must Adapt or Risk Becoming Extinct
I was recently talking to a marketing firm that really doesn’t grasp the changing dynamic of the marketing environment online. They were still convinced that the best way was still the old way and they had little knowledge of email marketing, how to implement it and virtually no knowledge of how to utilize online social media. Which quickly made me realize that they must adapt and learn quickly or they may go the way of the dodo bird. Here’s why:
Think back to 1995…I know…I know it seems like a long time ago. I was just graduating from college with a degree in Visual Design. The college curriculum during the early nineties included very little computer design because…well…there weren’t many programs and most of the professors had no idea how to use the programs themselves.
- Adobe software programs that are design standards today like Photoshop & Illustrator were in their relative infancy. The majority of our design work and training was still a lot of paste up, photocopying and layout done by hand, not COMPLETELY on the computer as almost all design work is done today.
- The “home” computer was still relatively new as Windows 95 had not been released yet and most of our computer work was done in on-campus “computer labs” because few students could afford their own computer, much less the expensive software needed for design. The computers we did have in the computer labs were also notoriously slow. If you put a photo into the design you may as well ask the computer to slowly crash and die.
- The internet was also in it’s infancy for the home user as most web browsers were released to the public in 1995. So there was NO training in web site design. Most web developers at this time coded HTML using text editors. Web site design was not done visually until 1997 with the release of Macromedia’s Dreamweaver program.
All right, enough waxing nostalgic. So what’s your point, is what you are probably saying now. Well I’m getting to that.
14 years ago it was a much different world
After college I learned much of what I know by taking classes, learning on the job and teaching myself in my spare time. So I was able to survive and thrive with my own business doing graphic and website design. That’s not to say I’m the cat’s meow of design. Eric Guerin isn’t walking around talking about himself in the third person. There are many, many designers that are far more talented than I am BUT I can say that a number of people I graduated with and who were in the design field in the mid-nineties are no longer. Why? Because they didn’t change with the times and adapt to the new tools emerging.
Which brings me to today
We are on the precipice of another landslide change in how people are marketed to and how they interact with brands. People want to interact with the companies and brands they are passionate about online. That’s why there are over 70 million blogs worldwide and counting. Email Marketing is one of the simplest and easiest ways to keep in contact with your customers and help promote repeat business. Over 390 million consumers are at least watching video clips and listening to podcasts on a weekly basis. Social Media websites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter offer the business the ability to have individuals in their company interact with consumers and their brand identity on a 1on1 basis.
So the what is the moral to this story?
These social media tools are developing and growing in popularity at an alarmingly fast rate. If marketing firms, designers and even the individual business owner doesn’t take the time to educate themselves they could find themselves within a relatively short period of time falling victim to advertising natural selection.
