YouTube has become a hot site for businesses looking to promote their products and services. But not every business gets acceptable results from their YouTube marketing videos.


Success on YouTube depends on what you want to accomplish with your online videos. So, before you press the record button your video camera, answer some key questions about your YouTube video strategy.

1. Should your business even be on YouTube?

Not every type of business is a good fit for YouTube. Put simply, if you can't show your product or service in action, don't put it on YouTube.

For example, if you sell or manufacture power tools, it can be easy to show how a power drill works in a short video. But if you offer college-tutoring services, you don't have much to demonstrate on camera, so YouTube might not make sense.

Even if you can demonstrate what you do in videos, you still need to set a clear goal for what you hope to accomplish. Your goal will help you determine what type of video to produce.

2. Do you want to attract new customers or support existing ones?

For many companies, YouTube is an ideal medium for attracting new customers. You pull them in by showing them your product and how it works, and then direct them to your website for more information or to close the sale. Since you can't link directly from a video, you'll need to superimpose your URL onscreen and include the URL in the video's text description.

You also can use YouTube to provide additional information and support to existing customers. For example, if you sell children's outdoor playsets, you might produce a video showing how to assemble them. A how-to video can be much more effective than printed instructions, and can cut down the volume of post-sale customer support calls.

3. Do you want to inform or educate with your video?

The most successful YouTube videos tend to accomplish one of three things: inform, educate or entertain. While entertaining videos are the most likely to go viral, they're also the most difficult to pull off. That's why most businesses focus on either informing or educating with their videos.

An informative video can provide details about a specific product, your company or industry, or simply topics of interest to potential customers. For example, if you're an attorney, you might produce a series of videos that discuss important legal issues. If you run a bed and breakfast, you might offer video tours of your facilities.

An educational video shows customers how to do something, typically in step-by-step fashion. For example, if you sell computer-networking equipment, you might produce a video that shows customers how to set up a home network -- using your equipment, of course. If you sell musical instruments, it's a no-brainer to offer a series of music instruction videos.

Some businesses naturally gravitate to either an informative or educational approach, while others can go either way. For example, if you run a restaurant, you could produce informative videos that show your top dishes in attractive settings, or you could produce educational videos that show customers how to cook their own versions of some of your favorite recipes.

Whether you take the informative or educational video approach depends a lot on your company's image and your own personal style. But whichever approach you take, remember that YouTube is a soft sell medium, meaning viewers tend to reject direct commercial messages. Offer potential customers something useful, however, and you'll help to build your brand over the long term.



































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Unless you’ve been living with that Russian family cut off from human contact since before World War II, you may have noticed that pretty much every video worth a watch on YouTube has an ad in front of it.
This, of course, is not an accident. This is a carefully built and highly profitable scheme created by the good people of Google, and one that's been netting top YouTubers annual salaries of well over a hundred grand per year.

That’s right, that dopey guy with the Justin Beiber haircut is making around four hundred thousand a year for essentially talking into his webcam about nothing. Do yourself a favor and try not to think about what kind of money the Annoying Orange is pulling in—it’s hard enough getting to work on a Monday as it is, and knowing that the world's most abrasive citrus is pulling in more than you are isn’t going to help.
The latest twist from the brain trust at YouTube, the idea of the paid channel, has taken a page from the book of, If it Ain’t Broke, Let’s Try to Break it. When Ad Age broke the story, a collective “WTF?” rang out across cyberspace.

Remember TV? You know, it’s that thing you watched The Sopranos and Homeland on. And Game of Thrones and Dexter and Girls and Boardwalk Empire... see the pattern here? Well, the gang at YouTube saw the pattern, too.

They saw premium cable charging a hefty monthly fee, and they thought about all those millions upon millions of views their popular channels get, and it was only natural to do the math. Apparently a few billion views at a few dollars a piece is just too much money to pass up. I’m sure they then all did a good round of back patting and buying each other overpriced cocktails at whatever painfully trendy mixology speakeasy bar the YouTube guys go to after work. After all, what could possibly go wrong?

What went wrong is that they overlooked the simple yet all-important precondition of premium cable: the idea of premium itself.

What went wrong is that they overlooked the simple yet all-important precondition of premium cable: the idea of premium itself. The idea that this stuff really is the best of the best, and it’s worth paying extra for.
To put it bluntly, when things you want to watch are awesome (like The Sopranos), when they are so good you’d swear it was a major studio film, when the content is of such exceptionally superior quality that it’s worthy of the word premium—then, and only then, will the audience be happy to pay for it.

And premium, on YouTube? So far, it ain’t. To be fair, some of the better content from Machinema and Full Screen is beginning to resemble network television, but let’s all keep in mind the important fact that network TV is free.

The word is that YouTube partner companies Maker Studios, Machinima and Fullscreen, who control well over 10,000 YouTube channels between them, will be the first to take the plunge into pay subscription channels. Sure, these young companies have a huge number of channels, and tons upon mind-numbing tons of view counts. But the disconnect between what they offer on YouTube and what premium cable (or, for that matter, Netflix or Hulu Plus) offer is trying to find similarities between The Hubble Telescope to Kim Kardashian—only the Hubble telescope is undeniably amazing and has contributed immeasurably to the furtherment of science and the whole of mankind, while Kim Kardashian is just stupid.

The idea of premium is the lynchpin around which this entire pay-to-watch endeavor lives or dies. Game of Thrones is a multi-million dollar extravaganza—per episode. Whether or not Lord of the Rings-ish people behaving like sex-obsessed fourteen year olds is your thing, the production value is as undeniable as the gratuitous girl-on-girl action.

Compare that to your average YouTube videos.

Now don’t get me wrong—I love YouTube. YouTube is the answer to years of restless insomnia for me, and I can still kill as much time as there is bandwidth to be had, watching Russian car wrecks and GoPro cameras mounted to pretty much anything. But while these cultural gems are amusing, the words production value don’t easily come to mind. Nor engrossing epic. The same can easily be said about virtually all of the products on offer from these YouTube Channel providers. Are they funny? Sure. Entertaining? Sometimes. Emmy award-winning premium programming? Not so much.

Outside of the music video channels some of these guys provide (which, to be fair, do have some big name talent attached), are we likely to get the same high caliber content we as consumers have come to expect from the glossy media outlets that charge us a monthly fee?

You all know the answer to that already.

YouTube has also failed here to recognize their audience. An older YouTube consumer is someone who grew up on Napster. For a younger one, who probably started stealing music after Napster shut down in 2001, the idea of paying for online content is just an absurd story old people like to scare them with. Not to mention the fact that they are just that, after all: kids.

Are parents really going to give kids another $4.50 per month in their allowance so they can watch awkward guys do bad green screen parody songs? For money?

YouTube is poised on an enormously powerful precipice. Does it have the power to kill television? Most likely, yes. But what they seem to have forgotten is that in this country at least, television has a long history of being pretty close to free. We tolerated the ads in return for the half hour comedies, the cop shows, the endless hours of housewives of wherever. That was the deal and it largely still is. It’s part of the very soul of television.

YouTube seems embarrassingly tone deaf to these unwritten norms we have held with our entertainment providers in the past. Which are basically: If you make really cool TV shows that pretty much look like movies, we’ll pay a decent amount for that—but it’s gotta be really really good. And sure, if you can supply me with hundreds of A-list movies and network TV shows on demand and commercial free, I’m willing to throw you a few dollars per month.

But if all you make are three minute videos and you use crappy looking green screen effects as your sole “production value,” don’t expect me to pay a monthly fee. It just won’t happen. Especially considering that the other guys with the hundreds of movies and TV shows just got David Fincher to produce a big fat thirteen part series which I can watch for about the same price per month as you’re offering for your line up of low-fi web shows.

For three-minute web videos, you’ve already reached my limit. My limit is the five seconds of a commercial before I hit the “Skip Ad” button.

So be mindful as you enter the pimply faced years of your adolescence, young YouTube Networks. Remember, the fact is, any video on YouTube can be ripped, downloaded, and re-uploaded to a subscription-free channel faster than you can say “Hey, whatever happened to SOPA?”



































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Social media is emerging from its adolescent phase and is rapidly maturing.


Initially social networks had an image problem with some CEO’s and executives thinking Facebook was for teenagers to post the weekend’s party photos and Twitter was for narcisstic attention seekers with a limited vocabulary.


There was also an initial perception that because the platforms were free to use that participating was cheap and easy. Experience has shown otherwise.

Social media, blogging and digital content creation are resource intensive and doing it right takes time and money.

Tools and time saving apps are emerging to help companies to be more efficient and able to manage, control and  monitor social media. These functions and features are also being integrated into Enterprise class software solutions.

Social media has grown up and is now accepted as mainstream by companies including the Fortune Global 100. These companies include Ford, Walmart and BP.

Facebook , Twitter, Google+, YouTube and the fast emerging Pinterest have all been embraced by the top companies as they find ways to leverage their brands globally.

Burson-Marsteller first launched a study in 2010 that looked closely at how companies were adapting to this new media. Here are their 2012 findings

5 Insights into Global Social Media

In 2010 the Fortune 100 were participating on social media but not to the extent they are now. The social networks were used for broadcasting but there was limited engagement. In 2012 they are having constant conversations with their customers and followers and creating vast amounts of  digital content.

What are the top 5 findings from their latest research?

1. Twitter is more than 50% of the Conversations

Corporations, Brands and organisations have realized that  social media spreads stories in real time and at high velocity. In 2012 the Fortune Global 100 are mentioned 10.4 million times per month with Twitter transmitting 5.6 million of those conversations. This represents a growth in Twitter conversations of over 700% in just 2 years.

Gone are the days when PR companies were clipping media mentions from newspapers and magazines and posting them to the corporation via snail mail.

2.  YouTube is a Serious Media Channel

In just one year YouTube use has increased by 39 percent. It is no longer considered a channel for just entertainment but also education and positioning and branding. Corporate YouTube channels are averaging over 2 million views. This growth in conversations and views by customers is making it compulsory for companies to participate on social networks.  The social networks are proving to be a great source of free media attention that is not paid but earned.

3. Engagement is the Norm

Organisations are not just broadcasting but engaging with their customers and prospects. On Twitter 79 percent of companies are engaging via retweeting and @mentions. On Facebook 70 percent of brands are are responding to comments on their walls and timelines.

4. Multiple Accounts are Common

The average number of multiple social media accounts has soared since 2010. The number of average Twitter accounts is now over ten (up from four since 2010)  and over 8 YouTube channels (up from 1.6 in 2010). This is because companies have realized that they need to target audiences by geography, topic and service. The larger organisations now have both the tools and the resources allocated.

5. Companies are Rapidly Adapting to New Platforms

In the last twelve months Google+ and Pinterest have entered the social networking ecosystem. Companies have quickly embraced these channels with  nearly 50 perecent of the Fortune Global 100 on Google+ brand pages and 25 percent on Pinterest.


Infographic source: Burson-Marsteller







































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YouTube announced two updates to its non-profit program on Friday, streamlining how non-profits and viral philanthropists can use the social video-sharing platform to turn views into action.

Starting July 31, members of the YouTube for Good team will host “YouTube 101″ trainings via Google+ Hangout. These live trainings, which will take place on the last Tuesday of every month, are for non-profits that recently joined the non-profit program or created a YouTube page. The live feed will be available on the YouTube for Nonprofits channel for those who want to watch and listen without being recorded.

YouTube also officially announced the integration of annotations that can link to four websites: Change.org, DonorsChoose.org, RocketHub.com and Causes.com. Since April, creators have been able to link to crowdfunding platforms Kickstarter and Indiegogo as well. In the past, annotations could only link to other YouTube videos, channels and search results.

“YouTube gives non-profits access to a large global audience eager to be inspired and informed,” Jessica Mason, a YouTube spokesperson, told Mashable. “There are over 17,000 organizations in our non-profit program, and more join everyday. We want to make sure they can turn their video views into volunteer hours, petitions signed, laws changed and dollars donated.”

YouTube for Good is a company-wide initiative that focuses on building tools and audiences for non-profits, educators and activists. The YouTube for Good team aims to make sure YouTube employees, creators and users have the means to “do good” on the platform. As part of the initiative, the YouTube Nonprofit Program gives 501(c)3 organizations access to YouTube tools, such as live streaming and fundraising capabilities, for free.





























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