viral video marketing, death of old media - and still whinging about amplifier.co.nz

I can’t stop marketing even though I really should!

Still got way too much work on!!!

You see if I stop testing and developing new online marketing strategies then how am I going to create further and increasing value to my digital promotions clients by providing the most effective new techniques?

It’s really time I made some more videos but I’m trying to find a unique angle.


That USP (unique selling point) is essential in what you do!

We have the internet now. If there’s something better, than people are going to find it.


I’m always trying to find something better, I think that’s what I just told you. But you can't always be the best.


But you can always be unique!



So I’ve been planning for a while to try some true viral video marketing techniques – that is – focus more on being “remarkable” than actually pushing my product and reasoning why people should give me their money.




This is more of a branding exercise. Selling stuff is so 20th century. Building relationships and attention with your audience is the new paradigm.



I was going to do a typical TV ad style video going on about how “bands were exploding” online and have a warzone bunker theme with explosions going off in the background and musicians who were literally blowing up.



Silly stuff.




I thought about making a funny video based around Seth Godin’s “purple cow” concept the original metaphor for “remarkable” marketing where some hick farmer calls me up wanting services from Kurb because they’ve used purple food colouring to make a purple cow and now they want to “Mana Tai’s” it

(that’s monetize for all you non Maori :p)

This is stuff that people want to see and share. Not me asking for money.



The state of new media in New Zealand leaves me with mixed feelings, much like the slashing of EMI’s operation in New Zealand (and throughout the world) just recently is sad given EMI’s historical role in developing New Zealand talent, and that this does represent decreased opportunities for New Zealand artists, but on other hand once again, it represents increased opportunities in the market for people like me who are digital strategists and innovators.



Because . . . there’s a lot of Dinosaurs just waiting round for the next meteor.



I am going to have to stop being polite about Amplifier.


I know its Chris the lawyer, and Simon who I love and Richie from One Million Dollars and all but seriously!!!

STOP THIS WEB 1.0 NONSENSE IMMEDIATELY!

Only 50% for the artists? NO! (itunes offers 70%)

No share of advertising revenue for artists? NO! (sites like Reverb nation and Squidoo are already rolling out revenue sharing, while myspace has struck such a deal with the Majors)

No variable pricing determined by artists? NO!

Widgets only for P-money? NO!

Incredibly limited features? NO!

No access to fan data? NO!!

No social or any other discernable web 2.0 features? NO!

I may have to come out as an official critic of www. amplifier. co. nz

Amplifier, please!!!!! SORT IT!!!!!

Why if I wasn’t bigger and tougher I’d innovate their faces in!!!!

What is so ironic is that AMPLIFIER HAS A MYSPACE PAGE.


I was looking at the myspace of another popular traditional NZ Music media institution, not geographically that far from amplifier, thinking about 2006 when so many people capitulated and accepted that being on Myspace just had to be done.


How frustrating it must be to be part of the old media. Doing things like setting up a myspace page and probably thinking . . .


will this increase our readership or advertising revenue?

Not realising that the massive backlash against traditional advertising has already begun.


Television, Radio, Magazines – the authority of this old, centralized, gatekeeper style of media based on the disruptive power of advertising is just going to lose any relevance and quickly.


I’m not expecting to make a lot of money as a result of making silly videos, doing my blogs, and building my very own personalised media communication, specialized for my audience who trusts my authority.


But I will be very very surprised if I don’t.

Video Revenue - monetizing video and youtube promotion

And so here I am getting excited about advertising revenue from blogging and your site - you probably might still be a little skeptical about what my now $1 p/day earnings represent in the future, but then I'd forgotten all about revver and the ad supported video situation!

Youtube has begun offering in video adsense advertising and adsense offers video enabled ads so the crawl towards monetization is definitely on!

What I read into this piece for musicians is as I said! HUNDREDS OF REVENUE STREAMS!!!! You may only be making a few bucks a day off your blog, a few off your videos, selling a few downloads, selling a few CD's, collecting royalties but it all will start to add up.

ALSO I hope I get round to posting an update on our youtube promotion because I feel like we're really starting to make progress here finally!!! So check out our digital artist services if you're interested in video promotion, video promotion starts @ $US200p/month.

If you're serious about youtube promotion, video promotion, marketing your videos, and preparing for a new era where all producers of online video content will get paid - all that kind of thing, get in touch with us @ Kurb!!!
Check this out from Silicon Valley Insider:



Online video company Revver announced that it has paid $1 million in revenue share to video producers over the past year. With the help of a calculator and some additional reporting from NewTeeVee, can learn a lot from this nugget. Would-be online video producers, listen up.

NewTeeVee calculates that this payout translates to approximately $40 per REVVER producer per year, which obviously means that a handful make some money and most make nothing. One well-paid producer says he is making $1,000 to $3,000 a month. The highest paid Revver producer is reportedly EepyBird, which has "earned over $50,000 to date for the nearly 11 million views garnered by the Extreme Diet Coke & Mentos Experiments clip."

Unfortunately, after the splits, the [half a cent per view] is still far below the level needed to sustain life at most online video production shops (you could probably make more money writing short stories). So don't quit the day job just yet.

Kurb is a media promotions company providing a regular blog on digital music promotion, marketing digital content and creating revenue from new media online.

Kurb also provides online promotion and revenue management services for musicians and artists internationally

All the best with your project, from KurbFor direct enquiries get us on gmail as kurbpromoDIGITAL COACHING AND ONLINE MANAGEMENT STARTS @ $NZ250

Youtube promotion - secret video marketing techniques

Oh oh oh Matthew shameless traffic grab.

heaps of people have been hitting up this blog about youtube promo. So I thought I’d give it more there.

Hi new visitors, I’m Matt I provide online promotion management for bands and stuff.

I would only talk about Britney Spears pregnant or Britney Spears naked or Paris hilton pregnant or Lindsay lohan pregnant on a blog about online promotion and music marketing to experiment and illustrate a point about this crazy google blog type age we’re living in.

In 2009 Right here is where I might put my affiliate ad for a youtube marketing handbook, software or something. BUY BUY BUY

Y’know if it was $19.95 you’d at least probably get $5.

AND offer a bonus gift of a free digital product from the bands store! nice.

ANYWAY onto this controversial article. Well it’s not actually controversial to me, I’m well aware of this kind of carry on, but y’know - if your product/music/service/quality is poor . . . NO amount of sneaky stuff is going to help you - or . . . do little more than stroke your ego!

But if you do have good stuff well. Drop me a line. we can be nnnnnnnnnaughtyyyyyy
YOUTUBE PROMOTION TECHNIQUES

Have you ever watched a video with 100,000 views on YouTube and thought to yourself: “How the hell did that video get so many views?” Chances are pretty good that this didn’t happen naturally, but rather that some company worked hard to make it happen – some company like mine.

When most people talk about “viral videos,” they’re usually referring to videos like Miss Teen South Carolina , Smirnoff’s Tea Partay music video, the Sony Bravia ads , Soulja Boy - videos that have traveled all around the internet and been posted on YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, Facebook, Digg, blogs, etc. - videos with millions and millions of views.

Over the past year, I have run clandestine marketing campaigns meant to ensure that promotional videos become truly viral, as these examples have become in the extreme. In this post, I will share some of the techniques I use to do my job: to get at least 100,000 people to watch my clients’ “viral” videos.

Secret #1: Not all viral videos are what they seem

There are tens of thousands of videos uploaded to YouTube each day (I’ve heard estimates between 10-65,000 videos per day). I don’t care how “viral” you think your video is; no one is going to find it and no one is going to watch it.

The members of my startup are hired guns – our clients give us videos and we make them go viral. Our rule of thumb is that if we don’t get a video 100,000 views, we don’t charge.

So far, we’ve worked on 80-90 videos and we’ve seen overwhelming success. In the past 3 months, we’ve achieved over 20 million views for our clients, with videos ranging from 100,000 views to upwards of 1.5 million views each. In other words, not all videos go viral organically – there is a method to the madness.

I can’t reveal our clients’ names and I can’t link to the videos we’ve worked on, because YouTube surely doesn’t like what we’re doing and our clients hate to admit that they need professional help with their “viral” videos. But I can give you a general idea of who we’ve worked with: two top Hollywood movie studios, a major record label, a variety of very well known consumer brands, and a number of different startups, both domestic and international.

This summer, we were approached by a Hollywood movie studio and asked to help market a series of viral clips they had created in advance of a blockbuster. The videos were 10-20 seconds each, were shot from what appeared to be a camera phone, and captured a series of unexpected and shocking events that required professional post-production and CGI. Needless to say, the studio had invested a significant amount of money in creating the videos but every time they put them online, they couldn’t get more than a few thousand views.

We took six videos and achieved:

• 6 million views on YouTube
  
• ~30,000 ratings
  
• ~10,000 favorites
  
• ~10,000 comments
  
• 200+ blog posts linking back to the videos
  
• All six videos made it into the top 5 Most Viewed of the Day, and the two that went truly viral (1.5 million views each) were #1 and #2 Most Viewed of the Week.

The following principles were the secrets to our success.

2. Content is NOT King

If you want a truly viral video that will get millions of people to watch and share it, then yes, content is key. But good content is not necessary to get 100,000 views if you follow these strategies.

Don’t get me wrong: the content is what will drive visitors back to a site. So a video must have a decent concept, but one shouldn’t agonize over determining the best “viral” video possible. Generally, a concept should not be forced because it fits a brand. Rather, a brand should be fit into a great concept. Here are some guidelines we follow:

• Make it short: 15-30 seconds is ideal; break down long stories into bite-sized clips
  
• Design for remixing: create a video that is simple enough to be remixed over and over again by others. Ex: “Dramatic Hamster”
  
• Don’t make an outright ad: if a video feels like an ad, viewers won’t share it unless it’s really amazing. Ex: Sony Bravia
  
• Make it shocking: give a viewer no choice but to investigate further. Ex: “UFO Haiti”
  
• Use fake headlines: make the viewer say, “Holy shit, did that actually happen?!” Ex: “Stolen Nascar”
  
• Appeal to sex: if all else fails, hire the most attractive women available to be in the video. Ex: “Yoga 4 Dudes”

These recent videos would have been perfect had they been viral “ads” pointing people back to websites:

• Model Falls in Hole on Runway
  
• Cheerleader Gets Run Over By Football Team
  
• PacMan: The Chase
  
• Dude
  
• Dog Drives Car
  
• Snowball – Dancing Cockatoo

3. Core Strategy: Getting onto the “Most Viewed” page

Now that a video is ready to go, how the hell is it going to attract 100,000 viewers?

The core concept of video marketing on YouTube is to harness the power of the site’s traffic. Here’s the idea: something like 80 million videos are watched each day on YouTube, and a significant number of those views come from people clicking the “Videos” tab at the top. The goal is to get a video on that Videos page, which lists the Daily Most Viewed videos.

If we succeed, the video will no longer be a single needle in the haystack of 10,000 new videos per day. It will be one of the twenty videos on the Most Viewed page, which means that we can grab 1/20th of the clicks on that page! And the higher up on the page our video is, the more views we are going to get.

So how do we get the first 50,000 views we need to get our videos onto the Most Viewed list?

• Blogs: We reach out to individuals who run relevant blogs and actually pay them to post our embedded videos. Sounds a little bit like cheating/PayPerPost, but it’s effective and it’s not against any rules.
  
• Forums: We start new threads and embed our videos. Sometimes, this means kickstarting the conversations by setting up multiple accounts on each forum and posting back and forth between a few different users. Yes, it’s tedious and time-consuming, but if we get enough people working on it, it can have a tremendous effect.
  
• MySpace: Plenty of users allow you to embed YouTube videos right in the comments section of their MySpace pages. We take advantage of this.
  
• Facebook: Share, share, share. We’ve taken Dave McClure’s advice and built a sizeable presence on Facebook, so sharing a video with our entire friends list can have a real impact. Other ideas include creating an event that announces the video launch and inviting friends, writing a note and tagging friends, or posting the video on Facebook Video with a link back to the original YouTube video.
  
• Email lists: Send the video to an email list. Depending on the size of the list (and the recipients’ willingness to receive links to YouTube videos), this can be a very effective strategy.
  
• Friends: Make sure everyone we know watches the video and try to get them to email it out to their friends, or at least share it on Facebook.

Each video has a shelf life of 48 hours before it’s moved from the Daily Most Viewed list to the Weekly Most Viewed list, so it’s important that this happens quickly. As I mentioned before, when done right, this is a tremendously successful strategy.

4. Title Optimization

Once a video is on the Most Viewed page, what can be done to maximize views?

It seems obvious, but people see hundreds of videos on YouTube, and the title and thumbnail are an easy way for video publishers to actively persuade someone to click on a video. Titles can be changed a limitless number of times, so we sometimes have a catchy (and somewhat misleading) title for the first few days, then later switch to something more relevant to the brand. Recently, I’ve noticed a trend towards titling videos with the phrases “exclusive,” “behind the scenes,” and “leaked video.”

5. Thumbnail Optimization

If a video is sitting on the Most Viewed page with nineteen other videos, a compelling video thumbnail is the single best strategy to maximize the number of clicks the video gets.

YouTube provides three choices for a video’s thumbnail, one of which is grabbed from the exact middle of the video. As we edit our videos, we make sure that the frame at the very middle is interesting. It’s no surprise that videos with thumbnails of half naked women get hundreds of thousands of views. Not to say that this is the best strategy, but you get the idea. Two rules of thumb: the thumbnail should be clear (suggesting high video quality) and ideally it should have a face or at least a person in it.

Also, when we feel particularly creative, we optimize all three thumbnails then change the thumbnail every few hours. This is definitely an underused strategy, but it’s an interesting way to keep a video fresh once it’s on the Most Viewed list.

See the highlighted videos in the screenshot below for a good example of how a compelling title and screenshot can make all the difference once the video is on the Most Viewed page.

6. Commenting: Having a conversation with yourself

Every power user on YouTube has a number of different accounts. So do we. A great way to maximize the number of people who watch our videos is to create some sort of controversy in the comments section below the video. We get a few people in our office to log in throughout the day and post heated comments back and forth (you can definitely have a lot of fun with this). Everyone loves a good, heated discussion in the comments section - especially if the comments are related to a brand/startup.

Also, we aren’t afraid to delete comments – if someone is saying our video (or your startup) sucks, we just delete their comment. We can’t let one user’s negativity taint everyone else’s opinions.

We usually get one comment for every thousand views, since most people watching YouTube videos aren’t logged in. But a heated comment thread (done well) will engage viewers and will drive traffic back to our sites.

7. Releasing all videos simultaneously

Once people are watching a video, how do we keep them engaged and bring them back to a website?

A lot of the time our clients say: “We’ve got 5 videos and we’re going to release one every few days so that viewers look forward to each video.”

This is the wrong way to think about YouTube marketing. If we have multiple videos, we post all of them at once. If someone sees our first video and is so intrigued that they want to watch more, why would we make them wait until we post the next one? We give them everything up front. If a user wants to watch all five of our videos right now, there’s a much better chance that we’ll be able to persuade them to click through to our website. We don’t make them wait after seeing the first video, because they’re never going to see the next four.

Once our first video is done, we delete our second video then re-upload it. Now we have another 48-hour window to push it to the Most Viewed page. Rinse and repeat. Using this strategy, we give our most interested viewers the chance to fully engage with a campaign without compromising the opportunity to individually release and market each consecutive video.

8. Strategic Tagging: Leading viewers down the rabbit hole

This is one of my favorite strategies and one that I think we invented. YouTube allows you to tag your videos with keywords that make your videos show up in relevant searches. For the first week that our video is online, we don’t use keyword tags to optimize the video for searches on YouTube. Instead, we’ve discovered that you can use tags to control the videos that show up in the Related Videos box.

I like to think about it as leading viewers down the rabbit hole. The idea here is to make it as easy as possible for viewers to engage with all your content, rather than jumping away to “related” content that actually has nothing to do with your brand/startup.

So how do we strategically tag? We choose three or four unique tags and use only these tags for all of the videos we post. I’m not talking about obscure tags; I’m talking about unique tags, tags that are not used by any other YouTube videos. Done correctly, this will allow us to have full control over the videos that show up as “Related Videos.”

When views start trailing off after a few days to a week, it’s time to add some more generic tags, tags that draw out the long tail of a video as it starts to appear in search results on YouTube and Google.

9. Metrics/Tracking: How we measure effectiveness

The following is how we measure the success of our viral videos.

For one, we tweak the links put up on YouTube (whether in a YouTube channel or in a video description) by adding “?video=1” to the end of each URL. This makes it much easier to track inbound links using Google Analytics or another metrics tool.

TubeMogul and VidMetrix also track views/comments/ratings on each individual video and draw out nice graphs that can be shared with the team. Additionally, these tools follow the viral spread of a video outside of YouTube and throughout other social media sites and blogs.

Conclusion

The Wild West days of Lonely Girl and Ask A Ninja are over. You simply can’t expect to post great videos on YouTube and have them go viral on their own, even if you think you have the best videos ever. These days, achieving true virality takes serious creativity, some luck, and a lot of hard work. So, my advice: fire your PR firm and do it yourself.

Kurb is a New Zealand based media promotions company providing a regular blog on digital promotion, marketing digital content and creating revenue from new media online.

Kurb also provides online promotion and revenue management services for musicians and artists internationally and online / digital coaching for small business. We rank #1 for "online promotion" in New Zealand.

And the best value fast turnover physical media services in New Zealand including CD / DVD duplication and poster services.
Our physical media services come with free graphic set up and support, free delivery, and free promotions advice and support for musicians.

We provide expert and affordable promotion support in all web 2.0 areas: Cutting edge Social Network promotion (Myspace, Facebook, Bebo etc.), Social Media, Blogging, Spam management, Content creation, Content management, Content Distribution, OMD, RSS, Aggregators, podcasts, Search ranking, Search marketing and PPC campaigns on Google and Facebook, Website design, Website monetization, Video production + promotion,

We also have an extensive self promotion area for independent musician and talent featuring dozens of articles, how to features and blog links.

http://www.kurb.co.nz/
http://www.myspace.com/kurbpromo
http://www.youtube.com/user/kurbpromo -
http://kurbpromotion.wordpress.com/
http://kurbpromotion.blogspot.com/
http://www.squidoo.com/kurb

Marketing 2.0 for Web 2.0 - how can your business benefit?

ew I'm business blogging - shoot me now. How sickening.

You can be rest assured that the devil drives an extremely hard bargain. Apparently it’s a buyers market.

Don't worry I've got 2 more music blogs coming up on content and what to do now no one wants to buy CD's.

Of course the same principals apply if your small business is in music and you will obviously observe I'm generating content to distribute - not only to strengthen my search network but to create awareness of the work I'm doing by providing free expertise.

My expertise is obviously in online marketing and I'm not too shabby flinging a few words together. But I'm sure you're good at something you can write or make videos about to - and don't worry this article took me 4 hours to write.

Marketing 2.0 for Web 2.0 – how can your business benefit?

The Internet is the most powerful and far reaching marketing tool available to small businesses and increasingly word of mouth is now word of blog, email or IM and thats what web 2.0 is - when we stop hearing the messages sent by those who can afford to send them and we just learn from the messages we share from the access the internet now provides to one another.

According to Tim O’Reilly who coined the phrase “Web 2.0” in 2004:

"Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform."

Web 2.0 presents opportunities to use the internet in new and interactive ways to deliver an unprecedented amount of information and choice to unprecedented audience numbers.

Unlike declining traditional media the internet offers users control over access and it gives consumers choice. Web 2.0 represents a major blow for traditional advertising methods because Web 2.0 is about the online experience the user has customised – and no one wants ads! Marketing is to survive only as part of a media experience that is embraced, not an unwelcome interruption to be filtered out.

Social Networking:

Social networking – the explosion of sites like Myspace, Bebo, and Facebook – has transformed the online social environment into a place where branding happens naturally. Myspace, the big daddy of social networking sites, created an online environment where brands as well as bands, characters and ideas could be accounted for with online identities.

You only have to go to the stats to see the wild popularity of these sites in New Zealand and around the world. Even I choked when the Herald quoted 800,000 kiwis use http://www.bebo.com/. It comes behind only Google and Trademe for volume of usage in NZ.

By creating a presence for your business on social networks you are able to present content and interact with other users participating in a massive global network either as an individual representing or creating awareness (this will be required on facebook and bebo which are not so friendly to commercial brands), a brand profile of your business, or even a key product! Or all three! There’s no rule against having multiple accounts.

SEO and web 2.0 - when content "goes viral"

It is still the truth that most of your website traffic will come from search engines and in New Zealand that is overwhelmingly accounted for by the Google search engine. To put what is often reported to be a complex and competitive study into simple terms, search engine optimisation (SEO) is based around keywords matched to your content, and the ranking of its relevancy in the search by the amount of links to it and the quality of those links.

Search engines can be influenced in two ways – by both the quality and quantity of written content you make available and the quantity and quality of backlinks created to your site from other sites. Distributing and sharing as much content furnished with links back to your site as you can make available is the most effective way to dramatically increase your search rank, send your brand around the world and bring traffic to your website.

All I will say is that websites that follow the web 2.0 format, which are some of the highest ranked in the world – myspace, youtube, blogger – the last two of which of course are owned by google, are ranked in a different way by google, and using these sites in different ways to make people aware and provide links to your website can have dramatic results.

But when your marketing message has assumed the appearance of a media experience – whether a blog, a podcast or a short video demonstration - that you have made available through your various online social network to share and enjoy as “infotainment” it’s no longer advertising! And when people are motivated to share the information you have provided they are not only building your search ranking but sharing your marketing message that your personal brand represents knowledge and experience of the products and services you provide.

Video Marketing

Video marketing is the hottest thing in internet promotion right now and youtube is popular with an older demographic where social networking hasn’t spread. Unlike everything else I’ve talked about – videos in themselves will not increase your search rank on google! But the message out there is if you can do it, prove it - film it! People want to see for themselves and now you can show them!

Video content provides important information, breaking down the anonymity that effects a potential customer or clients decision to purchase through an online connection based on trust. Video is also the most potentially effective opportunity to offer deeper understanding through presentation and demonstration.

many more people will connect with your marketing messages as a visual image and when it comes to media – the types of small businesses that could never dream of affording to market by broadcasting video can now provide it cheaply in a way that makes it accessible to targeted users long after it is first made available.

One of the most successful viral campaigns focused on a series of short clips experimenting with blending different unusual objects in a brand presentation for a blender called "will it blend?"– one of these quirky clips featuring an iphone received over 3 million views on youtube.

XML, RSS, P2P, Aggregation

Web 2.0 continues to present newer and better solutions for distributing and accessing information but unlike social networking and video marketing these concepts of syndicating content feeds and providing ever more options for choice and access are ideas which time is yet to come.

But it remains that web 2.0 marketing is about “pull” and not “push”. Using social networking, and sharing blogs and videos, generating content that appeals to users whether it be through information, experience, demonstration, experiments or simply just the quirky, entertaining or humourous is a chance to build awareness of your business while connecting with people in a way they will appreciate and remember.

People are far more likely to "go with what they know" so establishing social profiles and participating in online communities, providing content that people will use and value, in a way that supports higher ranking in searches for your site is the best way for generating leads and contacts in the new online environment.

Cheers for the connection with Kurb. Supporting musicians with successful strategies on a budget. Kurb in NZ’s leader in online promotion strategies for artists and creative projects plus we offer the cheapest CD/DVD reproduction and cheap posters available.

Come by our page, theres plenty to pick up about new developments in the music industry in our blogs and theres a whole lot of free info and articles at our self promotions hub. Get some scope checking out our overview of online promotion strategies and if you’re interested our artist packages or brand new campaign packages including CD’s, o All the best with your music, from Kurb For direct enquiries get us on gmail as kurbpromo ..................... Kurb Myspace