Church of the Customer Blog
« Why everyone wants a viral video | Main | Products of mirth »
July 26, 2007
Why everyone wants a viral video
More evidence of how the proliferation of home-based broadband is changing the media landscape: Pew says that 57 million Americans watch online video content every day. That's 19% of American adult Internet users.
Americans between ages 18-29 are the most video-voracious; 31% of them watch online videos every day.
What are American adults watching? News, primarily, followed by comedy, movies or TV, music and surprisingly (to some, I imagine) commercials! 13% of American adults report they have downloaded or watched video ads.
The upshot of Pew's report is that word of mouth figures prominently in the spread of online video: Two out of three viewers ages 18-29 send links to video files, compared with half of Americans age 30 and older. Forty-two percent of the 18-29 year-olds send video links a few times per month or more. With numbers like that, it's little wonder that creating a "viral video" is the elusive emerald that so many marketers romance.
My take on this is two-fold:
- You are either old or a laggard if you aren't producing video-based content on a regular basis. Right now, that makes me an old laggard.
- A job title of the future for marketing departments is Video Producer. Like a news producer at a television station, she decides every day what's worth covering at the company and produces a short video segment for YouTube, the company blog or even the company intranet.
When the media landscape changes that dramatically, it creates significant ripples. Telling your company's ongoing story on a daily or weekly basis via online video is looking a lot like the future of marketing and advertising.
Other blogs that reference Why everyone wants a viral video:
» Video from WhereThePartyAt.net Development
I was reading the most recent post from the Church of the Customer Blog where the author says that websites such as mine should be publishing video regularly.
He's absolutely right - this is something that WhereThePartyAt.net is going to have to get... [Read More]
» Congratulations, you're in the TV business, too from Hear 2.0
From Church of the Customer: More evidence of how the proliferation of home-based broadband is changing the media landscape: Pew says that 57 million Americans watch online video content every day. That's 19% of American adult Internet users. Americans... [Read More]
What a delight reading this post!
I've been a corporate documentary video producer/director for 23 years.
For years, the technology and distribution methods were central obstacle for sharing a corporate story. Duplicating and shipping hundreds of VHS tapes not only was a costly process but spreading the word about a story and watching that story was even more difficult.
Telling and sharing your corporate video story is now easier than ever.
Thanks for confirming what I've been saying for a long time :-)
Absolutely. Video is not cheap say for a small startup, but can be used in a variety of ways. With some many different video sharing sites out there, it means endless destinations to post your viral video.
Trick is not to simply be an ad, but rather to offer people something of value to watch for their time spent watching it - Good videos get shared, so the sell message needs to be secondary to the content.
Ben, I think a lot of people are scared to put video out there because they can't do it with studio quality. In order to make them seem less corporate, Scoble intentionally did not over-produce his videos on Channel 9. To produce or not to produce? What's your take?
We're using video for our site to demonstrate products. We're uploading them to YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo Video and 5min.com.
We shoot in one or two takes with a video camera, and I edit them myself with Apple iMovie. After we upload them to the video sites, I'll embed the video into our product page so that anyone on our site can watch the video right there on the sales page.
The production quality is definitely not professional grade, but they are brutally effective at explaining products and teaching customers, and that's really all that our customers care about.
I sort of believe if they look "too slick" and expensively done, then they become less believable -- sort of like a TV commercial versus a person telling you about a product on video.
We've gotten around 50,000 combined views of our product videos.
Our videos aren't really funny or viral like Will It Blend, and we'll never see millions of views with our specialized audience.
But they have most certainly increased our sales and conversion rates, and decreased our returns, because people understand the product better before they order.
It's a huge competitive advantage, because it proves that we actually know something about our products and are real people and not just a faceless web site.
Feel free to check them out yourself, but please don't make fun of my amateur video making and editing skills. At least not to my face.
http://www.youtube.com/cleanairgardening
http://www.5min.com/cleanairgard
http://video.yahoo.com/video/profile?sid=86695
Our next step is to try and get customers to send us videos of themselves using our products.
Who better to explain to customers about our products than other customers who are using them already!
So stay tuned on that one.
We're still trying to figure out what will motivate customers to send us video. $50 in store credit, maybe? Ideas anyone?
We've had pretty good luck with getting still photos, so we're hopeful that we'll also be able to get some video, since almost every digital camera now shoots video.
Today everyone is talking about companies using blogs and other online resources to create a personal dialogue directly with customers and/or would be customers.
Wouldn’t the use of video for corporate blog posts help companies make their blogs even more personal? This would definitely help customers put a face with a name.
It seems like these two ideas a very complimentary.
Thomas -- You have a substantial head-start with video skills. You could be leading the way on this.
Lonely -- Right on. It means rethinking what an "ad" is.
Ben -- Interesting question. If we use the Pew data as something of a guide, it found that 62% of online video viewers say that "professionally produced" videos are their favorites. What "professionally produced" means is open to pretty wide interpretation, but we could safely assume it involves someone who's not talking into a webcam.
But Pew also found this disparity: A pretty healthy share of young adult men (about 34% of them) prefer amateur video over professionally produced video.
What this says to me is maintaining a balance between professional handling of a camera and sound, but also maintaining that spirit of amateur discovery.
Clean Air -- The 1% Rule will probably apply to your efforts. Incentives usually don't help much; it's more about creating and fostering a band of early-adopting creative contributors.
Roark -- Absolutely! If anything, John Mackey should have sat himself in front of a video camera after news of his sock-puppeting broke and used a video to deliver his apology. It could have been eminently more effective than his sterile text-based version. But of course, that would have worked only if he was truly apologetic. The camera never lies.
Ben: I love reading that brands want "viral videos" -- it's like the grandmother who introduces the two infant grandkids as "the doctor and the lawyer."
We all want our videos to go viral.
However, to your point: more brands should use video as a part of their communication and painfully few do. I worked at a company where we had a videographer on staff and by order of senior-most management, he spent his time transcribing sales meetings from years past (... never to be seen by anyone, needless to say...).
A company probably needs to have a blogging culture -- one that allows for decentralized communication to and from those 'outside the wall' -- before it can become a vlogging culture. Let's hope more get into it soon.
Thanks -- great post and great comments!
A great example of a company doing consistent weekly video content about their team and workspace is Pepperjam Search. http://pepperjamblog.com/category/meet-the-pepperjam-team/
"Every Friday Pepperjam will post a new video interview of a member of our staff - everyone will be included - affiliates managers, executives, search-engine marketing managers, directors, software engineers, assistants, online media buyers, and interns. The person being interviewed won’t know he / she has been chosen until about 30 seconds before the interview - this way you’ll get an unrehearsed, real world look at the employee…hopefully, this will make it interesting and non-corporate, which is what we are known and respected for across the internet marketing industry.
Why are we doing this? Well, I am proud of our team and I think you’ll find them as interesting and intelligent as I do. Also, I’m a student of viral video and the social media space and I want to test the waters as it relates to what corporate america is doing (and not doing) to spread buzz and build next generation work places."
Great post about video, and a belated welcome to Austin! This is one of the coolest cities in America. :)
Laura
I'm a firm believer in the possibilities surrounding online video and it eventually becoming a strong player in the Internet marketing game. Although with people being wimpy about trying things, it'll probably take 4 to 5 years before we find out the ways people want to consume video along with ads. It'll probably end up being a number of different ways.
But concerning video in general, I think it's still going to have to be very niche oriented to attract viewers. I watch a lot of video online, but it must hit my interests almost exactly to get me to turn it on.
I still prefer text to get a quick overview of things, as it only takes me a few seconds to find out if I'm interested in going on or not. Video doesn't offer us that opportunity.
It seems to me it will come down to whether we want to exchange our time for viewing the video. To make that decision it'll have to be extremely relevant to the individual.
Video has been the wave and we at CalMagazine.com have taken it further than the one-minute viral video and are producing 20 minute webshows. From those webshows, we create a one-minute viral video and place it in the common spots. I went from being a marketer to being a video producer. We've made mistakes and learned a lot, but the most important thing we've learned is that people want to watch videos. Our website, www.calmagazine.com, is now ranked in the top 40th percentile of all websites in the world. We did this over a 3 month period. Our goal is to be in the top 500 by the end of the year. Video is doing it for us. Check us out at www.calmagazine.com. By the way, for those of you looking for video to put on your website, unless you're extremely popular, don't expect someone to send video to you for free.
Great article, I found it via StumbleUpon. Big companies are spending more and more time on creating virals. Sure beats paying the big bucks for airtime, and the benefits can be just as good.
its how my whole site is based around good quality content from youtube check it out http://infocollective.com there are funny videos, ghost videos, ufo videos, street fights, bug fights and tons of other cool stuff
Funny viral videos are the future of internet marketing.
You can create a little Hollywood at home by blending two images, in which a color from one image is removed , revealing another image behind it.
The new distributed viral forum/blog/wiki/classified/etc advertising engine is here. We can spread the word about your site in short amount of time to millions of people and help with your SEO process by using backlinks. Start your campaign today! http://widecircles.com
Yea creating is not a bad idea..To make it better future it's good choice..
