We’ve also included some marketing strategies for each one. But, before you go hog wild with your next guerrilla marketing push, remember that these sites are largely used for social interaction between friends and co-workers. Using these sites as a means to establish your brand and market a product is still a nascent field. Your first directive should always be to question whether or not you’re respecting the privacy of users and using the network for its intent and be honest! There are many examples of viral campaigns that were uncovered as elaborate hoaxes hatched by design firms or ad agencies. The result has not been pretty.

With that said though, it can be a great way to engage in a positive exchange between brand and consumer. Here are some of the largest and hottest social networking sites. Have fun!.

YouTube: With over 1Billion pageviews per day, YouTube is the largest video-sharing site on the web. Founded in 2005 and acquired by Google in 2006, YouTube is as an important media hub as any other in print or broadcast communication. Users can easily create a profile and upload video content to the site.

Try: Create a video promoting your site or company’s product and upload it to YouTube. Go for a straight commercial type shoot or go low-tech and shoot a homemade looking office video. When you think about your YouTube video think humor and something unconventional. Remember, even though it’s free doesn’t mean that you should throw up a ton of bad content. Make sure, whether homemade or professional produced, have the content be memorable. It’s still about telling a great story.

MySpace: If you have a teenage child, neice, nephew or neighbor (or are still trying to live out your college years) or have a band, you’re well acquainted with MySpace.  A popular watering hole for the 15-25 demographic and a massively popular social network for bands, solo performers and indie filmmakers.  MySpace has also seen a boon in corporate-run pages for big budget films, A-list bands and even celebrities.  I would encourage you to look into myspace if your company has any sort of media bend or your target audience is 25 or younger.  Although it’s losing ground rapidly to Facebook, MySpace still has well over 100Million unique visitors per month.  Joining MySpace is simple, and creating a fully filled out profile is also a relatively easy task.  There are areas for adding photos, video, and adding some of your favorite music in a custom player on your page.

Over the course of the last couple quarters, MySpace has drawn some fire for it’s over commercialization of its site.  What was supposed to be a mechanism for friends to connect with one another and indie bands to find a fanbase has now become rife with the likes of BK’s King and Britney Spears emailing you asking to be added to your friends list.  If you use a MySpace page to promote yourself, just be leery of not encroaching too much on users privacy.  It could backfire.

Try: Create a page for yourself or your business.  Add friends that fit your target demographic and send out selective content.  Maybe a special offer for MySpace friends, or if you’re a media-centric site, try releasing some content to your MySpace friends before anyone else.  Bands have famously used this to offer pre-release tracks to their audience…and hey, the distribution’s free.

Facebook: Definitely one of the hottest properties in the social networking landscape at the moment.  Unlike YouTube and MySpace (owned by Google and Fox Interactive Media respectively), Facebook is privately owned and operates out of Palo Alto, CA.   Facebook is essentially like MySpace in that it allows users to create a profile, add friends and become “fans” of their favorite musician, actor, tv show, etc.  Facebook is also home to a powerful adserving engine that serves up CPC advertising much like Google Adwords.  In some sense, Facebook offers a better advertising angle due to the fact that you can much more precisely target who sees your ad.  Compared to almost any other kind of advertising, Facebook is very affordable.  Just last month Facebook announced they had reached 200Million active users so your advertising reach is great.

Try: Create a “Fan” page or a “Group” to promote your business or product.  Like the other social networking sites, this requires a creative approach to marketing…no hard sells.  Distribute something that is creative, interesting and has real value.  It’s definitely important to remember that, even though you may be tempted to send out offers ad nauseum, hold back.  You don’t want the user to feel like they’re under an advertising attack.

LinkedIn: Think of LinkedIn as the social network for professional relationship management.  If you want to maintain a social networking profile that’s safe to show colleagues without fear of your weird cousin’s drunk wedding photos showing up, LinkedIn is the way to go.  This may be the most useful (in the practical sense) application for social networking as it exists primarily as an online resume or CV.  The idea is to be able to keep a profile and connect with others you trust in a business capacity.

There are both free and paid memberships; if you’re in the business of hobnobbing, I’d say the paid membership is worth the money.  It allows you to more easily connect with others and grow your network.  Once you sign up, make sure to complete your profile by asking for (and giving out) recommendations, adding your job history and make sure to be thorough and honest.  A website with 40Million users is not a good place to fluff your resume.

Try: Join a LinkedIn group.  LinkedIn groups facilitate the conversation between like-minded individuals.  There are groups for just about everything.  Join one that is in an area that you feel confident you are at or close to expert level in.  An area where you could productively add to the conversation.  Start to post on the group message board regularly and soon you’ll start to get some recognition and hopefully some additional traffic to your site.

The above sites are all useful in their own way.  The most important recommendation is to pick one or two you think would be most useful and commit to using them a set amount of time each week.  Many people sign up, dump a bunch of content then run for the hills never to update their profile again.  Spend a little time each week to add some new content and at least give the appearance that somebody’s still home.  That alone will help get more visitors engaged in your brand and traffic to your site.

I’m currently working with a client on a large-scale video project that will result in dozens of online videos.  This client is a teacher and he’s taking his deep knowledge of a niche topic and putting it online.  He’s selling the content for a very reasonable price (far less than taking his class in-person) and in the process, he’s reducing the personal burden to have to teach the class himself.  He’s setting up a business whereby everyone benefits.  He will have to work less, his students will get the class content at a reduced rate and they can now access the content at any time.

After the first couple shoots with this client, I started looking at my client list and realized that many of them were sitting on information that would not only benefit others, but could also turn into a passive revenue stream.  In today’s highly connected marketplace, there’s a wide-open opportunity to quickly reach a global audience.

The client I referred to earlier does not teach subject matter that would be considered wildly popular.  But, the audience for his class is loyal and highly motivated to learn what he has to teach.  I’d encourage you all to think about what you know.  What knowledge do you have that others could benefit from?  Online video is an excellent way to get that knowledge out, enrich your audience and create a revenue stream that you never knew was there.

The model that I focused on in this article is one based on a pay-for-use scenario where the end user would pay for video content.  But you can certainly use the same tools to create promotional videos.  One great example that comes to mind is the blog site of Phil Bloom.  Phil is a UK based Director of Photography and Editor and the blog (and the videos posted there) firmly establish him as an industry expert in small and medium format HD cinematography as well as technical specifications and reviews of new products.  I don’t know him personally, but I frequent his blog for the extremely useful information on it and I’m quite sure that it’s lead to him getting more work.

If you have any questions on the best strategy for turning your knowledge into a revenue source or promotional tool, contact us and we’ll schedule a free consultation with you to create a plan to help you share what you know.

Let’s say you have 3 main product buckets on your home page.   These three products make up 75% of your company’s sales.  They’re your bread and butter.  In your brick and mortar retail store, these products sell at an even rate, making up about 25% of sales individually.  On the site, there’s one product that’s failing to come close to that.  If you only looked at the sales numbers that would surely tell you that you’re not selling as many units…but that’s it.

Analytics gives you a much more thorough and broad reaching look at what’s happening on your site.  Information like who’s coming to your site, where they’re coming from, how often, what time, where they’re clicking, how many pages they’re looking at and what page they’re most often bouncing (leaving the site) from are just a few of the options that are available to you using an analytics tool.

The question of which tool is really easy.  Google Analytics.  It’s a free tool (for sites with 5 million page views per month) and it is organized in a way that’s incredibility easy to use.  It’s based on a dashboard layout that allows you to view high-level information and simply drill down to minutia.  You can get a great overview of GA on their site here: http://www.google.com/analytics/

Over the last 2-3 years many of your customers have upgraded their old 56k modem with a high speed DSL or Cable connection that delivers content to their home at speeds of up to 20mbps.  Sites like YouTube™, Vimeo™ and Fancast™ have grown exponentially over that same 2-3 year timeframe based in large part on the fact that so many users now have the adequate bandwidth to watch video without the drawbacks of the early 2000’s.

It’s time to ask yourself, “Is my business using video to effectively communicate to my customers.”

Here are 5 things you could (and probably should) be doing with video on your company’s website.  If you’re already doing some or all of these things you’re one (very big) step ahead of your competition and should be commended.  If you’re not doing any of these 5, read this.  Then pick one…just one of these 5 things and do it!  Once that one thing is done, pick another and do that too.

1)    Product Demonstration – One of the great social scientists of our time, Albert Bandura, spoke about learning through “vicarious observation.”  In layman’s terms, this just means that we learn by watching other people do something.  For instance, a great way to learn how to hit a baseball is by watching old footage of Ted Williams.   Take that same idea and apply it to your product.  If you’re selling a product or service there should be, somewhere on your site, a video that clearly shows your user (through vicarious observation) how to use the product or service.  These videos should be simple and straightforward.  Think of them as instructional videos.

2)    Viral Video – If you haven’t seen the Gatorade “Ballgirl” or the “Why every guy should buy his girlfriend a Wii Fit” video you should.  They’re funny, quirky and they show off their respective brands in a covert and subversive way.  The videos build interest in the brand without the sometimes garish “buy this now” mentality of a traditional advertisement.  Virals are not so much meant to entice you to buy the moment the clips run out, but rather to build a buzz around a product or brand.  Another great example can be seen here.  At almost 27 million views, this video has performed as well (if not better) than any broadcast commercial Nike produced that year.

3)    Company Bio – Looking for a way to tell the story of your company in a concise, easy to follow and entertaining way?  Having trouble doing that with copy?  Try a video.  A company bio is a mini-documentary about your business.  It tells the story of who you are, the culture at your company, the people that make up your company.   It may feature products and services but it’s more than that.  It exists to build brand awareness and goodwill about you and your business.  Are you embarking on a green initiative this year?  Do your company’s employees want to tell the world what a great company they work for?   Is your CEO a wannabe actor who can’t miss on screen?  Company bios are great at communicating your company’s core message in a way that’s captivating and impressive.

4)    Employee Education/Enrichment – Does your company have ongoing employee development, all hands meetings, product rollouts?  If so, they need to be video recorded, encoded and put on the company site or intranet.  These are invaluable assets that the company invest heavily in and should not be viewed as one-time events.  Capture these events on video and save them to show those employees that couldn’t make it, or who were hired on just after the event.  Hosting an event as a web video can also cut travel costs dramatically.  Imagine that you could produce a web training video for $5000 - $10,000.  This video would be on the company site in perpetuity, available for your entire staff to view.  Factor in plane tickets, hotel accommodations, per diem and lost productivity and the cost savings are obvious.

5)    Testimonials – Nothing speaks louder than the voice of a happy client.  And that client’s voice can’t be heard any more clearly than through a video testimonial.  You can always have them write a testimonial and post that on your site, but a video is much more personal and gives the end user a face to the name.  This goes a long way in adding credibility to the testimonial.  Hearing it (and seeing it) from the horse’s mouth has much more impact than reading a quote.  Salesforce™ is doing this to great effect right now.  Check out what they’re doing here: http://www.salesforce.com/smallbusinesscenter/ (click on read more in the banner area).

By adding web design and development to the mix, it gives us an opportunity to both grow our business and offer our customers a “one stop shop” for their marketing needs.

Don’t worry,  we’ll still be offering video as a service.  Creating compelling video is something that we’ll always do and  I think we’ll only get better as we further explore the new ties between video and the web in this rich media driven world we live in.

Please check out the site and let us know what you think.

All the best and happy new year!

Open up iTunes, go to your podcast directory and search for “baz luhrmann” and you’ll find it.

Enjoy!

I’d recommend it to both people who are just coming into the video profession as well as seasoned pros looking to learn a little more about the unique art of web video.  It’s a quick read and it’s full of insightful bits of info that are enlightening to the beginner and things that a pro might have forgotten about.  You also come away invigorated for a new project.  He’s very in to the DIY philosophy so I definitely came away ready to get my camera and shoot something!  I mean check out the cover…nothing says DIY more than a hipster on a vintage bike with his camera bag and some sticks tied to the handlebars…nice.

Check out his website here.  Aside from being a great self-taught shooter and director…he’s also a world class (also self-taught) web designer.  He was once the Art Director at Macromedia and now runs his own firm in NYC.  I spent an entire evening watching his videos.  One thing made me gain a lot of respect is the fact that most (of not all) of his films are on his site.  This allows us to see his progression as a filmmaker his skills develop and that’s very encouraging for up and comers as it gives them the sense that one can come to this as a second profession and craft wonderful work.

So the 2nd SXSW post has taken about a month to materialize. What can I say? It’s been busy. Anywho, I’m going to go on an editing tirade and cut up a bunch of videos for Rockin’ moms as well as some other stuff I did at the Amoeba party and maybe some Old Man River video. We’ll see.

I also recently shot a viral for Laughlin Michaels PR firm in conjunction with 3 degrees marketing that I’ll see if I can post. If not, I’ll throw the youtube link up.

That’s it for now…more soon!

Here are a few grabs from the footage:

Here’s a link to an unedited song from her show. Let me know what you think and I’ll post some more band footage from SXSW later this week.

Your Song, performed by Kate Walsh at the SESAC Day Stage at SXSW

Tiffany had a great show at the convention center and I had a great time on some shoots throughout the festival.

Our first gig was shooting the Amoeba Music Label artists at The Compound.  We filmed an interview with Quincy Coleman, Brandi Shearer and Kate Walsh and then had the pleasure of filming their live performances.

I was brought in on this gig by Ray Schlogel at Underground planet.  If anyone is ever in need of a shooter in the Austin area, please give Ray a call.  He’s a solid guy and very talented.  He’s also a Sony PMW EX1 owner operator!  Click on the banner below to get in touch with him.

After the Amoeba party, the next bit of business was filming two shows for Australian up and comer Old Man River.  This band is great fun and was a blast to shoot.

Their music is catchy and they were a definite fan favorite at the festival.  Thanks to Troy Barrott from Hub Artist Management for booking Kilroy Films on the job.

That’s it for now but I’ll be posting some footage and stills as soon as I catch my breath.

Thanks!

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