What is the world’s second biggest search engine? YouTube. This statistic shows how important video has become to the internet, and was a thought-provoking way for Lee Smallwood to kick off his presentation on Making Video Rock at Social Media Week last Monday.
He argued that video is easier to create than the written word, and that it’s easier to consume too. I’m not sure I agree on those two points: you can write something using just a pen and paper, and you can skim-read written text, while video only goes at one speed. For the right type of content, though, there’s no doubt that video gives us many more opportunities for emotional engagement with audiences.
The key to success is to make videos for an audience, not to make a video and then try to find an audience for it. Once you’ve made your video, you need to get it in front of eyeballs, and encourage people to share it. There’s nothing wrong with asking people to click the Like button or share your video with their friends, and if you don’t ask, they probably won’t do it. If you want people to share your work and leave you comments, you need to do the same on their content too, though.
Smallwood is a keen advocate of Google+ too. Google is increasingly emphasising social signals (such as tweets and shares) in its ranking of search results, and Google+ is the search giant’s own social network, where it can freely access all the data. Smallwood said that videos shared on Google+ get a higher ranking in the YouTube search results, and are also indexed more quickly. He recommends actively participating in Google+, creating circles that reflect your niche interests and demonstrably implementing feedback you receive. If you show people you’re listening, they’re more likely to talk to you.
His top tips for seeding videos successfully were to upload and publish the video on the same day (YouTube prefers new content), offer your communities a sneak peek before publication, share across all your networking and social bookmarking sites, and amplify responses by replying to them and Liking any comments you get.
There were some presentations that tackled video content, too. Actor Steve Trister gave a short talk that emphasised the importance of emotion and storytelling in videos. He suggested you think about the character traits that people warm to about you, and bring out those same traits in your videos. Tell people why you do what you do, and share your story, and they will take the action you want them to if it’s consistent, he said. Nick Francis of Casual Films looked at the practical aspects of filming. The key lessons I took away are that you need to make sure the light and sound quality are excellent, and you can typically halve the length of the film to double its impact.
Later that same day, I attended the 4x4 Social Media Case Study event, which included a story that used video impressively. Mel Kirk, head of blogger engagement at Jam, told how her team created the ‘extreme unboxing’ campaign for Samsung. The team worked with key bloggers to co-create videos where they would unbox a new Samsung phone and describe it (as per the video craze at the time), except with the twist that they would do it in extreme situations, such as in a stunt plane or on a rollercoaster. This kind of campaign is clearly designed for video, and they generated over 800 embeds, 23,000 mentions of ‘extreme unboxing’ and achieved a total reach of 20 million. You can see the video here:
What’s the best viral video campaign you’ve seen?