YouTube blog has announced the release of the beta version of Video Annotations. Video annotations allows you to add commentary to your videos  (interactive commentary).

To quote YouTube:

With this feature, you can add background information, create branching (”choose your own adventure” style) stories or add links to any YouTube video, channel, or search results page — at any point in your video.

As the uploader you have complete control. You are able to insert commentary by adding speech bubbles, notes and highlight boxes at any point in your video. You can insert an unlimited number of annotations in each video as well.   Annotations, once published, are shown by default.  However if you want to turn it off while watching a video go ahead. Just click the button on the bottom right of the video player.

So how could something like this be of use in the Social Marketing arena?

Israel F. Swanson

Community Development

Yovia.com 

A man on a crowded New York City Subway Train yells out to the masses,

“ Would you like $1,000,000 cash?  Please come take my $1,000,000!”

The passersby look at the man in disgust, with rolling eyes they walk past the man and never look back.  They don’t discuss the absurdity with anyone and have completely forgotten about the man by the time the train stops at their final destinations.

Another man, on the same crowded New York City Subway train stands quietly next to a middle-aged woman.  He says “Hello” to the woman when she glances over her shoulder at him.  She returns his salutation.  The man then whispers to the woman:

“I am running an experiment and happen to have $1,000,000 in my bag right now.”

The woman looks at the man in confusion.  He says,

“I’m serious I have $1,000,000 in my bag and my intention is to give it to someone on this train today.  Can you help me?”

The woman, still skeptical asks the man

“What can I do?”

The man replies,

“Simple!  All you have to do is tell one person what I have told you.””

The woman turns away from the man and tells the young gentleman standing to her right in a very low voice the same message she was just given.  When she is done she looks back to the man holding the money.

“Thank You.”  He says with a smile and a wink. “Now just watch what happens.”

Soon the man was bombarded by money hungry New Yorker City commuters. He had told only one person about the money, but that‘s all it took.  They people surround the man with inquiries.

“Where did you get the money?” one man calls out.

“Why are you giving it away?” another stranger asks.

“What kind of experiment are you running anyway?” a blonde waitress questions

An old man asks “When are you giving it away?”

“Please sir,” a scruffy transient pleads. “ I could really use that money.  My father is in the hospital and this money could save his life.”

Soon people were not only asking the man with the money questions, but they were talking amongst themselves.  The news of the giveaway spread throughout the entire subway train with rapid speed.

As marketers we have to learn to get personal.  We need to befriend our consumer audience in order to engage and sell them on our product or service.  Consumers have been abused for too long and marketers who rely on conventional advertising are becoming an endangered species.

You have to get personal.  Even with a huge motivating factor blasting the message falls only on deaf ears.  We are all too skeptical to buy into conventional marketing anymore.  What has worked in the past is no longer working, let’s evolve before we are extinct.

Remember:

Put your message out in the right way and let your consumers do the pushing.

Written By : Michelle Amos

Lets face it, people today are tired of seeing ads and being sold stuff. As people become more familiar with technology this vehicle is growing. The internet is becoming more relevant and prominent to today’s times.

But, people today do not have the time or the inclination to have conversations with marketers although. People want what they want, and often get what they want when content is involved. So in a way the content is king. This can be looked at the same way television plays into marketing because just like changing the channel you can switch websites.

So this leads us to a question of how do you attract people’s attention who are actively trying to avoid you? Because the internet allows us to socialize with people this helps solve this problem to a certain extent, but the real question how do social marketers not get avoided? Because content is so important on the internet and within social marketing, being relevant is key.

As social marketers we need to truly understand who we are talking to, otherwise we could be wasting our words and wasting our customers time. We need to understand how people interact on the different sites we are linking to and what sites are relevant to our customers.

By: Matt Hite
Intern
Yovia.com

Maximum numbers of businesses today have an online presence as the Internet has grown to be the new rage in the communication world. The online presence (social media) can really create wonders for your company as well as business, provided you promote it using certain methods. One such key method for endorsing your website to the world is by making the use of the famous public media platforms or social bookmarking sites. Some of the more noteworthy websites like Digg, News vine and Reddit have been viewed as the prodigal son sense the rebirth of bookmarking. These platforms allow you to build back links, create and encourage your website popularity and bring in tons of new traffic.

One of the more recent booms in the social scene is the growing popularity of Facebook. Myspace was the forefather of social websites, before the social bookmarking renaissance. Myspace was the place to be, given its popularity Myspace became the target of SEOs, Internet marketers and spammers alike. But like every Gold Rush, people see new opportunities…enter FACEBOOK.

So as you can see there is really no time to sleep in the social marketing scene if you want to stay ahead of Johnny come lately spammer.

Israel F. Swanson

Community Development

     Do you have a core group of followers around your product?  Do you want to interact with your customers on a more personal level?  Try starting your own social network.  Sure, you could buy some $300 program and then pay some developers to set it up, etc., etc., etc., and now you’re down a grand or so and need to figure out how to get people to use your network.  Forget that, there is an easier way.  Ning, it means peace in Chinese.  Ning isn’t a new technology (started in 2004) and isn’t the only one on the block, but they seem to be the ones doing it the best.  I had thought about signing up for this one a few years ago, but it didn’t have the features I wanted.  I couldn’t even host it on my own domain.  That has all changed.  Ning has an active development community with documentation that can help even beginners start a thriving community around pretty much anything.  They have architecture and development guides, widget guides, API refrences, and more.  Finally, you can do what you want with a social network, but don’t have to begin at ground zero.  The Yovia network will be up soon.  Feel free to sign-up.

Mike Palmer

Analyst

Should you control social marketing? This is a question for many today because of different issues at hand. The biggest issue within this is the spam and irrelevant information that are being posted. Users are getting tired of clicking on pages that bring them to something of complete irrelevance. For example, although Facebook might have slightly less traffic than Myspace, they have created more value in their network by reducing the irrelevant links. Facebook’s network can be seen to many more closely nit and organized. Although Myspace is trying to head in this direction and cut back on this factor, their system and customer base is now use to this spam that is sometimes present. Ebay is heading in this direction on controlling social marketing and someways people are saying this can be seen as bad, but in reality I believe it is helping to increase the relevant information within their site. More importantly, this is helping ebay’s well known image of a unique marketplace for everyone to buy and sell. Like with many social networks such as Ebay people want to interact, but if it is full of junk and irrelevant information this could cause its social network to be a river hazards and people might not put their boat in the water.

It will be intresting to see how Ebay does in the next few years with social marketing. Will increasing their control hurt them or will it help to stimulate a better social network. Linking is crucial in a social network, but will cutting back on the links hurt them.  It will be interesting to see how controlling social marketing will play into effect. 

  By: Matt Hite

Intern

Yovia.com

The other day, I was involved in a rather heated, yet enlightening discussion with a dude who really hates marketing; and I don’t blame him. Here is an excerpt of one of his comments from our conversation:

“Yes, consumers want to be heard. They also want the option to NOT be annoyed by marketing. They want the option of not having to put up with marketers exploiting a medium meant for communication and turning it into one more TV commercial. Consumers should not have to spend time and effort to block marketers. Consumers do want a choice - given their druthers, most would choose to have no marketing at all.”

He was responding to a comment I made about consumers demanding to be heard online; and even as a marketer, I unequivocally agree with his assessment. In later comments, he said that he was tired of marketers like me just “talking about having conversations with consumers” and that there is way too much “talking about talking” and very little two-way communication. I agree.

A lot of marketers, including myself, talk the talk and rarely walk the walk. I often write about the need for marketers and brands to engage in “real” conversations with “real people” i.e. their customers; and I am sitting back asking myself … how the heck am I going to engage in such conversation on the internet?

It’s one thing to write about conversational marketing (and I know that some of you hate that term); but it’s another thing to actually do it. And, I agree that many marketers still don’t “get it”; and either don’t use social media as a conversational channel or use it to spam everyone. But there are some companies that realize the true value of conversations . Well, that leads me to my next point.

Are conversations really the holy grail of social media?

I think I may have been wrong with this one. Anyone can have conversations. Go to a used car lot and you will be bombarded with them the moment you step on the lot. Used car salesmen are some of the biggest spammers on the planet!

It’s the content of the conversation that is the core. It needs to be presented with a “real voice” and relevant to the other person. Isn’t that the true nature of human interaction?

Real voice, relevance = valuable conversations = trust = the beginning of a “real” relationship

Written by: Michelle Amos

The price of gas is skyrocketing. Which means companies need to reconsider there advertising options.

There is no doubt that there is an economic disruption out there and gas prices like this will force the consumer to spend more time at home.

Now that the average person is sacrificing 1 paycheck a month to Exxon, and the other to food, mortgage, and credit card debut the desire to fire up that engine to drive to the store for products that are increasing in cost due to transportation costs is highly unlikely.

People over the next few months or longer will be spending MUCH more time at home on their computer.  What does this mean?

It means huge opportunity for advertising agencies and marketing agencies that specialize on online marketing, and the necessity for social marketing.

Social marketing is changing the fundamental relationship with customers to be less about serving and more about collaborating. But customers who want to talk will and smart companies will not just listen but will engage them in decisions. This will have an impact not just on PR and image but also on product design, marketing, sales, and customer service. Jeff Jarvis

Israel Swanson

Community Development

YOVIA.com 

When building a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, it is very important to consider a number of factors like PageRank, keyword density, and backlinks. Social media optimization (SMO) works very closely with SEO. Many tactics for running successful campaigns benefit both. One of the main things Google suggests is to build content for your reader, not search engines, and build high-quality content. This benefits both SEO and SMO by giving your reader something interesting, which makes it more likely to be passed around. As it gets passed around, more backlinks are established benefiting PageRank and weight, key pieces in Google’s algorithm. High-quality content also benefits by adding keyword rich content to a site which helps increase relevancy to search terms, another big piece in the algorithm. If people begin talking about your content (i.e. posting your content on their site), the content benefits by the PageRank of their page. Social media optimization is a process by which viral growth is ignited by moving quality content past the initial negative inertia which prevents the success of most content and sites.

A great SMO tactic that benefits SEO is using a paid campaign to begin viral growth. If you are starting from scratch, then it is very easy to begin an SEO campaign, by using paid search to give yourself some traffic and a few links so that you will be indexed quickly. Sure that works, but try running a StumbleUpon campaign in addition to paid search. The one problem with paid search is if you start a campaign then stop your links disappear. When using something like SU you can begin the viral push, but more importantly, SU gives you links, permanent links. Every time someone thumbs up your content piece, you get a link placed in their profile. If they thumbs down your content, you get a link in their profile. When someone visits your site, you get a link in their profile. That’s about $.05, per backlink, even if no one likes your page, and as everyone knows, links are one of the big keys to SEO.

Mike Palmer
Analyst

This week I read a few articles about how people see social marketing. One article said, “Social marketing, as with any marketing , is always going to be trial and error. However, with social marketing you can be a little more proactive in your approach by being a part of the social scene that you are trying to engage.” Another article I read stated, “marketers just don’t get the new technologies and the fundamental changes in the ways people interact with brands.” This led me to think about how as social marketers relevance is huge. You can’t talk to a young kid about something that would go right over his head. The message on what your focusing on is king in this aspect. For social marketers to get things right they must realize this and concentrate on their target audience. To engage these people you must put them and the message at the forefront. Your content needs to connect with the right audience, community, network, or etcetera where they are at other wise you could be talking to no one. You could be just wasting your time and money. 

By: Matt Hite
Intern
Yovia.com 

  http://thenextweb.org/2008/05/15/social-media-marketing-might-have-a-limited-future/
http://socialmarketingjournal.com/2008/05/15/should-you-spend-more-on-social-marketing/