Last week on ViralBlog among others “40 Smart Uses Of Social Video Metrics”, “IKEA: The Facebook Fan Sleepover” and “Apple & Google Bid For UK Football TV Rights?”.

Stop Pushing Pop-up Ads In My Face!

Remember those annoying pop-up ads when you visit a website? Most websites got rid of them in the last decade. Well in China it’s still being used on a widespread scale. In China online marketing is still mostly pushing banners in people’s faces. It’s so annoying that sometimes users cannot even click it away.

40 Smart Uses Of Social Video Metrics

Brands can still buy media, but attention can only be earned. That’s why CMOs will massively embrace social videos and video metrics in 2012, says eMarketer. So see below video and our list: 40 smart uses of social video metrics…

Anarchy – A Social Game By Axe Is Coming

A graphic novel from AXE? Yes and no. Axe will provide the sketches and users take active part in the story. At least that’s the plan.

IKEA: The Facebook Fan Sleepover

After a few years of just focussing on gaining as many likes, friends and followers, brands slowly start to realize that real fan engagement is far more important than just showing a big number. IKEA is such a brand that goes beyond ‘the Facebook Like’.

Viral Friday: Golden Loves Guitar !!

A weekly viral video chart of ViralBlog, showing the 5 most popular viral videos, commercials, games or user-generated videos, carefully selected and ranked by popularity, viral impact & spread.

Apple & Google Bid For UK Football TV Rights?

Insiders say that Apple and Google are likely to enter the auction for the Premier League football TV rights in the UK. Both tech companies could easily afford the amount. What are the odds? And what could be the impact…

Can You Copy Rebecca Black?

Seeing that virality is such a sought after prize among marketers, is it worth marketing your brand in a way that gets you a lot of criticism but attention at the same time, much like Rebecca Black?

That’s why we wanted to share some examples, okay, well 40 examples, of actionable insights that CMOs could get from video tracking across the social web.

We are pretty sure this list will help CMOs to fuel their 2012 brand and business objectives…

The list with 40 smart uses of social video metrics, powerful videolytics and full social metrics:

1 Track your video views
2 Track your videos across 500+ video sharing portals
3 Measure your reach and engagement
4 Track Tweets of your video
5 Track Facebook shares of your video
6 Track comments of your video
7 Track ratings of your video
8 Learn about the creative power of your videos
9 Discover the long-tail effect of your videos
10 Discover your top viewing audiences by country
11 Measure the Costs Per View (CPV) of your videos
12 Measure your PR & Earned Media value
13 Discover what videos fly or die
14 Detect what videos your targets love and hate
15 Learn in what social hot spots your videos are embraced
16 Upload videos to multiple video sharing portals
17 Benchmark competitor videos against your own
18 Discover competitor video viewing peaks
19 Understand and measure competitor efforts
20 Discover social video shares of competitors
21 Enables you to track multiple videos for one campaign
22 Improve your creative power and future digital content strategies
23 Discover actionable insights and act upon them
24 Prove your natural seeding efforts with extreme low costs per contact
25 Measure free PR, Share of Voice (SoV) and earned media value
26 Save time with instant access to all external data
27 Manage information together in one (branded) dashboard
28 Measure videos at millions of blogs
29 Export video metrics data to Excel and PDF
30 Discover which video portals are important outside YouTube
31 Track videos of your brand ambassadors
32 Measure multiple campaigns at the same time
33 Review results from specific dates
34 Compare video results next to the overall campaign result
35 Discover when a video views start to drop
36 Learn about Strategic Social Seeding
37 Discover the power of the Owned – Earned- Paid value chain
38 Discover that content is king
39 Discover that distribution is queen
40 Discover why metrics is the emperor

We hope this list was useful to you. If so, please share this article with relevant peers.

And we would love to learn what other needs you have in the field of social video metrics. Please share them in the comments below.

Source: ViralTracker

This week I was amazed by below Nokia N9 video. Very cool, must go viral. But even our Viral Friday guys said: “Cool, but not a viral yet, it has only 35,000 views on YouTube.

Curious to learn more, I tapped into the dashboard of our sponsor ViralTracker and looked at the videolytics and social metrics around the Nokia N9 video.

And there it was: That same Nokia N9 video had over 1 Million views on its first day! Not on YouTube, but on Youku, one of China’s biggest video sharing sites…

If you are curious too, check the Nokia N9 video here on YouTube. Now check the same Nokia N9 (viral) video on Youku.

So a few learnings shared with all involved in marketing, media, pr and digital:

1. Think beyond YouTube insights. There are 500+ other video sharing portals to explore!
2. Use smart videolytics and social metrics technologies to get all insights.
3. Making the right decisions on content is about having the accurate data.
4. Content is King. Distrubution is Queen. Metrics is the Emperor.

So thank you, YouTube. For drawing big brands out of the box and onto the web. Your “insights” are fine, but other META insight companies should clearly take it from here.

To make the Nokia N9 example even more clear to CMOs and media agencies: Would you rather track 10% or 100% of your banner campaign? Or do you find being blindfolded 90% of the time more exciting?

It clearly shows how important powerful videolytics and full social metrics around your videos are. Across millions of blogs, social sites, YouTube but also 500+ other video sharing portals.

And yes we are aware this video is targeted at China, so Youku is fine. And not, we are not blaming YouTube.

Our message is: This is the era for non-linear marketers. Think way before you start: have I thought 360? Have I thought bottom-up? 365 Days?

Because if you don’t, you might easily miss-out on results and ROI. Like i.e missing out on 1 Million views at your next video campaign. Because you thought linear and YouTube only.

For example: How this would make you look, while your were reviewing the campaign review in the boardroom? So be clever.

And this is off course just one example on online video and distribution. Non-linear thinking offers many other benefits, in many other parts of marketing, media, broadcasting and publishing…

Ebuzzing is doing paid seeding of social video content but also performs paid blog content via Overblog, it’s European blogging platform. This blog network reached 28,5 Million unique visitors in July 2011, according to comScore.

Ebuzzing turnover was €10 Million in 2010, and says it expects this to grow to €18 Million by the end of 2011.

Now, Ebuzzing announces a new series of $25 Million in funding by GIMV, a leading European Venture Capital fund, and its existing investors Lightspeed, Gemini, Solorun and Pierre Chappaz.

We are curious when other large media networks (i.e. WPP and Omnicom) and media owners (i.e. Microsoft MSN and NewsCorp) will see and seize the opportunities of social video distribution and blogger outreach.

And do we all understand how Paid, Owned and Earned (POE) media works? That some viral videos you see in some Viral Charts, are not the organic growing viral weapons of mass affection at all.

Some of these videos are getting big so fast due to the fact that they are heavily supported by a push of paid video views. But that’s what the brands and chart builder are forgetting to tell you. Well, we’ll reveal a few of those cases coming months…

Next, we know that POE is OEP is social media. But according to Brian Solis, media are no longer limited to three groups (paid, owned, and earned) but instead categorized into five key segments: Paid, Promoted, Owned, Shared, and Earned.

Solis could be very right here. But only if the branded content is indeed compelling. Otherwise brands should hide their lousy content to clients, fans and followers. And earning attention will off course never work if the content is lousy.

We hear many talks about social media ROI from CMOs. Well my dear CMOs: You can impress us in interviews by saying how very much you want focus on ROI and marketing accountability, but if you still spend 90% of your budget in non accountable media, you are nothing but a public joke.

Next my dear CMOs, your talks about your struggle for Social Media ROI: They are mostly pathetic. When we screen, rank, rate and monitor your branded content, you should stop talking about ROI, fire 50% of your staff and agencies and work on creating some compelling content first.

Because without great content, there will be no engagement. Without engagement there will be no buzz, no viral, no social and no community. So no matter how often you pay to push your lousy TVCs and branded videos towards your target audiences: Without great content, Earned and Shared will not be part of your 3 or 5 media segments.

And if Media agencies can really start to understand the full POE value chain, I doubt that. Because in social media, you never ever start with Paid media. So, I support the new Solis model above. But I think that only a few around us have the same strategic brainpower as Solis. But most will have encounter difficulties on a tactical media level already.

However, back to social video advertising. It will be massive and impressive. But YouTube seems to be pulling a dead horse in this area.

So if the Display and Video market will be $200 Billion by 2020, like Eric Schmidt stated a while ago, who will bite the biggest chunk out of the social video advertising pie? Will it be Google? Facebook perhaps? Other media owners?

Or aggregating companies like Ebuzzing, GoViral, Unruly Media and SocialMedia8?

How do you see the next steps in social video advertising? Which companies will understand and monetize POE best? We are eager to learn from our peers…

The book, which was first printed in 1859, was bought by a family for just a few shillings in a shop about 40 years ago, Christie’s auction house said. The family has since kept the work on a bookcase in the guest lavatory at their home in the Oxford area, it said.

The book just went go under the hammer in London, last week, to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the publication of the father of the theory of evolution’s famous work. The book, about 1,250 copies of which were first printed, is expected to fetch 99,000 US dollars.

Margaret Ford, head of books and manuscripts at Christie’s, said the book would have been a bargain when it was bought by the present owner. “It’s incredibly important,” Ford said, adding of the current owner: “He knew it (the book) was textually important. He maybe did not know how much of a bargain he was getting.”

Christie’s said the son-in-law of the current owners was at an exhibition on Darwin and spotted a picture of the spine of the work. He realised the book in the toilet was something special, matching the binding of the work in the picture.

Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” set out his theory of evolution, by which species develop from generation to generation by a process of natural selection.

The link between viral and social marketing and Darwin’s hidden book?

Maybe we should not be so eager to get our precious and unique content immediately out to opinion leaders in the social space. But keep the original content in a safe and smelly place first for some years? We could tell people to look for our hidden viral video…

Bournemouth students & staff dance to the official Comic Relief single, ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ by The Saturdays

The aim of the video was also to drive traffic to the Comic Relief donation page, drive traffic to the Centre for Excellence in Media Practice (CEMP) site, raise awareness of Comic Relief and the University’s corresponding fundraising activities.

The making of
The making of the video was simple. Take nine outgoing youngsters with bundles of PR charm to convince unsuspecting, passing staff and students to give up a few minutes of their time to get involved and ‘do something funny for money’. Add a high quality digital camera mounted on a tripod to capture still images of random actions from chefs waving to a Wildcat cheerleader’s Red Nose Day cheer by said staff and students – and all with red noses on. The still images were put to the official Comic Relief single ‘Just Can’t Get Enough‘ by The Saturdays and sequenced into a stop motion animation using Final Cut Pro.

The strategy
Once the video was edited together, the seeding could begin. The video was posted to Youtube and linked to from a blog on the CEMP site thanking the participants and listing them by name. The CEMP link was then distributed via email to all participants, whose email addresses were captured at the time of filming, to thank them for participation and to encourage the virality of the content.

The initial simplistic strategy was to paste the CEMP link to Facebook and Twitter statuses to utilise the viral creators’ online networks and social capital and thus encourage community members to take a look at the content. Ultimately the aim was for the content to then be passed on to friends of friends, hence taking it viral. A Bournemouth University does Comic Relief group was set up on Facebook to specifically monitor video related comments outside of Youtube, and the video link was sent to existing Facebook Comic Relief groups to tap in to the interest in the event and encourage more views.

In addition to this the CEMP content was shared using the video creators’ existing participation in social networks including LinkedIn news, Google Bookmarks, digitalspy forums, StumbleUpon and Digg.

For the same reason, the video was also uploaded to third party sites including Mixx, the PR specific social network PROpenMic.org, funny clips blog site LOL Factory, and Dutch video hosting site Zie.nl. The uploading of the content to Zie.nl utilised the online contacts of Dutch colleague and interactive media enthusiast Daan Jansonius.

Bournemouth University Student’s Union uploaded the video to their Red Nose Day minisite, and agreed to send the link out in all communications relating to the fundraising event. This strategy aimed to give credibility to the video. The online activity was supported by traditional PR which involved the send out of the video link with a short broadcast-friendly press release to local media and key media contacts.

Analysis
The seeding strategy started immediately to try and ensure that the video secured enough hits so that it appealed to offline media and became a more mainstream news story with the local angle of Bournemouth University students doing something “funny for money”. The obvious validation of third party broadcast endorsement would have been invaluable. The ultimate, ambitious aim of the team, was to try and get the viral broadcast on the main Comic Relief telethon on Friday 13th March.

The ‘Bournemouth University Students support Comic Relief 2009‘ video went live on YouTube at 7.30pm on Monday 2nd March. The initial seeding strategy re-directed user back to Centre Of Excellence in Media Practice website at Bournemouth University, where the blog post explaining the concept was hosted. The initial posting of the blog saw a demonstrable rise in traffic to the CEMP site on Google analytics, through the initial seeding throughout Web 2.0. The initial post on CEMP elicited 40 comments from visitors to the blog post with 24 being unequivocally positive, one comment offered constructive critique which was subsequently discussed in the thread.

The inital blogposting caused a demonstrable rise in traffic to the CEMP site, see in full screen mode

At the time of writing, it had received 2,880 hits on YouTube with 30 text comments all of which were positive. The “Bournemouth University does Comic Relief” Facebook group has 104 members. The “do something funny for money page” that was set up by BAPR students had raised £18 for Comic Relief. On Zie, the video has been viewed 7,686 times and has been given a “thumbs up” 41 times. The video was placed on the homepages of both LOL Factory and PR Open Mic. The video has been “dugg” 11 times on Digg. In the run-up to actual Comic Relief day, participants in the viral’s creation have resolved to re-double their efforts to drive traffic to the video and intensify efforts to raise offline awareness. This will be done through assisting Comic Relief promotional activity around the university and re-focusing on targeting mainstream, traditional media.

The breakdown from YouTube insight, see in full screen mode

Results

• Youtube – 2,880 hits with 30 text comments
• Zie.nl – 5,828 views 41 ‘thumbs up’
• Facebook – 104 group members
• Digg – 11 diggs
• PROpenMic – 6 views
• MetaCafe – 197 views
• Yahoo Video – 56 views
• Myspace – 2 views

Conclusion
In summary the video tried to capitalise on the timeliness of Comic Relief as a national fundraising event to give newsworthy value and a purpose to the video. Upon reflection, however, it would seem that the video failed to capture the attention of a wide audience, and this could be attributed to the noise and clutter of Comic Relief activity. This year Comic Relief used social media to a greater extent and this means that our attempts could be lost within the official content.

The video clearly lacked something that would have made it worthy of being passed on amongst friends, to make it go viral. The collation of email addresses of the participation was a direct effort to stimulate virality, however this video only served to re-iterate the difficulties in creating a successful meaningful message that retains sufficient virality.

Comic Relief and Red Nose Day 2009 beat its previous 2007 record by raising over £57 million for good causes.

The event with Micha takes place at Strøget in Copenhagen, Denmark. The viral film was created by Karim Stoumann, founder at Danish viral and buzz marketing agency buzzanova and media agency Vizeum.

I feel it’s a clever and witty viral commercial with the TicTac product smartly used as epic center. And I like the TicTac Micha campaign site. Seeding in the Nordics was done by buzzanova, which resulted in over 220.000 clip views within a few weeks.

Due to the viral success of TicTac’s Micha in the Nordics, SocialMedia8 is now seeding Micha into the German social universe. Viral reach and ROI will be delivered by ViralTracker.

If you enjoyed this post or want to share your opinion: please leave your comment below or subscribe to our rss feed to have future articles delivered to your feed reader.

In 15 Dutch cities professional comedians and stand-up comedy talent battle for the best humorous stories, short jokes and one-liners to entertain the crowd and give them a fun night out full of laughs.

To promote the stand-up nights online, Sonnema let’s you create your own stand-up comedy, entitled Comedy on Demand. To create a fun and interactive experience the brand used the power of video, widgets and YouTube annotations to create buzz and direct traffic to Sonnema Home of Comedy.

In the annotations video below you start by selecting your comedian of choice: Harry or Jeffrey. Then you’re asked to choose a location (bar, bad neighbourhood or internet) and topic (women, integration and sports). When done, your personal stand-up selection is played.

Comedy on Demand is also available as widget that just like YouTube Annotations can be embedded on blogs and social networks, e.g. Hyves in The Netherlands.

The concept was developed by Blutarsky. Media agency is Mediaedge:cia and SocialMedia8 is responsible for the creation of the YouTube Annotations and viral seeding.

It’s the first time YouTube annotations is used in a Dutch advertising campaign!

Do you know more examples of brands and YouTube Annotations? Share it with us in the comments.

The movie was created by Utopia Films from Portugal. Since I’m Figo fan and feel the movie trailer is full of tension and erotic scenes, I hope the movie will be a big success. But I’m not yet convinced, the film will become a huge Box Office hit….

I liked the trailer and the making of teaser. More info about the movie can be found here. I would like to know more about the seeding and tracking of this movie trailer.

To our community: do you feel the movie will be a great success? To our friends from Portugal, if you’ve seen the movie in the cinema, please let us know how you rated it!

Tip: Jappyzinho
Source: De Ultieme FilmBlog

However it was clear from research groups that for many consumers ‘ease of use’ was the real barrier for what has previously been seen as a fairly niche service, therefore we wanted to communicate just how easy using e-mail on the full range of 3 mobile phones was, said creating agency glue London.

‘Easy Email’ was launched on three.co.uk as a homepage takeover which linked through to a bespoke landing page filled with our content, which is now a permanent demonstration of e-mail on 3.

glue London told: “Stylistically moving away from 3’s normal look and feel, the concept and design of both the page and video were pushed towards emphasizing the child like simplicity of the service by incorporating a really eye catching cut-out animation style, evoking a nostalgic simplicity.”

glue London also explained: “The work was loved by the client, who considers it up to be a great example of glue’s work for the brand, a perfect example creative for future briefings, blending strategic insight and engaging creative.”

I do like most pieces of glue’s creative work. But I just looked up 3 Mobile’s video results at YouTube: Uploaded at 15 December 2008, the video has realized only 11 clip views, 0 ratings and 0 comments in 21 days?!

Is the video that low interest, low awareness or not engaging at all? I don’t think so, since I have seen promotional online videos that were less compelling.

But why are the video results so low? Was all the online budget spent on homepage takeovers or banners? Is it a lack of seeding or social media marketing skills?

If your eyes observe the video results, your mind might say to you: it looks like “Ridiculously Slow Video”?!

Please help us out. Feed us some wisdom of crowds! What’s happening here?