SmartMarket Media Blog

Hello to all of my blog subscribers through e-mail, RSS or whatever your fancy. The point is you are here and you are reading this after there hasn’t been much activity here for several months.

The reason for that is that I am no longer with SmartMarket Media. My business partner Heather Riley and I decided to amicably part ways working together under the SmartMarket Media name. Heather is going to focus the brand more on film and long-form video production and I am going to continue working on short form online marketing video and animation production through Adelie Studios – my other company I’ve had in operation since 1999. The Adelie Studios blog focuses on all of the issues I tackled here concerning online video marketing. So if you liked what I had to say here, consider subscribing to my new blog so we can continue the conversation.

Thanks to everyone who commented, discussed and added value to this blog through your conversation. I look forward to hopefully having more conversations with you and wish you all the best for health, wealth and happiness, not necessarily in that order, and I look forward to hearing from you soon!

This is a question that was recently asked by Feed Company in a survey of 40 executives at top U.S. creative ad agencies and media buying firms. Almost 28% considered it a success if a viral video got more than 1 million views followed closely by about 22% each evenly saying it was successful if it was viewed 100,000, 250,000, or 500,000 times. A meager 2.8% each considered it successful if it was viewed 25,000 or 50,000 each. I’m telling you that of all these numbers the 2.8% were the closest to being correct. It’s not about the cumulative total of those views, it’s about getting that video in front of the right eyeballs.

This was a quote I pulled from the Feed Company’s Viral Video Marketing Survey “The Agency Perspective” The last part about the quality of engagement and conversation — that’s the real key to the success of a viral campaign.

Here’s an example that we utilized for ourselves using word of mouth or viral marketing as a self-promotional piece in a B2B environment with measurable results. Last September I was named by the Worcester Business Journal to their 40 Under Forty list. So to celebrate this we created a funny movie poking fun at myself. We set very clear goals to:

1. Increase our brand recognition within the Central Massachusetts region served by Worcester Business Journal.
2. To open a discussion which would hopefully lead to a working relationship with Worcester Business Journal.

First, we sent it to our contact at Worcester Business Journal to get their “blessing” before sending it out to our e-newsletter subscribers. The Business Journal’s editor-in-chief called us within 15 minutes to say that it had already been forwarded around their entire office and they wanted to show it at the awards banquet the next night with over 500 attendees. At the event the owner of the Business Journal (and several other regional business newspapers) came up to me and asked if they could send it out on their e-newsletter to their list of over 5,000 subscribers.

Within about two weeks after the event our e-newsletter subscriber list doubled and from that event we have created videos for two of the event attendees, we produced videos for all three business journals owned by the parent company of Worcester Business Journal and have all three business journals set up to resell our online marketing video product. As with any word of mouth marketing campaign, it needs to grab people’s attention and be easily passed on.

Based upon our website views of this video and the video views on sharing sites such as YouTube, we had a little over 12,000 total views. That’s it. But we were able to target our demographic specifically to decision makers in businesses in a select region. So all the right people were viewing the video that we wanted to engage with it.

So what’s the moral to this story? You can have 50 million views of a video but if it ultimately doesn’t lead to the desired brand interaction you were looking for how effective was it really? Be more targeted in your distribution and don’t worry about cumulative views if it is engaging the right people.

How Much of a Typical Online Video Is Actually Watched?

5 Questions Interview: Mike Langford of Tweetworks

With Hanukkah and Winter Solstice already starting at sundown last night, the holidays are upon us. Christmas and Kwanzaa are just a few days away.

So with that in mind I wanted to share a video of holiday cheer we just created for Waste Management as their holiday greeting. It has a very loose & funny “message” to it but it is more about enjoying the children running around giggling, your family, loved ones and the time you spend together. Cherish these moments together as they are fleeting. Today your little ones are excited to tear open their presents, tomorrow they will be headed off to college. Not trying to be a downer here, just trying to put those burned sugar cookies into perspective. This holiday season take a moment to take a deep breath and enjoy life while it happens.

So no matter what holidays you celebrate, I wish you all a very happy and safe holiday season and a fun and prosperous 2009!