I’m usually not a big fan of flash mob dance or singing videos, especially as part of a business branding strategy. I get it – the flash mob is a metaphor for community, blah, blah, blah. Chances are unless I know someone in the video, I’m not watching it to completion but if I just watch a few seconds and then click away on most video sharing sites…it is still counted as a view. So if I get a million “views” how many are actually watching to completion or are engaged in my brand?

Nonetheless, this week’s video is a flash mob and probably one of the few I will ever profile because it is very relevant to the subject. This week’s Buzzworthy Wednesday Video is for the “Hammer Pants Dance” promoting MC Hammer’s reality show “Hammertime” airing on the A&E Network following the life of rapper and dancer MC Hammer and his family. The show takes an unprecedented look behind his larger-than-life personality and his life as a business entrepreneur. Hammer, has over 800,000 followers on Twitter and he leveraged his huge social media presence (along with the shiny gold parachute pants wearing dancers in the video) to get over 1.2 million views in 12 days. It was truly a great strategy from A&E and MC Hammer to take advantage of his social media cache and to create a video like this for his connections to share and tell others about the show.

Nancy Giles is a regular opinion contributor to CBS Sunday Morning. Normally she has very witty, funny opinionated pieces as part of the show. This past week however I was disappointed. My disappointment was not in that she was taking a jab at Twitter…there are definitely ways to take clever jabs at Twitter and the people who use it, but Nancy Giles didn’t take that route.  My disappointment was that she clearly didn’t understand what makes Twitter so powerful and obviously had not used it. Here’s a link to her opinion on YouTube:

Her usual quick and witty opinion piece was about as blunt as a rubber mallet. Here’s the big point you are missing Nancy:

It’s about community

The Monday morning after this aired I went to an event (aka a TweetUp) organized by @AaronStrout in Arlington MA at a little coffee shop called Jam N’ Java at 8AM. I drove an hour in for this event. There were over 75 people who attended this event…all organized through Twitter. Yes Twitter is online but many people in the Twitter community actually like to get together at events as small as this or as large as SXSW. Here’s a picture of @JimStorer @ayemoah @alexa @esangenito and @AaronStrout at the event. Some people were networking for their business, some were meeting new people socially, some were continuing conversations they had started online. A few attendees were recently laid off and were there looking for potential employment opportunities or simply just for moral support and great conversation. The conversations were about everything from potential job opportunities in the current economy for a few to my conversation with @srdill about the finer points of vegetarianism.

It’s not about “What you are doing?”

Yes I understand that’s what the Twitter website says but if you actually take a minute to engage the community on Twitter you’d learn it’s less about the mundane “What you are doing?” and more about “What interesting article did you read?” or “Do you think the bailout plan will actually delay economic recovery?” Maybe even helping someone with a flat bicycle tire find a bike shop.

So Nancy Giles while your usual opinion pieces are spot on, this one…frankly was a dud. If you’d learned what Twitter is all about you’d know it’s about making connections, about conversation, it’s about engagement and most of all…it’s about community.

Getting Started with Twitter

How Much of a Typical Online Video Is Actually Watched?

45% of viewers find a video by direct navigation to a video site (i.e. going to YouTube and searching or clicking around the featured or related videos).

No surprise here given that over 10 hours of video footage are uploaded to YouTube every minute that going directly to the video sharing sites and searching would be the top method of finding videos.

In terms of individual web sites referring traffic, no single source dominated, here are the top 20 individual referrers:

However, since there are a limited number of players in certain areas online, TubeMogul was able to infer that:

• 11.18% of all traffic comes from search engines
• 3.66% comes from social networks
• 3.19% comes from social bookmarking sites
• 0.63% derives from video search engines
• 0.05% is directed from Email/IM
• 80.88% makes up the rest of the referred traffic…of this mix it is almost completely made up of blogs from the thousands of different blogs they scanned.

Here are the really interesting facts here:

Digg beats StumbleUpon by nearly 0.4% for video referrals

I wouldn’t have guessed that. When I share videos on both social bookmarking sites my traffic from StumbleUpon is nearly triple the traffic I receive from Digg. StumbleUpon is my #4 traffic source for the website (which of course does include my blog posts) bringing in 9.97% of my site traffic while Digg is my #10 source of traffic (also including my blog posts) accounting for about 3.85% of all my site traffic. About half of my bookmarks are for videos while the other half are for blog posts (possibly even this one will end up on both). Of course this is just me and I am not profiling over 35 million videos for my statistics.

0.05% is directed from Email/IM

This I find staggering to be so low. One of the easiest and most cost effective ways to get people to share your videos is through email marketing – particularly to an existing base of people who have opted in to receive your email newsletter. In a recent post about integrating video into your email marketing campaign I found that there was a significant 175% increase in click-throughs when video content was included in an email campaign. It sounds like a lot of people are missing the boat on this possible distribution channel.

Blogs sourcing most of the 80.88% of all referred traffic in this sample.

To those trying to make a video go viral, this should be telling you to reach out to relevant bloggers who could help you tremendously with the push for video views.

0.63% derives from video search engines

This is bad news to the ever increasing number of online video search sites that seem to keep popping up promising to help your video go viral or supposedly helping you search. With less than a 1% take, that doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence. I’ve long held that most of these sites have very little value to the online video producer – this study just proves my theory.

So the real take-a-way here…

…is engaging bloggers to work with you by sharing the video with them. If nearly 81% of video traffic is coming from blogs it only makes sense to try and engage relevant bloggers to share your video. The other real key that isn’t really discussed is to make sure you optimize a video’s meta-data to ensure it can easily be found by those who are searching.

How many views make a viral video a success?

How Much of a Typical Online Video Is Actually Watched?

Thanksgiving is all about being thankful for what you have and originally being thankful for the bounty of the earth as the holiday’s history is rooted in a harvest festival.

From a business perspective “Giver’s Gain” is a philosophy that when you set goals to help others and honestly work to achieve these goals, it will come back to you ten fold as others will be looking out for you.  This is the mantra of BNI as a networking organization that is drilled into every member. If you want to receive referrals for business…you have to give referrals and be looking out for your business networking friends, associates and contacts.

Too often with online networking, people are saying “LISTEN TO ME” and are not spending enough time listening to others. Online networking shouldn’t be any different than a business after hours event at your local Chamber of Commerce or cocktail party. What you do there is engage, listen and talk in equal amounts. If there’s someone you can help, you try to set up a later time when you can get together and talk in more detail. If you hear them mention they need a certain service and you know someone at the event that provides that service – you introduce them.

It’s not everyone networking online mind you – many of my followers on Twitter hear someone mention they are looking for online video production, animation or Flash development and immediately let them know they should contact me. That’s because they know I’m always on the lookout for them. I’m constantly reading posts, comments, etc. to see how my network of connections can help each other out. Sometimes when I don’t have a ton of time to read through all of my updates I simply scan them looking for question marks to see if there is some way I can help them answer their question.

On this Thanksgiving, I’m incredibly thankful and in awe of my online and offline network of friends and business colleagues. I always feel a little humbled when someone I know recommends me or connects me with someone who needs my help, but there is no better feeling for me than when I can connect someone who needs help with the person who could provide it.

So what’s the moral to this story? Say “Thanks” to your network connections by “Giving” them a referral or valuable connection. Listen to your connections online and see how you can help them. Helping others in the long run will always come back to help you.