First the bad news. As interesting as your internet marketing technique or product is, most YouTube visitors will only be too happy to slap it down with a low rating because it’s disrupted their entertainment schedule. It might’ve been because you tagged your SEO video with “Miley Cyrus” or “Lady GaGa”. So tagging your video correctly is a function of getting qualified traffic, not just pure traffic numbers alone.

You’ve probably heard of some of the headliners at events like SxSW and BlogWorld such as Lisa Nova and iJustine, but unless you’re actively researching the tween/teen market, you might not be aware of some of the up-and-coming YouTube posters.

Savannah Outen

Oregon-based 16-year-old Savannah first started posting videos of herself singing in March 2007 and posts under the username Savannah7448.

Parlaying her online popularity of 122,000 channel subscribers and 3.6 million channel views, she’s released 3 singles with one of them “Goodbyes” climbing to #5 on the Radio Disney Chart.

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Esmee Denters

Having sung cover songs from the likes of Justin Timberlake, Natasha Beddingfield and One Republic, Esmee (from the Netherlands) is among the first artists to be signed to a record label after having been spotted on YouTube. (She’s the first artist signed to Justin Timberlake’s inprint Tennman in association with Interscope).

She currently has 197,000 channel subscribers and 14 million channel views.

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Although Oprah Winfrey’s had her Oprah YouTube channel since 1997, a recent actor parlaying her offline fame into online popularity is actress Jessica Alba, who’s also gone on talk shows to promote her husband’s business venture IBeatYou, which features online competitions.

Here’s her recent entry from a starting competition.

While video is still very much in its infancy, savvy marketers would do well to take note of this channel which has already replaced mainstream television as the main media channel, especially for the tween/teenage market (who’ll eventually become adults and bring their preferred source of media consumption with them).

Rather than go for the overt direct response marketing approach of asking for the sale, more subtle approaches such as providing quality content, building viewer loyalty and stickiness, might be just the ingredients for long-term business growth.

Like iJustine (aka Justine Ezarik), Magibon is a young American woman whose videos on YouTube have generated quite a bit of interest, especially in Japan.

Here’s one of them:

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=kib05Ip6GSo[/youtube]

With 3.3 million views, it’s a little difficult to fathom the appeal where a young girl looks back at you for all of 30 seconds to about 4 minutes.

BUT the fact is that some of her videos have garnered between 1 million to 3 million views, she’s also appeared in a recent issue of Japan’s Playboy magazine (a non-nude pictorial) and been featured on a Japanese internet TV station GYAO.

You can check out Magibon’s wikipedia entry.

I think her appeal has to do with the fact that she looks like a Japanese schoolgirl or anime character (maybe both), and appeals to the techie/net-savvy/Japanese manga-anime reading/watching audience.

And she’s a partner of the YouTube partner program too.

What do we learn from this?

The fact that she’s being discussed in internet chatrooms suggests that rich media beyond text is being actively discussed in chatrooms. Subtle content is hammering its way onto YouTube viewers (especially in the tween/teen demographic), more so than overt content-based ads.

Is Magibon being sponsored by a skin whitening or skincare company? If not, it’ll just be a matter of time.

Video literally gives “face time” to everyday spokespersons (think of the Benetton or Dove print ads given the video treatment).

One way innovative marketers have bounced off the successful platform of video broadcasters like Magibon has been to create followup video responses to popular videos.

Check out “Timothy DeLaGhetto’s” “date” with Magibon.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFfwUWFRwBY[/youtube]

Because you are able to broadcast your message across multiple platforms and multiple social networks, you can reach a huge number of people in a very short time.

A recent incident (nowhere near conclusion now) bears this out.

Jim Kukral’s TwitterMeThis social adventure.

At the recent Affiliate Summit West in Vegas 2008: Andrew Wee, Shawn Collins, Jim Kukral, Sam Harrelson, Zac Johnson

About a week ago, Jim published a blog post “Twitter Marketing Experiment – TwitterMeThis” where he’s pay $5 to the winner of a trivia game played on the Twitter micro-blogging (similar to SMS text messages) platform.

Shortly after, the topic was discussed on Geekcast, Jim posts a follow up about “social media being bullshit” and Sam posted a response and Shawn follows up with a sequence of 3 posts: one, two and three. In between there’s a discussion on TrishaLynâ€s blog that Jim might not continue with the Geekcasts.

But Iâ€m not so keen to talk about the  discussion as to look at how it took place.

Far beyond a one-to-one email exchange, the issue has escalated to the point of seeming disagreement and the potential departure of Jim from the Geekcast team.

In the non-social media world, it would have just remained a private exchange of emails.

Within the social media context, the communication trail has gone through several blogs (many of which are highly trafficked), and re-syndicated or referred to by other blogs.

It has also been twittered about (with many of the protagonists in this exchange having followers in the high hundreds.

Add to this the number of Youtube and other video responses being generated, and you can see that a minor disagreement has blown up to probably most of the affiliate industry knowing or at least hearing about this.

If you factor in the fact that Iâ€m halfway around the world, reading and blogging about this at 4am, youâ€ll see that social media is pervasive and goes viral instantly. Forget “tell-a-friend” the news is delivered as soon as you type “twitter” or “youtube” into your address bar.

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What are the implications for social marketers?

• Awareness: Given the fact that most marketers will be reading words on their screen or facing a videocam, itâ€s easy to forget that thereâ€s another person at the other end of the computer. You can make friendships really easily on the internet, you can similarly disagree, argue and experience flare-ups with your friends too.
• The meaning is not always clear: Obviously nothing will communicate your point as well as a face-to-face meeting. Itâ€s hard to tell if someone is being serious or theyâ€re just joking around when they say they are upset with you. You could think theyâ€re joking around, when in fact they could be seriously upset at the other end.
• Itâ€s still the “undiscovered country”: Yes, we know how to use these new fangled technologies, but I donâ€t think we fully understand the social implications and more importantly the social consequences of social media yet. Sociologists have been study cultures for the last 100 years since the “father of sociology” Auguste Compte founded the field. Now what happens when you happens when you add the ability to instantaneously alert thousands, if not hundred of thousands of people with a single video, blog post or twit?

I think anyone whoâ€s read the documentation, FAQs and tutorial videos will be able to use the social media out there pretty easily.

But to be able to use such channels effectively and at the same time, responsibly, is another matter.

As Marvel Comics founder and creator of Spider-Man and the Silver Surfer, Stan Lee coined the phrase, “With great power there must also come – – great responsibility!“

I found his site when he first launched his eBay-Amazon-Youtube mashup script, which lets you build an affiliate site easily. Mark has already done the API (application programming interface) work for you, so you can skip around the techie aspects and get round to the business of generating affiliate commissions.

He followed that up with his 19pages.com application, which lets you build a niche site easily, and the best thing about it doesn’t require a MySQL connection, so you can transport it from one webhosting account to another easily. If you’re into site development/site flipping, it can be a handy tool to add value to a site (and increase it’s monetization and asking price too).

He’s since gone on to launch his Top100 “make money online” blog rankings (he developed the code) and it’s generated a fair amount of buzz in the internet marketing blogosphere.

So naturally I had to have him on the Friday Podcast to pick his brains about developing software applications to boost your internet marketing efforts and to directly monetize.

We talked about the building blocks of application development, as well as monetizing your application once it’s good to go.

You can hear our thorough discussion (weighing in at more than an hour long) and hear about his latest project ShowYourAdHere.com in the latest edition of the Friday Podcast accessible below:

Incidentially, Mark is also Blog Captain for the upcoming Affiliate Summit and you can hear about the blog room facilities too.

Somewhat ironic considering he had a promo with a British Sunday newspaper to give away copies of his “Planet Earth” CD free with a particular edition.

Already the Prince video clips are going up faster than older ones are being taken down at Youtube. Is this really a battle worth fighting for?

When products were physical – in the form of a CD, DVD, book, manual – it was easier to maintain copyright. When Prince distributes his CD free with the UK paper, were the CDs imprinted with “Promotional CD – Not for Sale”? Did they say “Resale Rights granted”?

And if you give away media and content free in one channel, how do you enforce pricing in another channel, whether it’s a iTunes store or in a CD store?

The moment something can be digitized, whether it’s an MP3, PDF, DOC, JPG or other digital media file, you can have legislature like the DMCA (digital millenium copyright act) and DRM (digital rights management) infrastructure in place. You can even password protect your files, but eventually these protective measures will be overcome.

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Don’t get me wrong, because I produce digital products too.

But where I see the opportunity is that most of these products are still linear in terms of information flow. It’s still very ol’ skool…

You buy a CD, you listen to it. You buy a book, you read it.

Where Web2.0 and community sites are coming into their own, is the ability to interact with the author or creator.

If a CD contain songs also contained a link to a forum or a blog, it’s add value to the process….You’re not just buying a song, you’re buying into the interactivity element too.

Many years ago, I had a chance to talk to the head honchos at Accenture, and they painted out the Internet’s 3 levels of development. (or levels of engagement if you prefer)

A blog/website/forum can be:

• Informational OR
• Conversational OR
• Transactional

In nature.

At the moment, most items are informational – information flows in one direction, from the creator to you, there’s no feedback loop, unless it’s conversational in nature like in a forum or on a blog with a comments section.

Why not evolve digital products to a conversational model?

Better yet, a transactional level (the highest) with the ability to upsell even more products – souvenirs, higher value items, collectibles, concert tickets, etc.

This is as applicable in the entertainment niche as it is in the Internet Marketing, business or any other vertical out there.

The bottomline line is that transactions are conducted on a value continuum – if we’re going to keep going back and forth and remain stagnant in the 1-way media, things will remain as they are.

If we move up the value chain to conversations/interactions and transactions, the profits will be higher and so will the market opportunity.

Beep!!! Don’t believe everything you hear!

In this edition of the Friday Podcast, I compare various channels like text, audio and video and you’ll see that there’s still life in the other channels.

Click on the “More” tab to access the notes.

Video is the buzzword, and according to some pundits you might even think that current traffic wave is just video, video, video.

Text: easiest to create, easy to distribute, lowest barrier of entry,
skim and go through it quickly, unlike audio or video.
enormous depth of information.
low bandwidth.
downside:
has lowest perceived value.

Audio/podcast: perfect for multitasking.
listen to audio while driving, working out, in bed, while cleaning the desk.
unless person is sitting down to listen to podcast, not suited to presenting complex information.
probably most compact.
A single CD contains about 10 hours of MP3 audio.
An MP3 player or cell phone with MP3 function could contain hundreds of hours of audio.
downside:
very high noise-to-signal ratio. everyone and his mother can produce an audio.
very linear medium. need to follow through with it, step by step. not really easy to jump around.

Video:
key advantages:
-branding: physical face
-great for complex info: a 5 min video could present info from 20 pages of text easily and pictures, combined with audio create an easy to understand medium.
downside:
bandwidth intensive.
requires pretty speedy internet connection.
concept of personal TV broadcast station – getting abused.

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Bottomline: each medium has its pros and cons.
Video is great and 2007 might be the year of video, metacafe, revver, magnify, bubble ply,
I don’t buy argument that video is everything.
That’s as silly as saying that Internet news is going to put newspapers and magazines out of business.

Maximize your effectiveness, need to understand the strengths and shortcomings of each medium and match it to your marketing campaign appropriately.

The projections coming from eMarketer Senior Analyst and the author of “User-Generated Content: Will Web 2.0 Pay Its Way?” Paul Verna.

Paul projects that YouTube, MySpace and Facebook will led the content change.

Another projection: “On a global basis, user- generated content ad revenues will increase from $1.6 billion in 2007 to $8.2 billion in 2011.”

Which has pundits reinforcing the “It’s about the content, stupid” mantra.

Arrayed against this are Asia-based telcos railing against Web 2.0 applications choking up the submarine cable bandwidth. [Has Web2.0 Broken The Internet?]

If the bandwidth bottleneck doesn’t get resolved soon, it’ll turn out to be a profit bottleneck for content providers.

Already on the horizon are other developments like:

“MySpace TV Set To Launch” with a new service (www.myspacetv.com) set to launch to cater to MySpace’s burgeoning 110 million visitors a month. In the pipelines: Intensive efforts to integrate videos more closely into profile.

And WebProNews reports: “We saw a clue to this development with the introduction of “minisodes” on MySpace; minisodes, as conceived by MySpace, Sony, and Honda, were shortened versions of classic TV shows. MySpace TV will also focus on clips that are more professional in nature. “When you go to MySpace video now, what you see is far less appealing to the eye than what you get from other video sites,” admitted MySpace exec Jeff Berman.”

Is MySpace gearing for a major face-off with YouTube? More importantly, does it have a fighting chance? Stay Tuned…

In the wings we have “YouTube Crushes All Video Competition” with the video sharing behemoth YouTube accounting for “A 60 percent market share that is 50 percent greater than the next 64 video sites combined (which) makes for a dominant position in the online video industry.” according to Hitwise research director LeeAnn Prescott.

I agree.

Incidentally, MySpace Videos picked up 16 percent market share in second behind YouTube; and Google, Yahoo, and MSN Video rounded out the top five, respectively.

MSN Video? I wasn’t aware MSN has a video service…

Is video in the future? Certainly, but I think a lot of the buzz surrounding it now has to do with the fact that it’s the new kid on the block.

Remember back when Mirabilis’ ICQ was the hotshot application and now IM clients are de rigeur?

Remember when only the uber rich has cell phones and now your average joe might own two or three of them?

Video is in the cards and the cards already show that user-generated content is the way to go.

As Time magazine pointed out, the (content-generating) person of the year is “You”.

That’s what Big Boys Cisco Systems and one of China’s biggest telcos China Netcom seem to be saying at the recent Broadband World Forum Asia (“Carriers struggle under P2P traffic boom“)

But is that the reality?

Download audio file (WhoIsAndrewWee.com-friday-podcast8.mp3)

For session notes, click “more”:

>> Cisco’s service provider group product and solutions marketing senior manager Wayne Cullen, said “broadband operators today now under great network pressure, as “disruptive” applications like P2P and video-oriented services like YouTube were pushing up average user’s traffic to 50-100% per year.”

Wayne continues to note that most of the traffic was “out of control” and that traffic growth was outpacing the decline in equipment cost was putting broadband operators in a dilemma.

On the one hand, he says, they see increased traffic, on the other, they have to deal with the bandwidth problem and need to pay for that bandwidth.

Additionally China Netcom deputy chief engineer Tang Xiongyan, concurs saying: “P2P has brought big challenges to China Netcom. P2P applications now account for 40-60% of our total network traffic, but without creating additional revenues.”

“So we have to take some measures to control the volume of the P2P traffic,” he says.

Globally broadband operators have taken different approaches:

• Some try to ignore it
• Others will block the service
• And the rest simply embrace it.

Rush to lay fiber, some telcos take the lead to hosting next generation voice and video services.

Instead of a reactive approach, telcos should see this as opportunity to scale their revenue.

Fiber to the home a reality?
Nope. (not in Asia at least.)

Fiber to the ISP, last mile copper wiring in most cases to the home in Asia.

Most content is hubbed in US, though number of content providers, especially MMPOG and entertainment content hub in Singapore.

The Telco approach seems very reactive.
Internet moves almost as fast as the speed of light, literally and figurative.
To saying bandwidth needs are “out of control” is like saying electricity consumption is much higher now, compared to the 1980s.

I’d think that a surge in bandwidth requirments means that either:
1) more people are getting onto the internet (a good thing)
2) internet applications are getting more sophisticated.(also a good thing).

In online world, data bandwidth is the petrol of the Internet.
Although bandwidth seems to be in Short supply now, but with the continued laying of underseas communications cables and addition of new terrestrial satelittes and other wireless technologies.

This should not be a major issue.

Telcos need to see web2.0 as more than a “disruptive” technology or going “out of control”

Web 2.0.
It’s a reality.
Telcos should sooner face up to expanding data bandwidth needs, faster able to deal with it.

What is URLFan?

If you’re a “Web2.0-ish” person, you’d want to check out this metric type site which ranks sites according to their RSS feeds.

The site description says URLFan is “currently parsing hundreds of gigabytes of RSS content a day”

As of my last visit, URLFan’s stats stand at “Reading 746,006 feeds, parsing 41,334,923 posts, ranking 1,844,043 domains”

Bear in mind that the criterion for ranking is popularity of web feeds. As you know, RSS (really simple syndication) is becoming more widely adopted as the distribution technology of choice for content syndication, whether it’s into your Google Reader (or it’s equivalent at your My Yahoo! page) or the Mozilla Thunderbird email/RSS client.

Out of curiosity, I pulled the top ranked sites according to URLFan:

With content sites, not surprisingly, dominating the top positions.

Interestingly, YouTube and Flickr, rank highly despite the fact that the bulk of their content is video and graphic-based. I suspect it has to do with the content’s title and tags.

The lesson here is if you’re not already tagging your content, you should start today!

I thought it’d be interesting to see how bloggers ranked, so I ran some blogs through the engine.

Problogger
Ranks 150 out of 1,844,043 sites
Mentioned in 927 unique feeds.
Mentioned in 1543 posts.

Shoemoney
Ranks 1036 out of 1,844,043 sites
Mentioned in 219 unique feeds.
Mentioned in 387 posts.

JohnChow
Ranks 1170 out of 1,844,043 sites
Mentioned in 200 unique feeds.
Mentioned in 341 posts.

TopRankBlog
Ranks 1680 out of 1,844,043 sites
Mentioned in 146 unique feeds.
Mentioned in 254 posts.

ConversionRater
Ranks 8265 out of 1,844,043 sites
Mentioned in 40 unique feeds.
Mentioned in 68 posts.

AffiliateTip
Ranks 8438 out of 1,844,043 sites
Mentioned in 40 unique feeds.
Mentioned in 64 posts.

WhoIsAndrewWee.com
Ranks 12688 out of 1,844,043 sites
Mentioned in 28 unique feeds.
Mentioned in 31 posts.

Jim Kukral
26190 out of 1,844,043 sites
Mentioned in 15 unique feeds.
Mentioned in 17 posts.

PepperJamBlog
Ranks 27113 out of 1,844,043 sites
Mentioned in 18 unique feeds.
Mentioned in 21 posts.

So does it mean that a “low” ranking on the URLFan scale means your site is “bad”?

That’s hardly the case.

Remember URLFan is primarily using RSS as the metric.

If you’re not actively promoting your RSS feed, or pushing traffic into your list (like I do), then you’ll score lower.

And remember too, that traffic quantity is not the entire picture.

Traffic quality (the type of visitor you are attracting) is as and could be more important.

I’d rather than 1,000 relevant and targeted visitors to my site, rather than 10,000 untargeted ones (who might come once and never come back).

When planning your online marketing strategy, always look at the big picture.

Although there is Internet connectivity in the 99% region, the available bandwidth has been affected. I estimate that in Asia (southwards of Taiwan) are probably at about 60%-80% of the pre-earthquake levels. I suspect the Internet Service Providers might be metering the bandwidth and skewing more resources towards corporates.

Although I have both cable modem and DSL connections, I’m finding that hosted applications like web-based email, my WordPress blog (which is hosted on a US server) and especially photo stock archives like Sxc.hu have excruciatingly slow load times. Lag times of 10-20 seconds for WordPress page loads are common, and widgets like MyBlogLog slow it down even further. It feels like we’ve moved back to the 28.8kbps dial-up modem days.

Being hostage to fast big data pipes is one bugbear we’ll have to deal with, especially as web applications are, well, more web-based. We’ll increasingly be held to the mercy of fiber optic (or should that be optic fiber? I’ve heard it used both ways) cables.

YouTube and other video streaming sites have pretty much come to a screaming halt for me.

I was checking out Kris Jone’s PepperJamBlog post “The Next Lonely Girl – ShmulTube is on Fire” about Shmuly Tennenhaus and was looking forward to viewing Shmuly work out at the Walmart Center. All I get is a black screen.

Andrea and Chris Hooley were also talking about some funny videos on YouTube, no luck there either.

Having a vulnerability such as being subject to a major POP (point of presence) through Taiwan will put a major dent in the Asia’s plans to lead the technological charge. Singapore’s recently rolled out free wireless broadband Internet access in the city center. This will be fairly hollow if we can’t surf out of the country at fast speeds.
Content will be one of the major determinant of success, as well as choke points in this drive, especially since the majority of content resides mainly in the US.

Although the government have activated contingency plans to route data through alternative routes, it clearly isn’t providing the same quality of service. “404 Page Not Found” errors are becoming a daily occurence.

If my business was primarily audio or video-based, or I used VoIP applications like Skype for the majority of my business communications, the estimated two week period to repair the underseas cables would make a major dent in my revenue and profits. Certainly not a good start to 2007.

I’ve heard some advice such as using an Australian public proxy to get faster browsing, but I think it’s more a stopgap measure more than anything.

If Asia plans to stay on track after we recover from this round of natural diaster (and my heart goes out to the people of Taiwan), telcos will need to continue to invest in more infrastructure.

As the Web continues to become more bandwidth intensive, we’ll experience the equivalent of ‘bandwidth blackouts’ and that certainly isn’t anything to look forward to.

I’ve put some of these business-themed ones (specifically related to Internet Marketing and business building) at my Digital Keiretsu forum.

Kineda.com vodcast host: Tami Andres (link: Kineda vodcasts)

I see blogging going beyond it’s text form as streaming audio and video (AKA podcasting and vblogging) become more mainstream.

These technologies have already been around for some time and we’re seeing more widespread adoption of them. It’ll only be a matter of time (I’m thinking 2-3 years) before they become the dominant medium.

Some obstacles:

• Internet Bandwidth: Although cable modems and DSL technology could provide speeds of about 10 mbps, this is still somewhat of a bottleneck because you might get the full speed to your internet service provider, but congestion on the intagible internet, especially during peak hours, brings YouTube video streaming to a screaming crawl in the evenings.
• Lack of Quality Content: Yes, there’re probably hundreds of millions of videos out there. The problem is that 99% of them are junk. Given that that leaves at least a million good videos out there, you’d have to sift through the electronic haystack to find a gem. Hence, video content aggregators and video search intelligence could be possible business models. Failing which, come visit DK’s video section!
• Lack of Technical Expertise: This is the major limitation at this time. Lots of the Internet Marketing big guns are still doing text blogging, with selected podcasting. I think there’s scope for new IMers to establish themselves in the new media space. Terry Ng from Kineda (blog post: Kicking it with Kineda vodcasts) puts out a series of vodcasts out, though I understand there’s a challenging in pushing out content on a weekly basis.

If you’re considering vodcasting as a marketing medium, it could bring you a torrent of traffic.

Which is why I especially like the Google Video Gold product that Louis Burleson just launched a couple of hours ago.

It’s targeted at both newbies and intermediate level Internet Marketers.

Here’re the contents (couldn’t fit it all, so there’s a little cropped off).

I skipped through the beginning videos and went straight to the ‘Insider Secret’.

In this section, a technique to get your videos to appear easily in searches is covered.

They review a prominent internet marketers videos and find that they aren’t using the technique. Although the video was shot earlier this year, I just went to Google Video a short while ago and was a little surprised that they still aren’t using the technique.

So I think if you’re a newer Internet Marketer, this is a good opportunity to check out ways to use video to help you establish a foothold.

You can check out the product here:

–> Louis Burleson Google Video Gold

PS: Like the rest of Louis’ products, investing in the product entitles you to sign up for his affiliate program, which gives you 100% affiliate commissions. (and it’s on a timed-pricing mechanism, so the price increases with time)
–> Louis Burleson Google Video Gold