Sometimes Its Better To Put Your Message On YouTube Instead Of Advertising To Pull Viewers Back To Your Web site
Late last year, Virilion did a public education campaign for a nonprofit client, using pay-per-click advertising on Google to bring traffic back to their Web site. The campaign performed well in a very competitive sector for pay-per-click ads (pharmaceuticals) and the client was happy, but something kept nagging at us. Tens of millions of people per day spend time on the search engines, YouTube, and the other top Internet sites. But isn’t it inefficient to pay someone to bring them back to our site when we could put our messaging and education in front of them on the top sites themselves?
The answer is ‘yes,’ and the solution is one that’s often overlooked by communications professionals.
Nowadays, you can expose your brand and your message to tens of millions of people through social networks and search engines and get pretty far before you even begin planning your advertising campaign. It’s a smart strategy, and not just for those watching their pennies. Only if you had an infinite advertising budget would you ignore the opportunities posed by bringing your messages to the places where people are.
The Alternative To Luring Them Away From YouTube
What are the strategies to take your ideas to the eight most popular Web sites? As of May 15th, Alexa lists these sites as: Yahoo!, Google, YouTube, Windows Live, MSN, MySpace, Wikipedia, Facebook, Blogger, and Yahoo Japan.
Yahoo!, Microsoft Live, and Google Search Engines: Time spent on search engines is brief, as people use them to find something and leave. It’s not surprising, then, that search referrals are a significant source of traffic across the Web. Stories like this one from the Industry Standard in March of this year are the norm.
Do your own search engine optimization by choosing some key phrases people use to search in your field; then, write regularly on your expertise using these phrases. Your rank will rise without having to pay third parties to tweak your links or run “fake sites” to artificially raise your prominence.
To understand the value of organic Google search results, consider this: Plaintiff injury attorneys pay as much as $80 per click to buy ad space next to the search results for “mesothilioma”.
Once you’ve started regularly writing and incorporating your key phrases into your text, you can work with an SEO consultant to learn the finer points of writing for search engines and how to optimize the underlying tags on your pages to make your key phrases easier to find.
Yahoo!, MSN and Google E-mail Apps: Take the content you are writing regularly and start an e-mail list. Some people tend to consume information via e-mail more readily than any other source. For a successful example of this, check out Very Short List, a company that puts out a very short e-mail daily with a useful tidbit of interesting culture. For most people, their entire relationship with VSL exists only within their e-mail box.
YouTube: Examine your field of expertise. Does it lend itself to a visual? You can probably find a way to make it interesting on video. The two best examples of this are is Blendtec and Cheddarvision.
Blendtec makes professional-grade blenders. Its execs figured out that one way to emphasize the toughness of their product would be to take unconventional items and see if they could be ground up without destroying the blender motor. From this insight, the video series “Will It Blend?” was born. Their creativity has spiraled into huge quantities of free publicity.
Had Blendtec execs only posted those videos on their corporate site, there would have been a slow climb of traffic. After all, grinding up iPods and tiki torches will always find an audience. But posting them on YouTube exposed them to a large share of the daily Internet audience and allowed them to grow quickly into a phenomenon.
Cheddarvision, on the other hand, is a live video cam run by the Farmhouse Cheese Company. The live camera they put on an ageing wheel of cheese was turned into a time lapse video that became incredibly popular YouTube and provided tons of free publicity during the 12 months the cheese aged, yielding significant traffic to this day, long after the wheel of cheese had been shipped.
MySpace and Facebook: To start a new outpost on these social networks, take the content you’re already writing and adapt it for these platforms. If you want an example of success in this area, look no further than the rise of the Obama group on Facebook. Other commercial brands such as radio stations, musicians and even some consumer goods are aggregating fans on these sites. You may not be on Facebook, but the fact that it’s a site in the top 10 means you shouldn’t ignore it.
Wikipedia: The great thing about Wikipedia is that anyone can edit an entry, and that includes you. Actively maintain the Wikipedia entries for your brand and your area of expertise. Write from an impartial point of view for the benefit of global knowledge about your area of expertise. Don’t just post press releases. The goal should be to be truly informative, so don’t get defensive when people post valid criticisms of your brand. Keep a thick skin.
The Bottom Line
The bottom line in taking your ideas to your audience is to make and keep a commitment to writing. It’s more important that you write an interesting paragraph every week than a 10 page white paper every quarter.
This strategy isn’t just a “get me out there on the cheap” strategy. The eight largest portals aggregate an amazing amount of traffic. To ignore the opportunities they present would just be foolish, no matter how large your budget.
Once you’ve mastered these skills, it’s time to start looking at the paid options for traffic. But until you’ve done that, you can’t expect to keep the attention of anyone you attract.
This article was written by Shabbir Imber Safdar and Jason Alcorn, both of whom execute digital campaigns at Virilion, Inc. for a wide variety of corporate and institutional clients.
August 27, 2008 
