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Lesson Learned: When YouTube is NOT good for your marketing videos

October 30th, 2009  by miki  Filed Under Privacy, Video  

I was having a chat with an entrepreneur the other day who was lamenting about his great marketing idea gone wrong. He was launching a new product and wanted to send out personalized videos to influential bloggers. Each video was a product demo featuring an exclusive treat for the blog readers. The goal was to grab the blogger’s attention and give them a great video to embed in a post.

Naturally, YouTube was top of mind when thinking about sharing and embedding videos. He uploaded 5 videos, all targeted towards different competing blogs in hopes that one would get him coverage. He sent each blog a link to their video. An hour later he checked his YouTube account to see if any of the videos had been viewed. That’s when he realized YouTube wasn’t the best way to go. Let’s take a closer look at why:

1. No control or limited control of viewing

The moment he uploaded his video it was available for everyone to see. But he wasn’t ready for everyone to see it. Not yet that is. Not until it had been seen by the blogger and THEY chose to distribute it to their readership. He could disable comments and ratings to avoid random (and many times inappropriate) comments but the number of views still displayed exactly how many people have seen the video. He couldn’t even pretend it was exclusive! So he enabled private sharing to avoid this problem all together. However, making a video private on YouTube creates another problem. Only 25 people are allowed to see the video in private mode, a limit set by YouTube, and the video can’t be embedded. By avoiding the unwanted publicity problem, he in turn inhibited the wanted publicity!

The lesson learned: YouTube is designed for public viewing and content discovery. It’s not designed for controlled distribution. Not all marketing videos are meant to “go viral” and control of timing and release of content can be very important for certain marketing initiatives. YouTube is only part of the video mix and businesses need a distribution solution that has been well thought out and designed for all types of business marketing needs.

2. No Control Over Related Videos

You can’t turn off related videos. It doesn’t matter if your video is public or private, it will still have related videos placed next to it. He noticed that some of the related videos placed next to his were offensive and reflected poorly on the target blog’s brand. That definitely wasn’t the impression he was trying to make. He spent hours trying to modify the video name and re-uploading a new version, trying to get different related video results. You never know what keywords your video will trigger, but it’s never good to have unwanted explicit and sexual content placed directly next to your communciations.

Lesson learned: YouTube is trying to keep your audience watching YouTube content. They will push related content on their site and even on their embedded player. Again, this overlooks important business needs for branding and reputation management.

3. No Individual Tracking

An hour or two after sending the links, this entrepreneur wanted to know if any of the bloggers had viewed the video. Unfortuantely, YouTube doesn’t give you immediate individual stats and he was faced with the message “there is no viewing data for this video”. When viewing data was finally registered, it doesn’t give any detailed information about who had recently seen the video and from what location. Lesson learned: YouTube is great for high level aggregate data. However, when looking for viewing stats on particular users, from a particular location, YouTube can’t help.

After he finished recounting his tale of frustration, I couldn’t help but let out a big smile. It may have seemed condescending  at the time, but it was really just a renewed appreciation for what we’ve accomplished here at Faculte. We’ve always known the pitfalls of YouTube when it comes to video publishing and distribution for business needs. That’s the problem we’ve set out to solve. We’re constantly mulling over different cases for sharing video and pay close attention to the intricacies in access rights when sending out communications to customers, partners, investors and other business stakeholders.

This frustration could have been avoided using Faculte. When a video is uploaded to Faculte, it is only seen by people you send the link to. There is no unwanted public community who can discover your content. The video can then be shared just like a YouTube video and the person you share it with can embed it in 4 different sizes, whichever fits best. Your content is secured and can be branded as well. There are no ads or related videos to confuse or send the wrong message. You also get a breakdown of views by unique individual viewer, which gives you a much clearer picture of when your target actually watched the video.

Lesson learned: YouTube is great when you want to try and get more exposure, but when you want more control over your video communications, it’s wiser to use a platform that’s designed specifically for business needs. If only I had met him a few weeks earlier!

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