New Marketing Trends – Viral Videos

By Ken | January 20, 2009

The term ‘video’ once meant that my techy uncle Bernard was coming with his VHS recorder to ‘document’ my birthday…the world of video has exploded since those early days of watching “America’s Funniest Home Videos” on television, to millions of people uploading their videos to video sharing websites like Youtube.com.

This is where the true beauty of  modern technology comes in…people begin talking, sharing what they see with other users and the video spreads…like a virus, hence the term ‘viral marketing’.

Here is the most watched video on youtube.  Guess how many times it’s been viewed…nope, higher.  Come’on…HIGHER…how about 111,124,422.  Over one hundred and eleven million views!

Let me give you a quick lowdown on how important online videos is in today’s world.  These statistics are from the January 5 press release from comScore.com showing video statistics from the month of November 2008.

- Internet users viewed 12.7 billion videos in Nov. 2008 (up 34% from 1 year ago) – YouTube has 40% of that market share.

- Out of the more than 146 million viewers, each of them watched an average of 87 videos – YouTube had 98 million of those users, about 2 out of 3 users.

Here’s some more useful stats from the report.

• 77% of the total U.S. Internet audience watched a video online
• The average online video viewer watched 273 minutes of video
• 97 million viewers watched 5.1 billion videos on YouTube.com (52.3 videos per viewer)
• 52.5 million viewers watched 371 million videos on MySpace.com (7.1 videos per viewer)
• The duration of the average online video was 3.1 minutes
• The duration of the average online video viewed at Hulu was 11.9 minutes, higher than any other video property in the top ten

Okay, so this is the deal.  Like every marketing strategy, you MUST know your customer.  Who they are and where they find their information.  The internet isn’t the only destination for information, but it is the number one destination.  That’s why its the information super highway.

Today’s marketing strategy is changing and it’s no longer based on what I, the marketer, wants to say about my product. It’s moving towards what the world is saying about my product.  The businesses and marketers learning how to distribute original content that encourages social interaction related to their product, and work towards building an emotional relationship between their product and the customer will have the leading edge. It’s  old-school friend/enemy making.  It’s like having a birthday party and inviting  your friends, except today, your friends can twitter, video, and blog about how good or bad it was.  Uncle Bernard isn’t the only one with a video camera now.

Video is a gigantic tool that is becoming easier to use, more accessible, and easier to share.  Every trend hunter out there is projecting a huge increase in the use of viral video for online marketing and user generator content.  If you want to see what BBM Studios is doing, keep and eye on our Youtube Channel.

The curtains are moving off to the side and every passerby now has the ability to take their cell phone camera, record a video, and post it to the world … and then ask opinions.  Now that’s viral marketing.

More posts on video to come including ‘how to’s’, new technology, and how to harness the power of this innovative tool.  Click on our RSS feed at the top of the blog and follow us to stay connected.

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