Blog › Video is the Word for 2012 Social Media
Video is the Word for 2012 Social Media
So this month we’ve all read the slew of social media experts at advertising and marketing agencies blog, tweet and publish their 2012 predictions — and last year saw its share of both the perceptive (the embrace of mobile) and the preposterous (Google+ immediately dethroning Facebook).
To keep my comments in the first camp, let me present my single Media Declaration of 2012. Video is going to be this year’s social marketing game changer. Just as the posting of photos has become second nature to users, so is video now in a position to drive social interaction.
Of course, the 800 pound gorilla — and getting bigger — is YouTube, which is now the world’s 2nd largest search engine and reports 4 billion views a day. Google has been gradually changing the site from passive video viewing to a full social experience, and is moving online marketing forward by tightly integrating YouTube with Google+. In fact, YouTube’s new website design launched last month features a central column that integrates other social networks and displays video channels. It gives the site a much more structured appearance and better positions it for business branding.
Smartphone video cameras are now as good or better than many mainstream video cameras, and especially my now virtually useless (OK, and defunct) Flip. Social networks are moving in lock step, with videos being added to Facebook pages and dedicated sites like Viddy, Tout, Blip and Keek that facilitate social video sharing and social marketing.
These sites also facilitate the disturbing success of Daniel Tosh, who brings no real talent to his TV show Tosh.0 beyond introducing a laundry list of video clips of the so‑bad‑they’re‑good variety. While the show validates my point, it kills me that its ratings are rising with no end in sight to its lame user-submitted content.
So what now? Should you plunge right in and create a YouTube channel for your brand? If it’s relevant to your business, absolutely, but only if you can do it well. The 2012 social media marketing landscape will continually present advertisers with new choices, and you can’t be everywhere — so focus on the sites likely to provide the best results for your company (and if you’d like some insight into my next blog, start spending more time on LinkedIn.)
Stacey Smith
President
Mood: Bleary-eyed
1 responses to "Video is the Word for 2012 Social Media"
Grant,On the whole, I agree with you that the Jun Group (as well as many other creative ainecges) still doesn’t understand what “social” means and that as a result, there is a lot of confusion in the business world about how to best enable social media and video campaigns.However, near the end, you list a number of categories around social video. My only nitpick that it is about the views, but that the views are necessary but not sufficient for a social endeavor. The real goal is to provide the basis for a multi-touch or ongoing relationship with as many people as possible. This still involves an engaging message that is targeted either tightly to a specific audience or broadly to high-level goals and aspirations. Without that infrastructure that promotes further engagement, there is no true “social media” or “social video”.But fundamentally, I agree that it’s not about the content and it’s not even about the channel at the end of the day; it’s about the social. Companies that legitimately understand this can turn traditional media into social and interactive campaigns (which has really been around for years, especially with non-profit and educational media efforts) while companies that don’ t understand this can turn social media-based efforts into traditional media campaigns and undercut themselves.That’s the exciting part around online video platforms to me; the ability to embed video, truly understand your audience, and then create new levels of insight and interaction that just can’t be done through traditional broadcast media.