Daniel Flamberg recently posted an article through iMedia which summarises the experience gained from a social video marketing campaign.
Their target audience were 25-35 year-old mostly mail IT guys in SMEs, which indeed hang out on social video sites. They published a sequence 3 videos, which were a mix of live action video showing work situations and animation using World of Warcraft characters to stylize emotional reactions to office situations.
Here's what they learnt:
A. Shorter clips get more views
B. Animation ghets more play than live action
C. Search engines drive a decent amount of traffic to video sites
D. They doubled their traffic by actively commenting on blogs and posting opinions in communities and including a link to their video
E. They think more links and more connections will yield more traffic.
F. The burden of creating interest is entirely on the publisher. Unlike TV or cable channels where no matter what you do somebody will watch your stuff, there is no baseline audience online.
This is important information for when you are planning a video marketing campaign online. In contrast to traditional marketing channels, there is indeed much work necessary after you have published the video, since social media is about getting a communication going with your viewers rather than simply throwing an ad at them. If you take the time to get into the conversation, you will get a lot out of it for your marketing campaign, but also for your product.
Head over to iMedia to read the full article.