In March, this feature was only available to non-profit partners. YouTube wrote about one particular instance of a non-profit partner who raised more than $10,000 in one day after including the hyperlink on their video and after YouTube featured it on their front page.

Now the Call to Action is available to all YouTube advertisers in the US. Unfortunately, we cannot access it yet in Australia.

If you are not publishing videos in social networks online, you are missing an opportunity to extend the impact of your brand online.

The situation with video is comparable to the beginning of the Web. Then, only the big brands were quick to embrace the new medium and have a representation on it – mostly a simple Website that re-enforced the existence of the company and its brands online and provided information for the online community. Web presence matured over time as the medium became mainstream, and it spread out to smaller organisations and brands.

Now, 15 years later, we are at the beginning of another era: video has become a medium online. For many, YouTube has become their default entry into the Web and they spend most of their time online on YouTube. For the majority, YouTube is the dominant search engine and the second largest search engine after Google overall.

What do people find when they search for your brand on YouTube? Go and try it out – you may be surprised what your community is posting about you! Would a YouTube user find your message amongst all the other chitter-chatter? What impact will that have on your brand?

Some of the larger brands understand. There are some very good YouTube brand channels online. For example, check out the Nike Football channel. With 8,326 subscribers, it is the number one most subscribed sponsor channel of all time. It hosts 207 videos of diverse football highlights involving Nike. Or look at a new channel like the MINI channel which already has 41 videos after only having been created on the 1st January 2009.

In Australia, other than the political parties and bloggers, not many YouTube channels have been set up. Probably the best are Cricket Australia, XXXX, and Tooheys. Comparing just the two beer brands, it is easy to notice that Tooheys uses the channel just for re-publishing TVCs, while XXXX uses it to create brand engagement – a difference that is also reflected in the number of videos, subscribers, channel views, and friends.

Why are they spending money on social video?

Video has huge advantages over other content. Videos are able to provide a direct and rememberable explanation of what a brand stands for – much more so than text or pictures. Video is therefore twice as effective for conversion actions than text only. An Australian study showed that 57% of online users have watched online videos before making a purchase decision.

But not only does video help in the actual act of selling. Video also has an advantage when it comes to exposure to eyeballs on the Web. In Google universal search, video is 50 times more likely than other Web content to turn up on the first search result page. Yes, you read correctly: 50 times more likely – just think about all the SEO that you’d have to do with other content to have such an effect. On top of that, users are more likely to click on the video thumbnails on the Google result page than on any other results – the thumbnails are strong in directing eyeballs.

Now that we’ve seen the upsides of video, you will ask yourself what the kind of content may be that you should publish about your brand. What would be the purpose of publishing video to social networks? Video is a communication channel like any other. You can use it for any brand strategy that you may be preparing. You might consider creating videos to launch a new brand, to diversify an existing brand, to educate about products, or to start a conversation with your customers.

Here are some examples of what companies have used their YouTube channels for:

• Nikon Australia use theirs to provide tutorials and product demonstrations
• Qantas provides facts about the company and their TVCs
• Doritos Australia use it to run an ad competition
• AXE provide funny content
• Sun Microsystems publishes a vlog that includes interviews of executives

My recommendation is not just to upload the videos to YouTube, but also to pick some other social networks that focus more on your actual target audience, e.g. Dailymotion for a European focus or Break.com for a young males focus. Also make sure to consider your release strategy and video SEO to reach a maximum number of eyeballs for your content. And finally: don’t forget to measure your success over and over again – with metrics tools like Vquence’s VQmetrics service you can learn which content and strategy works for your audience and which doesn’t. It is such attention to numbers that Natalie Tran who publishes Australia’s most subscribed YouTube channel reckons has helped her make it such a success.

All-excited, I went to YouTube to enjoy some shows. However, the first problem I had was that – at least here in Australia – the announced “Shows” tab was not available on the front page and there was no way to find the “Shows” or the “Movies”. Fortunately, the YouTube blog post also provided direct links, so I went there directly.

With new hope, I browsed the available shows and selected some to watch. I was, however, very disappointed. Most of the shows that I clicked on were not available in Australia. After some trial and error, I managed to watch “Astro Boy”, “Do you like Hitchcock”, and “Staffers”. I wasn’t able to access “Alf”, “The young and the restless”,”Star Treck”, “Beverley Hills 90210″, “MacGuyver”, “I dream of Jeannie”, “Dilbert” or “Bewitched”.

I would prefer if YouTube only exposed those videos that were actually available in Australia to us. What’s the point in pretending all this content is available, when it’s not? YouTube is no different in this respect to Hulu, which is virtually useless for an Australian.

YouTube is a large international site. Uploaded videos don’t easily rise above the general noise of the site.

If you are prepared to spend some money, there are ways in which videos can be lifted above the noise within YouTube. Particularly good candidates are the YouTube front page and search results pages, where a video will be exposed to many eyes and get a much better chance of being picked up and shared with friends, aka “going viral”.

YouTube Australia offers three different types of advertising on the front page: a masthead, an expandable video unit, and a video ad, each of which can be booked for a 24 hour period. The YouTube front page is localised, so your ads can be exposed to an Australian audience.

If you would like to target your audience further, you may want to consider advertising on search results pages. You can target age group, gender and interest areas of the searchers, thus reaching more valuable eyeballs.

An example of a campaign that has successfully used such an approach is posted on a recent AdAge article: advertsing pushed Geico’s “Numa Numa” video over 500K veiws on the first day, reaching more than 1.3M overall views by now.

There is a myth out there that a social video marketing campaign on YouTube – or more generally on social networks – can be done for free without spending any money on placement. The myth continues that merely publishing good content will automatically make it go viral. This simply is not true. Just because you don’t pay for the original placement, doesn’t mean your campaign can do without media buy expenditure.

There are strategies for exposing videos to more eyeballs – cheaper and more expensive ones. Advertising your social videos is one way – paying experts to execute a seeding strategy is another.

A new social video ad was uploaded on 25th March by Mini. It is about a couple of guys sitting in a car on the German Autobahn and watching two Minis do some crazy moves. At some point the moves become suspiciously unreal and the guys start commenting that they obviously got drawn into a viral video ad. The end consists of typical TV ad titles and the Mini logo.

This video absolutely hits a nerve. The stats that we have collected over the last 3 days are just amazing:

It hit 30,000 views within 3 days and continues to grow. By today it has taken 9 honours on YouTube.

What is it’s secret? Maybe it’s the honesty of the ad. It starts out like a dark viral, but at the minute that it is obviously not real any more, the comments make it funny and the effects are quite cool. There is no shame in confirming it as an ad in the end.

One of the biggest fears in our industry is that online video will replace TV, and the consequences this will have on advertising and broad audience reach. According to recent research reports, the notion that online video is pushing TV out of the market is at least partially mistaken – instead, both, TV and online video viewership are continuing to increase.

With time-shifted TV increasing over-proportionally, and therefore people increasingly skipping ad breaks, new and more effective forms of advertising on TV are increasingly necessary – such as sponsorships, overlay ads, or clickable product placements. However, the traditional ad breaks will not fully go away – they just need to be used more effectively.

The important finding in the reports is that 31 percent of Internet activity occurs when consumers are also watching TV. Almost every third person uses the Internet while watching TV! Surely, this is an opportunity that advertisers must not miss!

The Superbowl ads show the way: this year, almost 70% of the ads had a URL embedded and planned for interaction with their customers after running the ad. The role of TV ads is changing: they are now a start to online user engagement. Advertisers have to be aware that consumers have their universal look-up tool at hand as they are watching TV and are keen to type in a URL and follow it to explore new products, play an online game, or interact in some other way with the brand that is advertising on TV.

Even now, TV ads are still a very good means to reach a large and diverse audience and seed consumer interaction. The minimum of user interaction that a TV spot should provide is that a copy of itself can be found online and shared with others through a link. Having your TV spot uploaded online is a great means to seed a viral ad to an audience that is used to sharing through their social networks.

You just need to check out view counts on some of the top Superbowl ads of this season to see that their online impact can be enormous:

• “Free Doritos” has more than 2M views
• “Careerbuilder.com” also has more then 2M views
• “Pepsi Refresh Anthem” has more than 1.6M views
• “Cars.com Lifetime of Confidence” also has more than 1.6M views

A good Australian example is this Toohey’s ad, which was uploaded by a random user and achieved more than 500K views. Toohey’s would have gotten a lot of information about their audience and possibilities to re-connect to that audience had they published it themselves.

So, the next time you roll out a TV ad, also roll it out online and don’t wait until one of your customers does this job for you out of sheer frustration that it is not otherwise available.

Set up a channel on YouTube, through which you publish it. That gives your ads a common home and an authorised place to live. It also allows you to check out YouTube Insight metrics to analyse the composition of your audience.

Since YouTube is regarded by most as the default online video search engine, it should be your first call to upload it there. Another site to consider is MySpace.TV – if you have a MySpace page for your brand or campaign, you should also have your video ad at MySpace.TV. There are plenty of other sites that may be relevant depending on the audience you are targeting.

When you upload the video, also make sure to fill in the metadata with lots of information – this is your means of performing Search Engine Optimisation within YouTube and makes your video turn up in the “related videos” box of other videos more often.

Also consider making your TV ads more interesting for an online audience. Some recommendations for making interesting video ads for online were recently published by Daniel Flamberg at iMedia: make them short, funny, and use animation. And don’t forget to include a URL in your TV ad so you can direct your customers to the right place of engagement.

Some Video ad collectors on YouTube:

• http://www.youtube.com/user/tvadfad
• http://www.youtube.com/theinspirationroom
• http://www.youtube.com/user/ideenverteiler
• http://www.youtube.com/user/timyang
• http://www.youtube.com/australianads
• http://www.youtube.com/tvadsfromaus