Video Marketing | Andrew Wee | Blogging | Affiliate Marketing | Social Traffic Generation

YouTube Video + Word-Of-Mouth Marketing = A Flood of Traffic June 24, 2008

Posted by Andrew Wee in : Video Marketing , 4 comments

I was hanging out at an internet chatroom listening to the latest buzz on the internet and the name “Magibon” came up.

Like iJustine (aka Justine Ezarik), Magibon is a young American woman whose videos on YouTube have generated quite a bit of interest, especially in Japan.

Here’s one of them:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kib05Ip6GSo

With 3.3 million views, it’s a little difficult to fathom the appeal where a young girl looks back at you for all of 30 seconds to about 4 minutes.

BUT the fact is that some of her videos have garnered between 1 million to 3 million views, she’s also appeared in a recent issue of Japan’s Playboy magazine (a non-nude pictorial) and been featured on a Japanese internet TV station GYAO.

You can check out Magibon’s wikipedia entry.

I think her appeal has to do with the fact that she looks like a Japanese schoolgirl or anime character (maybe both), and appeals to the techie/net-savvy/Japanese manga-anime reading/watching audience.

And she’s a partner of the YouTube partner program too.

What do we learn from this?

The fact that she’s being discussed in internet chatrooms suggests that rich media beyond text is being actively discussed in chatrooms. Subtle content is hammering its way onto YouTube viewers (especially in the tween/teen demographic), more so than overt content-based ads.

Is Magibon being sponsored by a skin whitening or skincare company? If not, it’ll just be a matter of time.

Video literally gives “face time” to everyday spokespersons (think of the Benetton or Dove print ads given the video treatment).

One way innovative marketers have bounced off the successful platform of video broadcasters like Magibon has been to (more…)

So You Want To Be A Video Blogger… June 18, 2008

Posted by Andrew Wee in : Video Marketing , 4 comments

My friend Rachel Rofe won a bunch of cool prizes including cash, a MacBook Air, Brian Gardner’s Revolution Theme wordpress templates, shopping cart software and a Flip Ultra camera from Webmaster Talk recently and started posting videos on her blog at RachelRofe.

Video is a powerful branding medium, especially if you personalize the channel, rather than merely to fire out product launches or marketing announcements.

If pictures say a thousand words, I think video easily convey 10,000 words or more.

Some observations I’ve noticed about video:

Brevity is great: people have short attention spans. If you can convery you point in 1-2 minutes, just do it.
Content is still king: you need to include something useful in your entry. There’re too many “seinfeld” videos (about nothing) out there already.
X-Factor: Either you have it or you should go find it…But it has a lot to do with your personality.

Check out one of Rachel’s video’s below. I like the hair flipping and low-grade swearing at the end. Adds color!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YttPDDqncmk

Rachel’s headed for Cancun and I’m sure there’ll be some interesting videos coming out of the trip.

Popularity: 1%

Tags: rachel-rofe, video-blogging

The Worst Reasons To Start Podcasting and Video Blogging… April 9, 2008

Posted by Andrew Wee in : Video Marketing , 1 comment so far

Probably have to do with the fact that since “everyone” is doing it.

Or the opposite scenario “no one” is doing it, so you should be the first.

I have been downloading and listening fairly religiously to the Geekcast podcasts (one of the Geeksters Shawn Collins mentioned that the new episodes come out every Tuesday) and watching Gary Vaynerchuk’s video posts.

So the $1m question is if you like this audio and video content, should you also jump on the metaphorical bandwagon and fire up your Flip camera too?

Here’s where I might differ from some of the others - there’s 2 elements to communication - there’s form (whether you write something on a sheet of paper, take a photo, do a blog post, shoot a video) and there’s function (AKA content) - the meaning behind your message.

In the rock-paper-scissors equation of multimedia…