10.27.08

Digital Marketing Series: Tip #6

Tactic:
Use online tools like TubeMogul or blip.tv to easily distribute your video content across multiple community-based video sharing sites.

Why It Works:
These sites make it easy for users to distribute content to a variety of destinations with just a few clicks. As long as you have accounts with the supported partner sites uploading a video and distributing it is a simple and painless process that involves filling in a few forms and clicking the upload button. Once the video has been distributed you can track hit counts and follow metrics data in one convenient location.

The most time consuming aspect of using these sites is the fact that you need to sign up for accounts with all the sites they support. Though time-consuming, it’s also an important step to make sure your video content is relevant to the site’s mission. For instance, do you really want your educational video on StupidVideos.com? Once registration is out of the way, the tools these sites offer are simple and straightforward. Blip.tv allows you to bring your blog(s) into the fray and features a Windows/Mac desktop application as well.

TubeMogul works best with Quicktime movies or MPEG-4 video content that use MP3-encoded audio and have a 700-1500 Kbps data rate. Just a word of caution: we have run into a couple situations where we unknowingly used an unsupported audio codec in our MPEG-4 videos and the distributed content appeared on a number of sites without any audio. Though distributing video content via TubeMogul is easy, we have found that removing content from all member sites is not supported, thus forcing us to change our video settings and content on each individual sharing site. Perhaps that might be a good feature request for future versions of the product.

Distribution via TubeMogul and blip.tv also greatly increases search engine results. The simple act of uploading our demo reel gave us several additional pages of results based on the tags we included with each video. Plus, some of these sites aggregate their video content to other sites via RSS, adding even more results to the mix. Best of all, a basic account is free and upgrades are available to those who require more robust reporting and metrics data.

Resources:
As of this writing, TubeMogul supports twenty-one video sharing sites. Blip.tv supports twenty-two, plus the built-in ability to custom skin your content and share it via your blog(s). A complete breakdown is as follows:

TubeMogul:
AOL Video
Blip.tv
Break
Brightcove
Crackle
Daily Motion
Google Video
Graspr (instructional video network)
Howcast (how-to videos)
Imeem (music site with video sharing)
Metacafe
MySpace
Revver
Sclipo (social learning network)
StupidVideos
Veoh
Yahoo! Video
YouTube
Viddler
Vimeo
5min (quick instructional videos)

Blip.tv
iTunes
Internet Archive (content must have a Creative Commons license)
del.icio.us
Flickr
Adobe Media Player
Slide
Akimbo (video-on-demand system)
FeedBurner (video feeds via RSS)
MySpace
Twitter (Auto-Tweets your Twitter account every time you upload a video)
Facebook
Yahoo! Video
AOL Video
Lycos Mix
MeeVee
Mefeedia
Meebo
Blinkx
SplashCast
blip.tv Channels (various channels on the blip.tv network)
Pando

As you can see from the above lists, with a few exceptions each site distributes your video content to a variety of different sites, so it’s worthwhile to have accounts with each.

How We Have Embraced It:
When we finished our latest video and animation demo reel in June ‘08 we used TubeMogul to distribute it and received significant traffic increases and search engine results because of it. We did the same for our kiosk video on How We Help Publishers at the Association of Educational Publishers Digital Publishing Summit in June as well. Now, whenever we finish any video content, be it a blog entry, live performance, promo video, or education tip, we use these tools to distribute it to as many relevant sites as possible.

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