YouTube still claims to be the second largest search engine in the world. Just think about that for a minute. If you produce online video and it’s not on YouTube, you’re probably missing out on a great deal of potential viewers. If you’re not producing video at all, you’re missing out a lot of searches.

Do you consider YouTube important to search marketing? Let us know.

However, just uploading content to YouTube is not going to be enough. Like with any other form of search engine, content needs to be optimized to be found. At SXSW in Austin back in March, WebProNews spoke with Margaret Gould Stewart, who leads YouTube’s user experience team. She talked about some reasons a lot of content producers are missing out on some tremendous opportunities when they use the world’s most popular online video site.

"When you’re building a sustained audience, you have to continually create great content that connects with your audience," says Stewart. "I think the secondary part is understanding your audience – understanding who you want to reach, and proactively cultivating a relationship with the people in your audience. And on YouTube that means not just creating great content and uploading it to the site, but actively building your subscriber base, so that you can be in direct and regular interaction and conversation with those people."

"We find that video producers who are really active in the conversation, whether it’s comments or uploading ‘how this video was made’- you know, kind of the behind-the-scenes – people are really fascinated by that stuff, and we see some our most successful partners really having that, again, kind of ongoing conversation – not an arm’s length relationship to the audience, but very engaged," she adds.

More WebProNews Videos

"We sometimes see content producers not investing enough time in attaching great meta data to their content, because like I said, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, and we all know that for Google, it’s important to think seriously about search engine optimization, because you can have the great content, and ideally the cream will float to the top, but there’s definitely things you can do to help yourself along, right?"

"Good clear, direct titling of your content, putting the right kinds of tags…because the fact is initially when content goes viral, people may discover it through search engines, or embed it in blogs, but then it reaches that really exciting word-of-mouth status, where I just may mention it to you person-to-person, and then what most people do is just go to YouTube.com and they search for it," she continues. "So if you’re not indexed well in the search engine because you haven’t attached great meta data to your content, you’re going to miss out on that audience."

"The other thing that is really important is enabling embedding," notes Stewart. "It’s probably the number one most important thing, because what we see in videos that become very popular, very quickly and take on that kind of life of its own, a lot of that initial traffic in the first 48 hours happens actually off-site."

Note: This actually plays to a point I made about Twitter embeds as well.

If you want more success from your online video endeavors, read 35 Ways to Improve Your Online Video Performance, and Tips For Ranking Higher On and With YouTube, which features an interview with YouTube Product Manager Matt Liu. If real-time, live video is your thing, check out 8 Tips for Real-Time Video Blogging.

By the way, YouTube is renting movies now, and while it’s not exactly taking over Netflix at this point, I would expect this to grow significantly and get more people spending more time at YouTube, where there is a YouTube search box very close by, and relevant related video suggestions served to viewers constantly.

Is YouTube a significant part of your marketing strategy? Comment here.

Nothing’s more lonely than a disaster, even when you’re one among thousands. When Katrina struck, and all the traditional means of disseminating information washed away with the waters, social media took center stage in the battle for communication.

Now that oil from the drilling rig Deepwater Horizon is heading for landfall on the Gulf Shore, social media is out front again. A collaborative multimedia website, Gulf of Mexico – Deepwater Horizon Incident, rich in social media, has been launched information for those who are or might be hit.

Sponsor

The site is being maintained by British Petroleum, who own the oil; Transocean, who own the rig; the U.S. Coast Guard, the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Department of Department.

A Flickr slideshow, hosted by U.S. Coast Guard Eighth District External Affairs, plays at center, beside a clickable list of news items and documents, some in PDF format. Links are provided to the service’s Twitter account, Oil_Spill_2010 and its Facebook page, Deepwater Horizon Response. The response team’s YouTube page is at Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill.

The site allows you to register for updates. It also provides numbers to call for oiled wildlife, to report oil spill related damage, to report oiled shoreline, to request volunteer information or to submit alternative response technology, services or products.

Discuss

Brazil is objecting to the picture drawn of it from the data on Google’s Government Request tool, which shows requests filed with Google by each country. Brazil made the most data requests of any country, 3,663, and the requested the most removals, 291.

The Associated Press reported that Priscila Schreiner, a federal prosecutor focusing on child pornography and racist crimes claimed the requests were all devoted to those subjects. But that does not seem to be so.

Sponsor

Search Engine Watch points to Google’s own documents. Child pornography removals are not counted in the requests.

Business Week quoted Google as saying Brazil had a large number of requests “in part because of the popularity of our social networking website.” Orkut is very popular in Brazil.

“The Brazilian government is not exercising any type of censorship of any legal expression,” said Schreiner. However, Brazil has a history of blocking websites and services, including blogging platform WordPress and video-hosting site YouTube.

As we wrote last week, the statistics cover July through December.

Discuss

When YouTube first started streaming Indian Premier League cricket at the beginning of March, it did so on a time delay for matches shown in the United States. Today, the streaming video service has announced that the matches have become so popular in the U.S. that there’s no longer a need to wait – the games will be streamed live here as well.

Sponsor

According to YouTube’s blog post, the Indian Premier League YouTube channel has had over 40 million views, with the United States accounting for the most views after only the most obvious location – India.

While some seemed to say that the quality was subpar at the onset, you can’t really argue with more than 40 million views just over a month after launch. And, as a New York Giants fan living in the great state of Texas, I would know first hand that even a grainy Internet broadcast can be better than nothing.

Currently, YouTube’s IPL channel is its first and only foray into live sports streaming and, being on YouTube, is available to iPhone users as well as other mobile users that can access the site. And, according to Forbes, the cricket league is big business, so we can only wonder what the next step here is.

So, for you displaced sports fans like myself, the semi-finals begin in just over two days’ time and will be streaming live on YouTube. Get to watchin’.

Discuss

YouTube has launched a new feature that allows channel owners to send text messages and links to videos to the front page of their subscribers’ YouTube accounts. It’s a cool, if logical, feature to offer and one that could make visiting YouTube a lot more fun.

Called Channel Bulletins, the feature is pretty simple. But am I looking forward to seeing little updates sent out between videos from the people I’m subscribed to? Yes, I am.

Sponsor

It would be nice if YouTube allowed channel owners to pipe in RSS feeds, maybe Twitter messages. The personal touch should be nice too, though.

If you aren’t subscribed to any channels on YouTube, you’re missing out on one of the best ways to experience the site. I’m subscribed to Steve Gillmor, Breaking the News, Social Data Revolution and Brown Man Thinking Hard, among others. (Would love to get your suggestions for video channels to subscribe to, RWW readers.)

Blippy CEO Phil Kaplan brought this feature to our attention and framed it as YouTube’s version of Twitter. It may play out that way for hard-core YouTube users, but I hope more casual publishers will regularly send out bulletins as well. I wouldn’t mind getting them as emails, even.

It would be nice for subscribers to be able to reply easily to Channel Bulletins, too. There are lots of ways this could go, but getting it started, offering messaging other than videos and comments, is a good move.

Channels have long been a part of YouTube, Paris Hilton got the first branded one in 2006, and it’s pretty far-out to think that text message communication between channel owners and subscribers has taken this long to arrive. Perhaps when you’re coming from a video-centric perspective, these things don’t always come to mind.

There are many other social features that could be added to make YouTube a more compelling site. Could I please be shown the YouTube channels and favorites of my friends on Twitter, Facebook and Google Accounts, for example? That would be great.

Discuss

When we first looked at the conviction of three Google employees by an Italian judge in late February, we agreed with Google’s stance that the conviction attacked the very ideals of the Internet as we know it.

The comments in reaction to this article were many and varied, often speculating on the reasoning behind the conviciton. Today, a CNet article identifies profit as the judge’s reasoning behind the decision.

Sponsor

As Google stated when the convictions were first handed down, the case was concerned with a video of “students at a school in Turin, Italy [who] filmed and then uploaded a video to Google Video that showed them bullying an autistic schoolmate. The video was totally reprehensible and we took it down within hours of being notified by the Italian police.”

According to the Associated Press translation of the court document (pdf), the judge said Google’s profiting off of the video was the reason behind the conviction.

“In simple words, it is not the writing on the wall that constitutes a crime for the owner of the wall, but its commercial exploitation can,” wrote Judge Oscar Magi, continuing to say that the Internet was no longer an “unlimited prairie where everything is permitted and nothing can be prohibited”.

Profit, especially that profit which is made from completely automated advertising systems, seems like an odd reasoning to hold a content provider responsible for the content uploaded by its users. The oft-quoted statistic to keep in mind here is that YouTube has more than 20 hours of video uploaded every minute to the service. Judge Magi, however, argues that “the overwhelming speed of technical progress will allow, sooner or later, ever more stringent controls on uploaded data on the part of Web site managers”.

Google gave CNET the following statement in response to the news:

“We are reading the full 111-page document from the judge. But as we said when the verdict was announced, this conviction attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built. If these principles are swept aside, then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear. These are important points of principle, which is why we and our employees will vigorously appeal this decision.”

We have to say, we still agree with Google on this one, as far as the spirit of the conviction goes. Holding the content host, YouTube in this case, liable for the content of its users attacks the very foundation of the Web. If, as some claim, Google knowingly allowed the content to stay on the site, then its a different story. But if the company immediately responded to official requests to remove the video, it should not be held responsible for its users’ content.

Discuss

U.S. Internet users watched 28.1 billion videos in February, with Google sites leading the way as the top video property wit 11.9 billion videos, accounting for 42.5 percent of all videos viewed online, according to the latest report from comScore.

YouTube accounted for more than 99 percent of all videos viewed at the property. Hulu ranked second with 912.5 million videos, representing 3.2 percent of all online videos viewed. Microsoft sites landed in the third spot with 623 million (2.2%), trailed by Yahoo sites with 455 million (1.6%) and Turner Network with 318 million (1.1%).

More than 174 million viewers watched an average of 161 videos per viewer during the month of February. Google sites attracted 132.2 million unique viewers during the month (93.9 videos per viewer), followed by Yahoo sites with 53.5 million viewers (8.5 videos per viewer) and CBS Interactive with 45.3 million viewers (6.4 videos per viewer). The average Hulu viewer watched 23.3 videos during the month, representing another all time high for the property.

In February, Tremor Media ranked as the leading video ad network with a potential reach of 81.7 million viewers, or 46.9 percent of the total video viewing audience. YuMe Video Network ranked second with a potential reach of 75.5 million viewers (43.3% penetration) followed closely by Advertising.com Video Network with 74.8 million viewers (42.9%).

Other key findings from comScore include:

*83.1% of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.

*132.4 million viewers watched 11.9 billion videos on YouTube (89.5 videos per viewer).

*The length of the average online video was 4.3 minutes.
 

Viadeo, the social network for business, has added five applications built on Google’s OpenSocial platform. These apps are Twitter, YouTube, PollDaddy, a doc sharer called Ayos iShare and Google Presentation.

iShare will allow users to upload any file up to 100 MB and post it for download on their account. The Twitter app will allow a user to post their Tweet automatically on their Viadeo page. The Google Presentation function will allow them to convert Powerpoint presentations to Google and share them.

Sponsor

Viadeo is down in the ranks. Compete.com gives LinkedIn over 14 million visitors a month compared to 157,000 for Xing and 96,000 for Viadeo. Certainly, the ability of users to branch out and back with these apps should make it more appealing.

The question remains, however, not which business-focused social networks have the most features, or the most users, but the most utility. In that respect, I fear they are neck and neck. After years on the service, and over a year on unemployment, all I got, even with an old supervisor firing me job ads via LinkedIn, was a quick phone interview that went nowhere. That’s a guy with some experience, at some high-profile companies, actively searching, with friends on the look-out.

ReadWriteWeb has theorized before that part of the limitations of LinkedIn, in particular, is the fact that it’s a walled system. If its API opened up, it would benefit the social web as a whole, perhaps. But would it help the job seeker? The hiring manager? The sales or biz dev person looking for contacts? I am not sure.

But one person’s experience could be anomalous. So let me ask you, the ReadWriteWeb reader: What difference has your membership in a business-oriented social network like LinkedIn, Xing or Viadeo made in your career in the last year?

Discuss

This week was a busy one for technology lovers, especially fans of Apple as both the iPad and iPhone OS 4.0 both made their debuts. One of our more popular articles on ReadWriteStart this week mentioned here in the in Weekly Wrapup detailed how entrepreneurs and developers should team up to take advantage of the iPad as another gold rush of applications is impending. Also in this week’s wrapup, we discuss the opportunities for innovation and entrepreneurship in one of our favorite trends: the internet of things. Additionally, we’ve got startup job fairs, creating explainer videos, and marketing tips.

Sponsor

Internet of Things: Opportunities For Entrepreneurs

Last month the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab ran an event at the Stanford Business School, called The Internet of Things: Sensors Everywhere. The video of the event was recently put up on YouTube. We’ve embedded the entire hour-long video below, along with a 2-minute video snippet which we think budding entrepreneurs should take note of.

If you have time, the entire event is worth viewing. It delves into current successful use cases for Internet of Things. Panelists include representatives from HP’s sensor networks division, a medical software company, and a company which provides sensor-enabled products for vending machines.

Why You Need to Be Developing for the iPad Right Now

On Saturday Apple let the public get their hands on their newest creation, the iPad, setting off a flood of hype and media coverage which has likely yet to reach its peak. Yes, this is yet another post about the iPad, and my apologies go to those who are tired of being choked by the frenzy of stories surrounding the iPad launch, but a few things I learned from this weekend might come in handy for undecided developers.

How to Create a Killer Explainer Video for Your Startup

One of my favorite blogs to peruse now and then for amazing advice on web design is Webdesigner Depot which produces excellent in depth guides for various design related issues. Monday they produced an excellent in depth post that provides a step-by-step breakdown of best practices for creating a screen-cast for a Web page, a feature many startups like to include on their homepage to familiarize new visitors with their product.

NYC Startup Job Fair: How Graduates Can Get a Great Job at a Startup

As the season turns to spring in the U.S., many soon-to-be college graduates and their soon-to-be employers turn their focus to the job market. In answer to the questions that graduates inevitably face from friends and family – “What will you do with your degree?” – one response should certainly be, “Find work with an exciting startup.”

While some colleges are developing solid entrepreneurial programs, many graduates are still prone to believe that their best post-college employment prospects are to be found with more established companies. To change that perception, the Columbia Venture Company and the NYU Venture Company are hosting the first annual NYC Startup Job Fair.

Social Media Marketing Overload? Some Tips for Startups

It is widely accepted that social media has transformed the landscape of marketing radically, and no longer can businesses – no matter their size or stage of development – afford to avoid social media. While the importance of developing one’s brand online remains paramount – most obviously through the registration of a domain name – the proliferation of social media platforms can be overwhelming, and startups might feel compelled to register and interact with every service in order to quicken the spread of their name.

Discuss

Soon, Twitter users will be in a better position to get satisfaction with the companies that they do business with. This morning, SalesForce.com is announcing that the Chatter beta developer preview has grown to 500 companies and is integrated with its popular Service Cloud offering. The company has shown its ability to leverage the disruption of social media – rather than be disrupted by it.

We had a chance to review the new tools and experience what an end-to-end social media driven customer experience looks like. It was eye-opening for us – and is coming soon to the 70,000-plus customers of SalesForce platform.

Sponsor

The first thing we learned in our briefing with SalesForce is that the company has fully digested the reality of the new web. The company talks about how it started on a mission to bring the power of great web applications like Amazon.com to enterprise customers. Now, ten years later, the web and the company have moved on towards the new dominant engagement model on the web, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

Here is a graph the SalesForce team shared with us on the emerging trend of Internet usage, a key driver in how the Chatter product has been considered.

SalesForce makes a case that a fundamental shift is underway and its completely re-factoring the engagement model. The company calls it the “Facebook Imperitive”, which we interpret as “be as social and easy to use as Facebook, or whither”. Reminiscent of the Wired Magazine’s “Wired: Tired” lists SalesForce shares its observations of the fundamental shifts in the industry. We see Amazon.com as the old incumbent leader of the Internet being replaced by Facebook. Also series of observations that show the landscape change dominated by mobile, location, and web standards.

Here, we see a Chatter enabled service desk, where we can easily see the different channels that have opened tickets for customer service.

A case that has been opened via Twitter is seen in the dashboard here. It can be shared among team members, or escalated. We think this is an interesting evolution of the “follower” mechanic borrowed from Twitter. In this case, you can be assigned a topic to follow, since in the enterprise there is a job to be done.

Here, we see the familiar Twitter interface as the origination point of the case being managed internally.

From what we learned, several marquee customers such as Bank of America plan on rolling out Chatter plus Service Cloud. Shown here is the Bofa Twitter feed responding to individuals in the public forum.

Some of the productivity benefits offered by Chatter plus Service Cloud offered by the company are listed here:

• “Monitoring Priority Cases: Service agents can stay on top of high priority cases, updates to critical knowledge articles, and the latest product updates
• Locating Expertise: Service agents can follow experts across their organization and instantly get help from other agents, other departments, or from across the company
• Real-Time Case Collaboration: For high priority cases, service supervisors can assemble the best expertise and information to close complex cases faster
• SLA Management: Salesforce Chatter proactively can alert service agents of upcoming service level agreement milestones that they must meet
• Sales-Service Alignment: Service agents and sales reps can share the latest case and opportunity updates for their customer to ensure good service means good business”

We think there could be several big winners with SalesForce Chatter release.

• SalesForce may have found its way into the entire enterprise, where it becomes essential to connect departments and individuals together in the best collaboration model possible.
• Twitter seems like a big winner here, where it is now being demonstrated as the front end to customer service relationships. This pattern has been developing for several years with leaders like Comcast servicing customers with Twitter. Now, its moving to the next level where when you Tweet an issue, you’ll essentially be opening a ticket. And, where tickets are opened, you can be sure that it is someone’s job to close them. It seems that Twitter being cemented into enterprise processes just like the telephone of yesteryear.
• Consumers win by getting faster answers with less searching in document bases, or waiting in call center queues. Consumers also win by bringing speed and transparency to the process. No longer, will we wait on hold all alone, as we’re bringing our followers with us with every Tweet.
• IT departments that have invested in document management and other solutions will now be able to extend their reach
• Customer service departments that have the job of closing tickets and meeting SLAs (Service Level Agreements)

Welcome to the future of customer service, no telephone required, but your smart mobile device is definitely invited.

Do you believe SalesForce.com onto the next big shift in enterprise computing with the upcoming launch of Chatter?

Photo credits: Salesforce.com

Discuss

Last month the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab ran an event at the Stanford Business School, called The Internet of Things: Sensors Everywhere. The video of the event was recently put up on YouTube. We’ve embedded the entire hour-long video below, along with a 2-minute video snippet which we think budding entrepreneurs should take note of.

If you have time, the entire event is worth viewing. It delves into current successful use cases for Internet of Things. Panelists include representatives from HP’s sensor networks division, a medical software company, and a company which provides sensor-enabled products for vending machines.

Sponsor

The first speaker was Michael Chui, a Senior Fellow at McKinsey Global Institute. He explained that the Internet of Things is about incorporating sensors and actuators into physical objects, which "make the physical world part of an information system."

Chui noted that the Internet of Things is ramping up for 3 main reasons: 1) sensors are getting better, faster, smaller, cheaper, more plentiful; 2) networks are everywhere (pervasive, if not quite ubiquitous yet); 3) our new ability to analyze data that these network sensors generate and being able to control the actuators. Chui then went over the report that McKinsey released last month (our summary and analysis).

We’ve excerpted a couple of minutes from the end of Chui’s presentation, when he talked about potential applications for Internet of Things. If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, this is well worth watching.

The rest of the event focused on commercial solutions using Internet of Things. An example is vending machine software company Cantaloupe Systems. Co-founder Anant Agrawal said that for his company, "the Internet of Things eliminates the guesswork." Cataloupe Systems provides sensor-enabled software for vending machines, which gives vending machine companies hard data with which to run their businesses more efficiently.

Here’s the full video of the forum:

Hat-tip Ethan Bauley from HP Communications, who pointed to the video in a RWW comment.

Discuss

The iPad’s become almost inescapable – really, it’s hard to imagine that anyone with a TV or Internet connection hasn’t heard of the device by now – and to those people who actually buy one, Google would like to be similarly omnipresent.  The search giant discussed five iPad-specific tweaks and apps this afternoon.

Let’s start by talking about Gmail, since what Google’s cooked up in this respect represents the biggest deviation from the norm.  It seems that, when iPad users visit Gmail.com, they’ll see something a little special.

A post on the Official Google Mobile Blog announced, "We’re releasing an experimental user interface for the iPad built on the Gmail for mobile HTML5 web app that we launched last year . . . .  To take advantage of the iPad’s large display, we’ve created a two-pane view with your list of conversations on the left and messages to the right."

Then, well, there’s everything else.  Google Search and a YouTube app come preinstalled on the iPad.  A Maps app is available, too, and the Google Mobile App with search by voice is at the ready in the App Store.

Earlier today, we suggested that Yahoo will be hoping the iPad’s a success.  Now it’s fairly certain that Google will have a cheering section at work, too.

Today, YouTube migrated its user videos over to a new design. The design was available before now, and has been in development for months, but today was the day all the videos got their Sunday go-to-meeting clothes on.

In a January post, Julian Frumar, a YouTube user experience designer, commented on YouTube’s blog that the old design could appear “cluttered and a little overwhelming.” (Julian, by the way, is up for an Understatement of the Year Award.)

Sponsor

In the intervening months, YouTube has experimented with a cleaner design that made “the video the star.”

Other changes besides the focus on the video include a thumbs-up/thumbs-down rating system to replace the 1-5 scale, a finessed up-next video list, an easier-to-find subscription button and integrated video and text comments.

Is it a hit so far? Er. Nuh-uh.

On today’s YouTube blog post announcing the change, there were… comments – hundreds of them as invested users chimed in. And the chimes sounded pretty discordant. As of this posting, the word “suck” was used 14 times, “terrible” and “shit” tied at nine times each, the word “crap” six times and “bad” five times.

Lies, damned lies and statistics? Maybe. Representative comments included the following: “Looks like crap, keep up the horrible work.”

Firefox Twitter sentiment analysis gave the changes a 15-12 positive-negative rating. But TwitterFeel disagreed, with real-time analysis overwhelmingly negative.

Discuss

Google has launched a YouTube channel for its recently released Google Apps Marketplace. The Apps marketplace is a place where developers can create apps that integrate with Google Apps and sell them to users. According to Google, they can reach over 2 million businesses and 25 million users.

The YouTube channel should be a good place to checkout some of the apps that are available in the marketplace, and see what they can do.

"The Apps Marketplace YouTube channel showcases videos from Marketplace vendors," says YouTube’s Chris Kelly. "Ranging from funny to informative, from cartoons to screencasts, these videos are meant to convey the benefits of extending Google Apps with integrated apps that work seamlessly with Gmail, Calendar, Docs and more. We’re happy to already have more than a dozen videos in the channel and over 60 integrated app vendors in the Marketplace, and look forward to more great things as the Marketplace grows."

Here are a few sample videos:

The Apps marketplace is still young. It was only announced a couple weeks ago. Expect it to grow significantly, and hopefully this YouTube channel will continue to make for a good destination to check out some useful apps.