Who is in control of your brand?

Last night’s Social Media Club Melbourne (@smcmelb) we brought together Simon Goodrich from Portable Content, Suzie O’Carroll from YouTube & Nick Bolton of Viocorp to discuss why the advertising dollars aren’t following the audience, how marketers are doing it right and how Australians are consuming the medium. (Full bio’s of the speakers below)

Bradly Giblin MC’d the event that discussed concepts such as

• A Richer Experience for Youtube Ads
• Content Is Important
• Growth In APIs and Multi-Formating
• Seeding Advice
• Maximum Impact for Video
• Youtube Celebrities’ Cross-Over
• Viocorp & Accenture’s Partnership Delivers Malaysian Portal
• Youtube Does Not Deliver / Build / Allow Porn
• Youtube Partners with Brands
• Competitor Vimeo
• Portable, An Online Channel

(List & photo above thanks to a great review by Kim Ong)

Here’s the video for those of you who want to see the whole event.

A sample of the Tweets

KimberleyL

Kimberley Lee

@KimberleyL: YouTube celebs crossing into mainstream - exciting stuff! #smcmelb

Aug 18, 2010 @ 09:38 AM from Twitter for iPhone Powered by Tweeted

EmmaStirling

Emma Stirling

@EmmaStirling: Tip from #SMCMelb - click on downward right arrow on YouTube number of views for detailed analytics including referrals.....

Aug 18, 2010 @ 11:54 AM from TweetDeck Powered by Tweeted

ryanspanger

Ryan Spanger

@ryanspanger: RT @Stweeve Ideal length for online video: 2-4 minutes. Ideal length for a punk song: 3mins11 seconds.. Correlation? #smcmelb

Aug 18, 2010 @ 11:49 AM from web Powered by Tweeted

kellycmillar

Kelly Millar

@kellycmillar: YouTube insights to understand more about your specific video metrics #smcmelb

Aug 18, 2010 @ 09:43 AM from Twitterrific Powered by Tweeted

OzAutoSocial

Auto Social Media

@OzAutoSocial: It was a great evening at @smcmelb last night. I highly recommend these type of events to enhance your #sm knowledge. Follow #smcmelb #in

Aug 19, 2010 @ 05:01 AM from Twitter for iPhone Powered by Tweeted

dascottonline

David Scott

@dascottonline: Was good to finally catch up with @amcal @KimberleyL & meet @kimongsk at #smcmelb last night. Cheers for the good convos!

Aug 19, 2010 @ 02:17 AM from TweetDeck Powered by Tweeted

SPEAKER BIOS

Nick Bolton – General Manager Viocorp – Melbourne

Nick has in-depth Industry expertise having delivered numerous high profile web events on behalf of Viocorp.

Over the years Nick has also handled several Internationally significant projects including the first ever live stream direct from the Vatican.

He has been working in the webcasting space for almost eight years, and has managed several hundred webcast productions for most of the top corporates in Australia. Previous to this Nick was an Account Director for a leading healthcare advertising agency in London for 5 years, winning two Gold Medals at the Pharmaceutical Marketing Awards. Nick has also run his own business, and has in-depth understanding of the benefits of online video for clients.

Nick has: BA (Hons) 2:2 Marketing and Law, De Montfort University, Leicester UK, a Diploma in Marketing, Chartered Institute of Marketing, UK, and Diploma of Market Research, Market Research Society, UK.

Viocorp is Asia Pacific’s leading full service Internet broadcasting company. The company has worked on major events, like the Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race on Yahoo!7 and Microsoft’s TechEd conference in Barcelona, and has supported major brands such as the Australian Rugby Union and Tennis Australia.

Simon Goodrich, Managing Director, Portable

Simon is co-founder and Managing Director of Portable, a digital studio creating websites, mobile applications and video with offices in Melbourne and New York. Portable has grown to be internationally recognised as one of the most innovative companies in its field, creating products such as the Portable Film Festival, the world’s leading online film festival, and Portable Shops, an online e-commerce service for fashion designers. Clients include Adobe, Getty Images, Oxfam, Red Cross and the AFL Players Association.

Simon is the National President of the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association, the country’s digital peak body. He is also a judge and Australian Ambassador for the US based Webby Awards, the Oscars for online. Simon sits on the board of Design Victoria, the Victorian Government initiative to promote design in industry.

He has been recognised as one of Australia’s leading entrepreneurs under the age of 30 by Anthill Magazine.

Suzie O’Carroll – Industry Manager – YouTube Australia

Suzie has worked in online media for over a decade! Starting during the heady days of the boom, with Excite Europe, where she worked in a team setting up ops teams in the new offices across Europe.

Then over to Australia, and Yahoo! AUNZ looking after their content partnerships with Drive, Seek and Domain.

A move agency side followed with three years at Mindshare Sydney, heading up the digital team there. Suzie worked across all key clients, from ING Direct to Diageo, Land Rover to LG.

After a short sabbatical in Central and South America earlier this year, Suzie joined the YouTube and Google team in May. In between watching videos, she’s been educating clients on content online, and developing video strategies for key accounts.

Natalie Tran, of Australia’s most subscribed YouTube channel Community Channel, takes on the science used in some advertising to make a product seem more awesome.

This episode kinda reminds me of Seinfeld.

Laziest blog post ever.

(It was labelled as ‘Australian’s like Youtube ads’ on Adnews…) Take this research with a grain of salt as they surveyed people who have been to YouTube in the last 3 months, kinda going to skew the results (massively!).

Seventy percent of Australian YouTube users enjoy watching ads on the site if they are relevant and entertaining, according to Research International.

The survey found 25% actively seek out ads on YouTube, while one-third of Australian users who see an ad on YouTube click on it.

Professionally produced brand videos are nearly as trusted as user-generated videos, with 49% trusting user-generated videos and 41% trusting a brand feature or segment.

YouTube’s Australian audience aged 14 and over includes 14 to 17-year-olds (7%), 18 to 29-year-olds (32%), 30 to 39-year-olds (20%), 40 to 49-year-olds (18%), 50 to 59-year-olds (13%) and 60-year-olds and over (10%).

Research International conducted the research on behalf of Google, interviewing 3000 males and females nationwide, aged 14 and over, who had visited the YouTube website in the past three months.

YouTube was created in February 2005 and was acquired by Google in November 2006.

Source: AdNews

Thanks to Krisite Wells at Social Media Club for finding this market research by Rubicon. It’s a very comprehensive study, however, social media‘s influence on purchasing decisions is second only to word-of-mouth/personal advice.

It’s funny when companies says “Social media sounds exciting, and we’ll getting into it once we’ve upgraded our website” as it’s in no way their choice if their product, service or organisation is ‘in social media’.

The following graphs summarise these findings well.

As Krisite comments

that shows online reviews and comments written by users are second only to word of mouth as a purchase influence for most Americans. Some great stats in this document for you all to chew on including items such as websites that Americans value most are (in order), Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Wikipedia, and Facebook.