Buzz Marketing And The Future of YouTube

Of all social media outlets, the one that may get most of the buzz this year from a marketing potential standpoint is one that’s been around for a bit already, YouTube.

As the viewership of YouTube becomes more mainstream, its potential for buzz marketing is becoming more viable as well. Unlike something like Facebook and their Beacon program, the buzz marketing potential for YouTube seems more organic and less intrusive, since in many ways it falls along the lines of traditional television advertising.

As this article by Tameka Kee at Online Media Daily outlines, Google is piloting some very interesting tools, including the placement of in-video ads through use of their buzz targeting algorithmn:

“YouTube buzz targeting works on an algorithm that looks at a number of viewer activities, including how many times a video is chosen as a favorite, how favorably it’s rated, and how quickly it picks up views, to determine which clips are about to ‘go viral.’”

One of the pilot participants was Lionsgate, which utilized buzz targeting for its April 18th launch of the movie, “The Forbidden Kingdom”. Danielle DePalma, Lionsgate’s director of digital media feels the potential of buzz targeting with YouTube will be strong:

“With so many videos going viral on YouTube at any given time, buzz targeting allowed us to reach a very large, diverse audience….It) was an amazing opportunity for us to capitalize on the most popular videos on the site.”

In addition to their in-video advertising, Lionsgate went beyond the obligatory movie trailers and included an interactive video mixer tool, which allows viewers to create their own clips with sound and video transitions from provided footage from the movie.

It’s these type of viewer engagement tools that makes Google CEO Eric Schmidt bullish on the increased marketing potential for YouTube for 2008.

“We believe the best (YouTube) products are coming out this year,” Schmidt said, in an interview with CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo. “And they’re new products…much more participative, much more creative…much more interesting in and of themselves.”

If 2007 was the year that the marketing potential of Facebook flashed on and off with Beacon, 2008 may be the year that YouTube gets it right with buzz targeting and other tools.