Videos | SageRock Digital Marketing Blog

March 28, 2011 By Sage Lewis 1 Comment

SageRock Donates To Waldorf and Gets Art

Spring Garden Waldorf, a private school in Akron Ohio, just had their annual charity auction.

2 different families of the SageRock team have kids that go to Spring Garden.

So, it seemed only reasonable that SageRock would participate in a small way in the Auction.

SageRock purchased 3 items at the auction:

Miss Julie’s Class Project: Earth, Wind & Fire
The Teacher Appreciation donation to help the teachers fund ongoing learning for themselves.
A Sculpture by P.R. Miller

The final item is the one that should make the biggest impact at the SageRock Building and in the surrounding community.

P.R. Miller is a renowned Akron artist. He is known as “The Grizzled Wizard.” He takes found objects from dumpsters and landfills and recycles them into art.

We are extremely excited to have the opportunity to feature his work at SageRock and, in doing so, also supporting a great school, Spring Garden Waldorf.

As we work with P.R. Miller we will keep you updated on what kind of art he plans for the space.

Filed Under: Featured, SageRock, Videos

January 13, 2011 By Greg Habermann 2 Comments

TubeMogul: Tracking Your Videos Across Multiple Sites

After my in-depth overview on YouTube video analytics, hopefully most of you understand that YouTube isn’t the be all, end all of video on the Internet. In fact, as much time as I usually spend finding video ~~that would make my mom blush~~ on YouTube, I’ve found that I’m spending more time at other places, like Vimeo, Revver, and Break.com.

Nothing is inherently wrong with YouTube. There are just different audiences for different outlets. Spend less than a minute on Vimeo and tell me you aren’t dealing with a completely different group of publishers and viewers.

Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket

Let’s look at a real life example.. I’ll call this TubeMogul vs …

The latest M.I.A. video “Born Free” was banned by YouTube “ostensibly for its graphic content.” If you search hard enough you’ll probably still find it there (while their censors play a round of Whac-A-Mole), but what is most interesting is that its artistic nature seems much more suited for a site like Vimeo and indeed the original upload/comments to that platform remain.

Furthermore? It’s received more than 2.4 million views there due in part to it’s prominent ranking in key Google SERPs

Clear enough, right? You wouldn’t want to only rank in Google, but not Yahoo, Bing, AOL, or Ask. You’d be throwing away 30 to 40 percent of your audience!

Is that what you want to do? Of course not.

Same rules apply when dealing with online video. It’s not just the lone destination that you’ve uploaded your video to — it’s all the different places that could showcase your video to multiple audiences.

Clients have told me numerous times that they’ve put up their videos on YouTube, and that’s that. But what if you went so far as to not only upload to YouTube, but also a ton of other destination sites?

TubeMogul offers a single upload, which is then broadcast to a chosen array of video sites that you have an account with. One upload, multiple video site destinations. If you haven’t yet, test drive one of their free accounts.

Basic Video Analytics

Something that you should be mindful of as you disseminate your videos across the web is how you will track those videos. While logging into multiple accounts is feasible, it’s also tedious, time consuming, and the metrics between one publisher and another are often handled quite differently, making uniformity for reporting difficult. Luckily, TubeMogul has a variety of options available with its basic and advanced analytics packages that this tutorial covers.

The standard free online video analytics gives you quick, exportable data at a glance to see your performance across all the channels that you’ve uploaded to.

You can then drill down by any publisher to see what videos are being measured and then drill into each video to see a variety of metrics across time.

By focusing on the key metrics that are uniform across publishers, TubeMogul makes reporting and understanding your online video reach quick and painless.

But Wait, There’s More!

You want something a bit more in-depth? How about a lot more in-depth? Well, In-Play, TubeMogul’s advanced analytics has you covered.

InPlay unlocks a bevy of in-depth detail across publishers, including:

Viewed time and attention span.

Quality of your video streams from the visitor’s POV.

Embedding details.

Geolocation.

Advertising effectiveness.

With these online video analytics at your fingertips, you can quickly and easily measure the success of your campaigns. The days of just uploading to YouTube and seeing how many stars you got are now things of the past.

Original Picture “adtech london” from channelship on Flickr

Filed Under: Featured, Social Media, Videos Tagged With: online video analytics, tubemogel

January 4, 2011 By Greg Habermann 3 Comments

YouTube Insight – Advanced Techniques with Online Video Analytics

Last time, I presented an overview of YouTube Insight and went into some of the common metrics that you could find through utilizing this unique video analytics tool. Hopefully you’re ready to roll up your sleeves, queue up Excel, and dig deeper into your YouTube data.

Google tends to reward those who are more curious than others. I don’t mean black hat techniques or anything of the sort. It just seems that, for the most part, the reports that are given to someone through many Google properties are aimed at the layperson or meant as an executive summary of sorts.

Seriously, when was the last time a hardcore search marketer looked at a pie graph in an analytics report as if it held the location of the Holy Grail somewhere deep in its midst?

Leave the graphs for your executive summary sheet. If you’re going to get down and dirty with online video analytics, then you should move to a tool that will get stuff done for you — Excel.

Luckily, Google (and in this case You Tube) loves the spreadsheet and is willing to give you more data through it then they do with their dashboard interface. At the bottom of any report within YouTube Insight you will see a link to: “Download reports for this video”.

Clicking on this link will yield a Zip file that will make your pie chars cry out in agony while your actual statistics revel in moans of pleasure.

Here is my video export to download for your reference.

Inside this Zip you will find three different files:

gBpFE3u0WPc_2010-04-28-2010-05-11_world_views_1.csv
gBpFE3u0WPc_2010-04-28-2010-05-11_world_referrers_1.csv
gBpFE3u0WPc_demographics_1.csv

Anatomy of a File Name

gBpFE3u0WPc_2010-04-28-2010-05-11_world_views_1 csv

The first series of letters/numbers is the ID of the video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBpFE3u0WPc

The second set is the reporting dates: 2010-04-28-2010-05-11 You can change the reporting dates by adjusting the date range on the graph in the Views tab.

The third part of the file name is the type of report you’re viewing: world views, world referrers, or demographics.

Armed with these three reports, let’s look at what info is given.

World Views Report from YouTube Insight

This shows us the date the video was viewed, the country the view was in, the ID and Title of the video, number of views, unique viewers, number of comments, number of people who made this video a favorite, and the ratings that people gave. This is a lot of sortable information about your YouTube video that you won’t find in other places. The good news is that it only gets better from here!

World Referrers Report

This is the most important YouTube report because it gives you data like source type (how people were referred to your video), detail (original keyphrase referenced or site the video embed was on), and referred views (how many people came to you video through this source).

For example, we can see that X amount of people came to this video by doing a Google Search (GOOGLE_SEARCH) for: “asus f3 keyboard”; Y amount of people watched this video due to it being related to (RELATED_VIDEO) video ID “X2p8qYPIT_o”; and Z people found this through searching YouTube (YT_SEARCH) for a particular phrase.

This is a tremendous amount of insightful data to be looking at. In addition to telling you what data is popular over a given time frame, it also looks at where that data came from and what they did with your content. This is invaluable for advertisers on YouTube and even could help craft your keyword targeting efforts on related videos.

Demographics Report

In this report we find a lot of information that we could use as advertisers to target our ads to the precise people who are watching our videos or find a demographic that we could target our future related You Tube videos or annotations towards.

This report shows the YouTube video ID, title, gender of the viewer, age range, and percent of viewership.

As you can plainly see, digging into the CSV downloads of YouTube data can clearly yield some valuable information that isn’t available elsewhere. If you’re handy enough with Excel you might even be able to make an impressive pie chart out of it. Good luck!

Tune in next time where we look at what the leading third-party video site, TubeMogul, offers from a video analytics perspective.

Original Photo “Lego Indiana Jones” from zombieite on Flickr

Filed Under: Featured, Social Media, Videos Tagged With: online video analytics, youtube

December 23, 2010 By Greg Habermann 2 Comments

Get Started with YouTube Insight – Online Video Analytics

When last we left back in Getting Started with Online Video Analytics,” I was looking for some insight into the best ways to track video performance on YouTube over and above star ratings and number of views.

Apparently the fine folks at YouTube must have read my article and decided that, lest they suffer the wrath of my keyboard, they should comply. In the past month, YouTube Insight, their fledgling video analytics tool, has been pushed front and center. In addition, they replaced the star rating system (of which I was actually becoming quite fond) with a Facebook-style thumbs up/thumbs down rating system.

Bringing the YouTube Insight Tool to the foreground is an interesting move by Google because it takes what most users perceive as a simple, easy system and reveals some severely complex tracking things going on in the background. The average user who uploads 15 second phone clips of their kids saying “mama” probably doesn’t really care about how engaged their viewers from Hong Kong were. But what do I know?

Let’s look at an overview of what information is provided and how to retrieve it. To get to your YouTube Insight page, go to any page contained within your My Account section shown through the dropdown of your username in the top right of YouTube.

If you’re logged into your account and looking for a direct link (for a bookmark, perhaps) you can use: http://www.youtube.com/my_videos_insight.

Once there, you’ll be presented with a Summary dashboard that provides a quick visual overview of your account alongside a snapshot of what metrics are available to you.

YouTube Insight’s Views page offers similar information as that found on the Summary page. The Views page shows you the total number of views of all your videos, over time, and in particular regions (who would’ve thought I’d be big in Australia with Japan being so close?). You can also see what percentage of which of your videos made up the majority of your views.

The Discovery tab contains some interesting, if only cursory, information. Basically, this page tells you how your videos were discovered. This is similar to the Traffic Sources Overview report in Google Analytics.

Clicking on the Demographics link will show you your videos performance across known age and gender of viewers. This could be interesting information for a potential YouTube advertiser because, depending on your viewership, you might be able to better target your ads. Not surprisingly, my laptop fix-it-yourself video skewed males ranging from age 25 to 44. Yeah, geeks, I’m talking to you!

The Community Tab gives you a bit of info on your ratings, comments, how many people favorited your video, over what amount of time, and what country they were from. This sounds like it will give more insight than it actually does. For the most part, looking at your actual video page(s), reading the comments, and seeing your overall rating (per video) is more useful.

The final tab you’ll come across is the Subscribers tab, which allows you to view the number of subscriptions you gained on your videos on any given day. As just having one nerdy video up doesn’t make for many subscribers, I’ll spare you the screenshot.

Please come back next month as we take a more in-depth look at some of the advanced information you can get from YouTube Insight if you know where to look and how to read the data.

Original Photo (features one of my favorite artists- Tom Waits!!) Waits on Waits by Hryck on Flickr

Filed Under: Featured, Social Media, Videos Tagged With: youtube insight

December 16, 2010 By Greg Habermann 1 Comment

Getting Started with Online Video Analytics

I have to admit: I’m just not that into making online videos.

Sure, I’ve logged countless hours watching YouTube, Hulu, and the like since January 2007. But my YouTube account has remained empty. Don’t get me wrong, video certainly has it’s purpose and place, I just never felt those things align for me before.

There are lots of reasons:

It can be time consuming.

I don’t really like how I look or sound on camera.

I prefer the written word for learning.

I’ve never really much cared for the available stats or video search capabilities.

In fact, looking at the online video analytics for videos of friends and colleagues literally made me cringe. It felt like I was teleported back to the days when we just counted “hits” and WebRings were filled to the brim with lovely counters.

The most in-depth analytics we get with online videos is tantamount to: “This video got 4 stars and was viewed 59 times.” Fascinating! Not. What good is that besides just an ego boost/blow?

Did people watch the whole thing? Did they click on links? Was it too long or too short, or just something that no one was interested in?

If you were lucky, you could glean some of this from comments. Assuming, of course, that you had any and that they weren’t of the usual low-brow caliber. If you weren’t so lucky, the average contributor on YouTube was mostly left in the land that tracking forgot.

This past December the keyboard on my aging Asus F3 laptop broke. I scoured the Internet, but couldn’t find anyone with step-by-step directions on how to replace the keyboard.

Eventually, I decided to go for broke and see if I could figure it out myself. I ordered the keyboard and when it arrived a week later I went to gather my trusty tools of destruction, figuring my laptop may never see the light of a BSOD again. Lo and behold, right above my trusty PC toolkit was my little digital camera. Nothing fancy at all, really, and probably about the same age as my laptop, but at that moment I had this crazy thought:

“Why not make a how-to video?”

I mean, isn’t that what I advise other people to do? Perhaps it would actually help someone. Maybe if I did a little SEO with it, I might even rank. The market, niche as it might be, seemed wide open.

But how would I track its effectiveness? Would I just look at how many hits it got? Would I check its rankings in the SERPs? How would I figure out who searched for what and from where if I just put it up on YouTube?

Was that some secret metric hidden in the YouTube star ratings? Perhaps they’d send me a decoder ring in the mail when I uploaded my first video.

Please tune in to part two (coming soon!) wherein I receive my secret YouTube online video analytics decoder ring.

Original Photo: Web Analytics Washing by Vicky Brock on Flickr

Filed Under: Featured, Social Media, Videos Tagged With: online video analytics

November 8, 2010 By Sage Lewis 1 Comment

Jeffrey Hayzlett Comes Back at Sage

A couple years ago I did a video where I was pretty harsh on Jeffrey Hayzlett about his position on print at Kodak.

Jeff agreed to do an interview with me about our differences.

This video represents a lot of what is good about social media.

A person with little to no power (myself) was able to have his voice heard. And the person with power (Jeff Hayzlett) listened and responded.

This is a representation of the signficant change social media has caused in business. A CMO of a Fortune 50 company engaging with an individual person is unique and exciting.

This will likely be a hard pill to swallow for people in high-level positions. But I think it’s a new reality. Jeffrey Hayzlett gets it. I’m interested to see if others will as well.

http://twitter.com/jeffreyhayzlett
http://hayzlett.com/

Filed Under: Featured, Videos

November 5, 2010 By Sage Lewis 7 Comments

Want To Be Interviewed About Your Business?

I’m not sure what will come from this post, but let’s see

I am looking to get better at doing video interviews with people using Skype.

The way they work is, I connect with a person on Skype doing a video conference call.

I then record the conversation, edit it and put it on YouTube.

So, you get a YouTube video about you talking about how awesome your business is.

All you have to do is have a Skype video conference call with me.

Maybe no one will be interested in this. But if they are interested, I will promise to do 10 of these. I might be able to do more. But I can’t promise I’ll do more.

So, the first 10 people who post a comment to this post will get the interview.

You just have to be able to do a Skype video conference call. As long as you have a webcam and a mic on your camera you should be set.

Just post a comment here telling me you are interested. And we’ll go from there.

Happy Friday!

Sage

Photo from: Job interview | Flickr – Photo Sharing!

Filed Under: Featured, Videos

November 1, 2010 By Sage Lewis 1 Comment

The New Twitter Profile

The future is here! Twitter automation will make us all rich. This video will show you how.

Filed Under: Featured, Videos

October 18, 2010 By Sage Lewis 2 Comments

Sage On Zappos Videos

I look at some of the videos they have on Youtube. These are interesting and risky.

If a billion dollar company can do these kinds of things you probably can to.

Companies like Zappos are getting the online video culture and are running with it. Understanding what resonates with this audience and also not being afraid to give them what they want can really pay off in a big way.

Zappos Commercial: “Emotionally Ready”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGn0BP…

Zappos Commercial: “Different Direction”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GXtFv…

Crazy Radio DJ!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUKG_m…

Zappos Commercial: 5 Ways to Add Elegance to Dresses
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x31XZH…

I didn’t show it, but their top viewed (223,738 views) video is:
The Zappos Family on Nightline
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFyW5s…

Filed Under: Featured, Videos

October 15, 2010 By Sage Lewis 2 Comments

Sage on Swagger Wagon

Have you seen the Swagger Wagon:
http://www.youtube.com/user/Sienna

Its an edgy Youtube channel devoted to the Toyota Sienna.

I talk about the components of the video and how you could do something similar.

I like this video so much because it changes how you think about a minivan. Marketing has a massive influence on perception. The only reason minivans ever got a bad rap to begin with was because they were branded as unhip. Videos like this will go a long way to make them cool.

Filed Under: Featured, Videos