Another benefit to you is the ability to add content to your site that adds more value for your users. You can pick and choose the products or services that you like, that fit your style or philosophy.

One of my favorites is an Amazon Bookshelf.

Not only can you choose any of the books to you like for the bookshelf, but almost any of the inventory listed on Amazon.com can be selected. Typically your referral fee will be about 6% and could go up to 15% depending on the item and volume of sales you produce. And, if you enter your bank info Amazon will direct deposit your referral fees once you reach the threshold.

Jonathan

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Instead of creating an advertisement and hoping that it reaches the right customers, you can create a Facebook Ad and target it precisely to the audience you choose. The ads can also be shown to users whose friends have recently engaged with your Facebook Page or engaged with your application. Facebook Ads are more likely to influence users when they appear next to a story about a friend’s interaction with your business.

Here’s a preview of one of our currently running ads:

We are able to target our client’s demo with precision accuracy, generating only high quality leads for them. These ads also feed into our client’s Facebook Page for additional social marketing - a great way to create buzz.

Give us a call if you have any questions about Facebook advertising and promotion.

Jonathan

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All good points. But, it is much more sophisticated that he explains. The primary driver behind a video is the production of the video itself. Specticle is usually the driving force behind this component. Most of the videos gone viral are simply capitalizing on shock value. If ever there is a subsequent video to this, the specticle must innovate at the same level or beyond the original. If not relying on specticle (or in addition to it) emotions must be moved - strong emotions, like fear or hope - look at the presidential candidates now!

The second component is visibility. You can place a fantastically compelling video into a network like Youtube and get no results because its buried in a mountain of wanna-be viral videos. Aside from proper tagging and titling (from a search marketing and publicity perspective) the video must be promoted and distributed to networks that swing towards appropriate demos. Furthermore, promotion within social bookmarking sites are essential for enabling virality. Digg and Stumbleupon are our favorites.

The last components are timing and luck. There might a current event that you could be leveraged with keywords. There is no guarantee that a video can go viral, but there are certainly best practices that position a video for maximum potential.

Response to article by Andreas Roell, The ClickZ Network, Sep 30, 2008 - Article Posted below.

While there is absolutely no formula to produce an effective viral video, there are some common themes. Here are two.

An obvious component, but difficult to manufacture, is to create a video worth talking about. A viral video is like the one play of a game that I talk about first. Whether it’s a touchdown pass thrown by a running back or a walk-off home run by a rookie, a viral video needs to show something novel to rise above the rest of the field. It needs to grab attention, be memorable, and ultimately make viewers feel duty bound to pass it on.

For marketing purposes, the video also needs to allude to the brand or product of focus in an unobtrusive manner. The risk of not including a branding message, even if it’s subtle, is that everyone will share the video but not be able to give credit where credit is due. On the flip side, very few users would pass a commercial on to their friends. To be most effective, a viral video must straddle the line between advertisements and CGM (define).

The most difficult part of crafting a viable video is that what internal teams find amusing, interesting, and attention-worthy might not be shared by their user base. To overcome this, marketers must attack a viral campaign from a user-centric perspective. EA Sports’s marketing team got it right with its response to a YouTube post exposing a glitch in the 2008 version of “Tiger Woods PGA Tour.” The glitch occurred occasionally when players hit a shot into a water hazard; Woods was able to walk on water, make the shot, and continue on. In response, EA Sports released a YouTube video that parlayed the original negative video to promote the 2009 version of the game. Using Woods himself, the video showed the golf legend actually walking on water to hit a shot off a lily pad. The closing line was, “It’s not a glitch. He’s just that good.”

The video has generated more than 2 million views to date. I attribute its success to communicating with users in a meaningful, unexpected way. The video would probably have been less successful if EA Sports didn’t include Tiger Woods in its response or if the video’s tone was less playful and clever.

Tackling a viral video campaign can seem like a futile effort since more times than not they fall short of expectations. I do think, however, there’s always value in thinking about a campaign from users’ perspective. With a broader audience on the online horizon, adapting a user-centric perspective will only become more important as advertisers plan their online video campaigns to reach users.

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We’re back and settled in after a whirlwind New Media Expo in Vegas. Another great year with a tremendous lineup of presentations and wonderful networking opportunities.

Of particular note, was a presentation on making money by selling your media content. Here are a few points from that lecture:

1. Sell sponsorships. This can be done per episode or over a set period of time. As your audience grows, and there are metrics to substantiate them, the value to an advertiser increases. Its a great advertising opportunity because of the high level of engagement of the audience and the niche market they represent.

2. Subscription-based Premium Podcast. This is a great way to create a recurring income stream by creating extra “Premium” content that gets distributed through a podcast feed that only paying subscribers have access to. Examples include extra audio, video or pdf files delivered on a periodic basis.

3. Pay-Per-Episode Downloads. Sell your episodes as one-offs. One podcaster we met runs Yogamazing.com. After 14 weeks of the content being free, he archives it and charges $1.99/download.

4. E-books. Transcribe the podcast and edit it into a PDF file. Just write an intro and conclusion.

5. Affiliate Marketing. Use the power of affiliate marketing by putting related products on your blog or website through a referral program. Usually affiliates offer 10-15% of sales referred through your site. Its also a great way to offer valuable resources to your current audience.

Invisible Idea executes all of the above strategies for its current clients. Please inquire at jonathan at invisibleidea.com with any questions.

Jonathan

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1. Blendtec’s “Will it Blend”. Amazingly viral and a brilliant product driven series. This iPhone video has over 5,100,000 Youtube views.

2. Quicksilver’s amazing, low-pro Dynamite Surfing video: 700,000 Youtube views

Jonathan

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National Park Service

All across the country, park rangers are turning into podcasters. Hundreds of brief audio and video programs are up on park websites and on iTunes giving visitors a new national park experience. People can learn about park resources, take a guided tour, get help planning trips, and, best of all, meet actual rangers.

“While nothing can replace a personal experience in a national park, we think our podcasts will enhance people’s trips or give them the opportunity to learn about a park that they can’t visit,” said Mary A. Bomar, Director of the National Park Service. “Whether people download them to portable devices or watch them on their computers, these free electronic presentations give us another way to serve park enthusiasts of all ages.

Sample Audio Tour of The Everglades

Learn About Parks Many parks offer interpretive podcasts about wildlife, history, and topical issues like climate change and fire management. The most extensive collection of park podcasts is from Yellowstone National Park where they are reaching out to new and nontraditional audiences to spark an interest in visiting the park. The Inside Yellowstone series has more than 50 episodes, which are one to two minutes in length. More episodes are on the way.

“Our podcasts give people from every corner of the earth the chance to fall in love with Yellowstone and become its stewards for the future,” said George Heinz, one of the writers and on-screen personalities for the podcast series. The park has another online series called Yellowstone InDepth that presents mini-documentaries on subjects like volcanoes, invasive species, bears, and wolves.

Yosemite National Park launched a new monthly podcast called Yosemite Nature Notes. A printed publication of the same name began in the 1920s and existed for five decades. “Just like the earlier version of Nature Notes, our podcasts tell Yosemite’s stories from the perspective of the people who work here,” said Steve Bumgardner, videographer and producer at Yosemite National Park. “I like the idea that we’ve brought this institution back to life and that we use new media to put a personal face on the National Park Service.”

“My favorite podcast about Canyonlands National Park is the one on potholes,” said Carter, an 8-year-old visitor who watched all of the park’s podcasts before his trip. “It was so interesting to learn that tiny creatures are living in a bunch of dirt.” Carter’s sister Brooke, 11, appreciated knowing how to recognize cryptobiotic soils so she didn’t walk on the delicate crust. Their mother, Tiffani, thought the podcasts empowered her kids and said, “they loved being the experts and teaching us (their parents) what they learned while we walked around the park.”

Take a Guided Tour In addition to general information, podcasts are a great way to offer ranger-led tours of specific areas that people can enjoy on their own schedule. More and more people download guided tours onto their iPods or mp3 players prior to their national park trip. When they arrive, they literally have a ranger in the palm of their hand to guide them on a walking or driving tour.

At Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, people stop at overlooks along the South Rim Road and watch podcasts about geology, history, life, and recreation at those exact spots. Everglades National Park also has a car tour (audio only) that leads listeners on a guided exploration down the main park road. Four civil war battlefields – Gettysburg, Antietam, Petersburg, and Richmond – offer podcasts that allow you to walk or drive along as you listen to an NPS historian talk about decisive and dramatic battles.

Urban parks use podcast tours to reach local residents who may not know much about the parks they pass every day. For example, residents in Minneapolis and St. Paul can listen to information about Mississippi National River and Recreation Area while walking a four-mile loop near the river. Residents of Washington D.C. can download walking tours for Rock Creek Park and people in St. Louis can do the same for Jefferson National Expansion Memorial.

Plan a Trip Visitors already use the internet to research park trips, but now podcasts make it more personal. “It’s a blast when visitors hear my voice and recognize me from the podcast,” said Elysha Iversen, Wilderness Visitor Use Assistant at Grand Canyon National Park. “It tells me that we actually reach people and help them plan their hikes before they get here.” Iversen and others record podcasts with important safety information about trail conditions. The park also offers hiking and river running orientation videos as podcasts and will soon, launch new podcasts about Leave No Trace to help people reduce their recreational impacts.

Glacier National Park offers videos online about hiking, and rangers say the programs speed up the backcountry permit process. “Rather than having to watch the video at the permit station which is required, more and more visitors have watched it online ahead of time,” said Bill Hayden, Interpretive Specialist.

Other parks help people plan trips with podcasts, too. Visitors can learn about recreational activities at Curecanti National Recreation Area, like fishing, hiking, and camping. Katmai National Park and Preserve has an audio podcast weaving together music, stories, and tips for reaching that remote wilderness area.

Take a Virtual Tour While not available for download like podcasts, virtual tours give people a park experience right on their home computer. For example, Clara Barton National Historic Site offers a virtual tour of Barton’s home, a building that served as the national headquarters for the American Red Cross. The tour allows visitors to navigate through all three levels of the house and gives access to images, text, and audio clips.

Acadia National Park has an eCruise along the rocky shores of Mount Desert Island and Glacier National Park offers eHikes that take visitors through stunning wilderness areas among glaciers, wildflowers, and bears. The experiences really have visitors buzzing. One man wrote, “I am a fighter pilot in Iraq…and it makes my day when I can take a hike in Glacier even if it’s from behind my computer.” A teacher from Michigan said, “the virtual hikes are awesome for a classroom project I am doing with my 5th graders.” And, another visitor remarked, “they are perhaps the next best thing to actually being there.”

New virtual tours are coming soon: Zion National Park will release an eHike for Angel’s Landing; Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks will launch eHikes that go through the Sierra Nevada foothills or among the giant sequoias; and the Statue of Liberty will provide an eTour covering Liberty Island, the inside of Lady Liberty, and a 360-degree view from her crown.

Some worry that creating podcasts and virtual tours about national parks may keep people, especially children, disconnected from the actual places. “Personally, I don’t think that people are going to give up on the real thing,” said Todd Edgar, Media Specialist at Acadia National Park. “After learning about parks from our online resources, people want to get outside and explore on their own.”

For many other national park podcasts and virtual tours, go to www.nps.gov. If a park unit offers online programs, you will find them by clicking on “Photos and Multimedia” in the left navigation bar of their homepage.

Matthew

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Jonathan

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Virginia Beach’s Department of Economic Development began podcasting in March. Interviews have included a city councilman, the editor of Men’s Fitness magazine and retired NFL icon Emmitt Smith.

“We’re trying to show we’re really in tune with what’s happening,” said Cynthia Whitbred-Spanoulis, the department’s strategy and performance coordinator.

City of Virginia Beach Podcast

Matthew

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Podcasting is seen to have a positive effect on radio listening, according to a study relased today in the UK. Rajar (Radio Joint Audience Research Ltd) released findings of its second survey into podcasting and radio listening via the internet. The findings were based on 863 respondents who were asked to complete an online questionnaire.

People were asked if they had ever listened to the radio stations via the internet and the study found that 14.5 million people had done so - up 2.5 million from 12 million in November 2007.

When asked if listening to podcasts effectived their radio listening, three quarters of those listeners said podcasting had no impact on the amount of live radio to which they listened. And almost half said they were listening to radio programs to which they did not listen to previously.

Six million people in the UK have downloaded a podcast, up from 4.3 million in the previous survey. iTunes remained the software of choice, used by almost three-quarters of podcast users to subscribe to podcasts.

Overall the study showed that Podcasting appeared to have a positive effect on live radio listening. Almost 15% of respondents said they listened to more live radio since they began downloading podcasts while 10% stated they listened to less, and 39% said they were listening to radio programs they did not listen to previously.

Podcast listening occurred throughout the day, with an evening peak, when 44% of podcast users pressed the play button. The survey also found that 53% of respondents said they would be interested in downloading podcasts containing advertising if they were free, while only 31% responded positively to the idea of podcasts with advertising that had to be paid for.

This study somewhat contridicts the long thought idea that podcasting is stealing the terrestrial radio listening audience. It appears that the opposite is occuring, and that podcasting is recondioning listeners to listen to audio programs and even introducing them to content that they previsously were unaware of.

I have always loved pairing radio with podcasting. Radio serves as an excellent promotional vehicle and provides an instant audience, where podcasting allows you to manage that audience as they subscsribe to your feed.

Matthew

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