We have been testing some different videos campaigns and I was struck by how social media optimization has changed how companies view videos. From a nice to have feature on a web site to a strategic portable asset

Video is not a new thing to the web. Pre-social media (say 2 years ago) a lot of sites had video. Characteristics of video pre-social media was:

• Long Videos (20 minutes was not an uncommon size)
• Stick on their own pages (usually pop-up pages with no content)
• Rarely found by search engines or users!

Now consider what video is today. Instead of a nice to have feature videos have become strategic assets that can be watched across the internet, not just on a company’s web site. Characteristics of videos today are:

• Videos are much shorter and focused in length (under 5 minutes)
• Video’s are featured on sites and on pages surrounded by content
• Video’s are portable in that they can show up in multiple locations
• Search engines and users are actively looking for them

How to get started
You don’t need a super expensive video camera to get started. We use Flip Video  which is small and easy to use. The picture quality is ok which I like as it looks more viral or homemade.

Say that your company makes widgets in five colors. Instead of producing one long video on widgets, I would recommend making  4-5 shorter videos that talk about red widgets, blue widgets, green widgets, etc. The red widget video for example is embedded within a web page that discusses red widgets.

Now you have five portable assets that can be distributed across the Internet. They can be uploaded to the search engines so that it can show up in the organic videos results, or to social media video sites like YouTube or MetaCafe where its reach is far greater than when someone just visits the website. You can include them in your Facebook site or use traditional social media sites like StumbleUpon, Muixx and Propeller to increase the awareness of your brand.

It has been a bad week for Rupert Murdoch and MySpace. Last week we wrote about how Facebook has passed MySpace in total visitors for the first time and now Compete  releases data that shows MySpace is rapidly losing market share to Google and Yahoo.

MySpace has traditionally made money because of its heavy focus on entertainment (nee video), so the alarm bells must be going off at News Corp. that MySpace has seen its online video market share fall from 8.9% to 5.1% in one year. That is a 42% drop which is huge.

The only other company that has seen a similar drop is ManiaTV.com which saw its market share plummet by 64%.

For biggest battle online is being contested by ABC and NBC through their proxy sites Veoh.com (ABC) an Hulu (NBC). In May, Disney-owned ABC made its first public move to embrace online distribution by signing up with Veoh.com.
The move is a defensive play against Hulu, the NBCU-News Corp joint venture and ABC has previously announced plans to release an embed-friendly player this fall, though not ruled out working with Hulu.

While Veoh.com shows up much higher in Compete’s ranking of on-site video viewing visits, Hulu.com actually plays host to ABC visitors slightly more often (4.7% vs. 4% in May).

Compete.com has some new video market share data and it seems that YouTube has gotten even stronger. YouTube’s market share has grown by 12.3% in the last year and is now at 50.4%, . For the first time ever half of the videos watched online are viewed on YouTube.

With over 10 billion videos viewed a month online, YouTube must be close to being the second most popular search engine in the world (after its parent Google).

The gap between #1 YouTube and other top sites like Yahoo, MySpace, TimeWarner and Microsoft continues to widen as they continue to lose market share. YouTube’s viewers are 7-10 times greater than its main competitors. If you are thinking about launching any sort of video campaign, then I don’t see reason at the moment why you would not just focus just on YouTube and ignore these other sites.