Our CEO Silvia Pfeiffer gave a presentation about “ICT Innovation is easy – Commercialisation is hard”. It summarises some of the experiences made in Vquence with creating a Web 2.0 business in Australia and also addresses more generally the situation Australian ICT startups find themselves in after the GFC (global financial crisis). Slides and video below, as well as a playlist of all the videos from the Public Sphere event.

If you are not publishing videos in social networks online, you are missing an opportunity to extend the impact of your brand online.

The situation with video is comparable to the beginning of the Web. Then, only the big brands were quick to embrace the new medium and have a representation on it – mostly a simple Website that re-enforced the existence of the company and its brands online and provided information for the online community. Web presence matured over time as the medium became mainstream, and it spread out to smaller organisations and brands.

Now, 15 years later, we are at the beginning of another era: video has become a medium online. For many, YouTube has become their default entry into the Web and they spend most of their time online on YouTube. For the majority, YouTube is the dominant search engine and the second largest search engine after Google overall.

What do people find when they search for your brand on YouTube? Go and try it out – you may be surprised what your community is posting about you! Would a YouTube user find your message amongst all the other chitter-chatter? What impact will that have on your brand?

Some of the larger brands understand. There are some very good YouTube brand channels online. For example, check out the Nike Football channel. With 8,326 subscribers, it is the number one most subscribed sponsor channel of all time. It hosts 207 videos of diverse football highlights involving Nike. Or look at a new channel like the MINI channel which already has 41 videos after only having been created on the 1st January 2009.

In Australia, other than the political parties and bloggers, not many YouTube channels have been set up. Probably the best are Cricket Australia, XXXX, and Tooheys. Comparing just the two beer brands, it is easy to notice that Tooheys uses the channel just for re-publishing TVCs, while XXXX uses it to create brand engagement – a difference that is also reflected in the number of videos, subscribers, channel views, and friends.

Why are they spending money on social video?

Video has huge advantages over other content. Videos are able to provide a direct and rememberable explanation of what a brand stands for – much more so than text or pictures. Video is therefore twice as effective for conversion actions than text only. An Australian study showed that 57% of online users have watched online videos before making a purchase decision.

But not only does video help in the actual act of selling. Video also has an advantage when it comes to exposure to eyeballs on the Web. In Google universal search, video is 50 times more likely than other Web content to turn up on the first search result page. Yes, you read correctly: 50 times more likely – just think about all the SEO that you’d have to do with other content to have such an effect. On top of that, users are more likely to click on the video thumbnails on the Google result page than on any other results – the thumbnails are strong in directing eyeballs.

Now that we’ve seen the upsides of video, you will ask yourself what the kind of content may be that you should publish about your brand. What would be the purpose of publishing video to social networks? Video is a communication channel like any other. You can use it for any brand strategy that you may be preparing. You might consider creating videos to launch a new brand, to diversify an existing brand, to educate about products, or to start a conversation with your customers.

Here are some examples of what companies have used their YouTube channels for:

• Nikon Australia use theirs to provide tutorials and product demonstrations
• Qantas provides facts about the company and their TVCs
• Doritos Australia use it to run an ad competition
• AXE provide funny content
• Sun Microsystems publishes a vlog that includes interviews of executives

My recommendation is not just to upload the videos to YouTube, but also to pick some other social networks that focus more on your actual target audience, e.g. Dailymotion for a European focus or Break.com for a young males focus. Also make sure to consider your release strategy and video SEO to reach a maximum number of eyeballs for your content. And finally: don’t forget to measure your success over and over again – with metrics tools like Vquence’s VQmetrics service you can learn which content and strategy works for your audience and which doesn’t. It is such attention to numbers that Natalie Tran who publishes Australia’s most subscribed YouTube channel reckons has helped her make it such a success.

I stumbled about it because four key areas that Vquence works in are mentioned as exciting new opportunities in his blog post about the topic:

• Digital video (esp. getting Internet video onto the TV)
• New analytics companies (in the vein of Compete.com, Visible Measures, Localytics, etc.)
• New forms of media/reporting/content creation
• Social media and marketing

I can only agree!

Two employees at a Domino’s in the U.S. had nothing better to do during their work time than to record a video of themselves putting all sorts of bodily fluids into the meals they prepared. They uploaded it to YouTube a few days ago and started a nightmare for themselves and for the brand that they are ridiculing. Their video is here, if you are willing to stand it.

The video obviously created an enormous brand damage and had a pretty bad effect on the fast food market in general with people proposing that such actions happened every day across a lot of the fast food chains of the world. Domino’s executive first decided to not react aggressively to the posting, but hoped the controversy would die down, but that is not how viral sensations work.

Only when many posts on Twitter asked for Domino’s reactions did they decide to work against the brand-damaging ongoing discussions: the workers were fired, charged with food tampering, the restaurant in question was closed and completely sanitised, and Domino’s start a Twitter channel to directly respond to customer’s concerns. Domino’s president Patrick Doyle even posted a message to YouTube in which he apologises and clarifies the company’s commitment to food safety.

The brand’s reputation was indeed damaged. According to research firm YouGov, who undertook an online suvey, the perception of its quality among consumers went from positive to negative within the first 3 days after the video was posted.

Accordingly, the call for tools to help deal with such situations is growing louder. Social media monitoring tools provide a means to make sure brand-damaging postings are captured early, their impact is measured exactly, and adequate reactions can be prepared. Tools like Google Alerts, and Sydney-based companies S7, Brandtology, and also Vquence provide tools to address the challenges.

The whole affair engaged people so much that there are now almost 100 copies and replies to the video available on YouTube. Some of these are copies of the original video, some of Mr Doyle’s apology – one even with captions.

Interestingly, the Domino’s Incident has stayed mostly a YouTube phenomenon. There is no copy on MySpace.TV, there are only two copies on Dailymotion, one on Break.com, one on Metacafe, one on Yahoo video, and a few more random singles on other sites. It is a big public discussion held on YouTube. The videos are reaching 500K-1M views and 5.5K comments here. But given the reactions of Domino’s, we expect the buzz to die down rather quickly before creating more brand damage.

In comparison to that, the recent “Susan Doyle” videos with the star from “Britain’s Got Talent” have spread across many more sites. There are 87 copies on Dailymotion, 23 on MySpace.TV, 7 on Break.com, 13 on Vimeo, 14 on Yahoo video, and 42 on Metacafe. The original video on the BritiansSoTalented YouTube channel reached almost 30M views and 150K comments. This video single-handedly achieved 700 video responses and many many more copies.

It is a good sign that a positive message where a person lives up to her dreams and out-performs all expectations receives a much higher spread than a brand-damaging, stupid prank.

All-excited, I went to YouTube to enjoy some shows. However, the first problem I had was that – at least here in Australia – the announced “Shows” tab was not available on the front page and there was no way to find the “Shows” or the “Movies”. Fortunately, the YouTube blog post also provided direct links, so I went there directly.

With new hope, I browsed the available shows and selected some to watch. I was, however, very disappointed. Most of the shows that I clicked on were not available in Australia. After some trial and error, I managed to watch “Astro Boy”, “Do you like Hitchcock”, and “Staffers”. I wasn’t able to access “Alf”, “The young and the restless”,”Star Treck”, “Beverley Hills 90210″, “MacGuyver”, “I dream of Jeannie”, “Dilbert” or “Bewitched”.

I would prefer if YouTube only exposed those videos that were actually available in Australia to us. What’s the point in pretending all this content is available, when it’s not? YouTube is no different in this respect to Hulu, which is virtually useless for an Australian.

On Tuesday I attended a panel on “Effects Of Transparency: Cash For Comment And The Dark Marketing Debate” by David Lee and Julian Cole. They presented a comprehensive list of dark marketing campaigns, some of which were successful and others backfired. The take-away message was that it is in general a bad idea to keep the consumer in the dark and that transparency needs to become a requirement for marketing campaigns.

It was proposed that the best way to achieve transparency is through the development of a regulation for online marketing campaigns within one of Australia’s leading digital industry bodies AIMIA, AFA, or mfa.

I’d like to respectfully disagree. I don’t think we need a police force for online marketing. The Web is quite a self-regulating environment and all the poorly executed campaigns learnt very quickly that the truth comes out no matter if they want to. Do we really need a law to forbid us to leave the house without a coat in winter, because we could catch a cold?

Who are we trying to protect? Every poorly executed dark campaign has backfired either on the brand or the agency. Has it really had such a negative effect on society that we need to bring out legislation?

Even a call for an “industry code of practice” is too much IMHO. Do we even know what we are asking for and what we are restricting? Let’s not restrict our creativity before we have even explored the new medium and its possibilities in full.

Instead, what we need is education. Education on what works and what doesn’t. After all, the medium is still new and we are all still trying it out. We will get burnt for a bit before we understand the rules under which it works.

For example, there are some very good dark viral video campaigns that are very successful and have not created any negative reactions – not from consumers, not from the mainstream press, not from politics or society. Just check out the first and second example on my blog on “dark viral videos and witchery“.

What we need are “best practices” – examples and case studies of successful campaigns that people can replicate. This will not restrict creativity, but will give those that are uncertain about how to make best use of a new medium the tools to execute successfully. It does not restrict those that are more creative and open to experiments to find out how to make the most of the new medium.