In my continual quest as an internet guinea pig (read about last week’s social experiment with social networking here), this week my social experiment on myself was to see just how powerful placing video online can be for views of the actual footage and thereafter traffic to your website.

So here’s what I did. Back in April I was contacted by a production company in Sydney asking me if I would like to be on a new business/lifestyle show called Business Sense being produced on Sky Business. Naturally I said ‘YES!’ They’d come into contact with me in the first place because of my placing as Queensland Small Business Champions Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2007 (for more information on how much I believe in the power of entering business awards, see a previous blog entry here)

Any-hoo (purposeful Canadian eloquency), apart from the FANTASTIC media coverage on not only Sky Business Channel in October 2008 but also on the Vodafone Australia website and Qantas Inflight TV (and at some stage Channel 9 too I believe) they sent all participants both a high definition copy of their clips to show of course the eager friends and family and also a low res, ready to go version for the online medium. Whew — no foray into video production for me to do!

Now that’s a little bit lucky and I know not all of you reading this blog will have access to something as professional as this delivered to your letterbox ready to go BUT I bet that many of you do possibly have television media coverage of your advertisement, an interview you’ve done or even some kind of sales tool you had cut (if you don’t see this blog entry with some tips on how to cut a video clip really easily and really cheaply).

Anyways, I decided first to have a dabble with the almighty YouTube. If you’re under the age of 25 years, you’ve probably more than likely visited this website once or twice. If you’re like my 16 year old exchange student from Brazil you probably live on the thing preferring it to television (in fact he downloads and watches all his favourite shows from home in Portguese that he can’t obviously get here). If you’re a Gen X or older, chances are you’ve heard of it in the media, but probably never dabbled.

Whether you’ve visited it or not, the first thing you need to do before you place a video online is register for an account. It’s a quick, easy and painless process and it won’t cost you a single cent. The process is much the same as applying for a free email account on one of the free online email services such as hotmail, yahoo, gmail and so on (interesting side bar — multiple account names I tried to get had all been taken. I ended up having to go for a ‘gangsta’ version of my company name ‘dacreativecollective’ rather than my preferred ‘thecreativecollective’. My younger staff think it’s hysterical.

In just 5 days I’ve had 45 views. That’s right, 45 different people have logged into and somehow found me on YouTube and checked out what I had to say. That’s pretty cheap marketing right?

Now I don’t know who these people are, where they came from or what part of my title, description or tags (essential key words you place when you upload the file for people to find your clip on) but they’re viewers non the less and I have definitely noticed my web stats have taken a nice little spike too.

What I’m now playing with and am really excited about it www.TubeMogul.com. TubeMogul is a free service that provides a single point for deploying uploads to the top video sharing sites, and powerful analytics on who, what, and how videos are being viewed. So rather than uploading it to You Tube and sitting back, when you post to TubeMogul you can upload to You Tube, Viddler, Vimeo, Veoh, Google Video and a bunch of others ALL IN ONE GO.

Stay tuned for the next update on how my TubeMoguling goes and in the mean time watch the video clip I’m referring to on You Tube now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb9ky5PmaAs