Entertain – Educate – Sell | New Media Drivers License Seminars

Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 03/26/2010 - 6:19pm

Entertain – Educate – Sell

In this assignment, I’ve started to fully appreciate the amazing potential of YouTube for marketing. As I explore YouTube, I may be looking to learn something, buy something, or more likely just be entertained. The mix is when these paths overlap. Take the series of Valentina Trevino’s videos. Her videos first – entertain. They are genuine and personal. Second – they educate. You understand what the artist was trying to convey when they composed the painting featured in the video. And last, the video leads to a sale. I am not surprised that her YouTube channel subscribers have grown, with her well crafted and personal videos. I read replies to her videos where artists on hiatus from their art have been inspired to go back to the canvas because of her videos. Part of the magic which is behind the scenes, is her effective and artistic use of video editing. For example in the video Art, Valentina explains the composition for her painting as bold yellow lines are electronically overlain onto the painting to visually critical lines in the painting. This is no amateur with a camcorder. The videos in themselves are artistically composed.

AVerMedia on YouTube

I immediately think of how companies I work with in education are using YouTube to both educate and market their product such as AVerMedia, one of the leading companies providing document cameras for schools. When I visit the AVerMedia channel, I pay attention to the number of views for their 100 different videos featured on their channel. Most of their videos have less than 100 views. One reason may be the limited audience. Another may be that the person presenting to educators looks like a sales person, not a teacher. Professionals tend to trust other professionals and AVerMedia should consider using someone who looks like a veteran teacher rather than a blonde sales rep. In searching I also found that AVerMedia’s competitors are also using YouTube. Epson has a channel to educate/promote their document cameras. And they selected a graphic to represent the avatar image for their “user”. AVerMedia still uses the default blank avatar head. The greatest competitor to AVerMedia document cameras for the educational market is Elmo. Elmo has no channel to market their products, though some multimedia resellers include Elmo videos on their channel. When talking to the national sales representation for Elmo at a national conference, I learned that this is a company run by engineers. So it was no surprise that Elmo has no channel. If Elmo is to stay competitive, they should invest the resources to create and maintain a YouTube channel.

Brand Channel

As I was exploring document cameras I came across a YouTube brand channel, Kodak’s channel called KodakTube. It provides a number of marketing elements beyond the standard video player and video list. It included an interactive “overpayment” calculator to estimate how a user paid too much for their printer ink. I was disappointed that within the brand channel no search box was displayed. I was looking to search for a video related to a new Kodak camera, the Zi8 but couldn’t do this within the site.

I am very interested in how nonprofits can create a YouTube brand channel. I wonder what a school districts would need to pay to have a brand channel? I was surprised that the wine expert show

called on the WineLibraryTV user channel does not have a brand channel, while Cooking for Dads uses a brilliantly blue themed brand channel, providing space for pharmaceutical ads pushing Lipitor.

Takeaways

I am taking away a better understanding of the use of YouTube in marketing. I’m also taking away a commitment to help school districts better use YouTube for marketing and communicating the great things happening in their schools. They should be creating a district or school YouTube channel (along with Facebook and Twitter.) To help with this process, I am critically looking at user channels including WineLibraryTV channel and MSU’s channel, as these both have the free user channel design. I’m looking at layout, modules, customization…things a school could do to make their channel more user-friendly and stand out – all for free.