More than 35 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. This means 2,100 hours of video is uploaded every hour, or 50,400 hours of content is uploaded to YouTube every day.

"If we were to measure that in movie terms (assuming the average Hollywood film is around 120 minutes long), 35 hours a minute is the equivalent of over 176,000 full-length Hollywood releases every week." according to Hunter Walk, YouTube's Director of product management. "Another way to think about it is: if three of the major U.S. networks were broadcasting 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year for the last 60 years, they still wouldn't have broadcast as much content as is uploaded to YouTube every 30 days."

So, you will need to learn How to optimise your video for YouTube. Otherwise, the odds that a critical mass of viewers will discover it are slim to nil.

Choose Relevant Keywords

The first step in this process is to think about the words users would type into the YouTube search box to find your video. Choosing relevant keywords can help you get your video content in front of interested users.

You can use the YouTube keyword tool to get new keyword ideas. It gives you a couple of options. You can enter a few descriptive words or phrases, or you can type in a YouTube video's ID or watch page URL. Results can be tailored to more than 40 languages and more than 230 countries.

In addition, the YouTube keyword tool lets you choose the demographic you wish to target. This includes male or female, ages 13 to 65+, applicable countries, and 24 interests from animals to travel.

Although you can use these keywords for advertising if you want, you don't need to. The YouTube keyword tool can be used to optimize your video for YouTube search, too. Remember, users are searching for video content, so they're less likely to look for something to buy on YouTube than they are on a search engine.

Users search for topics related to what entertains them, so choose your keywords accordingly:
Names (celebrities)
Titles (movies, shows)
Quotes
Actions/verbs
Objects in the video (cars, etc.)
Emotions (funny, hilarious)

When choosing your keywords, think about the trends in online video overall, plus trends on YouTube (hot topics, political awareness, celebrity gossip, and popular videos).

Optimize Your Video Title

The second step is to make sure that your titles, video descriptions and tags actually include your keywords. This will help your videos be discovered in YouTube search results and related videos.

Your video's title can be up to 100 characters long, including the spaces between words. This means your title can be up to 16 words long, depending on the number of characters in each word.

Although you can think of your title as a headline, don't use puns or other word play in this important element of your video's metadata. As Steve Lohr of The New York Times once observed, "There are no algorithms for wit, irony, humour or stylish writing." So, your title should be straightforward enough to be indexed properly and should contain the keyword phrases most important to the message of your video.

If you want to include your brand name in the title, it should always go last. You brand name faces less competition, so put the keywords that face more competition at the beginning of the title, which appears to help in YouTube search ranking.

Your description should be as detailed as possible -- short of offering an entire transcript. It can be up to 5,000 characters, including spaces. This means your video's description can be up to 800 words long.

Include URLs with http:// to other videos, playlists, or your website in your description. This will turn the URLs into a hyperlink. Optimize Your Tags

Finally, your tags should be as detailed as possible within the 120-character limit. They can include your brand, city, and topics. Consider using your current tags or another user's tags.

Greg Jarboe is president of SEO-PR which provides search engine optimization, public relations, video marketing, and social media marketing services. He's the author of YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day", a faculty member at Rutgers University and Market Motive, as well as a frequent speaker at SES conferences.

Please read full article and find other useful articles at Search Engine Watch.

And yes Be a Tiger can help you with all of this – just call 01525 384440 for advice.

Clients should always be looking how to get the greatest return from their marketing budget, and the best way to judge whether a marketing strategy is effective, is to look at the obvious - whether the customer is buying and if the business is growing.

An effective way to encourage the customer to buy is to make all design communication relevant. These tools have to be aligned with the marketing plan, and in turn, this marketing plan has to be aligned with the business plan.

In simple terms: Evaluate, Build and Apply:

Step 1 is always to focus on the company; we review and understand the current business plan and objectives.

Step 2 is then to undertake a review of the existing marketing plan, the current channels of distribution combined with a brand ‘health check’, to review all existing materials and identify any missing data.

Step 3 is then to devise a tactical plan with materials best suited.

It’s important to note that to be most productive, this exercise should be undertaken with a mixture of all levels of staff, as the MD’s perspective might be different to the Sales Manager to the Marketing Executive, and all these views will contribute to how the company thinks it is positioned to how it might actually be positioned. Although the client will have an instinctive view on what areas of their business they want to grow, there might not be any current or formal research to provide them, with absolute clarity, which of its strengths excites the market best or which is the best market segment to exploit for maximum impact.

The client therefore potentially might have too many messages that could easily confuse customers, or be simply ignored, and this means they will be less likely to meet targets in a hardening and more competitive market.

So we might:

• Review ‘client attractiveness’ – what specifically qualifies as a great customer
• Create and carry out customer audits – ask what their experience is of the business and other competitors, their expectations etc, how they want to be communicated with
• Undertake competitor analysis
  
  

It is then critical to establish what makes a business different. This is so we might help position the company so it has a clear vision, an identifiable brand combined with unique selling propositions that can be exploited.
Based on the information we acquire by talking to key staff, key customers and even competitors, we help define and create differential advantage – there are many thoughts on this subject, but I like to follow one of the world’s leading authorities on marketing, Dr Philip Kotler’s process of developing positional strategy:

Is the product or service:

Important - the difference delivers a highly valued benefit to a sufficient number of buyers
Distinctive - The difference either isn't offered by others or is offered in a more distinctive way by the company
Superior - the difference is superior to other ways of obtaining the same benefit
Communicable - The difference is communicable and visible to buyers
Pre-emptive - the difference cannot easily be copied by others
Affordable - The buyer can afford to pay for the difference
Profitable - The company will find it profitable to introduce the difference

When positioning its wares, a company should pick an attribute for that product or service, and tout itself as the number 1 on that attribute - it may be they pick 2 attributes if competing with others that do.

And finally, along with the physical marketing tools to allow the company to communicate both internally and externally, we need to ensure there is a cultural methodology of communication for the business, adopted by everyone so the message to customers is consistent, relevant and effective, and one which is aligned with the business objectives.

What this means is looking at how the company delivers; in what style, operationally. In short the people!

We know from experience that many staff have the knowledge, but may not have the know-how to deliver on the business plan. So we advocate training, interaction, coaching, new service development. Once the staff are empowered with the operational tools, and supported with the physical tools, then the business should grow.

In no particular order, my top 3 tips to create a successful plan are:

1. Know that 1 shoe does not fit all – what works for 1 company might not work for another, yet certain practices if deployed in the right way and in the right time frame, will be successful i.e. there might be things that are peculiar to the automotive industry that in practice could be excellent for the property industry. Be open minded.
2. Work hard on setting short, mid and long term goals, evaluate regularly and don’t be afraid to adapt. The market is a ‘live’ beast and successful companies have the ability to recognise how to change in order to harness business!
3. It’s all about excellent communication – GET TO UNDERSTAND YOUR CUSTOMERS INSTEAD OF ASKING THEM TO UNDERSTAND YOU. It’s about the right relationships, the right communication, the right audience.

And yes Be a Tiger can help you with all of this – just call 01525 384440 for advice.

How much does a spelling mistake cost?  It’s hard to say, but you could try asking Birmingham City Council for an estimate.  They recently sent out 60,000 postal ballot cards with a return deadline of May 29 2009 - last year's European Election date. They corrected this and sent out a further set of cards.  Unfortunately they failed to notice that the return address had a spelling mistake: “Great Charles Street, Birmingam.”

According to the Daily Telegraph, a spokesman for the council said: "Over recent years we have introduced rigourous [sic] checking processes to ensure the integrity of local elections and results are protected to the highest possible standard, and we accept these same standards need applying to all election literature."
Oh dear.  I can’t be sure whether to blame Birmingham City Council or the Daily Telegraph for this error, but it seems that even rigorous processes are not enough to eliminate the mistakes.

HSBC, meanwhile, managed to misspell the name of one of its branches.  They put up a sign above the door of its local Suffolk branch that read “Welcome to Lowerstoft, a branch of the world’s leading local bank”.  Bank executives apologised when customers pointed out the superfluous “r” in the place name.

Mistakes like these are not just about extra print costs.  As well as being deeply embarrassing, they can make a company seem incompetent or unprofessional and can do severe damage to its reputation. 

Of course, someone should have spotted these mistakes before they caused public humiliation.  But it is often the most obvious things that catch people out – the headings, the names, the dates and the things you take for granted – and which are guaranteed to cause maximum embarrassment if you get them wrong.  And if you’ve already made one mistake, you can’t assume that everything else is going to be all right, as Birmingham City Council found out to its cost.

But while this kind of embarrassment is not going to help anyone’s business, the personal cost of a typing mistake can sometimes be very high indeed.  Apparently a man in Indonesia has just spent three extra years in prison because of a typo on his paperwork.  He should have been released in 2007, after serving a 20-year sentence for possessing heroin, but a clerical error meant his first year in prison was shown as 1997 instead of 1987. 

Of course nobody’s perfect, but if you proofread your work thoroughly, at least you stand a better chance of getting it right.  You can find lots of proofreading hints and tips online, but here are a few suggestions.

Some proofreading tips
1) Do a spell check – it won’t find everything, but it will help you clear up the obvious errors.  See some examples of things spell check won’t spot: see example here

2) Print it out – you can check thoroughly on screen first, but it’s amazing how mistakes can leap out at you once you see things in print.  You can also check for consistency much more easily if you have a hard copy in front of you.

3) Concentrate – if you just give it a quick read through, you’ll see what you want to see.  You need to consciously look for errors. 

4) Don’t try and check everything at once – you’ll need to make several passes looking at different things, such as sense, spellings and consistency.
 
5) Do separate checks for significant items – for example, check the main text, then look at headings/sub-heads, numbers (page numbers, lists, numbers in the text and so on), names/titles etc.

6) Check for consistency – look at typeface/font sizes, use of capitals, preferred spellings eg organisation or organization, numbering systems and so on.

7) Punctuation – for example check for missing full stops (have you used them consistently at the end of bullet point lists?), brackets and speech marks (are they at the beginning and end of relevant text), hyphens (co-operate or cooperate?), apostrophes (in the right places?).

8) Look out for homophones (words that sound the same but have different spellings) eg their and they’re, your and you’re, aloud and allowed, steel and steal etc .

9) Don’t take anything for granted – call phone numbers and test web links to make sure they’re correct.

10) Take extra care over the big things – for example main headings, place names, people’s names, significant facts and figures – anything that’s likely to cause embarrassment or upset someone if you get it wrong.

www.wordpoint.co.uk

When I’m asked why public relations matters for a business, the easiest way of answering is with another question: “Do you care about your reputation?”  To any sensible business, that’s a rhetorical question, because whatever the size of the organisation – from sole trader to multi-national – reputation matters even more than ever before. 

Much research has reached the same conclusion, for example an academic study by Wei-Ming, Abratt and Dion succinctly stated: “Retailer reputation is an important factor that influences consumer's store patronage.” 

In short, if your reputation stinks then people won’t buy your product, visit your shop, vote for you, stay at your holiday park, and so on. Just ask Gerald Ratner, who destroyed his business virtually overnight by joking that his jewellery products were “crap”.

Of course, nothing had really changed, other than the public’s perception, who took Ratner at his word and their money elsewhere. More recently, Tiger Woods has seen sponsors rush to distance themselves from a shredded reputation they fear could damage them by association. 

It stands to reason that a poor reputation will affect a business’s share price, but research also shows that companies seen as “reputation leaders” will substantially outperform the market. 

What has fundamentally changed in the 21st century is how widely and quickly reputations can be built up or knocked down. With an arsenal of social media tools at their immediate disposal, dissatisfied customers can seriously damage a brand in a matter of hours, if not minutes – and in the same timespan a new hero can be created by avid followers, such as Susan Boyle’s overnight success. 

Twitter and Facebook campaigns and YouTube videos which make the leap to mainstream media can be powerful influences on your brand, and that’s where the modern PR practitioner earns their corn. 

The UK is probably the most sophisticated (and cynical) marketing environment in the world – and public relations has moved a long way from the days lampooned by Jennifer Saunders’ debauched PR executive in Absolutely Fabulous. Today, business goals and key performance indicators are clearly identified before creating and delivering the campaign.

The tools at our disposal are much more sophisticated too, reflecting the dramatic changes in media channels and technology and, underlying it all, social behaviour. How much does your life revolve around your PC, or your smart phone? Who could have foreseen just 10 years ago the way Google would revolutionise the way we find information in a matter of seconds, or how YouTube and on-demand TV - such as the BBC’s iPlayer - would change the way we watch video? 

In the old days, PR was portrayed typically as long lunches with editors – a metaphor for good solid media relations work with journalists in press, radio and TV. The ‘scattergun’ approach was rife, with mass mailing and faxing of press releases with little thought given to targeting individual journalists.  However, ask any news editor with an overflowing inbox today and they will say that the advent of email has prompted an avalanche of untargeted press releases to all and sundry, which threatens to cause lasting damage to the reputation of PR practitioners among journalists. So, to win attention (and to manage our own reputation) our approach is much more refined and targeted and may exclude the traditional media all together. 

At the same time, the traditional media are being forced to change – to what we don’t yet know, but it will undoubtedly provide more opportunities for public relations activity rather than less. 

Techniques and tools of the trade coming to the fore to reflect this changing world include stakeholder and issues management, public affairs (recognising that politicians are 

increasingly prepared to take soundings from the community to shore up their battered reputations) and of course the whole gamut of online PR. 

Looking into my crystal ball, I predict that in 2010 we will see much greater use of video online as a PR tool, enabled by always-on social media. The capability of smart phones to play video allows “older” social media such as YouTube to be linked to via a Tweet or a Facebook update, with retweets (a Twitter message forwarded on) potentially reaching tens of thousands of people. 

So what does it all mean for PR? All in all, the speed with which reputations can be built or destroyed will mean that businesses – and individuals – will turn to experts more and more to manage their reputations, both online and using tried-and-tested methods with the “old media”, which will undoubtedly find a new role in the world.

www.tribepr.com