So concludes a new University of California, Davis, study of \u201cbuzz\u201d marketing on YouTube. The research takes an important first step in looking at video viewership online, and in helping companies best use online campaigns to boost their return on investment (ROI).<\/p>\n \u201cThe identification of effective seeds (or primary authors) is not only key to the success of these campaigns, but also an important factor in estimating the return on investment from a manager\u2019s perspective<\/strong>,\u201d said Hema Yoganarasimhan, a professor at the UC Davis Graduate School of Management and author of the study.<\/p>\n \u201cSeeding information in social media outlets through handpicked agents is now becoming a common strategy in buzz marketing campaigns,\u201d the study notes.<\/p>\n Choosing the right seeding \u201cagent\u201d isn\u2019t just about friends and followers, Yoganarasimhan found. \u201cIt\u2019s not the number of people, it\u2019s focusing on the right people,\u201d she explained. \u201cThey need to ask who are their friends, and who are their friends\u2019 friends \u2014 and how are they positioned in the network?\u201d<\/p>\n She cites a Ford Motor Co. buzz marketing campaign for the subcompact Fiesta car in 2009 as a good example. Eschewing traditional marketing, Ford garnered 6,000 car reservations, 6.2 million YouTube views, 750,000 Flickr views and about 4 million Twitter impressions in less than a year. In what became a well-known campaign in the social marketing world, Ford selected 100 influential video bloggers, or \u201cvloggers,\u201d who agreed to try out a Fiesta for six months in return for blogging, tweeting and otherwise recording their experiences with the car on social media.<\/p>\n In her research, Yoganarasimhan looked at 1,939 videos that were uploaded to YouTube during November 2007. Among those, more than 1,800 were posted by authors who listed their friends.<\/p>\n \u201cI visited the pages of these friends and obtained a list of their friends. So for each video, I reconstructed the social network of the author up to two hops,\u201d Yoganarasimhan said. She then monitored those videos daily for more than a month for views, ratings, comments, sharing and other statistics.<\/p>\n While a close-knit community may be committed and loyal to a dispenser of information, that community may generate low video popularity in the long run, the study showed. That\u2019s because people in a close-knit community don\u2019t interact much with outsiders, resulting in few interactions with second- or third-degree \u201cfriends.\u201d<\/p>\n The study found that while first-degree friends are important for initial marketing, second- and third-degree friends are essential for “viral” spread.<\/p>\n Finally, the study found that video ratings are important \u2014 but it doesn\u2019t much matter if the rating is good or bad<\/strong>. Yoganarasimhan\u2019s analysis showed that video quality, as measured by viewer comments and ratings, had little effect on viewership in the long run. However a video with any rating was likely to have more viewers than one with no rating.<\/p>\n YouTube is a good platform to study, Yoganarasimhan said, because it involves both social media and video sharing.<\/p>\n The paper: \u201cImpact of social network structure on content propagation: A study using YouTube data,\u201d is available at: http:\/\/www.springerlink.com\/content\/u243567n085537p6\/fulltext.pdf<\/p>\n The research is published in the latest issue of Quantitative Marketing Economics.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the UC Davis press release: When it comes to marketing via video sharing on social media, choosing an influential person to \u201cseed\u201d a video is essential \u2014 but video… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[153,85,59,364,193,12,166,186],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3724"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3724"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3724\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3757,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3724\/revisions\/3757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/images\/blogpics\/ComputerUser4.jpg\" "\\"showing")
When it comes to marketing via video sharing on social media, choosing an influential person to \u201cseed\u201d a video is essential \u2014 but video quality isn\u2019t all that important.<\/strong><\/p>\n