Just finished reading a report from eMarketer about future of sharing video online. You can find the full article here: http://www.emarketer.com. (Subscription required. (c) eMarketer Inc.)

The study cited statistics that indicate that online video in the US is now as big as network TV.

The study notes that the age of online video viewers trends younger: 82% of teens (16-to-17-year-olds) and young adults (18 to 24) streamed video, compared with 73% of Generation X (25 to 34) and 65% of older boomers (55 to 64) who said they watched.

Younger people will educate older generations how to watch, where to watch, and what’s worth watching online. The day is coming soon when my family will look at our television as merely a big screen monitor attached to our computer. We already use it that way a great deal.

I was first introduced to Seth Godin’s work by one of my all-time-favorite people Guy Kawasaki. (I know. I’m not alone in that crowd.) I read his book Permission Marketing : Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers. He has many other books, and when I have time (yeah right) I’ll read others.

I read his blog when I can. Today I read a truly winning article that made me laugh and made me think. What a great combination. Called “Can You Change Anything?” it offers a list of 45 things you can do to get out of your rut. Awesome.

His list reminded me of a very interesting management team exercise I experienced a few years back. The company I worked for a few years back was in something of a mental rut. We felt we needed to rethink how we were approaching the market for our product. So we embarked on a day-long exercise with small group breakouts, large wall post-its and lots of healthy debate.

Two exercises stick in my mind:

1. What strategies and tactics would you employ if you had unlimited budget? Sometimes you find that released from the burden of thinking about what it’ll cost, great ideas that actually don’t cost much show up unexpectedly.
2. Turn everything upside down. (e.g., global vs. local; or older demographics vs. younger demographics) So whatever you’re doing now, consider the polar opposite approach.

Both exercises yielded worthwhile results.

I work in very budget constrained times. I am constantly looking for new ways to get the word out that are low cost, but remain effective. But sometimes the easy, cheap methods of getting the word out are really hard to measure. And the ones that cost money are measurable. Tricky situation. But just because something is hard to measure, it should not be a reason to devalue its effectiveness and thus ignore it. Sometimes you just have to do it.

In the ‘old days’ marketing was much more ‘top down.’ You used direct mail, paid advertising, email marketing and later paid search to get the word out. But life isn’t top down any more. Thankfully. It’s much more fun being a marketer now! Everyone is an influencer. You need to give them the tools to get your message out there.

But before you embark on any of these tactics, ensure that your strategy is totally solid. Now is not the time to experiment in the dark. Segment your audience so you understand the most valuable and profitable targets. Use the data you have available to understand what’s worked in the past, and what hasn’t. Study your competition and learn from their weaknesses and mistakes. In all your tactics, be completely clear of your goal, your audience, your message. Be consistent and stick with it until you can clearly measure results. Then, tweak and adjust to fine-tune.

1. Advertising
Clearly this is highly measurable and target-able. But network advertising doesn’t offer the creativity and effectiveness that we’re looking for. It’s not inviting your audience to be a part of your conversation. However, see another post here about ideas for using advertising not to build clicks, but to build brand recognition.

2. Press releases
These aren’t exactly cheap. Well, I guess that depends on your budget perspective. But you obviously have to pay an agency/writer, get the release on the wire, and target your follow up. It’s not easy to measure results, but you can certainly measure the hits you get on the various search engines, and thus calculate potential readers. Don’t, however, be lured into the ‘spray and pray’ method of press outreach. Target the writers who speak to the audience you are reaching. Use your press release merely as your news hook. The real value is in the conversation you’ll have with that writer one-on-one.

3. Social network profiles
You can measure your friends, the visits to your social network profiles, the numbers of discussions and comments. If you’re clever with your parameter tracking in something like Google Analytics you can measure clicks from specific posts or articles. But the real measurements are hard to quantify. Regardless, having a lively, personal, interesting and regularly updating social network profile on MySpace and Facebook is vitally important to ensuring your brand is effectively represented. Ensure that anyone who goes to your social network profile will learn something new about you and your brand. Something they’ll want to share.

4. SEO campaigns
Both measurable and effective. Measurable in the sense that you should clearly be able to see changes in your traffic to your site if you have decent tracking at your end of the clickstream. Effective because if you do a good job of ensuring your site content is well indexed and follows all the plethora of SEO rules, then someone looking for what you offer should be easily able to find you. During our recent campaign with the wondrous Lady GaGa, searching for “lady gaga photos” during the campaign resulted in Photobucket as the #2 result in Google, right after Google’s own image search (which was also full of Photobucket images). Great traffic spikes resulted.

5. Corporate blog
A well documented corporate blog is highly effective: the press find you, and read backgrounds on you and your stories. The terms in your blog should be well indexed through SEO. However, if it’s hard to measure effectiveness. Even if you only get a few thousand visitors to your corporate blog a day, those are still a few thousand people who are getting a back story, and who can potentially pass along what they have found.

6. Schmoozing the blogosphere and twitosphere
In an ideal world, you have a full time community manager whose job it is to continually engage bloggers and tweeters who may be interested in your proposition. Each tweeter or blogger who tells their audience about you and your product has a huge multiple effect. Even if it’s hard to measure it is a highly effective way to get the word out at low cost.

I seem a lot of this in my job. How to do more with less. Without hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even a small percentage of that, to fill the awareness/consideration end of the marketing funnel, how do you introduce new people to your service?

Traditional Marketing Funnel

(I am not trying to analyze the appropriateness of a traditional marketing funnel in the social media world. That’s the subject of a separate post, to come. But suffice to say that we have to drive awareness and consideration of your product or service, regardless.)

Here are some of the strategies and tactics I have employed in budget-challenged times that reap results:

Marketing Value Trades

If you have something to offer, trade. Trade promotional units, emails, blog posts, your technology, know how for promotion in return. At Photobucket, we have been promoted by #1 air time radio hosts, FOX TV shows, many music bands, even the Presidential Inaugural Committee for Barack Obama. Build a tiered trade system that you can measure. Estimate what it would cost to have your value sponsored or sold, and get value in kind.

Partner Placements

Partner programs, where you trade what you have for promotion on your partner sites, even if no money changes hands work. If partners integrate with your technology or content, work with them to promote it to their users, do PR outreach, and share the love. If they have marketing dollars to spend, so much the better. Leverage their budget to your mutual benefit.

Viral Promotions

Many blog words have been spent trying to unlock the key to what makes something viral. If you have the approach to build viral-sharing into your property from the very beginning, you’re in with a better chance. But it’s very hard to know what’s going to take off. We all have viral envy. I often look at viral campaigns and think how easy it looks, and how hard it actually is to do. But keep trying. No one will fault you for trying, and failing. Just keep trying. But do look a the failed campaigns that uncovered the PR or Ad Agency schills, and avoid the most obvious pitfalls. See another blog post here, “what makes a message viral?” and “what do great viral videos have in common?”

Word of Mouth

Build word-of-mouth into everything from the beginning. “Share this with a friend” options should always be part of your site. Look to see what people are talking about, and if it’s absolutely relevant to your product, join the conversation. (If you’re not relevant, you’ll be outed as @spam right away.) Build conversations wherever you go. If you can build forums, even crowd-sourced ones, do so. Respond to blog comments. Build your Twitter presence. All these help. They sometimes feel slow to get going, but get going they will.

I have learned a little over the past years about how to go about selecting a PR firm. I thought it would be useful to myself, and possibly others, to outline what I have learned.

1. Set Goals

Without PR goals for yourself, how on earth do you expect to choose a firm?

Before you do anything else, agree on your goals for PR. Do you want your PR to:

• Build awareness among a specific audience — be sure to clearly define that audience (customers, partners, brands, developers, business leaders)
• Drive traffic to your site (same question as above — for what audience?)
• Get developers to build apps on your platform
• Get partners to integrate with your site, technology, API
• Get acquired by someone bigger and richer than you
• and so on….

The PR strategy you build with a goal to get acquired is a wholly and utterly different strategy than the one designed to drive customer traffic to your site. So be clear up front. This is particularly important when selling up your PR budget to management. When you come to deliver results, they should be measured against the goal established and agreed upon.

Some firms are good at real business/old fashioned journalism. Others specialize in consumer social media outreach and blogs. There are many specialities. Consider firms that specialize in areas related to your goals. It’s highly probable that your goals year one are different than your goals year three, in which case a new firm is likely to be needed. But remember the speciality needs to match your goal.

2. Snoop the ecosystem

Who is always getting press? Who is doing it well? Find out who their firm is! If they are your competition, you may likely run into conflicts of interest. But still try. If they are a larger firm, they may be able to support you by separating your team from your competitor’s team. Though that doesn’t always work. If they are a smaller firm, they will not be able to support you honestly.

If you can find a company that’s getting great press from a related, and complementary product then it’s a win. When I selected Lewis PR for Photobucket’s early days, I liked how they were handling press for Second Life, at that time a huge Internet darling. I hadn’t heard of Lewis PR, but I certainly had heard of this particular client of theirs, and that was a good recommendation.

3. List your goals for PR

Related to (1) above, but in more detail. Define at least 5 top goals for your first year of engagement with your PR firm. Think: if you can achieve these goals within the first year of engagement, I’ll be a happy client.

Some goals may be very specific: get on the back page of the “USA Today Money section”, and “Get read about by Rupert Murdoch.”

Or they may be slightly less specific: get into the “how to column” of 6 major national Sunday papers, or get a detailed article on the top 10 mommy blogs.

Whatever you choose, your PR firm will love that you are being specific, not vague.

And by the way, I gave those two goals (USA Today and Rupert Murdoch, among others) to Lewis PR for Photobucket when I hired them. They delivered. I was happy.

4. Cold call, or write to the PR firms you have shortlisted in (2) above.

Unbelievably, some firms don’t call back. Strike one. Actually, strike OUT. If you know someone who can introduce you, great. But frankly, they should have their act together enough to call and email you back promptly even if you’re not introduced and don’t know anyone there.

5. Telephone interview (brief)

Just see if there’s a conflict of interest, and see if you like their general reaction to you. Also check that they could potentially take on your workload. Some of the smaller firms may be too busy to give you the love you deserve. Though in today’s climate, that’s highly unlikely.

6. Write to the PR firms that make it through (4) and (5) with your goals

As listed in (3) above. Then set up a longer phone interview to discuss those goals. This is a killer step: if they don’t speak to your goals, don’t bother seeing them face-to-face. I recall specifically stating in goals that I was not interested in guerrilla PR marketing ploys. I was then regaled with exactly that. Did you not read my email? Again, using the Lewis PR example, Morgan McClintock of Lewis PR not only talked to my goals, but offered insights I hadn’t thought of. I learned something about my company from talking to him. Joy.

Don’t be lead down the budget path yet. They don’t yet need to know your budget. You need to know how, and if, they can meet your goals.

7. Finally, face-to-face

Hopefully you’re down to three firms by this time. Only now do you need to spend face-to-face time. Here are some deal breakers:

• Are they willing to come to your space? They should be.
• Do they bring 100 people? You only need to meet the people who will work directly on your account
• Do they speak to your goals? At this point, you should expect a preliminary idea of how they’d approach reaching the goals you have generously outlined for them; if they don’t, and they haven’t done their homework, they don’t care and should be thrown out.
• They should also look to help you define a reasonable budget, with what would be included and excluded

8. Decision time

Finally, don’t choose a firm without specifically meeting your potential account representative. Don’t be taken in by the ‘bait and switch.’ The bait and switch is where you meet the fabulous PR guru at the top who can do all the name-dropping, fall in love, and then get a 22-year old school leaver on your account. Sorry. That doesn’t work.

The person dialing for you needs to know their stuff, and you should be able to ask for someone good. You should know in advance who is going to be calling journalists on your behalf.

Find out how often they would meet you face-to-face and on the phone. I think weekly status calls is great, and at least a one month face-to-face. At that point, I’m happy to go to their space. I want them to spend their hourly time working for me, not driving to see me.

9. Budget planning

Before you finally marry the firm, make some agreements:

• 30-day opt out ideal; not every PR firm likes this
• agree how they spend your retainer; I caution against weekly clippings. Do that yourself with Google Alerts. Spend your money on something real, not gathering of weekly emails
• I also caution against expensive blog monitors too. Unless of course you have lots of money to spend. But who does?

I am sure I’ll add to this blog post as I consider further what it takes to make a great PR marriage. Be brave and be firm. You are in a PR buyer’s market right now. And firms are hungry for your business, so you can choose to be picky.