Here are the top three YouTube videos for the first three months of 2011.
I chose these videos because, not only are they now part of video-sharing history, but also they conveyed mixed emotions.
Enjoy!
TOP 3:
TOP 2:
TOP 1:
It used to be that a company’s online marketing efforts consist of having a Web page, sending out e-mails, and advertising on high-traffic sites. However, in this age of social networking sites – like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace – these efforts are no longer enough!
Social networking sites have allowed businesses big and small to be more interactive in the way they present their companies, brands, products, and services. Online marketing has ceased to be a one-way street where the businesses do all the talking and hope that their potential customers listen and try out their goods and services. Interactivity has become the key feature of online marketing on social networking sites.
Businesses can still advertise their products and services by sending out a Tweet or updating their Facebook status for all their followers and friends to see, or update them about the latest promotions and discounts. Meanwhile, customers can post questions and complaints in real time.
A company doing business on social networking sites can further keep itself ahead of the game by easily developing customer relationships and loyalty. You are no longer an
e-mail address promoting a product via spam, or a Web site they stumbled upon, but a profile with a real person behind it. This personal touch, which is an additional way of interacting with your customers, can make them feel connected and supported and in turn leads to more positive feelings and loyalty to your business. Anne Rice, for instance, just does not write great novels, she goes on Facebook to discuss any aspect of her characters as her fans ask her questions about them, or she conducts online writing workshops for her fans. Rice also speaks to them, making them feel that they are friends and that she, too, has her own hopes and dreams.
Social networking sites also provide a way for businesses to talk about their products in a more natural setting. You are not a business that intrudes on people as they read e-mails from friends and family, but you are part of the social network. That means that people will be more receptive to your pitch. If you provide a link to your Web site, people are also more inclined to click on it and visit your site.
More importantly, these links on social networking sites become new inbound links to your site, which makes your site rank higher on search engines. Few people realize that the links they put up on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook do not only point their friends and family to their site, they also point search engine spiders to their sites, making it seem more important and therefore making their site rank higher on Google, Yahoo and other search engines.
Most ordinary Internet users have encountered a link. That blue thing that they see on blogs, Web sites, Facebook accounts, even on YouTube. Just about every page of the Web has it. And when these links point to your Web site, they are called your site’s backlinks.
Backlinks, or inbound links, are incoming links to a certain Web site or page that does not originate on that particular site. Put simply, it is a link from another site that points back to your own site. If you have a Web site, pray hard that you get a lot of backlinks, as they are the only way people will get to visit your site without you telling them personally that your site exists.
An even more important thing to consider when talking about backlinks is search engine optimization or SEO. Backlinks are one way to get a higher ranking on most search engines, provided that they occur naturally. Search engine spiders are now capable of counting the number of sites pointing to your own. And most search engines consider these backlinks in ranking your site according to a particular keyword.
If you are interested to see just how many Web sites or pages have backlinks pointing to your site, you can go to Google Search at Google.com and input link:www.yoursite.com. In just seconds, the search results would list the different Web sites or pages that do link to your site, and in the upper right hand portion of the screen, you’d see the total number of sites and pages that have backlinks to your site.
Backlinks quite simply are inbound links from other sites that point directly to your Web site or page. And while backlinks are that simple to define, they carry an important role to improving your Web site’s or page’s PageRank.
The page rank is a numerical indicator or gauge of the importance or popularity of a particular Web page or Web site on the Internet. This means that the more popular the page or the site is, the higher the PageRank is.
Although the algorithms used by search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN are top secret, it is generally accepted that PageRank is one of the more important considerations in these engines’ ranking schemes. Conversely, the more popular your page gets and the higher PageRank you have, the higher you rank on search results.
IPhone OS 3.0
iPhone has touted it as the next generation of the world’s most advanced operating system. On March 17, Apple gave the world a preview of the iPhone 3.0 OS.
The new OS promises to bring 100 new features to iPhones worldwide, including the following:
- the ability to search or “spotlight” the whole phone
- cut, copy and paste functions, even between apps
-you can also send photos, contacts, audio files and location via multimedia messaging
- read and compose SMS and e-mail in landscape orientation
All these are just the official ones. Unsurprisingly, various blogs and tech journals have come out with their own versions of what features would be included in the new 100 list. Some are unimaginative, while others say that the new iPhone 3.0 would enable you to use your iPhone to predict when the Second Coming would take place.
Recent years have seen the rise of broadband, the capability of connecting to the Internet at connection speeds of more than 200 kilobits per second, or 1.5 megabits per second (depending on who you ask, the required speeds for broadband vary).
Apart from the faster connections, however, the advent of broadband did away with the tedious task of calling your ISP, waiting for an open line, and logging in before you could surf. Now, you only have to power on your computer and you’re instantly connected. And it has been met with widespread, and even increasing, acceptance. By February 2004, 48 million American homes already had broadband connection at home, representing around 24% of American adults, and signifying a 60% increase in adoption rates from a year earlier. You can only imagine what the adoption rates are currently at.
From how I see it, 2009 will be the year of video advertising, but it may not be YouTube’s year at all.
Recent reports have related about the rise of Hulu, which is significant for two reasons. One is that Hulu seems to be getting better reception nowadays and is said to be getting people off YouTube into its own domain.
They are advertising in YouTube. In fact, YouTube is where most users get introduced to Hulu. They upload short clips of films, TV series and other content on their YouTube channels, and then tell people to go to their site for the full versions.
Two, Hulu seems to have succeeded where YouTube failed: monetizing its videos. This is important because, as big as it is, YouTube have not earned too much from its videos, even when advertising overlord Google assumed its management. Hulu has done what YouTube did not bother looking at: advertising in the videos.
And it is not something that YouTube can easily replicate. Hulu has, from the start, secured the right to advertise in ALL the videos posted on the site. YouTube, on the other hand, is a hosting service that is not supposed to know what its users are posting on its site, much less be licensed to advertise with these videos. Much like how your hosting service is not supposed to see your database of customers, or what is on your Web site. Conversely, your hosting service is not allowed to proofread and edit the contents of your Web pages.
While YouTube will remain as the place to go to when you need a viral video fix, or went you want to watch user-generated videos, even when you need to upload your own videos, Hulu makes money better, and will become the go-to place for paid content like TV shows and movies. In this case, YouTube may not be the only victim, but also companies like NetFlix, that offer paid streaming of movies.
I concede that it will never be a question of Hulu toppling YouTube or vice versa: each serves a different purpose and caters to different needs. At the end of the day, YouTube will still find it more difficult to turn its site visitors into paying customers. Hulu, it seems, is inherently set to make money. In the world of business, it is not the number of people who goes into your store every day that makes a difference; it’s the number of people who buys. With the Hulu showing the way on how to monetize videos, video advertising will soon make sense.
YouTube is one of my guilty pleasures. I have a confession to make. Netflix does not do it for me, and somehow my brick and mortar video rentals have tapered off last year, thanks partly to these videos: