Trophy Room put together a little video recap of our fishing trip to Antero reservoir. It is a beautiful location and an amazing place to fish.

Enjoy!

-Brandon

How do you keep your personality when launching a social media campaign? In this example, I use Phish (not just for my love of their music, but because they have launched an incredible social media campaign).  Phish is a band that has a long history of interaction with their fans and that doesn’t appear to be stopping anytime soon.

Phish hasn’t ever done things the ‘normal’ way; they have rarely used conventional advertising, or experienced popularity on MTV or the radio, yet they consistently sell out the largest venues in the US, and have held the “largest paid concert in the world on the eve of the millennium (1999, Big Cypress, Florida) with 80,000 fans.” - Rolling Stone – How? They continuously adapt with their fans and have never lost sense of their community, or their personality – even in their social media campaign.

Phish fans have always been internet savvy, from the days of tape trading and chat rooms, and the band recognizes this. In 2003, Phish launched LivePhish where fans can instantly download anything in the LivePhish catalog and stream music. Phish is on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, and have a separate section of Phish.com: ‘from the road,’ where pictures and setlists from tour are posted.

Phish’s social media campaign launched with the announcement of their reunion show in March at Hampton Coliseum in Virginia, via video. Hampton Coliseum has been a fan favorite for years and it is no coincidence that Phish chose this as their venue – they listen to their fans.

Since then, Phish has incorporated their unique (and strange) personality into various announcement videos such as their 2009 Summer Tour, 2009 Late Summer Tour, their shows at historic Fenway park (in baseball form, of course – see below), and the unveiling of the box set for their new album Joy.

As of a few weeks ago, their biggest social media promotion was the puzzling ‘Save the Date’ announcement for their Halloween festival, in which various US states would be eliminated from a map by way of darts, hot air balloons, and tug boats, just to name a few.  From early July until they announced the Festival a few weeks ago, fans were fixated on the outcome, creating massive buzz. Hidden Track, voted the Best Music Blog by 2008 Weblog Awwards, received 642 comments on theircontinually updated post about the ‘Save the Date’ map.

The biggest promotion now: what album will the band cover for their Halloween show during Festival 8? In the past, Phish has preformed albums by The Beatles, The Who, Talking Heads, and Velvet Underground. They have continued to engage fans by killing-off (Halloween style) the images of possible album covers.  Once again, fans are hooked on the cliffhanger waiting with baited breath for the outcome.

Phish posts about the festival on Twitter, as well as Facebook, and practice cross-promotion between their main sites and various social media sites. They continually keep their social media campaign interesting for their audience, they incorporate video that encompasses their brand’s personality and most importantly, they have fun with it.

Does your social media campaign have that much personality?

A few months ago, Room 214 worked with one of our clients (I’m not naming the company for competitive reasons but they are in the real estate industry) to create a series of promotional videos to be used on their website, blog, Facebook and Twitter accounts. Since we also manage a Google advertising campaign for this client, a logical place to utilize a small advertising surplus was with a one-month YouTube advertising “test” campaign. I call it a test because no one at Room 214 had ever tried a Promoted Video campaign on YouTube and, while we were optimistic that the campaign would work well given the visual nature of real estate, had no real benchmark in mind for what the results would be. It went well – we decided to allocate 20% of the monthly advertising budget moving forward to YouTube – and I walked away with a few learnings that may help you get your YouTube promoted video ad up-and-running.

First of all, I recommend that you consider a YouTube promoted video campaign if your company fits this description:

1) You already have a Google ad campaign (if you don’t have one, I recommend you make that your entree and consider YouTube as a supplement down the road)

2) Visual appeal has a direct impact on sales for your industry

3) You currently have or have plans to create a library of existing appealing video content (You probably don’t want to advertise the first video you put up on your YouTube channel – more on that in a sec)

If your company fits that description, keep reading. If not, you may want to look more closely at social media and search marketing.

·      A YouTube ad will, obviously, drive more views back to your YouTube channel so you’ll want to make sure that your channel’s up to par and that you have plenty of content/information available (re point 3 above). Create several videos and put them on your YouTube channel. Promote them via social networks, your website, blog, etc. Use audience feedback and YouTube insights to make an educated decision about which video resonates best with viewers and drives the most traffic back to your website and use that video for your ad.

·      The video you use should be entertaining and engaging. Don’t get too caught up with trying to make your video professional quality or overly marketed. You don’t need every line of the video to contain a keyword or marketing message – you need the video to be engaging and interesting so viewers will watch it and want to learn more. This is YouTube – some of the most successful viral videos have been amateur videos – this doesn’t need to be overly produced, shot on an expensive camera or cost a ton of money to show some ROI. If you’re not sure what I mean, check out Mashable’s list of the Top 20 YouTube and Video Memes of All Time.

·      When you create the ad, make a killer headline. The format of the ad is a still of your video, a 25 character headline and two 35 character lines of copy – so you need to make every word count.

·      Use keywords and linking in your video description, utilize tags and add annotations to point out what you want viewers to see/know during the video.

·      Create a Call to Action Overlay (they’re free with a promoted video campaign) so that, once you’ve driven potential customers to your video, they know what to do next and can become a customer.

·      Engage with viewers on your YouTube channel. You’ll see an increase in comments (ours increased about 300%), messages and ratings as well as views to the video – so be sure to interact with individuals who reach out to you.

·      Do a test run. I initially limited our campaign to one month and $3,000. Before you commit a large sum of your advertising budget to anything (in this economy?!) it’s a good idea to gauge if/how well promoted videos will work for you. During this limited-budget timeframe you can prioritize keywords, adjust bids and determine whether you want to allocate budget for it moving forward.

·      If you DO decide to move forward with a YouTube ad beyond the test-run phase – keep checking back with YouTube. This is a new ad platform for them so they’re making tweaks and updates that could potentially improve your campaign. Stay in the know and give it a shot!