For social video producers, a call-to-action for commerce can feel icky on their entertaining, creative content. They fear polarizing their audience or being seen as “selling out”. But there are ways to inject commerce into your social video while keeping the audience engaged:

New Antics’ latest video injects subtle commerce points into Terence Jay Music’s Diablo 3 music video.

1. Annotation & End Slate Calls-To-Action

Use annotations to direct viewers mid-video to important links in your description. Use the end slate to give your audience a “next step” now that the content has concluded. Use voice over or a talking head to deliver effective action.

In the Diablo 3 video…we have a persistent CTA to “Win the Armor” and a full end slate explaining what to do next including “buy the song” and “win the armor”.

2. Commerce & Affiliate Links in the Description

Include URL’s with “http://” in your video’s description for commerce and affiliate links. Sign up for Amazon’s Affiliate program or link directly to your own products.

In the Diablo 3 video…we include links to the Diablo 3 game on Amazon, download the song on iTunes, the T-shirt merch store and featured Call To Action to for the T-Shirt/Armor raffle.

3. Incentivize Commerce

Create a fun, compelling reason to drive commerce. In this Diablo 3 video our commerce goal is to drive special edition T-shirt sales. We incentivize T-shirt purchases by creating a simple raffle to win the epic Demon Hunter Armor featured in the video. For fans, getting a great T-shirt was already cool, but buying it for a chance to win the armor is just gravy.

Do you have more commerce tips? Questions about implementing these tips on your videos? Let us know in the comments!

However, on April 14 YouTube shook up of its famous Partner Program and Monetization (beta) Program, and so far the non-Partner response has been utter confusion.

If you were one of the many YouTubers who had monetization enabled on some videos, congratulations! You’re automatically considered a YouTube Partner now!

What about all those nifty branding options like custom thumbnails and banners? Sorry, those are reserved for Full Partners (those who were Partnered before April 14). But you can still apply to become a “Full Partner” and get those perks? No! You can no longer apply to the Partner Program, and there is no indication when/how those features will become accessible.

YouTube acknowledged the community backlash by updating their statement:

We’re excited to provide more creators with the opportunity to become partners and have access to programs and resources to help them be successful on YouTube. These programs will be tailored to partners based on their specific needs. We also recognize that custom thumbnails and banners are sought-after features by many creators. We are working on making these and other features available to more newly-made partners overtime, like we have done with long uploads and monetization.

So there may be hope. YouTube has already started updating the Video Manager page, but these changes exposed some significant problems in the YouTube community:

No one likes it when the finish line gets moved. If YouTube wants to keep new creators inspired to produce content on their platform, they’ll need to keep their promises clear and transparent to the community. Changing policy is fine, YouTube just needs to be clear about “where we go from here”.

If you’re offering a new feature, make sure it works. More Partners now means more monetized videos. Due to the higher volume of monetizable content, YouTube’s monetization review system broke. More content is getting denied unfairly by claiming “Insufficient rights to content” with no room to appeal. Many creators who were monetizing content with the same music and visuals pre-April 14, are now getting denied or delayed. And the YouTube support has been meek.

Do you think the Partner change up is fair or un-fair for YouTubers?

YouTubers are largely broke, web series budgets are low and destination sites can’t achieve ROI on their premium content. It’s become a race to the bottom with “how cheaply can you produce your content?”

Online video currently operates like TV, and its an industry-wide mistake. TV doesn’t cater to long-tail niche audiences and it doesn’t allow anyone with a camera equal access to an audience. TV isn’t lean forward, social or interactive.

True video monetization comes from social video commerce.

Social video commerce is video worth sharing that generates commerce. Video sharing leads to “earned commerce” similar to public relation firms measuring “earned media”. Commerce and video are both social. They are self expressions what we like to buy and watch. If the content and product are in harmony, earned commerce can be unlocked:

Imagine the boot advertiser above gives you a $2 CPM (cost per thousand views) and your social video received 50,000 views. You earned $100!

Now imagine the same boot advertiser paid you $2 per boot purchased from your video’s audience. And 1% of your 50,000 viewers bought a pair of boots from your social video. You just earned $1000.

In the diagram above, notice how these boot sales multiply exponentially because of sharing. Social video is a new medium TV has never known. Earned commerce eclipses earned media revenue and value exponentially.

The earned commerce effect is the heart of social video commerce. Expect direct marketers to start migrating towards video as the technology and platforms develop. Why wouldn’t a boot retailer want to sell their product on your share-worthy video?

If you’re a video content creator, don’t settle for impressions. Strive for social video commerce.

What’s cool about the app is that they came up with solutions for a lot of the basic problems that are inherent with making an Instagram for video. For example, a common issue with shooting video from your smart phone is rotating the phone to get a better view of what you are trying to see. While this makes sense while you are shooting, it can lead to a vomit-inducing final product. Viddy addresses this by instructing users to rotate the phone to a landscape view before they start shooting.

The addition of their stock music tracks is a little clunky and annoying, but I’m sure this will be streamlined. The other issue I have with it is the rendering time it takes to look at each new filter. This is a necessary consequence of applying video filters on the fly, but it seems like they could use a lower resolution file for quick previews and then have it get fully rendered before posting.

It’s got filters and a great user interface that makes it easy to cruise around and find interesting content. You can easily transmit your clips to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Tumblr. It also helps that all the videos are just 15 seconds long to mitigate time wasted on lame content. However, the bottom line is, will users adopt it and spread the love in the same way they have with Instagram?

So far so good with the app closing in on 5 million users and even having over 300,000 new users sign up in 24 hours once they launched Facebook Timeline integration last week. A lot of the content I saw was around music with people playing covers, clips from concerts, etc. and the ever-present baby and pet videos. As more and more users get on the platform, I’m excited to see what kind of 15 second creativity will emerge.

Have you tried Viddy? What are your thoughts? What is the app missing? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Gen-Y seeks retailers with an “experience they’d like to share”

Video will be a key differentiator for retailers. As the entertainment industry has proven, video is extremely visceral and triggers emotional responses. Those creating emotionally engaging videos will create an experience and piece of content that can be shared – and drive commerce. New Antics calls this social video commerce.

Ability to  ’make me smile’ is 33% more important to Gen Y than to Boomers

So which emotional response do customers want to share? Smiles. These can be comedic, inspiring, or whatever makes a retailer’s audience use their cheek muscles. The power of social video for retailers cannot be stressed enough. For Gen-Y, personality drives sales and social video should be a mandatory for any retailer’s marketing plan.

Gen-Y are more likely to wonder “What does this brand say about me?”

Self expression is synonymous with social media. As brand marketers know, video is the perfect tool to establish a brand’s tone, identity and anthem. Similar to creating “smiles”, retailers should also use video to communicate their identity and resonate with their core customers.

Bottom Line? Retailers serious about driving Gen-Y commerce need to create social videos about their brand, their products  and their customers.

Read the full report at MediaPost.

A while back, YouTube adopted the suggested search feature from Google to help guide searchers to phrases as they type in the search box. This is an excellent way to speed up your search time, but it also gives us an insight into what the most common searches are on YouTube.

Simply go to YouTube and begin typing phrases that you think people would search to find your content. As you type, YouTube will offer up suggestions each step of the way of the most common searches. The trick is to inspect the top search terms that YouTube suggests and then combine them in a relevant way to be your video’s title. You can also use the less relevant terms as tags for some extra link juice.

Another tip that people often over look is that the YouTube suggest tool is a powerful way to brainstorm content ideas before you produce a video. It makes it easy to gauge the interest of the YouTube audience in a quick, top level way before you dive in and actually create content.

Pinterest? For video marketing? The answer is yes.

While most people are using Pinterest strictly for sharing photos, it can also be used to share video content.  One of the biggest benefits of Pinterest is that it’s the only social platform that really gets content discovered outside of a given users network. Your friends see it, but so do other Pinterest users giving your content a great opportunity to be seen by a new audience.

Right now Pinterest users are mostly female and the most popular topics are in the fashion and food categories. If your business touches either of these spaces, you must be on Pinterest. If not, get on Pinterest and start creating collections around your industry so you can have an established channel as the audience expands.

Here are a few tips to get the most out of Pinterest for your social video marketing efforts.

Get More YouTube Views

Thumbnails are always critical. This is doubly true on Pinterest as the site will pull the thumbnail of the video to be the primary image on Pinterest. For a general YouTube channel, you get three pre-selected choices so the best way is to plan for that in your production and try and get a great looking shot right in the middle of the video.

If you are a YouTube partner, you can upload your own thumbnail. I would recommend cruising around on Pinterest so you can see what kind of imagery is doing well and get a strong photo that represents the content and would also be attractive to Pinterest users.

One thing to note for thumbnails when optimizing for Pinterest is that they put a big play button in the middle of the thumbnail. Make sure that this doesn’t obscure whatever your primary visual is. For example if you put your face in the middle of the screen, it will be blocked out by this button.

As of right now, I’ve only seen the video sharing where the embed an actual player work with YouTube. Pinterest doesn’t seem to recognize other video thumbnails embedded, which leads me to my next tip.

Drive Traffic To Your Video Pages

Whether or not you use YouTube for your videos on your site, you can still put an attractive image on your video page and Pinterest will pull it. If your goal is to drive traffic back to your site rather than drive views on a YouTube video, this is the best way to do it.

Everywhere that this image is shared on Pinterest will become a link back to your website page with the video on it leading to more views.

Encourage Your Audience to Pin

Pinterest is growing fast, but it’s still relatively young and people aren’t used to interacting with it on a regular basis like they are with Facebook and Twitter. This is especially true when looking at videos on Pinterest. How do you resolve this? Educate.

Write a post explaining to your audience what Pinterest is and how to use it to share and organize content from your site that they like. Then include the Pin This button on your individual pages so that users can easily share it with their audience.

The other technique is to share everything you put on Pinterest on Facebook and Twitter where your audience is already used to daily interactions.

Have you found an interesting way to use Pinterest for video marketing? Let us know in the comments!

The problem? YouTube is based on ad impressions (CPM) and it is simply not enough to support premium content. But what happens when you inject commerce and you generate more revenue per viewer?

What if OK GO did a special Kindle Fire social commerce video similar to the video it did with Chevy? The video could actually drive clicks and Kindle Fire sales. I don’t see anyone buying Chevy Sonics online. And with all the sharing OK GO videos get? For every 1 purchase, a viewer could share the video and drive additional sales, or “earned commerce”. This is the sweet spot of social video commerce. Of course this couldn’t happen on YouTube today. But it could happen elsewhere.

OK GO, drop us a line if you’re truly tired of being YouTube poor. We completely understand.

Discovered via DigitalMusicNews.com.
Scroll down to the comments section to read Rio Caraeff, VEVO CEO, reply to this article.

Here is a great opportunity to increase your brand awareness, acquire new customers and drive more traffic to your site in 2012. Communication with your customers does not have to be tedious. We believe video content, which was positioned at #7 last year, will gain more traction as a tactic used by content marketers in 2012. Video gives brands the chance to create fun, interesting and informative content that can drive their customers to share these videos through social media outlets.

Discovered via Mashable.com.

It seems many brands, including Verizon, have forgotten the golden rule of marketing: make it as simple as possible for the consumers. The more complex you make your product and service names, along with their actual benefits and differentiators, the worse the consumer experience becomes.

Enter Saturday Night Live’s recent skit which exposes a social truth we consumers have been experiencing “We’re overwhelmed by all the mobile phones, data plans, data speeds and benefits.” As marketers we can learn from Saturday Night Live and keep it simple, stupid.

What can Verizon do? We’re not saying they should contradict their current TV campaigns, but creating a fun, social response video with a call-to-action to drive commerce would be smart. Maybe create a new overly complex offer (hoax) with a coupon? What do you think?