YouTube Everything

I recently put out a press release for a client that I built in a lot of social networking tools to better enrich the news that was being announced and to actually have control over some of the messages. As part of the announcement we filmed a video with the new individual joining the company talking about how changes in the industry were accelerating and his point of view on technology, etc.

Ideally I wanted it to be 3 or 4 videos that we'd post on YouTube of 2-3 minutes each. But due to time it became 1 video, 7-minutes long. Still, after the first day that the news broke, the YouTube Video scored over 1,000 views. All the major news outlets included links to the video and some even referenced the conversation.

Now comes a story in the New York Times Magazine here that talks about how Obama used YouTube as part of his communications strategy.

Every communications vehicle today HAS to be part of a communications plan. And YouTube is the second most used search engine next to parent company Google.

As a PR professional I think that what the new social media tools do is give us a greater ability to not only tell our story across multiple channels, but in someways have greater control and visibility over what gets read. All this is due to the magic powers of "search" and what happens when the consumer, reporter, analyst, whomever, goes to search for a corporate name, a product, a whatever and they find a plethora of mentions that rise to the top that have all been provided and created by the company in question. The key is to do it from a journalistic point of view - not a spin doctor. But the tools are changing the game and for me, making my job different every day.