Inversores DC/AC

Content diversity, in combination with user base that covers almost all age groups, offers incredible possibilities for targeting on YouTube. For that very reason, when the majority of users think of digital video, they most commonly have YouTube in their mind. Studies conducted, like the one from 2012 by comScore, confirm what every user already intuitively knows – video platform No. 1 in the world is YouTube (No. 2 is Facebook, which is one more demonstration of the importance of these two social media). 2013 AYTM Market Research study speaks in the best possible way about YouTube's popularity – it showed that nearly half internet users spend time on YouTube at least couple of times a week. If observation period is extended to at least couple of times a month then data shows

that vast majority of U.S. internet users (almost 75%) use YouTube at least that much. Opposite to that, nearly half of respondents claimed that they very rarely or never access any other video-sharing web site. So, according to this study, not only that YouTube is the most popular video-sharing site, it doesn't have single true competitor, apart from Facebook (the only thing that has changed since 2013 is that usage rate for video content on Facebook is growing), with whom it's well connected and which is social media, as well.

EMarketer conducted a research in 2014, trying to find out which techniques are the most effective for attracting viewers to watch digital video on social media. These are the results:

 The largest percentage of marketing professionals (60,9%) that

participated in the research said that the most important thing is to target viewer's interest,

 21.9% of respondents thought that the most important is to make the ad entertaining,

 Next component, according to 7.8% of total responds, a video should possess, is being educational/informative,

 4,7% polled marketers considers humor the most important,

 While 4.7% respondents would decide to use famous actor/personality in other to make ad more attractive.

These findings are, in principle, in accordance with the recommendations given by Larry Weber who finds that video content, in order to be successful in social media world, needs to be either informative or educational or entertaining or all three (Weber, 2009, pp. 195).

Blendtec's series of video clips that caused a revolution on YouTube presents an example of successful YouTube campaign which, to some extent, breaks the rules established by the aforementioned eMarketer research (from 2014). Taking in consideration that Blendtec's “Will it Blend?” YouTube campaign, that made this small, unknown company from Utah a global phenomenon, exists for more than ten years – we could easily say that this particular campaign is the one who is/was creating rules for success on YouTube, instead of trying to fit into existing rules. It could easily be said that U.S. Midwest Company, Blendtec, represents the best example of using YouTube as a promotional tool – even more, as a primary sale & marketing tool. Before Blendtec started with its video campaign, in October of 2006, only the narrow circle of buyers knew about the high-performance blenders that Blendtec was selling. Even they didn't know anything about the “weird” habit that owner and CEO of Blendtec, Tom Dickson, had – in order to test his blenders, he pulverized anything that comes to his hands in them – from pieces of marble to Rubik's cubes. Noone would find out if there wasn't for company’s Marketing Director, George Wright, who had a brilliant idea for a series of viral video. They started shooting videos in which the main character, Tom Dickson, melted anything they could think of – iPhones, iPads, Nike snickers, Coke cans, Transformer toys, TV remote controls etc. – and posting those video clips on company's YouTube channel, which they named “Will it Blend?”.

Figure 6: Will it Blend?

Source: https://www.youtube.com/user/Blendtec

If we compare Blendtec's campaign with the way this type of campaigns are suppose to be run, according to eMarketer's research from 2014, we would notice that they are not very much in accordance. We could hardly say that Blendtec's campaign targets interests of large number of viewers, its educational/informative component is questionable, and company's CEO, Tom Dickson, hardly fits into the profile of famous personality – he even doesn't fit into the profile of a person any company would put in the commercial for its brand/product. Nevertheless, after only a month of “campaigning”, with the initial investment of 50$, Blendtec's blenders sale rose by 400%. That was followed by numerous interviews for some of the most influential newspapers, magazines and TV networks in America and globally: The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Esquire, Business Week, NBC, CBS, Fox, History Channel, Discovery Channel... With 825 thousand subscribers and over 265 million views, “Will it Blend?” became one of the most famous channels on YouTube. Some of the Blendtec's channel clips like “Will it Blend? iPad” with 18 million views, may be put in the group of extremely popular videos on YouTube. That brought global “glory” to company, as well to company's CEO, Tom Dickson, which, naturally, had its positive repercussions on financial results. After nearly ten years, video content on “Will it Blend?” YouTube channel didn't lose any of its initial actuality, creativity and humor – on the contrary. Recently, in one of the newly posted video clips, Tom Dickson blended “Hillary Clinton’s e-mails” (connected to recent scandal U.S. presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, had with e-mail "leak") on the set of Bloomberg's “With All Due Respect” show. During melting, he commented that he did it “faster than Hillary already did” because “pulverizing politics can be quite a rush”. Humor, entertainment, authenticity, originality and creativity are often capable of creating users interest, even if it didn't exist before.

Figure 7: Will it Blend? Hillary Clinton's Emails Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwhQGON-kxE

Like Facebook, YouTube can be used for cross-platform strategies. Sneak previews of Super Bowl commercials (American football championship game) which are usually posted on YouTube before the championship game can serve as a good example of “cooperation” between YouTube and classical TV campaign. During and after the game, hundreds of thousands of people jump online to debate about the commercials, share their favorites, see what reviewers say, and add their voices to the discussion (Weber, 2009, pp. 194). It's not unusual that, after the game, video clips with some kind of mix of Super Bowl commercials appear on channels of “ordinary” users. Those clips tend to gather thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of views. The unexpected and unusual part is that these viewers were clicking to watch five to ten minutes of nothing but ads!

CONCLUSION

In modern world, advertising content is, literally, everywhere we look. What would be the recipy for companies, in a world overloaded with ads, to make sure that their creative effort is noticed? By going where their users are spending more and more of their time – in digital world, e.g. in social media world. According to McKinsey Global Institute's ecent report, organizations can unlock up to $1.3 trillion in annual business value using social technologies. That's consistent with the findings of University of Chicago, Associated Press and American Press Institute February 2015 research, which showed that 26% of US millennial internet users rely on Facebook for researching products and price comparison, while another 18% rely on other social media. Thus, almost 50% of youngsters base their buying decisions on “social experiences”.

Companies are aware of these facts and majority of them put strong efforts in developing sustainable social media business strategies. However, number of companies is facing numerous challenges in choosing proper, effective strategy and its implementation. In Harris Poll's “Social Business Benchmark 2014” global online survey (in which participated more than 750 companies from around the world) couple of key themes emerged which are related to challenges that companies face in social media:

 Many of the benefits of social media are also the source of perceived challenges: while 84% of respondents consider enhancing relationships with existing customers as social media's value, 67% cite assessing the effectiveness of social media activities as a challenge; moreover, while around 80% companies value the ability to monitor external conversations about their company and to learn about company's reputation in social media, even 60% consider taking data gathered from social media and turning it into something actionable as a challenge,

 62% of participants in survey say designing a social media strategy is a challenge, while 43% cite creating buy-in among executives as a challenge,  That alignment across departments is a challenge said 54% of respondents;

opposite to that, only 30% of participants claimed that their social media strategy is very/completely aligned across various departments within their company; even among those who say their strategy is at least somewhat aligned, 64% cite aligning their social media strategy across various departments was difficult,

 Social media, while important to the bottom line, still presents challenges: while 88% of companies agree their organization's social media presence is important to stay competitive and 86% consider analyzing data about their social engagement can help their company improve its bottom line, only 41% of companies that participated in the survey agree their organization fully capitalizes on the data captured by social media.

It's obvious that three key findings single out from the above-cited data:  Business world realizes the importance of social media and that has been

materialized in stronger presence of brands/companies in social media,  creation and implementation of business strategies in social media still

presents a challenge for many companies, which is, in the number of cases, the consequence of the fact that

 The majority of companies are still not capable to manage, in the most productive way, data gathered in “social” world.

Hence, it's clear that, in the future, professionals will have to work on developing tools which will help in processing data gathered in social media and on creating more superior strategies of social media business presence. Global brewer, Anheuser-Busch InBev (ABI), might be considered as a good example how to succeed in social media, because they achieved twice the digital ROI as its peer competitors and compared to the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry average thanks to a successful digital strategy ABI created and implemented. ABI

recognized young people age 21-27 as target group for their campaign and then focused all their efforts on translating data-fueled insights into effective marketing and media execution that leads to strong ROI's. As Harry Lewis, Senior Director of Consumer Connections at ABI, said: “Developing a clear performance management strategy is essential to having successful digital advertising campaigns. There's no magic here – it just takes good data, discipline and process.”

LITERATURE

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VIRTUAL TEAMS COMMUNICATION MODEL