Sunday, May 29, 2016

YouTube


General Information
YouTube is social media platform enabling users to share video clips online. All users can watch videos on YouTube but the user must be registered to to upload their own videos. When a user is registered that user has their own “channel”. A user’s channel is the location where all of the videos that specific user uploads can be found. Users can subscribe to other user’s channels. YouTube.com described subscribing to a channel this way, “Instead of visiting each channel and looking for new content, subscribing allows you to see all of their new content, as well as what they’re watching and liking, right from the desktop YouTube homepage.” YouTube also allows users to build their own personalized playlists of their favorite videos eliminating the need for users to search for their favorite videos. Lastly, I believe another important use of the site is to allow the organization and storage of videos which ultimately serves to help the user remember important memories.

Purpose
YouTube.com states, “YouTube allows billions of people to discover, watch and share originally-created videos. YouTube provides a forum for people to connect, inform, and inspire others across the globe and acts as a distribution platform for original content creators and advertisers large and small.” Given this self description I assume the purpose of YouTube is to connect, inform, and inspire people across the globe through video clips.

Use in Business
YouTube provides one primary feature for businesses, video advertising. However, it is my opinion YouTube can also improve specific business operations when applied creatively. For example, at the physical therapy facility where I work I will routinely give my patients the name of a YouTube video they can watch to remind them of the correct way to perform an exercise while at home. In this specific situation YouTube can be used to provide better customer service. Another specific example is providing an employee with a video detailing how to use the features of computer software. If after the training the employee forgets how to use one of the software’s features the employee can review the video instead of asking another employee or calling the IT department thus increasing overall efficiency. Applying YouTube to create small improvements in operations may not yield a drastic impact on a business’s bottom line but this type of application deserves mention.

The most common method of a business using YouTube is advertising their brand, products, or services. Video offers the unique ability to deliver sight, sound, and convey the spectrum of human emotions which creates a better ad and thus increases consumer motivation to purchase a product. Channel.com describes ten reasons why advertising on YouTube can be successful:

  1. Incredible Reach: YouTube has the potential to reach the largest percentage of the population of any marketing medium.
  2. Search Engine Optimization: Video results appeared in almost 70% of the top 100 search listings on Google. When consumers look for products and services, the most likely first stop is a search engine.
  3. Share-ability: If viewers like what they see, the video shoots out across the video marketing universe in an instant, without the marketer investing another dollar to expand the video’s reach exponentially.
  4. Affordability: Television advertising is cost-prohibitive to reach a significant percentage of the target audience, but YouTube video marketing is extremely cost-effective.
  5. Product Support: Consumers want to know more about products and services they are considering purchasing. In 2012 Marketing Charts found that videos boost purchase confidence among viewers. More than 60% of consumers will spend at least two minutes viewing a video to obtain information for a planned purchase. At that time, about 66% of YouTube visitors responded that they had watched a product video within that social network.
  6. Obtain Feedback: Consumers are more likely to comment about online marketing messages than they are about traditional television advertisements.
  7. Measurability: Today’s advanced analytics enable marketers to understand exactly who is watching their message and when.
  8. Durability: While most advertising campaigns have a limited shelf life, YouTube video marketing is eternal, with a video message ready to respond every time a new prospect begins a search.
  9. Effectiveness: Consumers are motivated to buy after watching a video. In a ReelSEO study, 71% of the respondents confirmed that video converts better than other content.
  10.  Adds Personality: An online world can get impersonal pretty fast, but video gives marketers the opportunity to add some personality, humor, or testimonials, and put a “human face” on a corporation.
Assessment
According the statistical data provided by the DMR YouTube statistical Report there is enormous worldwide use of YouTube.
  • How many people use YouTube- 1 billion
  • How many video views per day- 4 billion
  • Hours of video watched per month- 6 billion
  • Percentage of U.S. small businesses using YouTube- 9%
  • Percent of millennials using YouTube- 81%
  • Percentage of U.S. Gen X using YouTube- 58%
  • Percentage of views coming from outside the U.S.- 80%
  • YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine and the 3rd most visited website worldwide, behind only Google and Facebook respectively


Unfortunately, the full report was no offered so I was not able to develop a complete understanding of YouTube’s effectiveness. From the information that was presented I am hesitant to recommend all businesses utilize YouTube for advertising purposes. YouTube may have a large reach, however, it may not reach into the demographic businesses may be targeting. 

My interpretation of the statics I saw was YouTube heavily saturates several demographic groups (millennials and Gen X) but lacks reach in younger and older generations. Another telling statistic was 80% of all views come from outside the U.S... So, if you are business targeting consumers only in the U.S. the number of people viewing YouTube in your demographic drops from 4 billion to 500 million. Which still sounds substantial considering the population of the U.S. was around 318 million in 2014. However, the number of 500 million views is not substantial when you consider how YouTube is typically used and what the mentality of the consumer is when using it.

Anecdotally, from my experience, people use YouTube to listen to music, watch movie previews, or watch comical videos. So, when I am using YouTube I do not have the mentality to buy something. I want to relax or party when I listen to music and be not be required to think when I watch comical videos. At that time I become extremely annoyed with ads and I become frustrated when they pop up. The ad actually has the effect of making me dislike the product or brand for annoying me. In conclusion, of the 500 million views in the U.S. that occur everyday the majority of those views are not of a business’s channel and seeing an ad for something when a consumer is not in the mood turns them off to what is being advertised. Thus, the total impact of YouTube’s reach is substantially smaller than the initial figure of 4 billion views leads someone to believe. Therefore, my opinion is the majority of businesses should not commit financial resources toward advertising on YouTube.

My Experience
Until this blog post I have not been a registered YouTube user, but I have been a viewer for many years. Creating an account was easy because I really didn’t need to. Since Google owns YouTube and I use Google for everything I went to my Google plus and selected the YouTube icon. So, in the future if I am logged into Google I will be logged into YouTube. To upload a video all that is needed is to drag and drop. I favorite a video about how to tie several different types of tie knots which also easy. Overall, the site is very intuitive, free, and quick so I had a good experience using it.

References
Wikipedia-Youtube
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Pintrest


General Information
Pinterest is a personalized social media platform that offers a “visual bookmark tool that helps you discover and save creative ideas.” It is comparable to a real life bulletin board. Instead of cutting pictures of things you like out of a magazine and putting the picture onto a physical bulletin board, you are searching online and “pin” an image to your Pinterest page. A pin is a picture which has a link embedded in the picture so when the image is selected the link will take the user to the website the image represents. Users can upload, save, sort, and manage their pins (pin=picture with link in it) through “pinboards” or just “boards”. Boards are collections of images users pin that are organized by a central topic or theme. For example, I have a pinboard titled watches where all the pins of watches I like can be found. Your “Pinterest Page” is a collection of all your pinboards. So, a Pinterest page holds a user’s personalized group of pinboards, and the pinboards hold all of the images the user wants to save.

Users find images to pin on their personal Pinterest page by browsing generic pinboards the website creates for you or by searching a specific topic. When a user pins images to their personal board the website is able to guess about what types of pins a user may like and puts them together for the user to look through. The group of pins the website guesses a user may like is called the “pin feed”. The pin feed will also show pins the user’s friends have pinned and users can send pins to their friends. Content found outside of the Pinterest website can be uploaded to the user’s board via the "Pin It" button. The pin it button can be downloaded to the bookmark bar on a web browser.

Purpose
You know when you're browsing online and see something you like and don't want to forget about it? What do you do? You could email it to yourself, print it out, or bookmark it on your computer. The problem is, each of those options has drawbacks which ultimately leads to you forgetting what you wanted to remember. Pinterest solves this problem by providing users a place to organize and remember those ideas. Pinterest is also self described as “the world’s catalog of ideas”.  The CEO of Pinterest, Ben Silbermann, summarized the purpose of the website is to provide a "catalog of ideas" that inspires users to "go out and do that thing."

Use in Business
Pinterest also allows businesses to create pages to promote their companies online. Pinterest offers services to assist businesses in creating their own Pinterest page and best practices for operating it. The Pinterest pages created serve as a "virtual storefront" for a business. The Social Media Examiner explained how Pinterest helps businesses in this way, “Pinterest lets brands deliver content in an easily shareable format that leads to increased visibility and higher traffic numbers.” A study observing the web traffic on the jewelry and accessories website Boticca.com is evidence for The Social Media Examiner’s statement. The study occurred in 2012 and compared users coming from Facebook and Pinterest. The study found users from Pinterest spent less time on the company’s website but spent $180 compared to $85 spent from users coming from Facebook. A systematic review also completed in 2012 confirmed the case study’s findings and concluded Pinterest was more effective at increasing sales than other social media platforms. However, according to a study done by the Pew Research Center in 2015 72% of internet users use Facebook compared to 31% of internet users using Pinterest and among the users of each respective site Facebook had a frequency of visits as seen in the graph

Pinterest can also contribute to companies, especially small companies, get become known. An anecdotal story from my own experience was my discovery of Etsy. It is group of small stores that typically only have a presence online and contains homemade products. I discovered the website on Pinterest and since then I have only gotten my family’s gifts from that site. The final use of Pinterest in business is to identify trends of customers. By tracking the way customers pin things, a business could gain insight to what products are popular, deduce why specific products are popular and use that information for product development.

Assessment
From a sales perspective there is no question Pinterest is the most effective social media platform. The studies described above, while older, offer the first quantitative evidence I have found comparing social media platform effectiveness. Considering the features of Pinterest vs. Facebook I believe Pinterest is more effective at increasing sales; because, generally speaking, a person using Facebook has a different mentality or frame of mind than a person using Pinterest. Pinterest goers use the site, as Pinterests’ CEO Ben Silbermann said, to "go out and do that thing". When a person is on Pinterest the user is more likely to be looking for inspiration to accomplish a task, which is more likely to lead to a purchase compared to Facebook where users who are looking to connect with friends. However, there is a social stigma associated with the use of Pinterest. The belief is that using Pinterest is only for women and men use the site their masculinity questioned. I believe this stigma greatly limits the total number of Pinterest users and narrows the effectiveness to businesses catering to women.



My Experience
I am figuratively in love with Pinterest. The site simple to navigate and for me it is far more addicting to use than any other social media platform. As presented above, there is a stigma around the site as being predominately used by women for recipes, event planning, and decorating; however, I reject that perception. I have 21 difference pinboards on my page and none of them could be considered un-masculine.
My family uses my page as a source for gift ideas and I use it to store gift ideas I have for them. This makes shopping around birthdays and holidays much easier and no one ever has any idea what I am getting them as a gift because I don’t need to have the awkward, “what you want for Christmas?”, conversation. I also have a pinboard dedicated to each of my hobbies. Each board serves as a list of what I should do next pertaining to that hobby. Lastly, I find looking through the memes on Pinterest to be way more fun than using any other social media platform or visiting any other website on the internet. For example, the meme to the left was related to me today and seeing after my newly washed car got crapped on by was pretty funny.

References
Pew Research Study on Social Media Statistics 
Pinterest Image
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Google Drive




General Introduction
Google Drive is an online office suite that includes a word processor (Google Docs), spreadsheet program (Sheets), and presentation tool (powerpoint). It enables users to store any type of file (word document, photos, videos, PDF, etc.), access the files anywhere, from any device, share files with other users, take surveys, and connects seamlessly with other Google products. Users have 15 gigabytes (GB) of free storage space with the option to purchase more. For example, 100 GB of storage for $1.99, 1 TB for $9.99, 10 TB for $99.99, 20 TB for $199.00, 30 TB for $299.00 all paid per month. The files can be accessed through the Google Drive app or by logging onto its web address.

Google Drive keeps files saved on your device so that you can access them when offline and then syncs these files with your Google Drive whenever your computer connects to the internet. This removes the need to save multiple copies on different devices. It will sync automatically to any file or folder within the "my drive" category.

Purpose
The purpose of Google Drive is to make working on files more efficient, storage more secure, make the use of other google products easier, and offer a cheaper alternative to Microsoft office. Unlike other platforms I have reviewed for this blog, Google Drive is not another version of social media. Social media platforms were made to foster personal communication; they were not designed with business use as a major consideration. Businesses have adapted social media platform features to generally assist in marketing operations. Google Drive is different because it was designed to make doing work easier.

Use in Business
Google Drive’s application in business is significant because it can eliminate costs and improve efficiency.  There is unlimited storage, all files are backed up, the most up to date security features are applied, and it enables increased group collaboration. People can work on the same document simultaneously and make comments all in real-time, which avoids back and forth emails, communication delays, and duplication of work. Automatic activity updates show who edited files and when. A file version control feature lets you go back to previous versions of a file without having to worry about losing track of a change. The video meeting feature connects group members while saving money and time on travel, but still getting the benefits of face-to-face meetings.

Assessment
Google Drive amazing integrates products to accomplish tasks faster. The sharing features will significantly improve collaboration and efficiency. However, there are areas where Google Drive can improve and falls short of competitors. One negative is any deletion on Google Drive cannot be undone. So, there is no chance to recover a document from a hard drive or the trash once it has been deleted. Google Drive also falls short to Microsoft regarding available options and performance when creating files. For example, when making files, such as: word documents, spread sheets, and powerpoints there are not as many fonts to select from, in-text citation formats, and it seems Google drive runs slower.  

My Experience
My experience with using all the features of Google Drive as been great.  I use Google Drive to store all of the documents I need regular access to for class, to collaborate on group projects, for my email, my personal calendar, and my online shopping. My favorite feature is being able to work on a single document with group members. There is no need for everyone to email their sections to a single persona and then have that person format the document. A close second favorite feature is the automatic sync of file changes. I no longer have a different version of a document saved on each of my different devices; so there is no more guessing which document version I worked on last. Lastly, the way Google Drive integrates my gmail, google calendar, google chrome browser, favorite links, google search engine, google scholar, and all the other features discussed together is fantastic. I utilize each product far more because they are together and presented to me in a logical way than if each product was stand alone.

References





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