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Stop looking at social media as a scary new world – or even as a separate world from the one your marketing campaign is already living in.

A big mistake I’ve noticed companies making as they test the waters of marketing online is to think of social media marketing as a separate category from traditional marketing. This approach doesn’t make any sense to me.

Of course we all have budgets to stick to, but by taking advantage of the power of social media, you’re not subtracting from your marketing plan, you’re adding to it. No, wait…make that multiplying.

Anyone who’s ever had success in marketing will tell you the best approach is an integrated approach. Your work within one medium should complement your work in another medium. So when deciding to add social media to the mix, why treat it differently? Don’t you want your radio spot to gel with your TV spot? Same thing.

If you have an existing TV spot, put it on the web. If you have a website, create a microsite for an interactive twist. While you’re at it, Facebook is a great venue to bring your existing brand identity to life. Twitter can be an excellent gateway to your website. A blog can help create more personal relationships with the public and gain their trust.

To sweeten the pot, content created through your traditional marketing efforts can usually be transferred to online venues for little or no additional cost. (Don’t you love “synergy”?) Sprinkle in a few expertly executed videos (hint, hint), and you’re good to go.

It’s just common sense. Why not get more bang for your buck while also making your message more relevant to today’s more sophisticated consumer? It’s that simple.

But if it still doesn’t seem that simple, it’s okay, don’t throw up your hands in frustration. Write me at <a data-cke-saved-href="mailto:" href="mailto:" dan@bigteeth.tv"="">dan@bigteeth.tv</a>, or follow more of my amazing insights on <a data-cke-saved-href="twitter.com/danielhindin" href="twitter.com/danielhindin">twitter</a>, and I’ll be happy to walk you through some of the basics.</p><p></p><p></p> <p></p>

A recent New York Times online article (I would link but their idiotic policy of making you log in to view free content bugs me), posited that online video viewers are starting to tolerate longer video on the web. Essentially we are transitioning from the “dog humps chew toy” YouTube video to the episodic, well produced content – or as I like to call it the Huluization of the Internet.

To content producers, such as myself, this is a “great leap forward” (if China had twitter in the 1950s I’d reference @chairman_mao for that phrase). The idea here is that with the emergence of faster connection speeds and better technology, its not a matter of no attention span as much as actual ability to view video in real time. This was compared to the origin of film where kinematoscope could show 30-second clips and that became the standard until technology caught up and gave us feature length films (Note to Brad Pitt, you are allowed to make movies less than 3 hours long).

We makers of video have been sticking with the notion of shorter is better when it comes to the web, and this new hypothesis sticks a big giant thorn in the side of that concept. While I think that longer attention span for web video is the ultimate conclusion here, I’d estimate we’ve got a little ways to go. We’ve yet to cross the axis where content quality and technology meet for the average video viewer. But we’re moving closer to increasing length, and without having to buy any infomercial lengthening products.

So, dear readers, I ask you these questions:
1. What is your threshold for online video?

2.Do you have different criteria for different styles of video
(branding video on your website can be 1 minute, but “30 Rock” on Hulu can be 22 min)?

3. If your computer was hooked up to your TV would that make a difference?

Let’s hear what you have to say.

We’ve all heard the saying, “The customer is always right.” In a recent blog, blogger Alexander Kjerulf turned that age-old theory on its head, which led me to wonder: What’s the protocol when you completely disagree with your client’s comments or feedback, in a creative atmosphere?

We were in a situation recently where a client (let’s call him Napoleon) gave us feedback about a video project that basically sounded like he wasn’t too thrilled with the work we did. We, of course, can’t expect everyone to always love everything we do, so that’s part of the process. The rub came when Napoleon referred us to a video that he thought was the perfect example of what he wanted.

So, being the dutiful vendor that we are, we checked out this “perfect” video (I’ll mercifully omit a link to the example), and, in several of the Teeth’s opinions, it was, how to put it nicely, a piece of crap. The music was obvious and overused, the transitions were cheesy and, above all, we didn’t feel it addressed Napoleon’s branding needs any more than the version we presented.

As a vendor, we believe that we provide a quality service and that any video (or other piece) we deliver should be in the client’s best interest. The flip side is that ultimately someone is paying you to do something for them, and when it comes to something “creative,” there aren’t really right or wrong answers.

So what do you do in this situation when you’re dealing with a client you’d like to continue to work with in the future? Should you press back, touting your area of expertise? Is there a limit to how much, or a point you reach where you just give in and give them what they want, even if you know it’s wrong?

Let’s hear it, in your industry how do you deal with these situations?

For those who haven’t seen it, here’s a look into how many people on the vendor side feel.
(note: this is not a Big Teeth Production)

YouTube lets you annotate over your videos – which is sort of like pop-up video on VH-1. Remember that? Hmm, how can we take something someone’s supposed to watch and make it unwatchable? Let’s add lots of small bubbles of text over it. Good idea.

http://www.youtube.com/t/annotations_about

Point I’m making is YouTube and many other new ventures in web video are launching all these creative little quirky features to let you spruce up your video by adding text, or re-editing etc. Now here’s what strikes me as odd. Instead of coming up with new ways of encouraging people to pay less attention to the video their watching, why don’t we encourage people to make better videos?

There are countless new sites popping up with fresh web content and like regular ol’ TV, some of it is great and some of it is crap. But at least it’s out there and we can seek it out and watch it. Hurray for watching a show the way it’s made.

So, look, it’s late. It’s Sunday. I guess I spend so much of my days working on the best ways to deliver good content for either fun times or to market a product (and yes, sometimes both) and I can’t help but feel like all the developers out there who are looking for the way to revolutionize web video don’t realize the answer already exists, and I, dear friends, will impart this to you gratis. Write good scripts, think out your shots, edit wisely and learn how to compress video for the web.

There ya go, some more wisdom laid on ya from your pals at Big Teeth Productions.