Today, YouTube is being used in state and local elections around the country.

For example, State Senator Jamie Eldridge (D-Acton) has started uploading campaign videos to YouTube. Here’s one with an optimized title. In case you haven’t figured it out, the keywords are: Senator Jamie Eldridge, alternative energy sources, and green jobs in Massachusetts.

Senator Jamie Eldridge Speaks about Alternative Energy Sources & Green Jobs in Massachusetts

I should disclose that my son, Brendan, works on Senator Eldridge’s staff. But I was supporting Jamie long before that and I’m proud that he was the first (and only) candidate ever elected under the Clean Elections Law — before the Massachusetts Legislature repealed it.

And I should disclose that I provided about 5 minutes of free advice on how to optimize the title of this video. But I have no financial interest in supporting alternative energy sources and green jobs in Massachusetts.

So, take the FTC blogger guidelines and Massachusetts campaign finance laws and, well, follow them.

It’s also worth noting that this YouTube video has been embedded on the homepage of the Jamie Eldridge for State Senate website. This best practice was also used in the U.K. by The Conservative Party, The Liberal Democrats, and The Labour Party.

So, it’s not just the 2008 Obama campaign that is redefining the way that elections will be won in the future.

The Monty Python Channel on YouTube

In Chapter 11 of my new paperback book, Goldstone tells me the Pythons created a YouTube channel in November 2008 just to stop their content from being released illegally on the Internet. Goldstone says, “We felt the time had come to deal with the ‘YouTube problem.’ On the one hand, we were surprised at the number of clips that had been uploaded to YouTube in clear infringement of our copyright, and while we didn’t want to be spoilsports, it was getting pretty much out of control and we could see no real benefit. So I arranged a trip to meet the YouTube guys on the Google campus in San Jose and discovered that they had a program that would enable us to have our own Monty Python channel on YouTube where we could put up clips from the movies and TV shows of far greater quality and order that might also encourage viewers to want to see whole movies or TV episodes via links to Amazon and iTunes and expand our Monty Python fan base.”

When Goldstone launched Monty Python’s Channel on November 14, 2008, he took advantage of YouTube’s click-to-buy program. The Python’s DVDs quickly climbed to No. 2 on Amazon’s Movies & TV bestsellers list and DVD sales increased 23,000 percent. Goldstone tells me, “The click-to-buy ability was exactly what we were looking for to make the link from video to the right Amazon page much more effective than the URL by the side of the video description. We are only now beginning to address premium advertising, which is only possible when you can show the size, composition, and consistency of your viewers.”

Published by Wiley, YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day goes on sale on August 17, 2009. This 504-page guide provides extensive coverage of keyword strategies and video optimization, distribution and promotion strategies to other sites and blogs, YouTube advertising opportunities, and crucial metrics and analysis. For more information about the paperback book or to read excerpts of Chapters 1 and 11, go to www.wiley.com/go/youtubehouraday.

Among the people providing advance praise for my new paperback book is Michael Miller, author of YouTube for Business: Online Video Marketing for Any Business. Miller says, “Whether your budget is zero or tens of thousands of dollars, Greg Jarboe shows you how to get the best bang for your online marketing buck. In his book, YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day, Greg takes you beyond basic techniques to professional promotion and advertising strategies — everything you need to market your business on YouTube.”

After their presentation, I presented a case study on NACA’s Save the Dream event in Cleveland, Ohio. You can watch the documentary video produced by Mont Fennel and Michael Kolowich of DigiNovations that was featured in my presentation below.

Documentary: NACA’s “Save the Dream” – Mortgage Restructuring and Renegotiation Rescues Homeowners

I also talked about my new paperback book, YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day, which goes on sale August 17, 2009. To download a PDF of my PowerPoint presentation, click on NPVA/NE.

During the Q&A that followed my presentation, I was asked about a number of issues that I’ll also be addressing at both the SES San Jose conference August 10-14, 2009, and the Social Media & Video Strategies forum, which will run concurrently on August 11. These issues include:
(1) How to Optimize for Search & Engage the Community on Tuesday morning, August 11;
(2) What Works: Best Practices / Case Studies for Online Video on Tuesday afternoon, August 11;
(3) News Search SEO on Thursday, August 13; and
(4) YouTube and Video Marketing Workshop on Friday, August 14.

Now, it doesn’t take a whole lot of complex market trend analysis to see the parallels between the NPVA/NE meeting on the East Coast in July and SES San Jose and Social Media & Video Strategies on the West Coast in August. Professional videographers are just as interested in learning more about social media and search engine optimization as search engine optizers are in learning more about social media and video marketing. Why? As last night’s audience learned from Tom and Reiko, you can double your business by combining all of these digital marketing tactics into an integrated marketing strategy.

But, there’s another reason why it’s important to get out of your comfort zone and explore new categories.

Recently, Scott Kirsner of The Boston Globe wrote an article entited, “Where the jobs are in anxious times.” He talked with some local recruiters who focus on the innovation economyu, specializing in sectors like technology, life sciences, and energy. He asked them about specific jobs and industry clusters where they’ve been seeing demand lately — as well as jobs and industry clusters where demand has died off.

Clark Waterfall of the Boston Search Group told Kirsner, “engineers and salespeople are always perceived as must-have team members, but marketers and PR and business development can tend to be nice-to-haves in times like these.”

Kirsner also heard that a new role being created at many companies is a social media expert, who can help the company communicate with customers and prospects using new channels like Twitter, Facebook, and blogs.

“Sometimes that job is called ‘community manager’ or ‘community rep,’” Tom Summit of Catalyst Recruiting Corp. told Kirsner, adding, “But the people who can get hired are the ones who can relate online activities to quantifiable metrics. What are you doing for the company, aside from just starting a blog?”

What Kirsner didn’t address in his article is where this new community manager’s position fits in the org chart. In other words, does this new position report to the marketing director, the public relations director, or the digital media director? And is this new community manager position being created in addition to or instead of more search engine optimization jobs?

If the community manager is helping a company to communicate with customers and prospects using Twitter, Facebook, and blogs, who is responsible for using YouTube, Flickr and Digg? If the community manager is supposed to relate online activities to quantifiable metrics, will he or she have access to the company’s web site analytics?

Oh, and don’t even ask who the professional videographer reports to in the org chart. As Michael Kolowich, the President and Executive Producer of DigiNovations, said during the Q&A part of last night’s meeting, corporate videography is generally assigned to the marcom manager, who sees it as an isolated marketing tactic and not part of a broader integrated marketing strategy.

As I observe in my book, “I still don’t have all the answers, but I’m beginning to ask the right questions.” And these are the strategic questions that the Chief Marketing Officer of your organization needs to be asking, too.

My new paperback book which will be published August 17, 2009, reveals how the Barack Obama campaign utilized YouTube video marketing to win the 2008 presidential election. YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour A Day, a complete, task-based guide to developing, implementing, and tracking a video marketing strategy, features a case study of the Obama campaign along with an interview with Arun Chaudhary.

Chaudhary has been called “Obama’s auteur” by Aswini Anburajan of National Journal Magazine (April 19, 2008) and “Obama’s video guru” by Michael Learmonth of Silicon Alley Insider (July 17, 2008). Chaudhary’s official title on the campaign was New Media Road Director of Obama for America (OFA). Today, he is the White House videographer.

Chaudhary, a 32-year-old New York University film-school professor, took a leave of absence in the summer of 2007 to work for OFA. He says Obama’s campaign organization took online video seriously from the outset.

In Chapter 11, Chaudhary tells me about the Obama campaign’s online response to the Clinton campaign’s “3am Girl” ad. Chaudhary says, “Senator Clinton had made a political ad about a 3 a.m. phone call that occurred ‘while your children are asleep.’ In a strange turn of events, the child in the stock footage the ad used had grown up to be an Obama supporter. The young woman was actually an Obama precinct captain in Washington State. I went to Tacoma to see her, and within 20 hours, travel included, we had a response piece up in YouTube.”

Chaudhary also tells me about the most compelling video content of the campaign, the “Obama Speech: ‘A More Perfect Union’.” Uploaded March 18, 2008, the 37-minute, 39-second video shows Barack Obama speaking at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, PA, on race in America and building a more perfect union.

Chaudhary says, “We had consistent calls from the public to put up speeches in their entirety. As time went on we found that some of the effort of finding specific clips and producing them with cut shots was better spent trying to get entire speeches and town halls online. Folks really seemed to respond to being allowed to see the candidate unedited. In a sense they wanted to see the candidates in the raw and make their own decision, not to feel like they were being fed media.”

With more than 10,000 text comments, “Obama Speech: ‘A More Perfect Union’” is the most discussed video on BarackObamadotcom’s Channel on YouTube. It also has almost 6.1 million views and more than 28,750 ratings. The Pew Research Center called the speech “arguably the biggest political event of the campaign so far,” noting that 85 percent of Americans said they had heard at least a little about the speech and that 54 percent said they heard a lot about it.

Just after the election, Jose Antonio Vargas wrote an online column for the Washington Post (November 14, 2008) entitled “The YouTube Presidency.” In it, he quoted Steve Grove, head of news and politics at YouTube, who said, “The Obama team has written the playbook on how to use YouTube for political campaigns. Not only have they achieved impressive mass—uploading over 1,800 videos that have been viewed over 110 million times total—but they’ve also used video to cultivate a sense of community amongst supporters.”

Published by Wiley, YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour A Day goes on sale on August 17, 2009. This 504-page guide provides extensive coverage of keyword strategies and video optimization, distribution and promotion strategies to other sites and blogs, YouTube advertising opportunities, and crucial metrics and analysis. For more information about the paperback book or to read excerpts of Chapters 1 and 11, go to www.wiley.com/go/youtubehouraday.

Among the people providing advance praise for my new paperback book is Michael Kolowich, president and executive producer of DigiNovations and architect and producer of “Mitt TV”, the video website for the Mitt Romney Presidential Campaign. Kolowich says, “From the early days of personal computer software to today’s white-hot web and social media environment, Greg Jarboe has not only stayed up with modern marketing techniques – in many cases, he has invented them. These pages don’t just talk theory; they offer a practical, step-by-step guide on how to get the most out of online video marketing. Don’t be surprised if you start wanting to spend more than an hour a day; this is a page-turner that will bring you real results.”