07 Nov Is Oprah Ready for YouTube?
This morning I visited YouTube only to be overwhelmed with Oprah in the featured videos area. To be honest, I was quite surprised that my favorite marketing guru Martha Stewart hasn’t attempted this, but in her defense I guess she’s been busy with Marthapedia these days…
Anyway, as I delved further into YouTube, I watched Oprah’s very own “YouTube” introduction that basically announced she will be having a YouTube Oprah channel. Already it has over a million hits and is growing, along with pretty decent hits to the other videos posted to this “channel”, most of which were interesting clips from her YouTube debut where she interviewed the Evolution of Dance guy, YouTube creators, and various other interesting people who got discovered through YouTube.
As I found these clips of moments behind the scenes, in addition to a mix of clips from her interviews on stage – I thought to myself that I would like to include them in this post. But much to my disappointment – all of the videos on her “channel” were disabled from embedding.
Yes, disabled from embedding. Being since this isn’t the first time this has happened to me on YouTube (especially with larger brands) I thought I’d spend a little time dwelling on this fine detail.
Why? Because in every case that I can’t embed a video from YouTube it really makes me question if the brand is ready for social media. It makes me wonder if the creators understand that social media inspires sharing and collaboration and if they know they can benefit from enabling users to own and use their message.
Overall – I really believe Oprah is onto something here – and if she plays her cards right she will have a powerful channel on YouTube. Why? Because of her content. The people that she interviews are top of the line and her topics are always interesting. But I can’t help but to think that this could go a lot further if she allowed her videos to be more easily shared among her community of fans and among entirely new audience segments like me. YouTube gives her a new way to reach past her 4:00 broadcast time – and she needs to capitalize on it from blogs and websites that can easily grab her content.
While the lesson may be small here (allow your videos to be embedded), I hope you will see the benefits of allowing your social media efforts to be shared, grabbed, or mashed. This can result in large returns.
