Here are some interesting statistics related to the use of video in business:

• The number of people who view online video content monthly will increase to 147.5 million in 2010, up from 135.1 million in 2009 (eMarketer)
• 63 percent of U.S. Internet users watch online videos (Dynamic Logic)
• The use of video blogging among Fortune 500 companies with public-facing blogs rose 10 percent from 2008 to 2009 (Society for New Communications Research)
• Of rich-media features, video ranked highest at 46 percent with multichannel retailers (Multichannel Merchant)
• Among various online video types, more companies created branded video content in the last 12 months (TurnHere)
• This year, the number of mobile video viewers will grow nearly 30 percent (eMarketer)

So what’s your Web video strategy?

Editor’s note: The Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) is currently conducting a research study on the use of video storytelling in business. Share your experiences with video by participating in the survey.

Also according to the Nielsen report, the total mobile viewing audience “grew 51.2 percent year-over-year, surpassing 20 million users for the first time.”

This trend is supported by an eMarketer survey showing mobile content and Internet usage of U.S. mobile phone users. Although video streaming falls close to the bottom of the list in this survey in terms of content usage, it’s estimated to more than double this year from 2007, from 11 percent to 25 percent. And in 2011, that number will grow to 33 percent.

These statistics aren’t too surprising given the proliferation of smartphones and the introduction of other Internet-enabled mobile devices, such as Apple’s iPad. These devices present a great opportunity for reaching your audience in an engaging medium—video. With so many eyeballs on the small screen, the question is does video factor into your current or future marketing plans? If not, why not?

With YouTube’s recently redesigned website, it’s like walking into a brand new department store that’s bright, spacious, and nicely laid out.

The new YouTube site exhibits many of the best practices we at Tendo preach to our clients about website design. Most importantly, it’s clean and well organized. Gone is the clutter that overwhelmed the old site design. The use of mouseovers to reveal additional actions is a great device for taming clutter.

The most often used user tasks are easy to find. Also, the site presents users with options (for example, viewing the next video) at the appropriate times and doesn’t distract them with unnecessary information or actions.

Providing users with a clean design and simple navigation will keep them engaged so they spend more time on your website. I’m going to go watch the much-talked-about videos of my friend’s dog now that I’ve found them.

This week I sat in on a webinar that outlined the latest eye-tracking data for the Web. I was interested in these five findings:

1. The F Pattern. Studies show that we read horizontally first, then track down the page, forming an “F” pattern. Also, time records of online viewing show that most people *scan* web pages—they don’t read them.
2. The Golden Triangle. When looking at search results, readers spend a lot of time in the top left corner of the screen. A Yahoo study found that putting thumbnail photos or videos next to search results improved click-through rates, and Google found that thumbnail images in search results help users more quickly decide whether the result will be useful. A picture really does say a thousand words…
3. Banner Blindness. Nielsen Norman Group (a usability consultancy founded by Jakob Nielsen, the guru of Web page usability) found through heat maps that users ignore Web ads. Plain text on a Web page gets read in the golden triangle and face photos draw eyeballs, but ads are completely ignored.
4. Talking Heads Bore. Studies show that online video of a talking person loses the user’s attention—users start looking at things in the background of the person in the video, or anywhere else except the person talking. The lesson? If you’re going to shoot video of a person talking, keep it really short (less than one minute) or use a photo instead. Sometimes video isn’t the right medium for your content. The most successful use of video on the Web, according to eye-tracking studies, is when you need to explain a concept or demonstrate some type of process or product.
5. Email Introductions Ignored. In e-newsletters, the studies found that most users ignore the introductory text. Sixty percent of users look at just the first two words and then skip down the page.

If you’re interested in reading more, check out these sites:

• http://usability.gov/pdfs/guidelines_book.pdf
• http://useit.com/eyetracking
• http://www.useit.com/eyetracking/methodology

2009 was a rough year for marketers. Budgets were cut, heads rolled, and projects came under tighter scrutiny than ever before. So, in such a high-stakes climate, mistakes and missteps  would be few and far between, right? Not so. The following awkward, painful, bizarre, and embarrassing marketing blunders show that even with the odds stacked against them, marketers both big and small will dare to dream the impossible dream (and pay the price in the end).

[10] Chevy Volt Dance

Click here to view the embedded video.

Embarrassing? Check. Awkward? Check. Painful? Check. Bizarre? Check And lucky for us, this was released before 2009 was up, so it makes the list.

Perhaps Autoextremist Peter D. Lorenzo put it best: A job qualification for GM’s new CEO would be “…somebody who would would fire everyone directly responsible for the ‘Chevy Volt Dance’ and even more important, understand the reasons why it never should have seen the light of day.”

GM killed the EV1, its ground-breaking electric car, with sheer marketing ineptitude in 1999. In 2009 GM did its best to abort its ground-breaking serial hybrid, the Volt, with this bit of marketing ineptitude.

[9] Windows 7 Launch Party

Click here to view the embedded video.

How to make an OS launch like a Tupperware party: a warm, fuzzy, diverse, and welcoming Tupperware party…

This is for those who thought that Gates and Co. could only move up after the company’s $300 million dud of an ad camapaign last year. Remember that campaign? It co-starred comedian Jerry Seinfeld and the man himself, Bill Gates, in a 90-second TV spot beginning in a shoe store and ending with the promise of a “delicious” future.

2009 delivered that future in the form of a Windows 7 launch campaign that, despite taking place in a kitchen, was anything but delicious.

[8] GM Reinvention (and its various spoofs):

Click here to view the embedded video.

USA! USA! Um… not so much. Here we have GM bouncing back from federally mandated bankruptcy restructuring with a message to the American people, its new owners.

And that message apparently had something to do with amputees and butterflies, but beyond that, we’re a little hazy on the details.

[7] Chia Obama

Click here to view the embedded video.

Really? The 2008 commemorative plate was too stuffy for you? Maybe you bought one and liked it, but just didn’t feel like it gave you enough Obama pride to carry you through 2009?

Well, our perennial friends at chi-chi-chi-chia came up with the answer in 2009, and boy did they hit this one out of the park.

[6] PETA Pet Shop Boys Name Change Request

Shoot for the stars, end up in the circular file.

While the Pet Shop Boys may have had a popular song (“I Want a Dog”), PETA, as is often the case, wasn’t satsified. In a bold attempt at rebranding by proxy, PETA made a teeny, weeny request of the boys. The result? Lots of free publicity for PETA, but not a whole lot of feel-good credibility to go along with it.

[5] Whole Foods CEO on Single Payer Healthcare Reform

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is Tendo strategy 101: Take the time to understand your audience. Whole Foods CEO John Mackey let all those commie, leftie, pinko Prius-driving shoppers of his know just where he stood on single payer healthcare reform, and the results that followed did not spur a rush to buy organic humus or premium, extra-firm tofu.

At least we give him props for taking a stand on something, speaking his mind, and being transparent about his beliefs–and frankly, that counts for a lot (and it kept him off the bottom of our list, despite the magnitude of this blunder).

(4) Visit Denmark, Conceive a Child

What better way to woo travelers to visit the Scandanavian land of fair-haired maidens than the promise of a one-night stand and a cute, illegitimate love child as a souvenir?

Tendo covered this in our blog when it first came out (that’s right, you read it here first), but the upshot is the Danish tourism board thought a suberversive viral featuring an attractive mother looking for the father of her baby was the hot ticket to encourage tourism to Denmark. Points for thinking outside of the box here, but…

[3] The Shake Weight

Click here to view the embedded video.

‘Nuff said.

[2] Amazon Deletes 1984 from Kindle

George Orwell predicted it. In what can only be called the consummate product marketing debacle of 2009, Amazon went Big Brother on its Kindle users–literally–by surreptitiously deleting what they believed to be unauthorized copies of Orwell’s classics, 1984 and Animal Farm, from their Kindle devices. This heaping bowl of “not good” had all the irony of, um, something with a lot of irony.

[1] Balloon Boy

Click here to view the embedded video.

When promoting your reality show concept gets away from you, as it were.

Robert Thomas, a Colorado State University student and paid assistant to Balloon Boy’s dad, Richard Heene, revealed the high-flying scare that captured worldwide attention to be a misguided, guerilla-style publicty stunt to promote Heene’s reality show pitch. According to CNN, “Thomas said that at one point they were talking about the Roswell UFO incident of the late 1940s when Heene said it would be easy to cook up a media stunt that would be equally profound as Roswell–and we could do so with nothing more than a weather balloon and some controversy.’”

The setting: Venture Capital Alley, aka Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park.
The gracious hosts: O’Melveny & Myers, fresh off their victorious settlement in AMD vs. Intel.
The panelists: Karla Spormann (president and CEO, Tendo Communications), Martin Eberhard (cofounder and former CEO, Tesla Motors), Patrick Ewers (founder, Mindmavin), and Dr. Marc A. Smith (chief social scientist, Connected Action).
The occasion: An opportunity to get perspective from local executives who are putting social media to work for business.

Below are several video highlights from the social media panel:

Dr. Marc A. Smith:

“The clustering of social connections is fascinating and really revealing.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Smith/Martin Eberhard:

“The downside to social media is that you’re going to have a conversation with someone that has a lot of time on their hands. With you. Now. And you may have other things on your agenda and this becomes an issue because then those people feel scorned and they have the same amplifier you have.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Karla Spormann:

“Understand where your audience is and what tools and channels they’re using. Listen first, and then determine whether or not you want to engage.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Patrick Ewers:

“Common ground is about making people think, ‘I am like you.’ And that’s what you want because ‘I am like you’ means ‘I like you,’ and this is important because…once you get to “I like you,” doors open, things go faster, people start looking for excuses to overlook your mistakes.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Eberhard/Spormann/Smith:

“Social media has already overtaken traditional media. General Motors has had more success getting people to understand the Chevy Volt through Bob Lutz’s own blog than through any advertising.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Smith:

“The more your message propagates, the more Google focuses on it.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Smith:

“Most opportunities flow not through strong ties/connections, but weak ties—the ones you know casually. In addition, humans evolved in tribes of 150 or less, so you can really only have strong ties with 150 or fewer people.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Eberhard:

“The social media thing really is about being a human being and this is why the Bob Lutz blog works. He says things in his rough-and-ready way that doesn’t align itself with the marketing speak that’s all over the rest of their website.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Spormann/Eberhard:

“So my advice is if you have done a good job of developing a network of people that are following and into what you are doing, you just kind of need to give the right people a hint that there is something bad being said about you on some other site and let them be the bulldogs.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

They created a video—later discovered to be a hoax—that they posted on their YouTube channel. It features a Danish woman (an actress, as it turns out) holding a baby. She is talking to the baby’s father, a man she says met in a bar in Copenhagen and had a one-night stand with. She doesn’t want money or anything from him, she says, she just wants to find him and tell him about their son. Her final plea in the video is for him—or anyone who may know him—to get in touch with her.

According to a Danish news site, VisitDenmark CEO Dorte Kiilerich had this to say in a press release: “We deeply apologise that the film has offended a lot of people—that certainly wasn’t the idea. The idea was to create a positive view of Denmark. In order not to continue offending people, we have removed the film from YouTube.”

I wasn’t offended by the video, but the explanation is a little offensive to anyone of average intelligence because the agency is not ‘fessing up about its goals. Rather than contributing to a positive view of Denmark, these marketers were trying to do something controversial to get people talking about Denmark and create some online publicity. Clearly, at some point they realized that any publicity is NOT good publicity.

Apparently overnight stays in the country are on the downswing—perhaps the Little Mermaid and Tivoli Gardens are a tough sell—but still. Sending out a message to travelers that Denmark has attractive blondes who like one-night stands? I don’t think that strategy belongs in the marketing playbook.