麻豆淫院

(麻豆淫院) -- When it comes to marketing via video sharing on social media, choosing an influential person to 鈥渟eed鈥� a video is essential 鈥� but video quality isn鈥檛 all that important.

So concludes a new University of California, Davis, study of 鈥渂uzz鈥� marketing on YouTube. The research takes an important first step in looking at video viewership online, and in helping companies best use online campaigns to boost their return on investment (ROI).

鈥淭he identification of effective seeds (or primary authors) is not only key to the success of these campaigns, but also an important factor in estimating the return on investment from a manager鈥檚 perspective,鈥� said Hema Yoganarasimhan, a professor at the UC Davis Graduate School of Management and author of the study.

鈥淪eeding information in social media outlets through handpicked agents is now becoming a common strategy in buzz marketing campaigns,鈥� the study notes.

Choosing the right seeding 鈥渁gent鈥� isn鈥檛 just about friends and followers, Yoganarasimhan found. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not the number of people, it鈥檚 focusing on the right people,鈥� she explained. 鈥淭hey need to ask who are their friends, and who are their friends鈥� friends 鈥� and how are they positioned in the network?鈥�

She cites a Ford Motor Co. buzz marketing campaign for the subcompact Fiesta car in 2009 as a good example. Eschewing traditional marketing, Ford garnered 6,000 car reservations, 6.2 million YouTube views, 750,000 Flickr views and about 4 million Twitter impressions in less than a year. In what became a well-known campaign in the social marketing world, Ford selected 100 influential video bloggers, or 鈥渧loggers,鈥� who agreed to try out a Fiesta for six months in return for blogging, tweeting and otherwise recording their experiences with the car on social media.

In her research, Yoganarasimhan looked at 1,939 videos that were uploaded to YouTube during November 2007. Among those, more than 1,800 were posted by authors who listed their friends.

鈥淚 visited the pages of these friends and obtained a list of their friends. So for each video, I reconstructed the social network of the author up to two hops,鈥� Yoganarasimhan said. She then monitored those videos daily for more than a month for views, ratings, comments, sharing and other statistics.

While a close-knit community may be committed and loyal to a dispenser of information, that community may generate low video popularity in the long run, the study showed. That鈥檚 because people in a close-knit community don鈥檛 interact much with outsiders, resulting in few interactions with second- or third-degree 鈥渇riends.鈥�

The study found that while first-degree friends are important for initial marketing, second- and third-degree friends are essential for "viral" spread.

Finally, the study found that video ratings are important 鈥� but it doesn鈥檛 much matter if the rating is good or bad. Yoganarasimhan鈥檚 analysis showed that video quality, as measured by viewer comments and ratings, had little effect on viewership in the long run. However a video with any rating was likely to have more viewers than one with no rating.

YouTube is a good platform to study, Yoganarasimhan said, because it involves both social media and video sharing.  

The paper: 鈥淚mpact of social network structure on content propagation: A study using YouTube data,鈥� is available at:

The research is published in the latest issue of Quantitative Marketing Economics.