By now you've probably seen the YouTube video of Englishwoman Susan Boyle singing on the UK show "Britain's Got Talent" but if not, please check it out.
Adam Ostrow has written a great article on Mashable.com "Susan Boyle Video Profits:$0" that details how both YouTube and Britain's ITV, the company that holds the rights to the British TV show have missed a huge opportunity to monetize the millions of views of the video by squabbling over how to serve the ads. Oops! You would think they would have worked this out years ago, right?!
There is a lesson here for all online marketers and website owners.
When Google bought YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion, a lot of people questioned how Google could expect to make that money back. Well the Susan Boyle phenomenon is an example of how Google could make the investment worthwhile, but instead they are dropping the ball through not having an effective strategy in place, poor customer service and not following up on sales leads.
I have personally attempted to contact YouTube's advertising department several times on behalf of clients who were interested in advertising and have yet to get a response.
A colleague of mine who runs a web development firm in New York has had similar results. After emailing YouTube and getting no response, he called Google directly and pleaded with the rep to have someone call him as he had a client that wanted to create a YouTube Channel. The Google rep assured my colleague he would make sure someone got back to him...NOTHING.
You might be able to drive a lot of traffic to your website and persuade people to take the action of requesting information, but if you aren't responding to those leads quickly, all of the previous efforts are for nothing. Bottom line: Make sure you are responding to web inquiries within a business day because you can be sure some of your competitors are.
PS. I just filled out YouTube's advertising inquiry form again before posting this and will post a comment to let you know if they get back to me.
UPDATE: As of May 14th (16 days later) YouTube still has not responded to my web inquiry. I guess they don't want my client's ad business.
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