“[...] I actually think every individual is now an entrepreneur, whether they recognize it or not. . . . Average job length is two to four years. That makes you a small business. . . . You are the entrepreneur of your own small business. How do you get to your next gig? How do you do your career progression? All these things now fall on the individual shoulders. And so, they’re essentially an entrepreneur. . . . [...]”

Whereas I think he is absolutly right and I see a lot of people in my professional environment acting that way already, I am not so sure if the “average” (horrible word, can’t think of anything better right now) European is prepared for this wave of entrepreurial metamorphosis, neither in terms of culture, nor in terms of attitude.

Some highlights:
Dian Kaplan, COO of Blip.tv: video advertising will be big, for 2 simple reasons
1) Audience is moving online.
2) There is a great opportunity in times of economic turndown to spend your marketing money on the web where you can exactly target and track your audience in a way which is absolutely not possible on TV.

Mike Volpi, CEO, Joost:
1) Online video advertising is more efficient and retain users more than other online contents because it integrates brand message and call or click to action creating substantially higher click through rates.
2) You need to design a intelligent syndication strategy for your contents and products, not everything should be everywhere. The media owners how do that best, will be the most successful.

Henrique de Castro, Managing Director, European Sales & Media Solutions, Google:
1) Media agencies don’t know if video content is TV or online budget, the user on the other hand does not care where it comes from.
2) Video can’t have too much advertising content, because otherwise users will get over-saturated and turn away, just like on TV.

Dan Scheinman, General Manager, Cisco Media Solution
1) Cisco is in a very experimental phase, building platforms where we are trying to figure out how to optimize the experience for the user; this includes mobile content.
2) Media brands will be back in the online video context in the next years.

YouTube says “it’s delighted” that the Vatican joins in and links to the video message of Father Lombardi, Media and PR Director of the Holy See, who says that their YT channel makes it easier for the Pope to connect with Christinans around the world and “it allows the Vatican to step into the global arena [...] and opens up a multi-directional dialoge with all Internet users”. To be honest, I’m quite impressed how rapid the Catholic Church has steped into the world of communication 2.0 although we can’t rate or comment the clips. So if a conservative organisation as the Vatican does it, online video communication can’t be the work of the devil, can it…

Whatever you’ll find out, there are loads of companies who should be highly alerted about the search results and user comments YouYube provides around their brands and products! You don’t need to worry too much if you are Nike but being Endesa, the quasi monopolist energy provider in Spain, your online communications managers should start thinking about how to improve your image among YouTube users because Green Peace Spain has uploaded a counter-spot, called “Contrapublicidad. Endesa, para los hijos de tus hijos” with some 45,000 views and 117 comments!

Anyway, your worst possible result is a “no videos found”. That simply means you DO NOT EXIST for all those users who start looking up information on YouTube rather than on text search engines. It’s like in those times when we used to say, You don’t exist unless you show up on Google’s page rank.

So why is this relevant in the first place? Well, last month, Cinco Dias reported that in the US, YouTube has already generated more search traffic than Yahoo’s search engine. According to a ComScor’s count, the video sharing site registered more than 2.6 billion searches during the month of Aug. 08, leaving it on second place behind Google with 7.6 billion search queries, but surpassing Yahoo with only 2.4 billion requests in the same month. Microsoft’s MSN site, Ask.com and AOL are all behind.

So, marketing and communication people out there – the challenge has risen! Getting positive visibility, attention, and relevance on the web has become more complex again. We know that we can’t control your brand reputation since users have taken over control but it’s even worse not to be found on the web. And if you don’t have engaging video contents ready to watch on YouTube, you don’t exist for a growing number of users because to Youtube = to Google.

Many times it was commented that Barack Hussein Obama could not have won without having used the web 2.0 in the way he did. Others before him have tried to engage with digital natives and not so natives but Obama’s online campaign had all the ingredients to become a decisive factor.

First,  he had a scalable online social network that allowed to sustain and expand a campaign into an online movement. The social network site that also served as a fund-raising platform – more than 300 million USD were raised online! – was designed and operated by Blue State Digital a Boston-based consultancy.  Click on the video to see “How Obama Really Did It”, and watch the interview with Blue State Digital’s CTO and co-founder Jascha Franklin-Hodge produced by Technology Review Videos (which unfortunately have no embed option in there player…).

So there was scale but second, there was emotion on the web and a lot of that was transmitted by  user-generated video contents. According to Prime Visibility, by mid-October YouTube had more than 530,000 videos with the name Obama, in contrast to just 297,000 who had something to do with McCain. The clip “Yes We Can” has been reproduced almost 12 million times on YouTube and has become the most sucessful political viral content so far.

“I got a crush on Obama” by Super Obama Girl follows suit with almost 11 million views on YouTube, which confirms that a good viral needs girls and sex, or light sex to be precise.