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.