darrenfoulds.com

So, on Sunday afternoon, April 10, 2011, there was a sudden and intense hail storm in the north end of Thunder Bay. I was in the kitchen at the time, starting some seeds for the vegetable garden with the Dude, and had the video camera going. So, when Jenny said, “What’s that noise?” and then yelled “Hail!” I was able to head out the front door, just as the hail started coming down.

I edited the video later than night, and posted it to YouTube. Then I put a link to it from Facegroup and asked my friends to share the video around, just to see if we could social network it up as the Thunder Bay hail storm video. My friends came through and overnight I had close to a hundred views. This was pretty big for me my most viewed video (so far on my new YouTube account was around 160 views.) The next morning, I submitted it to a couple local news websites, mentioned it once more on Facegroup, sent it to the local CBC radio station and emailed it to family and some co-workers. By noon, it was a featured video on the local CBC website and during that evening’s drive home show, Voyage North, Cathy Alex mentioned it at least twice.

By the time I went to bed the next day (about 24 hours after the video came out) I was at about three hundred views. Then in the morning, Lisa Laco mentioned the video on The Great Northwest and somehow, over night, I was up at close to five hundred and fifty. I linked to it one more time on Facegroup and by the end of the day Tuesday, I was around six hundred and fifty. Now at noon on Wednesday, views are slowing down and am just over seven hundred.

What have I observed from this?

Other people sharing my video on Facebook really helped get it out. It’s hard for me to self-promote like that, especially to ask others to promote me, but it produced results. The local news websites were almost as effective as Facegroup, and I’m impressed that Net News Ledger has sent more than 70 views my way so far. I noticed a small, but not insignificant, number of views from a forum that I didn’t send the video to. I think I’d try that next time. After all, the Canadian geocachers would find my video amusing wouldn’t they?

And that’s another thing. The hail storm was an event that affected lots of people, so there was a built in interest in the video. Also, it was timely. Even though my video wasn’t out until five hours after the event, the hail storm was still big news the next day. It probably didn’t hurt that I wasn’t really “in” the video, but my wife and baby boy were, so there was some cute-factor there.

Here’s a breakdown of views. It totals 92%, there were lots of other <1% numbers I'm not including.

• 18% Facegroup
• 10% NetNewsLedger.com
• 5% CBC
• 8% YouTube
• 7% Searches (not even 1% Google though)
• 44% No Referrer

Have you ever experienced what you consider to be “success” with YouTube or your blog or something else you do online? How do you measure it and what do you think works well to promote your work online?