Ecopreneurist

As David Wigder wrote way back in 2006:

For green marketers, video sharing offers a powerful new channel to reach consumers and promote their message.  Specifically, video sharing enables marketers to:

· Engage consumers through compelling, multimedia experiences

· Facilitate word-of-mouth marketing efforts

· Attract highly influential online users they can leverage as brand advocates.  In fact, 28% of users that view online videos regularly “ranked themselves as the first person people come to for recommendations about TV and movies, compared with 12 percent of all online consumers” according to Jupiter Research (Online Video Search, 11/06)

Now even more options are available for eco friendly companies to promote their businesses to those key influencers – innovators and early adopters. Green focused videos on Youtube are rapidly climbing up the ranks of the most popular, spawning dedicated eco-only sites like EcoLive, GoGreenTube and GreenTV.

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The newly launched GoGreenTube offers videos on a variety of different channels and for every video watched by registered users, offsets one pound of carbon dioxide emissions through carbonfund.org. Ecolive scours the web to collect and present the best green videos and share them on their site. GreenTV, produced by the digital agency Large Blue with the endorsement of The United Nations Environmental Programme claims it “is the first website to bring together films from a whole range of environmental organizations and independent filmmakers and make them available to anyone anywhere.”

And there are more. Eco video sharing sites and green and activist channels and entries within established sites like Youtube and MySpace offer a blizzard of options for ecopreneurs. So what to do?

Unlike in broadcast advertising, attracting more eyeballs has less to do with where the clip is placed and more to do with the entertainment and sometimes, the educational value of the piece. A highly trafficked site like Youtube theoretically puts your video in front of more viewers but, by the same note, the popularity of Youtube means it is more likely to get lost in the shuffle. Posting your video on smaller, greener sites means your video will be seen by true green consumers, users which, may or may not be your target market.

As noted by The Daily Green, “…effective viral videos can shape elections, push millions of products and establish artists.” Tree hugger echoes the sentiment, “The Green Movement needs to compete for consumer attention. Funny, eye-catching ads open the door for change.” And so

Tip#1: Focus creating an entertaining, professionally done, powerful video.

As I’ve mentioned here and here, know your target market. Not all green consumers are alike and your target market may not be and actually probably IS not, the already green consumer but rather one who tilts green.

Tip # 2: Understand the your target market when creating your video

As often noted in Green Options posts, knowing how to effectively market your product on the web takes an in depth understanding of how social media works and how users determine which articles, blog posts and, yes, videos they pass on to their friends and colleagues. Creating an effective video is just the first step. Finding and using the right social media tools to ensure that your video has legs, is perhaps the most important step of all.

Tip #3: Use as many social networking tools as possible to spread the word about your video: MySpace, Bookmarking, RSS, Blog outreach, etc.

Video sharing, while not in its infancy is certainly at a point where dramatic change is in the air. Don’t be left behind as you plan your video marketing strategy.

Photo Credit striatic at Flickr Under Creative Commons License

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Target Practice - Finding The Right Green Consumer

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Social Networking and Online Marketing for the Ecopreneur

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