Made you look! Made you look!

“How a University Embraced Social Marketing and Scored Millions in YouTube Views” is the title of a self-promotion case study someone forwarded me yesterday. It’s the story of a social media campaign conducted for Carnegie Mellon University.

Right about now, I guess I need to point out that I’m not some sort of old-school luddite who doesn’t understand things like MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and the rest. What I am is someone who tries very hard not to confuse activity with accomplishment.

Like in this case. Their social media campaign goals included securing 10,000 video views for each of their three YouTube videos, getting 500 subscribers to the school’s YouTube channel within a year, getting 1,000 Facebook fans and (I love this bit of baroque writing) “engendering viral forwarding of the campaigns videos and having them picked up by large blog sites.”

The challenge was to reach potential students. So they moved “beyond hard-sell marketing and instead turned to social media.” A lot of it seems to have been built around three clever “RoboU videos” on YouTube. The whole thing, according to the case study, was a smashing success.

More than 2,000 subscribers signed up for the school’s YouTube channel, the number of views of the YouTube videos surpassed the goals and “Carnegie Mellon students continue to ‘blog forward’ the school’s online initiatives”, whatever the hell that is. Says Carnegie Mellon Associate Director of Marketing for Web Communications, "the effort to increase brand awareness and affinity has been a great success.”

Here’s the problem I have with calling this a success. For one thing, I looked at all of the videos and still don’t have much of an idea of what the Carnegie Mellon brand is ― at least not in what I understand the definition of a brand to be. Which is: “a unique claim of distinction supported by evidence of performance.” Nothing really tells me why I should be interested in going there or, if I’m an alum, why I should support it.

Also, so 22,000 people watched the “Keepon Auditioning” episode for example. So what? Especially when you consider that the 24 comments posted (out of 22,000 viewers) were along the lines of “haha”, “cute brick shirt!” and “LOL”. Did they do anything useful as a result of seeing the video?

Besides, how many of those 43,000 are in the target or can influence the target? YouTube is a worldwide phenomenon, viewed by people of all ages. I don’t believe there is any way to tell through analytics who these folks are or what relevant action they took, if any. Sure, you can tell who came to your site from YouTube and who “continued to blog forward the school’s online initiatives” I guess, but still, I’m just saying.

Believe me, I understand that YouTube/Facebook/MySpace is a totally different sort of animal than traditional advertising. And I believe that it’s an animal that has a valuable place in many marketing campaigns. But if you define “success” simply as having oopty-number of people see your message, that’s pretty much like saying you were successful in your marketing campaign because you bought an ad in the Post and the Post has a circulation of 631,000, so 631,000 people saw your message, so it was a success. High-fives all around!

YouTube, Facebook and MySpace ― like web sites, e-mails, guerilla tactics, collateral and (gasp) print and broadcast advertising ― are tactics. And more often than not, these specific tactics are promoted to clients by specific companies that traffic in those specific tactics and therefore have a vested interest in seeing those specific tactics employed by their specific clients. Personally, I'd rather get advice from someone who is a bit more media agnostic. As opposed to throwing everything onto what my partner and Reason For Living Karen calls “the tactic du jour”.

Look, I really don’t care what medium you employ as long as it’s effective. Geeze, hire those guys with the big arrows to stand on a street corner. Just first make sure you’re saying something of substance, something that does you some good and something that compels your target to do something relevant. I’m not convinced Carnegie Mellon did that.

If you want to do a cool video on YouTube, go ahead. Hell, if it’s cool, I’ll look at it and pass it on. But don’t congratulate yourself simply because people look at it.

Years ago, I saw a study that showed that print ads with attractive, busty women in them attracted more attention than other ads. People didn’t necessarily respond in any fashion that was meaningful for the advertiser, but they did notice the ads.

My point is, don’t confuse a cool YouTube video with a strategic marketing effort. Because it might be nothing more than a good-looking girl in a tight sweater.