Come See the Noise

If I understand it correctly, this video was placed on YouTube by the St. Petersburg Times to attract young people to its website that does traditional print analysis of political claims. I do not interpret this to mean that young journalists need to know how to do this sort of thing. This is marketing, I think. But it is certainly interesting. Look at the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O80WRuLNp4g


Then, look at the site:

http://www.politifact.com


The site has bells and whistles, but it’s print based.

I got all this From the website News Videographer

The guys at the St. Petersburg Times also have some great ideas we can steal.

Politifact.com is the kind of site that makes politics accessible and interesting to lots of people. Especially young people, we thought. So a few of us on the editorial side started brainstorming ways to get the word out in a more viral way — that is, ways that would be easy for people to share with each other …

Yes, we made this video for YouTube specifically. We also seeded it on over a dozen other video sites, such as Crackle (where it was featured as their top political video for some time), Yahoo!, MySpace and MetaCafe. It has appeared on our main site, tampabay.com and is still linked off the Politifact.com home page.

So far the video has been viewed more than 200,000 times on YouTube. Unfortunately, we can’t track how many of the viewers then clicked to our site. We did see a week-over-week spike in Politifact.com traffic of 67% when the Gimme the Truth video was featured on YouTube’s homepage. Of course, it was also the week we hosted a GOP debate in our hometown and we were doing a lot of other promotion of the site. That said, I’m thrilled with the response and consider it a successful marketing effort.