Five questions for Jamie Grenney, Senior Director of Social Media Strategy, Salesforce.com

Periodically we come across advertisers on YouTube who do more than just run campaigns on the site. Many are prolific creators of content, some test new tools and targeting features, and others experiment with YouTube's APIs. Then there's the rare advertiser like Salesforce.com, who does all of the above.

For our latest interview, we chatted with Jamie Grenney, Senior Director of Social Media Strategy at Salesforce.com, about the many ways his company uses YouTube to reach its customers across the web.

1. Why has video become such an important part of your general marketing strategy?

Salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company -- more than 67,000 customers use our cloud platform and apps to help run their businesses. Of the various social media channels we use to engage our community, YouTube has emerged as the most important for our business because it allows us to deliver a rich and concise message with perfect fidelity. Today we are generating about 6,000 video views a day on our Salesforce TV channel on YouTube. If we estimate the average view to be two minutes in length, that's roughly equivalent to 35 hyper-efficient sales reps on the phone. That is a huge productivity boon for a company like ours and something we want to build upon.

The question we are asking now is, "how do we double or triple the number of people watching our videos?" Partnering with YouTube is a central part of that strategy.

2. Why was it important for salesforce.com to have a presence on YouTube?

We looked at a number of different approaches to publishing video both on our own website as well as other sites on the web. Given that YouTube is such a large percentage of online video, we knew it was a platform that we couldn't overlook. When people receive a YouTube link in their inbox, they have an expectation and a common understanding of what they're going to get when they click it. They know how the player works and how to share it with their friends. We considered using a service that would publish videos to our website and syndicate a copy to YouTube, but we wanted to stay focused and make sure we didn't dilute our view counts. View counts are weighted heavily in search and are an important part of what makes a video interesting to other viewers.

Today, all our video content is hosted on YouTube and we use the YouTube APIs to serve up videos in branded players on our website. This allows us to manage all of our content in one place; and YouTube Insight provides excellent analytics to show us where the views are coming from.


3. How does your YouTube campaign fit into your larger online advertising strategy (display, search, etc.)?

We look at our YouTube campaign as part of the overall marketing pie. We are using YouTube to test display ads, landing pages and behavioral targeting and are then optimizing based on results. We are taking what we learn about our audience and applying that to other display strategies.

4. Do you see advertising on YouTube as a branding opportunity, a customer acquisition opportunity, or both?

YouTube is both a branding opportunity and a customer acquisition opportunity. From a branding perspective, we are able to target our users with the ads that are most relevant to them. We are able to introduce them to new products, such as Salesforce Chatter, and help build awareness for them. We are also able to use YouTube as part of a customer acquisition strategy by utilizing targeted offers for the audience the ads are shown to.


5. What are your key indicators of success today and what do you see salesforce.com doing on YouTube in one year?

In the last year we've grown from 50 videos on YouTube to 650! This is tremendous growth in content. But just as important, we've been able to eliminate islands of video that existed within our organization. We now have a holistic view of our content library, and with YouTube Insight we can see exactly what's working and what's not. Our video views have grown from 350 a day to 6,000 a day. It's a tall order, but we are trying to figure out how to double that number to 12,000 a day this year. We are building a second recording studio and hope to crank out lots more content. We are also working with the broader salesforce.com community to create significantly more user generated content through YouTube Direct.

To help us manage video and create even more granular reports we are building a mash-up between Force.com (our platform for custom app development) and YouTube. We'll be able to manage uploads from hundreds of content contributors from across the company and report on video views on salesforce.com reports and dashboards.

Posted by Elliott Selzer, Account Executive