So, on Sunday, my wife and I watched the season premier of America’s Funniest Home Videos…yes, the early 90’s Bob Saget started show based on cute children, talented pets, and men getting hit in the crotch.

It’s still on, and in its 19th season no less, who knew? So, after we reveled in the darker side of humanity and the pain of others, I started thinking about how America’s Funniest Home Videos (or AFV as it’s now officially abbreviated) was the YouTube of its day.

It (far ahead of its time) used the wisdom of the crowd to produce a show popular enough to last 19 seasons and be on its third host. Most TV shows nowadays get canceled after an episode or three let alone several hosts. (That is unless you’re Family Feud. Anything that can survive Louie Anderson must be something special.)

So, what am I blabbering about? Why should you care? Because we all should have seen YouTube coming. We all should have been able to stand upon the shoulders of giants like Bob Saget and create that next big thing. Certainly there had to be a confluence of technology and business savvy to make it work.  But, 16 years before YouTube was founded, Vin Di Bona (AFV’s Producer) saw something that became the basis of Web 2.0.

The only way you’re going to stay ahead of the game in this business is to constantly innovate. To constantly ask yourself, “What next?” and to keep pushing for new ways to interact with your customers and constituents. By the time you’re done reading this blog and blogs like us, the current industry fad will be over and you’ll be behind the curve. So push forward, beyond the bounds of what you see, and strike deep into the heartland of that yet undiscovered country that is the next big thing… your big thing.

Since the introduction of Universal or Blended search last year, where images and videos can now show up alongside the regular search listings, it makes sense for businesses to go ahead and work on getting videos and images indexed and ranked by the search engines, if for no other reason than to take up more of that valuable search engine shelf space.

But how can you do it for your company? Videos take time and money to produce don’t they? After all, if you want it to look good you need to have a flashy title sequence, and so on. Well, not really, as long as what you say is relevant and interesting enough. The lack of flashiness doesn’t hurt, in fact it may even help you as viewers may see your home produced video as being more real to them.

These days most laptops come with a built in webcam, so there’s no real excuse not to go ahead and record something. Your first few efforts don’t even have to go on the web, use them as practice, finding out what works and what doesn’t. After all, it may be disconcerting for you the first time you’re looking at the screen and you turn left while the image turns right…

How long does it take? Well this took 5 minutes to write the script, and substantially less to record. In fact I expect it’ll take longer to upload this video than it’s taken to create.

What do you do after you record and upload the video? Well, you need to make sure you use the right keywords when you upload it, so that the engines know what it’s about. You can link to it, or easily embed it on your blog or site, encouraging people to comment on and / or rate the video. If it’s good enough people will link to it, or embed it themselves on their sites. On some video sites, such as YouTube, you can create a channel which people can subscribe to, so they know whenever you release a new video.

More likely than not you won’t have an instant viral hit on your hands, but that’s fine. If you can use your videos to either build up or engage an existing user base, a base of people who are interested in your company, products or cause, then, search engines aside, that’s a pretty good tool that you should be using…

After growing weary of story after story of girl fights, sexual deviants, and copyright infringement on YouTube; it was nice to read a positive story covering a true Internet fairytale.

A few years ago, Arnel Pineda was just a singer in a cover band in the Philippines. Now, he is the new lead singer of Journey (yes, that Journey). Pineda was discovered on YouTube by the band’s guitarist Neal Schon. After seeing the video of Pineda, Schon picked up the phone, invited Pineda to audition, and the rest is history. The story reminded me of one of my favorite movies – Rock Star starring Mark Wahlberg and Jennifer Aniston.

Take a listen for yourself. I’m not sure I could discern Pineda’s Separate Ways from Steve Perry’s original. Journey fans rejoice.

In a presentation that I gave at SMX-London last year, I used Somerfield (a supermarket chain in the UK) as an example of a firm that was having an issue with Universal Reputation Management. Back then, there was a YouTube video ranking for their name that was displaying with text talking about how Somerfield was not a nice place to work (basically the last comment on the video). Six months on, I thought I’d take a quick look and see if that problem was still there. As you can see, that comment has been replaced by a more recent, fresher one, in this listing displaying in the 10th position.

Good news for Somerfield, now there’s a barely literate semi-positive comment about them instead. Knowing the issues that they’ve had over the last year (see this self created reputation management issue from last Easter as an example), I thought I’d click on to page 2 and see if anything was bubbling up over there. There in 20th position was this listing. (note I’ve only edited the image to pull the Google bar under the image for display purposes).

Huh? The exact same URL on YouTube displaying in 10th and 20th positions. I went over one more page… Yep there it was in 30th… One more page, and there it was in 31st. The same URL, from a Google property, displaying 4 times in the first 4 pages.

I’m sure it’s not intentional, and I’ve not seen it for other searches that I’ve done, but if I were Somerfield I’d be monitoring that YouTube video as much as possible. I’d make sure that the latest comments were as positive as they could be, especially when this video is receiving as much SERP visibility for their name as it is.

Additional: It’s not just the video, it’s also happening with some listings. Do a search on Somerfield Massive, and look at the 10th result, which should be an article from the Independent on battery farming titled “How Do You Like Your Eggs?”. Go to the next page, there it is again, go to the next page, once more it appears there. In the first 150 results, I found that same article, with the exact same URL (no session IDs or strange parameters to throw it off) 5 times.

Update: Naturally the SERPs have changed so the actual results I found yesterday are not there (I’m glad I had Li confirm that she saw the same thing), but if you do that search for “Somerfield Massive” above, you’ll now see this blog post in 10th and 11th, at the same http://endlessplain.com url, so while the players have changed, the issue remains the same.