YouTube Insight provides detailed information regarding use of the videos you post to the site.   It shows how many times your videos were viewed, how long people are staying on the videos and which site has deemed your video worthy enough to embed it into their site.   I use this tool weekly to gain an understanding of the audience that is viewing our videos and to help make decisions about what type of videos to make in the future.

One of the reports within Insight called “Demographics” has been very interesting to me.   When YouTube users create an account on do they really enter their age?   I never use my real age or birth date when I create accounts on Web sites, I want to have some privacy and retain some ownership of my personal information (if only in a small way) so how accurate is this chart really?

But what does this chart actually tell me.   Let’s look at it a little closer.

In order for YouTube to gain this information a user must be logged in.  By that token we would have to assume that males 35-54 are more likely to be logged into their YouTube account than females are.  (Guys, do they know something we don’t ).

Missing Key Metric
The missing metric?   Anonymous users.  How many people viewed my videos anonymously?   What percentage of entire use is this demographic really based on? How many people are actually logged into YouTube accounts when viewing videos?

Until YouTube provides this anonymous use information I will treat demographic information on their Insight tool with a bias, knowing that it isn’t accurate and only really represents a smaller audience than it should.

What is it missing you ask?  Local knowledge, and real time route mapping changes aka; the detour.

I work for the Washington State Department of Transportation and often we have to close roads for construction.   We put out the message of these closures through every avenue we can, however the one missing tool that we don’t have access to is the in car mapping or navigation systems.

Over the course of the last couple of years the agency has been working on constructing a new Hood Canal bridge.   During this construction, the bridge had a six week closure in June of 2009.  This closure was put into every media channel we had an outlet to.  Posted on Web sites, blogs, TV stations and we even publicly challenged Google, Mapquest and Bing to change their driving directions during the closure through Twitter (only Mapquest responded and made the change on their navigation and driving directions map, kudos to their team).

One of the audiences we found that was most difficult to reach during this closure were those who got into a rental car or RV with a gps navigation system and tried to get across the bridge.   This six week closure was not included in those navigation systems.  Because of the directions provided by the navigation systems we had to literally turn away hundreds of people and let them know they needed to take the nearly two hour long detour around the closure.

Can you imagine the look on their faces and the frustration they must have felt to be told they were given bad information?  More often than not our staff was on the receiving end of that frustration.

I will admit this is a considerable challenge for companies trying to map the world. However, we have the data these companies need, but many state and local transportation organizations don’t…yet.   Mapquest right now is the only company that has taken the the time to try to contact the state DOT’s and has offered a way for them to provide the local closure information so that their customers have the most accurate information when using their navigation and direction tools.

While Google is opening the doors to free directions and navigation, until they work with local agencies to enable real-time routing based on construction closures frustration will still abound.

Social Media is first the willingness to listen to your customers and have an honest conversation with them.  The ability to do this has been made much easier with Web sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Flicker, Friendfeed and many more that have established themselves and have gained a large audience of people who check in with them and their “social network” with great frequency.

The biggest challenge you will face when embarking on a social media campaign is not the creative side of the campaign but the willingness to listen.  People will have something to say about your product and most often, they are right.  It is the willingness to listen and make changes based on that feedback that can prove to be invaluable in improving your product or services.

The first step is having the courage to ask the question “how are we doing”, if your willing to hear that answer, then social media is the right place for you to engage your audience.

Just installed Word Press on my local site and am learning how to use this tool. This is fantastic, Wordpress, where have you been all my life? You may have to be patient with me as I learn how to use the interface and the random theme I chose. I plan to start updating this much more regularly and make a rich content site out of it.