GTChannel On Comcast's Cross Platform Video Service Watchable

 Although YouTube is still GTChannel's biggest market, we feel that our creators and content need to develop new distribution channels. Our audience is consuming content in every way possible and we want to be there.

We have continued to expand our reach onto other platforms and in October we launched on Comcast's new video service called Watchable.  Watchable curates the best content from popular video networks and we are proud to be one of the select content providers for this new service.

Other content service providers include Buzzfeed, GoPro, Maker Studio, Vice, Discovery Networks, Vox Media etc.
 - TK

How To Do SEMA - SEMA 2015 Report

The 2015 SEMA Show took place from Nov 3 to 6 and GTChannel was on site to cover the best of the best of the show. It was personally one of my best show experiences because we were able to focus on a few goals we set out to achieve. 

Top 13 Tuner Cars of SEMA 2015

1. Create Good Video: We really just focused on making two videos from the show.  The first piece was going to be a "Top Tuner Car" video because that is what our (at least my) expertise lies in. I'm not going to pretend I know everything about trucks and muscle cars because I don't.  We're producing videos for GTChannel's home channel so let's just stick to what our audience wants to see and what we do best.  We also didn't want to go in blind to the show and end up with a highlight video. The show is enormous and just absolutely impossible to cover everything. (Not according to our friends at Speed Academy...) So we chose to focus on selecting a number of "tuner cars" and list them as our favorites. That direction ended up saving our time and prevented us from scattering our resources all over the place.  

Our second video is on the GT Awards with an interview with Sung Kang (Han from Fast & Furious Tokyo Drift) and Kenji Sumino from GReddy.  You may have seen his Z Dream series on the Speed -Fox YouTube Channel which was beautifully shot by eGarage.  We had interviewed Sung and Kenji at the Fugu Z reveal event in Irvine the week prior to the show so we didn't have to interview them during the crazy SEMA week. It just happened that we were also working with Sony to produce a GT Awards video so it turned out perfect that they also won Best of Show for GT Awards. It's extremely rare that things fall into place this perfectly but when it does, it feels really good!  That video with the Fugu Z featuring Sung and Kenji is scheduled for release in the next couple of days. 

                            

                               Sung and Kazunori Yamauchi, creator of PlayStation's Gran Turismo

In partnership with the ID Agency, I directed videos for CTEK Battery Chargers. We have created a series of videos leading up to the show featuring builders and the CTEK Battery Charger. It's a brand/product integrated video series that could be a good template for future video projects. We hope to get more partner channels involved in these types of brand/product integration projects. It's a great way to earn additional revenue from the videos we create.

How LTMW Became The Go-To Builder - Road 2 SEMA Presented by CTEK

2. Partners: The SEMA Show is a once a year event where many of our Network Partner Channels get together in one location. Since we sponsor the Honda Soiree, we took advantage of the situation to get a little corner to hang out and enjoy a few drinks together.  Individually we were also able to see a bunch of partners on the show floor, at restaurants or on the dance floor. It's always great to see our partners in person. Maybe next year we'll even plan a bigger get together at SEMA with more of our awesome partners.  

SEMA Show Day 1 

The Speed Academy guys unfortunately were not able to come out to any of the parties but heck they got a lot of work done.  This video was released on the first night of the show and it already has 123K views.  Way to go guys! 

MotoIQ was also there to cover the SEMA Show. These guys cover the industry from the car nerd perspective and we love their stuff.  

Photo M.D. Media looks like he got some great footage. Let's see the video now!

SuperspeedersRob walks the floor and shows us what's hot or not.  

3. Taking Care of Biz: The SEMA Show is also a time for us to wheel and deal. But the reality is that not much ever really gets done at the SEMA Show floor because people are just so busy and hard to get their attention. You have to do the ground work before SEMA so you can follow up at SEMA or actually close the deal as a formality.  We took the opportunity to meet face to face with several potential brand clients which we hope to work with in 2016.  

This is also a great time to just hang out with folks you normally only work with. The after hours of SEMA is just as important to what is going on during show hours. The big difference with other trade shows is that we are all there to share a common passion which is cars. So when we get to relax over a drink or a meal, we're still talking about CARS!  

Out of my 10+ years of going to SEMA, the key is not to try to do too much.  If you try to grab too much candy, you're hand is going to get stuck and you won't be able to pull it out of the jar. So focus your efforts on a few important things. Set those goals and spend your time wisely.  And drink a LOT of water! 

- Taro Koki 

President & Co-founder of GTChannel Inc.

See our Instagram for car pics from the SEMA Show.

Get a YouTube Custom URL Today

Now it's easier than ever to obtain a custom URL.  

When you create a new channel, it usually looks like a bunch of mumbo jumbo after youtube.com/channel/.  No one will remember this and it also looks amateurish. 

You want a custom URL like https://www.youtube.com/gtchannel. 

You can claim your URL right from your YouTube account. You used to need 500 subscribers but now you only need 100 subs.  

Think hard about what your URL should be.  You can never change this!  Watch the video below to see how to create your custom URL! 

No More BS! Strike Social Can Predict And Analyze Your Next Online Video Campaign- Part 2

In our Part 1 of "No More BS! Strike Social Can Predict And Analyze Your Next Online Video Campaign" post we introduced the Contagious Index(CI).  This index is based on how much your video is getting shared around the various social media platforms out there.
Let's take one of our videos for an example.

Drifting Top 6 Reasons Why We Love It is a video we released on August 27th, 2015.  It has 30,387 views as of today on September 24, 2015.  So it's been a little short of a month since we released this video.

Our goal from the beginning was to produce a video that would get shared by many of our viewers.  That is actually the number one objective when coming up with video ideas these days.  We question ourselves, "hmm, that's a cool video concept but would my friends want to watch and share this video"?

We figured if we compiled videos from our library and made a humorous list of why we love drifting, our viewers would share the videos on social media. Everyone loves lists as Buzzfeed has proven.

On Strike, you are able to conduct individual video analysis and even predictions.  Let's take a look at our above drifting video.

The Contagious Index is 241 which is not too bad but not that great either.  There are substantially more "Likes" than "Dislikes" so that is a good sign. 

Below you can see the engagement on various social media platforms from YouTube, Twitter, G+ and Facebook.  YT and FB count for the majority of the engagement with FB doing just a little more than a point more than YT.  The 160 Shares on FB is not that bad I suppose.  So we can say we somewhat achieved our goal.  Except we would be happy with more. These things take time and the more we practice, analyze and re-try, we get better at it.  

The following tab "PREDICT" is where it starts to get really interesting.  With this tool, we can predict how many views we can generate both artificially/PAID and ORGANIC.  And even run the campaign via the site, by clicking on PROMOTE to run your own Programmatic ad campaign. 

Now creators and online video marketers can analyze video performance, also plan promotional campaigns and even implement campaigns all on this platform.   

Even after campaigns, we can go back to export reports on how the entire campaign performed.  We have used this tool so far to report back to brands on how their videos are performing on GTChannel.  

So partners, use these metrics when pitching to clients and brands and also understand that although you want to have a strong organic view baseline,  you have that option to buy views on YouTube to fulfill view count obligations. 

- TK

More NASCAR And REDBULL GLOBAL RALLYCROSS Partnerships With Brian Wong And World Stage Racing

GTChannel signed on as a marketing partner as Brian Wong challenged the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series for the first time.  

Brian climbing into the Chevrolet Silverado 250 at the Canadian Tire Motorsport Park formerly known as Mosport.

At Redbull Global Rallycross Long Beach.  Brian was running a Hyundai Veloster rallycross car built by Rhys Millen Racing.

"Yahoooo!" 

One of the best things about the Redbull Global Rallycross is the jumps they have on the course. 

Our friends at Superstreet Magazine were also supporting Brian's efforts for his GRC Super Car debut.  

Videos from Brian's weekend competing in GRC coming soon to GTChannel!

You can follow Brian Wong here.
Twitter: @BWMotorsports
http://www.worldstageracing.com

No More BS! Strike Social Can Predict And Analyze Your Next Online Video Campaign

No more, guestimates and bull shitting your way through presentations because now you and your clients have access to intelligent online tools like Strike Social.

Some GTChannel partners already produce online videos for brands and individual clients. Even for those partners without clients yet, this tool can help you predict the performance of your videos and an accurate return on investment. We suggest you give it a try on your next marketing proposal or even when you are just planning for your next video release.

Strike Social is an awesome tool we found that enables creators and marketers smarter media planning, buying and competitive analysis.  The best part about it is that it's absolutely free.  Here at GTChannel, we love data and we love free shit. Especially if it helps our partners. Let's walk through the site.

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

The first Competitive Analysis section enable users of the site to run a competitive analysis on brands with YouTube channels. We entered the Toyota USA and Nissan USA YouTube channels just for kicks.

Since we are on the PAID tab, it shows how many YouTube TrueView advertising views each brand has paid for.  (Basically the pre-roll ads we see in front of the videos most people skip automatically)We can see that Toyota has paid for 69.6M views and Nissan 34.3M views.

Toyota has a bigger budget so they buy more views. There is nothing wrong with that.  Now let's see the next tab "EARNED".

Boom! Nissan has twice as many EARNED views at 7.76 M compared to Toyota's 3.52 M.  This is the most important figure since this reflects how many people are sharing, reposting, commenting and reviewing the content. It's essentially the virality(if that's even a word) of the video content.

For the next OWNED views come from the brands own channel, blogs, websites and social media accounts.  This reflects how much effort the brands itself puts into getting the content out on their own. Most definitely an important index as well as it shows how effective their own PR and marketing team is doing.

TOTAL VIEWS is obvious.  This shows the overall reach whether attained through PAID, EARNED or OWNED.

The second part "Top Industry Videos" are sorted by Best Videos as default. This is sorted by the Contagious Index.  The lower the better.  The CI identifies videos that are being highly shared, commented on and viewed at real time. Three out of the top 4 videos are by Nissan as shown above. The top video by Nissan comes up with a low Contagious Index(CI) of 68 points.


To be continued...

-TK

GTChannel Does NASCAR?!

Last weekend GTChannel had an opportunity to partner with Brian Wong for the K&N East Pro Series as part of the NASCAR Sprint Cup last weekend.

The track was the legendary Watkins Glen and we were proud to have Brian run our name across the hood and rear panel of his MDM Hillman Racing prepped race car!

Read full story here.