Buddy Media Jazzes Up YouTube Page Control

6 Social Sites Sitting On The Cutting Edge

Buddy Media is introducing what it calls the first "global" YouTube marketing product, with tools that go beyond publishing and sharing videos to extensive customization of a YouTube channel page.

Best known for its Facebook marketing prowess, Buddy Media provides tools for publishing content to social sites and managing social pages. Now, it's making many of the same tools it provides for Facebook business-page customization available for YouTube.

YouTube already contains heavily customized channel pages for big brands like Pepsi. Brand channels can be customized according to YouTube's guidelines by a Web developer, with additional custom application "gadgets" and brand-specific page backgrounds. Buddy Media's software streamlines the process, providing a palette of ready-made social applications to plug into a page.

The available applications include:

-- Branded video player
-- Custom images, including banners and photos, linked to sharing functionality
-- Quiz
-- Voting
-- Photo gallery
-- Product gallery
-- Pledge, to drive users to share deals that are unlocked after goals are reached
-- Poll
-- RSS news feeds from blogs or Twitter

All of the social applications feature social hooks to encourage sharing. Buddy Media's software is provided over the Web, as software-as-a-service.

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"Instead of starting from scratch, you now have building blocks to use out of the box," Buddy Media spokesman Joe Ciarallo said in an interview. "The demand is there. YouTube is the world's foremost video platform, and this gives you a way of putting content there the same way you would on other social networks."

Buddy Media provided a screenshot of a sample design, shown below, although as of Tuesday morning the current Buddy Media YouTube channel wasn't nearly so fancy.

An example of an enhanced YouTube page

Follow David F. Carr on Twitter @davidfcarr. The BrainYard is @thebyard and facebook.com/thebyard

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