Youtube is amazing. I’ve been spending a lot of time there these last few weeks, trying to pull together a framework for thinking through the business opportunities. It’s making my head spin, but in a good way.

I keep thinking of the poor, overmatched brand managers out there. With all the homebrewed content out there – a bajillion blogposts, god knows how many gigs of video, comments, etc. – how does a brand manager compete, much less keep up?

1) Have an Open Mind – In the last week, I’ve asked four or five smart people, really bright folks, about blogs and video sharing sites and how they fit in a brand manager’s toolkit. All of them, from the advertising world mostly, dismissed blogs out of hand and hadn’t really thought about Youtube. Huge opportunity missed. As for blogs, the folks I asked think of them primarily as the domain of dumb kids who don’t have much to say. They miss the key point: these are people talking. And, while alot of bloggers skew young, and do say a lot of dumb stuff, there’s plenty of gold out there in amongst the 40-50 million blogs.

2) Listen – Start by reading some good blogs. get a feel for the personalities behind them. Can you imagine listening to a recommendation from these guys? Can you imagine that you’d listen a little more closely to them than that ad you just blew by in your favorite magazine?

3) Track – Use the web to track your favorite brand, competitor or even a concept. It’s not hard to get an RSS feed from Technorati that lets you know when your favorite term was mentioned in a blog post. Here’s a great "101" for beginners from Marketing Pilgrim that could get you started.

Now, see what some kid did to with his favorite cereal.

Link: YouTube – cheerios.