On my last post I talked about  whether video can be meaningfully measured using analytics tools. And I indicated that by placing the right kind of tags inside your video or flash modules, of course you can track video–where started, where stopped, how much viewed and things like that. The presumption was that these videos are on your site, and that you control them.

But what about when your video goes viral? Can you still track it? See the next myth (below) for my answer:

Myth #2: You can’t track video on sites you don’t control.

Fact: Using certain tools, you can track viral video usage robustly and you don’t have to control the content area to do so.

This seems to run counter to every assumption we have about web analytics. Companies have a tough enough time getting their developers and partners to tag pages they pay them to host—never mind trying to measure content on places like YouTube, Facebook and dozens of others!

But there’s at least one tool from a company called Divinity Metrics (it’s called “Scope”) that allows you to do just that. Once you set up this tool, you’re able to define videos you want to track as “campaigns,” and then set up some keyword criteria. Scope uses a kind of “scraping” technology to pull data off the YouTube’s of the world—there are dozens of viral video sites it can search—and it presents the data to you in an understandable analytics format. You’ll know how many times the video was viewed, which logged-in users viewed it, whether they forwarded it, whether they qualify as “influencers” and more. It’s pretty cool. And like the last post, I have to let you know that we know the folks at Divinity Metrics pretty well and that their products are available through Technology Leaders.

I am not currently aware of any other tool that manages to do quite what Divinity does–but am willing to hear about them!

My next (and last, for now) post about tracking video will be about tracking ROI on video content. Look for it soon.