Archives for September 2009

September 30, 2009 By splatter 1 Comment

Pros and Cons for housing your Video on YouTube.

Your entire organization is going ga-ga over your hot new instructional video on how to manufacture a better widget without going overseas. Now it’s time to post it on the Internet so you can get it in front of a larger audience and put your brand name out there. Where you post your video is almost as important as what your video says. Do you post on YouTube or do you post on your company website? That’s the big question. Before deciding which route to take, weigh some of the pros and cons to help you decide what’s best for your company:

PROs FOR POSTING YOUR COMPANY VIDEO ON YouTube:

“¢ YouTube instantly allows you to tap into a huge audience. YouTube gets literally billions and billions of video requests per month. How many visitors do you get to your site per month? Probably not nearly that.

“¢ If you’re video is good enough, YouTube may feature your video on its homepage. This could mean exposure to more eyeballs than you ever dreamed possible, which puts a lot of pressure on how good your video really is.

“¢ Youtube has some pretty cool analytics tools allowing you to collect data on who’s watching, how long they are watching, where they live etc. For more info on this subject, click here.

“¢ No need to pay for extra bandwidth. YouTube keeps all videos on their servers which means that videos that suck up bandwidth won’t cost you a dime extra for server space.

CONS FOR POSTING YOUR COMPANY VIDEO ON YouTube:

“¢ You can’t build link juice to your site by posting on YouTube. YouTube gets all the credit. This may change in the future, but for now, they ain’t sharing.

“¢ If people are searching for your products or services online, by and large YouTube entries will rank lower than text-based sites. If your strategy includes Search Engine Optimization (SEO),Â you may want to consider housing a transcript of your video in text format on your company site.

“¢ Why relegate your video to just one network? There are lots of other distribution channels out there (although none as popular as YouTube). For more info on other channels, click here

“¢ For more cons, visit “You Shouldn’t Use YouTube for Building YouLinks” on linkspiel.com

No matter which route you choose, know that digital video gives your company additional exposure and can ultimately produce a wider online footprint. Keep in mind that the content of your video is of importance. If you’re doing a viral video, you had better make sure it is entertaining enough that someone will want to pass it around. Make sure that your content fits your strategy for making a video. Digital video can be a big plus if you’re the only business in your industry who offers it. If this is the case, not only will your videos help you rank higher in the SERPs, but you’ll look like a more dominant player in your industry. So what are you waiting for Scorsese? Grab a camera and a megaphone and get ready to roll.

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September 29, 2009 By splatter Leave a Comment

I just filmed a great digital video. Now what?

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As digital video is becoming more and more accessible to Joe Interweb, more websites are adding video to their user experience than ever before. Let’s say you are one of the lucky few who have figured out how to produce, edit and convert an eye-catching video to post, but you’re not really sure what is the best way to get it out there. The most common question we get here at Brandsplat is whether to post videos on YouTube or to keep it housed on the company website. The answer often relies on the strategy for having a video, the size of the company, and the budget. If the strategy is to build traffic to the company site, often times we suggest doing a bit of both by having two versions of your video; a longer format for your site and a shorter one for YouTube. Or, we encourage companies to incentivize a visit to the company’s home site in the video itself.

There are definitely pros and cons for posting your company’s video on YouTube. Check out our next blog for more on this.

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If you like this post and are interested in getting intelligent brand strategies for your online business, sign up for the The Brandcast Report. You can also follow us on Twitter.

September 28, 2009 By splatter Leave a Comment

Google/YouTube grab billions of eyeballs in August

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According to recent August 2009 data from the comScore Video Metrix service, Google sites (including YouTube) garnered over 10 billion video views in the month of August alone. No other brands came close. Google has the majority of video views considering that overall numbers totaled 25 billion video views, according to the data. That’s a lot of traffic! Microsoft came in at a distant second with only 546 million views for the month with Viacom digital and Hulu coming in just behind in third and fourth place. It’s evident that Google/YouTube has deep penetration when it comes to online videos when you consider that they attracted 121.4 million unique viewers for August. Whenever you see numbers like that, you can expect to see advertisers and marketers flocking toward a medium that can capture that much traffic and keep growing. You can bet that video will be huge in the next year. Keep an eye out for more blog videos, how-to videos, branded content, viral videos, interactive videos, television shows, independent videos and all kinds of advertising to go with it. Let the proliferation begin.

September 25, 2009 By splatter Leave a Comment

Zen and the art of digital house painting.

I’ve seen a lot of shuffling of the decks at agencies over the last decade as many of them have attempted to transform the way they do business in the age of social media, search engine marketing, viral videos and all the rest that the digital age has bestowed upon us. If you’re a traditional ad agency, you either “get it” or you slowly fade into the background. One agency that proves time and time again that it “gets it” is Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. Named Interactive Agency of the Year at the One Show in 2009, GSP has gotten quite a bit of attention both online and off with their latest opus. I came across the story in a post titled,Â “Goodby Implores Ad executives to Embrace Change“. The post describes howÂ co-founder Jeff Goodby used the painting of his house as a platform to illustrate how his agency approaches communication in the age of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

I once had the goodÂ fortune of being invited up to the shop in San Francisco just after graduating from a Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. What inspired me on that visit years ago was how the two founders, Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein, approached the day-to-day operations of the agency;Â both were extremely passionate about the craft and creativity involved in their business and both approached advertising as if it were the greatest form of art in the world.Â I remember having a half-hour conversation with Mr. Silverstein on the virtues of well-crafted typography in the hallway as he was passing by!

I digress. So it was no surprise to me when I came across the link in the above mentioned story for PoemHouse.org which demonstrated how Jeff Goodby used huge letters in exquisite type on the side of a Victorian house to get his message across.Â When you visit the site you are welcomed with the following message,

“Could a house be a book? Would words be different if they were five feet high and printed on an emotional symbol of domesticity?

Is this idea a violation? And if so, is it a violation of the house or the words?

The home on Oak Avenue in St. Helena, California, is one of the most charming late Victorian houses in the Napa Valley. Built by a German family in 1892, it was at its birth a tribute to the optimism and elegance of what might be the most fertile time in English and American literary history – the era of Tennyson, Woolf, Eliot, Stevenson, London, and Bierce (the last three lived for a while in the Napa).

Here, in the summer of 2009, Oakland visual and media artist Jeff Goodby has covered the Oak Avenue house with a series of enigmatic words, set in a typeface designed in the 1760s by John Baskerville. The effect is a combination of Harry Potter and Andy Warhol and has challenged the meaning of home and book alike.’

The site was developed only after Mr. Goodby posted photos of his house idea on Facebook where it created a considerable amount of buzz.Â Then all hell broke loose. Word spread like wildfire across the digital landscape. Word spread across the real world landscape too, and eventually got people off their butts and into the sunlight to rubberneck the house for themselves. Talk about driving traffic!Â It’s a fine lesson on harnessing the power of the Interwebs with a simple, beautifully-crafted message. They make it look easy.

September 24, 2009 By splatter Leave a Comment

News content ain’t what it used to be.

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As the proliferation of digital media as a source of information has swelled in the last couple of years, more and more people are turning away from traditional news media and powering up their computers to get the latest scoop. A recent poll conducted by Sacred Heart University suggests that average Americans don’t care much for newspapers and traditional news outlets to get their unbiased fix of reporting.

Newspapers and traditional news organizations have done a poor job protecting their reputations by creating an environment where profits override content. But hey, everybody needs to make a living, right? News agencies are giving their audience what they want by delivering info-tainment, rather than what they need; unbiased reporting of events that effect us all.

Over the years, traditional news has become more of a business and less of a public service which has lead to a proliferation of news outlets that cater to sensational headlines and buzz, which in turn is good for the bottom line. Greed may be good for business, but it is not necessarily good for news. So what to do?

Recently, Senator Ben Cardin suggested a bill that would give newspapers non-profit status so they can deliver news without the worry of raking in a profit. But does changing into a non-profit going to encourage readers? Will that change the quality of the content? Believe it or not, quality content can be had on the internet by individuals who are doing the reporting more for the love of the craft than the need to profit. And readers are taking notice. As audiences flock to these writers, they will become more attractive destinations for news. In a recent interview of Tom Fenton, former senior correspondent for CBS news and author of “Bad News: The Decline of Reporting, the Business of News, and the Danger To Us All” believes that the answer to low-quality news content will depend on whether or not there is public outcry for better news. But I think it will be less of an outcry from the public, and more a slow turning away to better alternatives. For more on Tom Fenton’s take on the state of traditional news, click on the video below.

September 23, 2009 By splatter Leave a Comment

It’s official. Google does not use keywords meta tag in web ranking.

thinker

Do you ever wonder how much weight meta tags carry? According to Matt Cutts, not much when it comes to ranking. The reason for this is probably due to spammers who have tried to game the system by packing meta tags into their code. Google, being the number one search engine, is always going to be one step ahead by trying to change their technology so it’s is difficult to game the system. In a recent blog post, Mr. Cutts says that Google uses over 200 hundred factors when it comes to ranking. But he isn’t about to tell us what those 200 things are. In the meantime, he does tell us one factor they do not put much weight in. Rather than hear it from me, click on the video below. Or, if you like reading, visit Google’s official webmaster blog

September 22, 2009 By splatter Leave a Comment

When it comes to the future of SEO, think small.

The field of SEO was created by a need to optimize websites based on reverse engineering algorithims coming from the major search engines so that a website would rank higher on a search result page and be more findable on the Internet. The process by which SEO practices were (and still are) developed depends on which search technology is reverse engineered. Best practices rely on the ability to keep up with the latest technology offered by the major search engines. And those search engines who are in the top three don’t let you peek behind the curtain to see just how their algorithims function, so most of it relies on SEO experts who share information and build their own models that are later tested to see if they work. That means SEO is an ongoing, never-ending process that relies on expertise and on-going management. But as search technology becomes smarter and smarter, things like keyword density on a website becomes less and less important. Some may argue that the days of search engine optimization are over. In an informative article titled “The End of Search Engine Optimisation” writer Fran Molloy suggests that the sophistication of how search engines index content has made keyword density less relevant and contextual content more important than ever before. In the article, Kate Gramble, search manager with Bruce Clay Global Internet Marketing Solutions says,

“we discovered last month that the US site redsox.com ranked very well for “˜baseball’ ““ despite no use of this keyword on the site”

Does this mean SEO copywriters have their days numbered? Perhaps. But if history has a way of repeating itself, I believe SEO copywriters will still have a roll.Â I have seen a similar trajectory within the world of traditional advertising. It was once common to repeat sales copy in a television commercial or radio ad repeatedly to get the message across for a particular advertiser.Â This is known in the advertising world as frequency. In 1959, one little print ad changed that kind of thinking.Â The advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach’s 1959 “Think Small” ad for Volkswagen proved that for the first time, a major advertiser could get your attention by content rather than frequency. Today, most advertisers use a mix of both content and frequency to get our attention. But that doesn’t stop some advertisers who rely on frequency only. Sham-wow and lowermybills.com are fine examples that frequency is here to stay. But alternatives that rely on the message can be just as, if not more than,Â successful and more affordable to boot. I think this is what we are seeing in the world of SEO. We are just realizing that you can get the attention of the search engines via creative content. So will keyword density (frequency) still have a roll in helping websites get ranked in the future? It all depends on how small you’re willing to think.

September 21, 2009 By splatter Leave a Comment

Micro-vlogging takes a big step forward.

I came across an interesting article in today’s NY Times about a video product that could be the next big thing in very tiny, very short video content. The service is robo.to and comes to you via Particle, a San Francisco based think-tank that invents

“massively small, “featureful” products that humbly aim to impact people’s lives in a big way.”

Their latest offering aims to empower individual users to post very short (up to four seconds) videos onto their favorite social media platform, thus enabling tiny video tweets and updates to all your friends. Wanna tell your posse that you just ordered a venti cappuccino? Why not use your video enabled phone or webcam to record and share that foamy milk mustache you’ve got going on? And if you have multiple social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, etc.), you can instantly broadcast that vid to all of them with just one click. As the company says on their site, “write once, publish everywhere”. But the service doesn’t stop there. Today, robo.tv is announcing the release of “TV Mode” which allows users to search videos based on a keyword or #hashtag. For example, if you type in #a in the searchbox in TV Mode, you will see all videos posted that start with #a. You can see how this could be a powerful tool once they get a few million video posts from around the globe.Â This kind of short-form video content and distribution is a very simple, very elegant idea that could be used to get a visual snapshot of what is going on in the world of social media. It’s a pretty powerful little tool. One that I hope will catch on.

Archives for September 2009

Pros and Cons for housing your Video on YouTube.

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I just filmed a great digital video. Now what?

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Google/YouTube grab billions of eyeballs in August

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News content ain’t what it used to be.

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It’s official. Google does not use keywords meta tag in web ranking.

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When it comes to the future of SEO, think small.

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