Jon DiPietro is Domesticating IT

Bettina Hein, Founder & CEO of Pixability, Inc.

One of my (many) marketing resolutions is to start making use of video. As such, I’ve had an eye out for all things video here at the Inbound Marketing Summit 2011. Bettina Hein from Pixability did a presentation titled, “The Power of Reel: 5 Successful Recipes How Marketers Use Video for Results.” She presented some great tips and several examples.

But first, some obligatory “convincer” statistics:

• One minute of video is worth 1.8 million words, according to Dr. James McQuivey of Forrester research.
• According to Comscore Video Matrix, the average U.S. Internet user watches 186 videos per month.
• E-commerce sites that incorporate product videos sell up to 45% more. Zappos reports that it sells 30% more of products with demonstration videos than those with just pictures.

Recipe 1: Short and Simple

Given the Forester statistic cited above, it’s easy to see how powerful video can be at delivering messages. Hein talked about Site Slinger, who was having a hard time convincing prospects that it could deliver on its value proposition: Design to code in 24 hours or less. They made this video for a total cost of $1,300:

Recipe 2: Video as a Strategy

Many companies who do use video are not incorporating them into overall marketing strategy. Bettina highlighted EasyCare Inc.‘s highly successful video marketing campaign, which was tightly integrated with their website and Facebook fan page. The success of these videos increased revenue and dramatically cut marketing expense.

Recipe 3: Build Context

The third recipe is to build context by incorporating text, video, pictures and other media into your website. The example cited for this approach was the San Diego Zoo. Check out the link and notice the use of video, images, calls to action, and even a game!

Recipe 4: Use Video to Drive Action

Online retailer Zappos uses product demonstration videos and found that products with videos generate more sales and fewer returns.

Recipe 5: Find Your Audience Where They Are

In 2011, more people access the Internet from mobile devices than from desktops. You need to make sure your videos work on mobile devices. Many time, this means not using Flash but HTML5.

Top 3 Things Successful Video Marketers Do Differently

Bettina finished up by observing that successful video marketers:

1. Produce way, way more videos
2. Invest in metadata the drive SEO (more tags, longer descriptions more playlists)
3. Use video assets on all channels

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A guy walks into a bar with a duck under his arm and orders a drink. The bartender serves him and says, “That will be one hundred dollars.” The guy exclaims, “A hundred bucks! Why so much?” The bartender reaches under the bar, retrieves a thirty page document and replies, “There was a sign on the entrance clearly stating that by entering these premises, you agree to be bound to our terms of service. Paragraph 23 of Section 2 of Article 12 requires patrons to pay a $90 cleaning fee for bringing animals into the bar.”

As jokes go, that one wasn’t very funny. Yet most of us chuckle about the fact that we agree to terms of service contracts on an almost daily basis without ever reading them. I was commissioned by the American Water Works Association (AWWA) to study and report on the terms of service for 13 social media sites. I’ll be presenting the results during the “Creating Successful Social Media Strategies for Today, Tomorrow and the Future” session at ACE11 on 16-June in Washington, DC. While I’ll be covering lots of important aspects, there were three terms of service common to all sites that I thought deserved special attention.

1) You’re On Your Own

Every single one of these services expressly stipulates that the service is provided “as is,” with no warranties of fitness, completeness or reliability. In other words, “it may work, it may not work, you’re on your own.” This is no great shock and in the era of the Never Ending Beta, we have grown accustomed to this. But the problem is that we’ve grown so accustomed to this and the services have been so reliable that we are unprepared when things don’t work.

Takeaway: Don’t make these services part of any mission critical service.

2) You’re Liable for Security Breaches

Another common aspect of these agreements dealt with account security. The surprising twist (to me) is that many of these services require you to notify them if your account has been compromised. If you don’t notify them, you could be held liable for any damages caused by the breach.

Takeaway: Take account security seriously, don’t share passwords and keep an eye out for suspicious activity.

3) You’re the Last to Know

Similar to the first caveat, nearly every one of these services reserves the right to terminate your account for any reason, without notification. In some cases, they go so far as to say that in such a case, your content may be irretrievable. Facebook, for example, has been in the news quite frequently recently for suspending accounts for a whole host of reasons (including having a name they don’t like). Although Facebook is notoriously slow at resolving these issues, they generally get resolved without further harm. Nonetheless, there’s no shortage of other services shutting down suddenly and without notice.

Takeaway: Have a solid backup plan.

I’ll be sharing more insights from this research with my newsletter subscribers, so sign up if you haven’t already!

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You may have heard this already, but this social networking thing is starting to get popular. It’s fundamentally altering the way we conduct our daily lives and that has lots of people coming unhinged. Daily shrieks on my Facebook wall warn of a new plan from the modern day Trilateral Commission(Facebook, Google, and Foursquare) to turn us into strung out, ad-clicking junkies so they can cut off our heads and mount them on pikes. News reporters who wouldn’t know the difference between a browser cookie and an Oreo cookie write terrifying stories about web sites stealing deep, dark, private secrets: like the URL for your Facebook profile that is already indexed by Google.

But I had to write this post after reading the latest prediction of the privacy apocalypse from the Intelligentsia. In a February Wired Magazine article titled “Your Life Torn Open,” Andrew Keen wails that we are being led down a primrose path to Hell with these social networking sites. Fear mongering has a long and glorious history – especially in journalism and politics – because it’s such a powerful emotion. If Gordon Gecko were a journalist instead of a wall street banker he would have said, “Fear, for lack of a better word, is good.”

While being concerned about your privacy is very important, articles like Keen’s focus the attention in the wrong place, in my opinion. In an effort to warn people about an impending doom, he’s inadvertently doing more harm than good. His article peddles three untruths that I see commonly thrown around and I will take exception to them now.

#1 – Social Networking is Narcissistic

In my opinion, this is the laziest, most gratuitous slap anyone can take at social networking. Almost invariably, they cite Tweets about what someone had for lunch or wall updates about their pet did this morning. Since social networking begins with us talking about ourselves, it’s really easy (too easy) to make quips about it being narcissistic. But it’s also demonstrably false.

If social networking were truly narcissistic, then NOBODY WOULD FOLLOW ANYONE BUT THEMSELVES. And that would pretty much defeat the whole purpose of a social network, wouldn’t it? The very fact that someone has Facebook friends or Twitter followers annihilates the argument. I follow other people because I either learn something from time to time, or am entertained by that person, or want to keep my relationship with them warm by seeing what they’re doing. I’m interested.

There are billions of people on this planet who could not possibly care less about what I have to say. From their perspective, I’m obviously self-absorbed for writing about stuff they don’t care about. But I’m not talking to them. I’m talking to few hundred or thousand who do care. I’m talking to you. Does that make me a narcissist?

Now, I have no doubt there are true narcissists in social networks, but that’s because they are already narcissists and would be whether Facebook existed or not.

#2 – We Aren’t Naturally Social Beings

This line in Keen’s story made burst out loud with incredulity. This is absolutely demonstrably false. There have been countless experiments that illustrate the fact that much of our irrational behaviors are specifically geared toward social acceptance and group dynamics. Fear of public speaking is an example. We developed a fear of standing out from a crowd as a survival mechanism because there’s safety in numbers. Cognitive researchers have shown that our decision process is highly dependent on and easily swayed by others’ opinions. This helps promote harmony in small groups so that consensus can be reached on important decisions.

Keen opines that “human happiness is really about being left alone.” Really? Do I really even need to make an argument against that? Everybody likes some alone time now and then, obviously. But for my entire adult life I’ve heard about how our social fabric is being torn apart by people moving out of cities and into solitary lives in suburbia.

Now all of a sudden we’re all Greta Garbo? Here’s a free tip if you’re feeling too “social” – shut down your laptop and turn off your phone for a few hours. Problem solved!

#3 – Social Graphs Are Evil

Whereas the first two points I’ve made are demonstrable facts, this one is a little more of an opinion and personal preference. However, I feel like the whole paranoia over privacy settings gets a bit hysterical sometimes. First of all, you’re in complete control over what data you want to share and what data you want to keep private. Yes, reasonable people can argue about whether or not it could be more user friendly but the capability is there.

Second, we’re not talking about sharing social security numbers and credit card details. We’re talking about the brand of car you drive, your favorite songs and television shows, and news articles you’ve read. Lots of people think it’s “creepy” that this information can be used to target advertisements to us when log into Facebook or visit a newspaper website. I prefer to think of it as spam-blocking. I’m all in favor of giving these websites information that lets them improve the ads I see and offers I receive so that it’s more relevant to me.

Let’s Be Smart

OK, please don’t waste our time by mis-characterizing my point: I am not saying you should make everything public. I am not saying there’s no such thing as identity theft. I am saying that you should be concerned about the important things, like strong passwords and recognizing a phishing attack when you see one. Those are much, much more important than preventing Facebook from telling someone your favorite artist is Justin Bieber.

Well, maybe you do want to keep that one private.

Let me know what you think about privacy and targeted ads. I think there are more dangerous things to worry about but maybe I’m missing something.

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Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.  This week’s theme is “Looking Ahead at Google and Social Media.”

#5: Internet 2010 in numbers

Those who do not study the past are doomed to repeat it. Throughout 2011, many employees and consultants will be putting together presentations and plans for implementing social media strategies. This list of figures and statistics should provide some good raw material.

Link: Royal Pingdom

#4: Arm Yourself With Content, For Goliath Is Coming

One of the best things about inbound marketing is that is levels the playing field between small and large businesses. The bad news is that the word is getting out regarding how effective this strategy is and the big businesses will likely be jumping in in 2011. I predict that most of them will do it poorly at first, so you do have time but the clock is ticking.

Link: Hubspot

#3: So Google, You’ll Be Dropping Support For Flash Next, Right?

This is a little more technical than I typically get on this blog, but it could turn out to be an important maneuver in the burgeoning clash of the titans (Google and Apple). Google is making a move to replace one method of encoding Internet video (H.264) with its preferred version (WebM). The former is a proprietary technology whose future licensing costs are uncertain while the latter is an open source standard. One article suggests that it is more about infrastructure costs rather than throwing a punch at Apple. Either way, it’s the users and web developers who will be caught in the middle (as usual).

Link: TechCrunch

#2: How Media Will Relate to Facebook in the Future

I just met with a company that owns multiple newspapers and it was interesting to see the company politics from the inside out. This is a very old school industry that is not at all comfortable with the Web 2.0 technologies that are disrupting them. This article describes how the UK Independent is starting to realize one of the fundamental differences between its print and digital consumers is granularity.

Link: ReadWriteWeb

#1: Google already knows its search sucks (and is working to fix it)

Last week’s #1 article in this position was “Can Google Get Its Mojo Back?” There was lots of discussion all week about the increasingly successful “black hat” SEO techniques that are degrading the quality of Google’s search results pages. This article presents a very interesting perspective about why Google was successful in the first place (scalable design) and theorizes about why it will be able to “fix” its search. I’m not sure I buy the latter, but the former was an interesting perspective.

Link: VentureBeat

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Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.  This week’s theme is “The Tangled Web.” An effective web presence used to mean a well-optimized (for search) web site. But today, the ever-expanding world of social networks is both complicating and simplifying the process at the same time. This week’s links reflect on how social media sites are impacting search and connecting with one another.

#5: Your Income, Home Ownership & Parenthood Status Now Available as an API

RapLeaf has taken some heat over the past couple of months. Privacy concerns for consumers are going to have to be balanced with the openness of the Internet. The U.S. Congress is even making noise about a “Do Not Track” registry for Internet browsers that is similar to the “Do Not Call” registry for telemarketers.

Link: ReadWriteWeb

#4: Facebook Testing New Registration Social Plugin

Facebook is looking to extend its fingers further across the web by providing web developers with more tools to simplify their tasks. By offering a free registration system for web sites, they are strengthening their position as a standard identity provider on the web.

Link: All Facebook

#3: LinkedIn Launches Share Button

I have no idea what took LinkedIn so long, but they have finally created a share button for web site owners to allow users to easily share their content with LinkedIn. Sharing is fundamentally changing the world of search marketing and is eating away at the monopoly search engines have had since the inception of the Internet.

Link: Mashable

#2: Twitter Proven to Impact Search Engine Rankings

In my Personal Inbound Marketing talks, I frequently encourage people to use Twitter as much for the inbound links as for the engagement. In other words, even if you don’t have a lot of followers there is value in posting your content there in the form of search engine juice. This article provides more supporting evidence for that strategy.

Link: Hubspot

#1: Why WordPress rules the Web

Blogs are the engines that drive Inbound Marketing. There simply isn’t a better system for delivering your remarkable content in a search engine optimized format. Here’s another person’s opinion on the subject.

Link: SEO Theory

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