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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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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The Who 1308720059 by Heinrich Klaffs on Flickr

In an article titled, “Meet the new boss” on Magellan Media’s blog, Brian O’Leary expresses skepticism about the characterization of a “new crop of chiefs” profiled by the New York Times as really being very new. O’Leary says:

First, these guys – all middle-aged white men – reflect experience in the old order, not necessarily an embrace of a new one. They aren’t part of a “born-digital” generation; they are on the other side of that divide.

This article caught my eye because I wrote a blog article earlier this year about this same group of companies called “Print Publishing’s Public Pity Party.”

The publishing industry has embarked on a quixotic journey.  A recent  Adweek article announces that “Close to 100 titles are planning to sacrifice prominent placements in their issues for an industry campaign.”  Their tilted windmill is a sense that we have all simply forgotten how wonderful their product is, and that by running ads they can remind us.  I can’t help but picture a group of buggy whip salesmen on the side of the road laughing at a car with a flat tire, secure in the knowledge that a horse would never succumb to such embarrassment.

I commented on O’Leary’s post, agreeing with him that it seemed that this new group would simply be tinkering with a model that needs to be blown up. Or as he quotes, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” And then it occurred to me to offer these titans of publishing some unsolicited advice: they could learn a lot from ESPN.

Inbound marketing is fueled by compelling content. The magazine publishing industry doesn’t have a content quality problem; they have a content packaging, promotion and delivery problem. As it turns out, there are two things that ESPN does exceedingly well in this regard, and I think any organization following a content marketing strategy can learn from them as well.

Repurposing

I’m a fairly avid sports fan and have been consuming sporting news in all its various forms for a long time. I’ve watched television programs, read newspapers, subscribed to magazines, listened to sports radio, and read blogs. ESPN has invaded all of those media channels and more with Napoleonic fervor. One thing I’ve noticed in particular is how effectively they’ve modularized their content and then squeeze every last drop of value out of it.

Take a simple 20 second sound bite from a post-game interview, for example. You’ll see this snippet embedded in a Sports Center broadcast, embedded in multiple ESPN.com articles, played throughout the day on ESPN Radio broadcasts, incorporated into relevant Podcasts, embedded in blog opinion pieces, uploaded to YouTube, posted on the Sports Nation fan page, Tweeted by one of their anchors, etc… And even that list doesn’t really do justice to the number of different places from which that singular chunk of content will be consumed.

Instead of embracing reuse and extracting the maximum value from their content, what are newspaper and magazine publishers doing? Erecting pay walls on the web and creating tablet applications (that are pretty terrible, by the way). But efficiently re-purposing content by itself isn’t enough…

Demand Publishing

Richard Nash is an independent publishing entrepreneur, having previously run the iconic indie Soft Skull Press for which work he was awarded the Association of American Publishers’ Miriam Bass Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing in 2005. I watched a 35 minute video of Nash at BookNet Canada’s Technology Forum 2010 in a session entitled “Publishing 3.0: Moving from Gatekeeping to Partnerships.” It connected a whole bunch of dots for me and blew my mind (the video is embedded at the end of this post).

In this presentation, Nash describes how the publishing industry must evolve from a supply model to a demand model. Under an economic model of scarcity, companies manage supply. From the invention of movable type until the proliferation of Web 2.0, information was – relatively speaking – scarce. Publishers would, in the words of Clay Shirky, “filter, then publish.” In other words, they would decide what books deserved to be published and then deliver them to the market. In an economic landscape where information is abundant, Nash argues that publishers must manage demand instead.

Mike Reiss began as a New England Patriots beat writer for the Boston Globe and is now ubiquitous across ESPN's many media channels.

How do you manage demand? You need to provide products and services along the entire demand curve; abundant but inexpensive (or free) as well as scarce but expensive experiences. ESPN does this by turning their content creators (formerly known as journalists) into experiences. Instead of writing one or two weekly columns, their correspondents deliver a constant stream of bit-sized content from short videos to blog posts and Tweets. This forms a sort of experiential pyramid, where we can consume lower value products (i.e. facts) at a greater volume and higher value products (i.e. video and opinion) at a lower volume.

Instead of embracing demand publishing, newspaper and magazine publishers are implementing draconian social media policies that attempt to keep their journalists as faceless as possible.

Here is Richard Nash’s 35 minute presentation. If you’re interested in the future of publishing, this is well worth the time.

Inbound Marketing Takewaways

Many organizations and individuals could do a better job at re-purposing and leveraging their content. Recall my social media strategy advice: Be authentic, relentless and everywhere. You can achieve better results by promoting your content relentlessly and everywhere, and by having your content creators engage with the audience in order to create enhanced, value-added experiences.

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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 “Choosing a basket for your Internet eggs.”

#5: WordPress Wins Open Source CMS Hall of Fame Award

Since the most important aspect of an effective inbound marketing strategy is remarkable, shareable, readable content, it therefore stands to reason that choosing the right basket (content management system) for your eggs (content)  is also going to be critical to success. I’m a huge fan of WordPress and the Open Source Awards agree.

Link: PacketPub

#4: iPad ‘newspaper’ created by Steve Jobs and Rupert Murdoch

Publishers are spreading their eggs in all kinds of baskets (print, open web, walled web, mobile, social media) in an attempt to figure out the best business model in a Web 2.0 economy. We now see the Oscar Madison and Felix Ungar of media by planning an iPad-only publication.

Link: The Guardian

#3: Ask the Wise Guy: Facebook Fan Page or Website?

Guy Kawasaki is nothing if not a “bottom line” kind of guy (rimshot). In this article, he does a great job of explaining why he put all of his eggs in the Facebook basket for his latest book, Enchantment. The bottom line is that if you’re trying to establish a web presence for something more ephemeral and less permanent, then skipping the website and going for a Fan page may very well be your best option.

Link: American Express Open Forum

#2: Facebook Introduces Anti-Email: Social Inbox, Seamless Messaging, Conversation History

Where are you going to put your e-communication eggs? Facebook is betting on the current trend of teens and twenty-somethings shunning email in favor of texting and instant messaging. But the central issue here may turn out not to be the technology, but the trust. Facebook hasn’t engendered a very high degree of trust lately, but we’ll see whether convenience and expediency win out over trust.

Link: Fast Company

#1: Long Live the Web

Tim Berners-Lee authored a sort of “State of Internet” article this week. Much of it discusses eggs and baskets, and the threats to both. He argues that net neutrality (lack thereof) threatens to crush certain eggs while failure to adhere to open standards threatens to diminish the quantity and diversity of baskets we have to choose from. It’s big thinking from a big brain about big issues.

Link: Scientific American

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Chris Dunlap, ISA Boston Section Vice President, kicks off our October meeting on Livestream.

I hosted a Web 2.0 workshop at last month’s ISA Fall Leader Meetings that was an open discussion of social media and collaborative technologies. The overwhelming interest was clearly focused on using video conferencing for holding meetings and presenting information. Before, during and after that workshop I’ve promised at least a dozen people that I would put together a comparison of available services and some hints and tips for using them.

In this post, I’m going to compare four different free services for conducting online meetings and/or presentations; DimDim , Ustream, Livestream and Skype. None of them is a perfect solution and they all have trade-offs that need to be considered for their applicability to your specific needs.

The Big Picture

Meetings vs. Presentations

The first question to answer is whether the collaboration is primarily a meeting or a presentation. While all of these services support online chat, only two of them permit muli-party audio or video conferencing. For meetings that are primarily one-way, Livestream and Ustream will be the best option. If you require audio or video conferencing capability, you need to look at either DimDim or Skype.

Audience Size

This is another critical factor, and will frequently dictate whether or not one of these services will fit the bill. DimDim’s free service will limit the number of attendees to 10, while Livestream’s audience can reach 50 and Ustream is unlimited. Skype’s limitations depend on how you’re using it – it allows up to 9 video conference participants, 25 audio and 50 chat.

Cameras and Desktops

Each of these services (except for Ustream) supports simultaneous broadcasting of both a webcam and computer desktop in one form or another. In my opinion, Livestream does the best job at this by a wide margin while Skype’s is pretty poor. The quality of the webcam broadcasting is always limited by the bandwidth of your Internet connection, but they all offer decent to excellent quality as long as you have a high speed link. Skype’s video quality is hands-down the best, with Livestream and Ustream tied for a very close second.

Head to Head

Paid Alternatives

While this article was meant to cover some free options, it’s probably worth listing a few options that are available on a paid basis for comparison purposes.

A Word of Caution

And that word is “firewall.” Many corporate firewalls block Skype and video streaming sites like Livestream and Ustream. It’s important to understand who your audience will be and take this into account.

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