Do NOT Screw Viral Videos
I decided to dedicate a post to Jim Louderback’s “There, I said it: Screw Viral Videos” article in Monday’s AdAge. To briefly recap Louderback’s argument, he compares viral video to the nutritional value of fluffernutter white-bread sandwiches and believes industry focus on viral video success is single-handedly bringing us down.
Well Jim, first off I happen to disagree with you about a couple points you make in your article, the first being fluffernutter sandwiches. (more…)
Video Content Marketing Highlights
David Murdico recently wrote an article for ReelSEO about content marketing strategies. You can read the full post here, but I wanted to expand upon his comment that video content marketing is “the most engaging way to share your message” by highlighting the specific ways that video is such a great marketing vehicle.
- Video is an excellent way to get people’s attention since it appeals to the senses of sight and hearing, and appeals to each in more ways than other types of content. A viewer absorbs the pictures, any text within the video, the title and description, background music, speech, and sound effects. What other type of content can provide such a full experience?
- Video portrays a company’s spirit. A humorous video shows the company has a fun attitude, while an informative video shows it has a direct attitude. Videos can also blend multiple styles to show a diverse attitude. Other content, such as an article, is more one-dimensional and won’t portray a company’s spirit as fully.
- The message you want to get across to customers or industry insiders is not only conveyed through body text, but also through the action of the video, (more…)
Determining ROI on Viral Video and Social Media Marketing
The first step in determining ROI for viral video and social media marketing is to define what a successful return on investment will look like in terms of achievable goals. Defining campaign expectations helps to determine the tactical approach and necessary investment. Start by assigning a budget, establishing goals that if achieved would exceed that investment, selecting tactics that will achieve the goals and identifying how ROI will be quantified. This way, you can simply ask “did we reach our goals?” If the answer is yes and your goals, by design, exceeded your investment then you will have earned a positive ROI.
The following are achievable goals for viral video and social media marketing.
Increase consumer engagement and interaction: A long-term goal that maximizes time spent with your brand and results in increased sales (more…)
SEO is Like High School
In the typical American high school there is a hierarchy of social cliques. At the bottom are the ridiculed: the nerds, dorks, band geeks, etc. In the middle are the regular kids: your average not-totally-dorky, but not-totally-cool-either types. Then at the top, of course, is the popular group: the beautiful, the rich, the well-dressed, the elite.
In most cases a large percentage of kids in the school aspire to become part of the popular group. Whether you were one of these kids trying to get accepted into the higher echelons, or you were already a member, everyone remembers this teenage pattern. But is trying to get into the “in crowd” a pursuit restricted to adolescents? Definitely not. While reading the latest articles about search engine optimization recently, I realized something suddenly: optimizing a website for search is just like trying to become popular in high school! (more…)
Top 10 Most Annoying Tweets
Twitter is one of the biggest internet phenomenons in the last few years. Everyone from Ashton Kutcher to your grandmother has a Twitter account. It’s a great way to stay updated on your friends’ lives and get the latest news. However, it is also a great way for people to be annoying. You know what I’m talking about. All those obnoxious, useless, or frustrating tweets that you just want to ignore. There are many different types of annoying tweets, but here is a list of the top 10. Enjoy!
1. Mundane activities
These are the tweets that inform a following of every inconsequential thing a tweeter does. They tell us when he’s at the gym, driving home, eating a bowl of ceral, etc., etc. While we appreciate that you want to keep us all so well-informed, I’m not sure we need to know about every activity you accomplish daily. There is something to be said for leaving a little mystery in life. (more…)
Fire Breathing Dragon Discovered In UK
Researchers in London have identified the actual remains of what they are certain is the first legitimate proof of the existence of Fire Breathing Dragons. Warren Latham, lead researcher at the School of Ancient Studies at The University of Kent At Canterbury says The artifact, dating back to at least 50 BC “clearly shows wings, the face of a creature in the lizard family and carbon traces consistent with fire.”
The only thing more surprising the discovery itself, made in a dig site just East of Leatherhead, is the size of the dragon. “Most people imagine dragons as these large, ferocious, fire breathing monsters,” said Latham, “but this dragon clearly shows that they were about the size of a large mouse and were likely more of a nuisance then a threat.” (more…)
Increase Video SEO with YouTube’s Closed Captioning Feature
“Search Engine Optimization,” or, “SEO” refers to the practice of formatting a website and its content in a way that makes the site come up higher on search engine results pages. The higher up on the results page a site is, the more likely people will visit the site, therefore increasing visitation to that site.
One of the most important places to use SEO is within the content of your page. The text of a website should contain the relevant information and keywords that will attract people to each page. The effective use of keywords in the text of your pages will land your website and content higher on search engine results pages.
YouTube’s closed captioning feature now allows these SEO techniques to be applied to video marketing. Until recently videos were mostly searchable through their titles, descriptions, and tags. This meant that your video would show up on a search results page if someone searched for the select words you chose to include here.
Since the introduction of YouTube’s closed captioning, videos are even more SEO-friendly. Users can now add captions to their videos with the Auto-Captioning service so that the narrative in their videos is turned into captions. Now Google indexes videos based on all the spoken content of a video in addition to its title, tags, and summary. This gives more value to videos as internet marketing tools in terms of search engine optimization in the following key ways: (more…)
Supercool Creative at E3
Special thanks to THQ, Inc. for inviting us to E3 2010. The experience was surreal. Check out the pictures below for a glimpse of the three-day event.
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