Partner Views Blog

Anyone familiar with the sales funnel or the concept of closed loop marketing realizes that a successful business must attract potential customers, make the sale and keep their customers coming back for more. There are many different types and styles of online video but for businesses marketing videos usually support one of those three goals. Each type of video has a unique goal and that goal will help determine what style of video should be used, how it should be used and where it should be used. Most marketing videos would fall under outreach or traffic generating videos, conversion or sales videos and customer retention or engagement videos.

In my last blog, YouTube Auto Caption will Increase SEO for YouTube Videos, we talked a bit on how YouTube’s closed captions and transcripts will help improve Search Engine Optimization by turning the audio track on the video into text that can be searched by YouTube’s and Google’s search engines. In fact, YouTube has an automatic caption function; unfortunately it is not always accurate. In a video I recently uploaded the auto caption turned this:

The main job of the QR Code is to bring someone, such as your potential customer, from the physical world to the online world. In my blog “30 or more Uses for QR Codes in Marketing” I talked about many of the ways you can use QR Codes. One very powerful tool you can use with QR Codes is mobile phone videos. You can link directly to a YouTube video for example or to a mobile landing page with an embedded mobile video or a link to a mobile video. The big advantage of linking to a mobile landing page is that you can update or change the mobile video when needed. Here is my list of what kind of mobile videos your QR Code could link to.

The other day I was having a cup of tea with Kim White, co-founder of Marketing Media Hub, at the airport. She had a layover in Seattle and we had just enough time get together. The thing is that I had never meet Kim before and up until a couple of months ago I didn’t even know about her and her new company. We actually had a lot to talk about including strategic partnerships and working on the internet. There are actually a lot of people I am connected with now. Just take a look at my LinkedIn InMap. I am not only connected with old classmates and coworkers, I’m connected with people who I wouldn’t recognize on the street unless they looked exactly like their twitter avatar.

Last week I was asked to present a workshop for a group at WorkSource Snohomish County on how to manage your on-line professional profile. It was a two hour workshop but I was able to cut it down to an hour long presentation.

I am sometimes asked about what I think of Do It Yourself (DIY) videos and User Generated Content (UGC) videos especially since UGC is #9 in our e-book: 10 Things You Can Do with Video on the Internet. Sometimes these terms are tossed around as if they are the same thing so I am going to make a distinction.

Last week I was at a planning meeting for the TEDxRainier event this coming fall in Seattle. One thing that Phil Klein, the events coordinator said that stuck with me was that each speaker for the event must agree to be coached. I have already blogged about how I think TED does a good job when it comes to videotaping lectures for distribution online and this just illustrated why they are doing a good job. Many people may be wondering why they would need to coach a speaker before they video tape them. The speaker already knows what they are talking about. How can they be coached? Let’s look at 5 things you should go over with every speaker or lecturer that you video tape.

I have often blogged about using videotaped lectures online, how TED does a good job of videotaping lectures, or techniques for recording a lecture with one camera and editing the lecture. For those who don’t like “talking heads” I’ve even suggested 10 other ways to use video on the internet. However I often champion videotaped lectures not because they are the most compelling video format (although they can be very compelling) but because compared to many other video formats they are cost effective and a good way to get a lot of content online at a reasonable cost. There is more bang for the buck providing that you do it right.

The other day I was putting the final touches on a proposal for a large bid. As I was sticking label tabs on a series of collated, three-hole punched, indexed folders I noticed that I was having a little trouble making all the labels line up EXACTLY the same. Well I thought, I’m not a machine and that reminded me of a passage I recently read in Jacques Barzun’s excellent survey of the past 500 years, From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present.