February 2010 – Online Insights: Online Video

Online Video Trends for 2010

Q1 is here again. It’s the time when companies of all stripes strive to put their strategies into place for the new year. Budgets are set, marketing plans are approved, product roadmaps are locked in and headcount allocations are finalized.

For those of us in the digital advertising industry, the start of 2010 and of the new decade is no exception. So what will be the major story for the kickoff of the new decade in online advertising? For me, 2010 will be focused on video.

More Screens, More Content, More Eyes, More Dollars
At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) conference earlier this year, one of the most dominant topics of discussion was the introduction of the iPad and other new tablet PC form factors along with other larger-screen mobile devices. Together with advancements in the smartphone market and their increased video capabilities, tablets will continue to move the needle in the total consumption of online-based video content. The introduction of these new hardware options and the increase in available content will be the core growth driver of digital video advertising inventory. Wherever consumer eyes wander, you can be sure that advertising will follow–and the rate at which consumers are watching video on their PCs, their mobile devices and internet-based TVs is growing rapidly. According to the Nielsen third quarter Three Screen Report, online video usage is on the rise, with Internet users watching 53 more minutes of video online in Q3 ‘09, a 34.9-percent increase from last year. In addition, the number of people watching mobile video has grown 53 percent year over year.

With more video being consumed on these alternative-screen devices, brands will find new ways of advertising around or during this content, and will subsequently continue to spend more on video-based ad formats. Forrester predicts that video will be the fastest growing area of display advertising over the next five years.

Ads Need to Get in Touch with Their Interactivity
As the inventory for online video ad placements has increased, advertisers have been quick to fill it with simple in-stream ads (pre-roll, mid-roll and post-roll). As a result, a customer experience issue has arisen–and the viewing experience is critical to users consuming online and mobile video content. This is a different beast than your traditional cable or broadcast viewer. Online consumers are driving innovations in our industry with the power of their clicks and engagement. Don’t expect them to sit through 15- or 30-second in-stream spots that have been repurposed from your broadcast campaigns; online consumers are demanding and expecting more.

In 2010, advertisers, publishers, agencies and technology companies will continue to push the innovation curve with advancements in online and mobile formats by focusing on developing highly customized, interactive and engaging video-based ad formats. Premium content publishers like ABC, CBS and NBC have had huge success enabling their premium full-episode player environments with custom, immersive advertising experiences. In 2010, look for new technologies, formats and features that truly engage consumers and offer opportunities to do way more than just watch the seconds count down until their video resumes.

“True” 3D–Coming Soon to a PC Near You?
3D movies like “Avatar” and “Up” have been a hot topic over the past year, with ticket sales reaching record numbers as audiences have lined up at theaters for these incredible movie experiences. One of the questions spurred by the technological advancements in production of films like Avatar is where this 3D technology will take us next. Will 3D make its way into our TV and PC viewing experiences in the near future and will advertisers be forced to hop aboard the 3D train?

The topic of 3D can be a confusing one as it relates to the interactive world, when compared to the “stereoscopic” 3D world of movies like Avatar that we see in IMAX theaters. Digital technology companies like my own are pushing the envelope with rich media technologies (like Papervision3D) that enable the delivery of real-time, rich, three dimensional online and mobile ads.

You’ll certainly hear a lot more about 3D in 2010, but 3D comes in many shapes and sizes–especially in the online advertising world. I wouldn’t be surprised to see companies emerge with software and hardware solutions for online stereoscopic (”Avatar-like”) video in the future, but I wouldn’t hold my breath if you are waiting to see it in an ad near you in 2010.

HD Online–Gaining Some Traction
High-definition content has become commonplace in our living rooms. The question for online advertisers is, “why haven’t we seen the same adoption curve in online video content?”

The simple answer lies in the economics. The cost of serving an HD video file over the web is still much higher than a standard-definition video file. This, along with the variability of serving cost when offering users the choice between HD and standard video viewing, has made advertisers reluctant to expand heavily into HD video for their ads. In 2010, look for continued reductions in serving costs and alternative pricing models that will begin to empower advertisers to explore options for HD video ads.

Continued Online/ Offline Integration
Now that video is completely digitally based, it seems inevitable that the two distinct advertising operational structures that we see today across advertisers, agencies and publishers will eventually converge and realize efficiencies of a truly unified model for video-based ad operations across traditional broadcast/cable and online/mobile platforms.

Integration is definitely a hot topic. According to a recent Forrester 2010 Predictions report, online technologies and processes are “seeping into television media. Television buyers and sellers should spend 2010 learning from their online brethren how to target, optimize and automate bid-based buys in order to be ready when the television upfront takes a backseat to the ‘online-like’ rules of order.”

The reality is that there are a lot of factors that will prove to be influencers of, or barriers to, this convergence. There is not yet a consensus in our industry on truly how much these two video workflows should converge, or how. In 2010, I expect that the following trends will continue to make this topic one to watch:

• Growth in the prevalence of online video (in terms of both content and consumption);
• The continued shift in budgets being allocated toward online and mobile video-related media buys;
• The desire for more robust and consolidated metrics and analysis around video campaigns across mediums;
• Economic conditions and the forced reduction of staffing models employed by agencies, publishers and advertisers; and
• Technology advances in TV, mobile, cable and PC hardware.

From online consumer trends to ad interactivity, 3D and HD technologies and innovations and online/offline integration–2010 is shaping up to be the year of video for the digital advertising industry.

Bryan Hjelm is vice president of marketing at Unicast, a leading rich media and video ad server and service provider. He can be reached at bryan.hjelm@unicast.com.

January 2010 – Online Insights: Online Video

Creating Persuasive Video

Everyone is experimenting with online video these days, which means that if your company’s clips don’t convince viewers to take action, fast-fingered cybersurfers will simply finish watching, hit “close” and cruise on over to another video. “If you’re spending time and money on online video, you’d better make sure you’re using persuasive strategies to get people to continue watching and responding,” says Colin Martin, marketing manager at business and marketing consultancy Antion and Associates in Virginia Beach.

AVOID ONLINE COMMERCIALS
Where most marketers go wrong in their quest to persuade via online video, says Martin, is by treating the clips like commercials. “It’s OK to use outrageous statements or graphics to lead into the video and grab attention (a search engine optimization firm, for example, might use a statement like, ‘We can get your company on Google’s front page’),” says Martin, “but you also need to follow that up with real results–proof.” Marketers also tend to drag out the videos too long, and wind up losing the viewer’s attention. “The idea is to keep the person engaged for three or four minutes at the most,” Martin says. “If you go longer, people will get bogged down and grow weary of it.”

Baiting viewers and leaving them wanting more also works well when creating persuasive clips, says Martin. “Show the viewer what you do and/or what you’re offering, but do it in a way that only provides a few key points,” he explains, “so that the viewer will want to learn more.” And don’t forget to tap into the persuasive nature of the video genre itself, the simple fact that moving pictures in and of themselves allow you to create very relevant content for a targeted audience.

“Being able to show the product or service in action goes a long way toward keeping the audience engaged,” says Martin, who points to Blendtec’s online videos for the Total Blender as a good example of this strategy in action. “The shows where the host puts iPods and other objects into the blender are meant to be humorous,” Martin says, “but they also plant in the consumer’s head the idea that this blender’s performance is as fantastic as the company claims.”

Service-oriented companies can use a similar approach. The firm that specializes in life coaching or business consulting, for example, can pull together a number of real-life testimonials to feature in the online video, thus cementing the fact that people use–and are pleased with–the firm’s services. When developing the testimonials, be sure to zero in on customers who are similar to the market that’s going to be watching the video. Then, let the moving pictures tell the tale. “Written testimonials can be faked, but video testimonials are far more legitimate,” says Martin. “They build trust and close the anonymity gap between companies and their customers.”

FRONT-END PLANNING
Christy Wise, vice president of marketing at Los Angeles-based online marketing firm Fanscape, Inc., says companies that want to develop persuasive videos must combine a solid call to action (a statement or offer that makes the consumer get up and do something) with content that is compelling and relevant. Getting there requires careful planning at the outset, says Wise, who advises companies to clearly define their goals instead of pulling out their camcorders and shooting randomly.

“Look at what your target audience is doing on Facebook and blogs before you create the content,” Wise says. “This will help you come up with videos that are truly relevant to your audience.” To get the most mileage from those videos, make sure they are sharable, and that they’re posted on public portals like YouTube, for maximum exposure. “You can’t just put a video online and sit back and wait for people to click on it and respond to it,” says Wise. “It’s up to you to make sure people see it.”

As for just how many people will see and react to your persuasive video efforts, Wise says: “Be realistic.” Only a small percentage of videos ever make it to YouTube’s 100,000-views milestone, she says, unless they become one of the lucky clips to go viral and get spread across the web like wildfire.

Rather than setting the bar at an unreachable height, develop realistic goals (such as attracting X number of new customers during the 30-day period that the video is posted online) and measure your results.

Martin says the company that comes up with an integrated plan (which includes traditional advertising, a website, online video and other elements) that keeps viewers engaged stands the best chance of succeeding in the online video space.

“You want people to view your videos, see the testimonials, meet the staff and then investigate your product or service even further,” says Martin, who advises firms to use a service like Google Analytics to measure the effectiveness of their online videos, and to hone their strategies.

“The key to getting your audience to react like you want it to is by closely identifying exactly who that audience is and what they want,” says Martin. “Build a rapport with them and create calls to action that get them to sit up and take notice.”

Timothy R. Hawthorne is founder, chairman and executive creative director of Hawthorne Direct, a full-service DRTV, print, mail and digital ad agency founded in 1986. A 36-year television producer/writer/director, Hawthorne is a cum laude Harvard graduate.

January 2010 – Feature: Bullish o Pre-Roll

Reports of the Video Advertising Format’s Demise are Greatly Exaggerated

By Caleb Hill

With the turn of the new year and interactive agency planning teams allocating their budgets for 2010, no doubt there will be a familiar debate between video and non-video planners: to invest or not to invest in pre-roll advertising. On one side will stand those who think pre-roll is a dying ad format for monetizing video content. (After all, as many industry experts have noted, haven’t we been waiting years for its breakthrough moment since the great video player wars earlier this decade?) The other side will defend pre-roll’s viability with as much conviction as Ad Mob will defend their valuation by Google. (After all, isn’t the very fact that pre-roll still dominates the conversation at many industry events testament enough that it’s worthy of a bigger line item in the planning budget?)

The fact is, both sides have a lot of convincing arguments for their cases. Pre-roll’s detractors point out that the format annoys users, it isn’t scalable, it doesn’t exploit the promise of interactive and that new trends merit more funding (like last year’s “next big thing”–widgets). The format’s evangelists point to data showing that pre-roll improves purchase intent and brand recall, that it can have interactive companion banners (that can even expand) and that it’s better to invest in proven, if vexing, video ad solutions than, say, widgets.

Those of us on the product development side of the coin look to where the money goes. And at last count, it seems the pre-roll bulls are prevailing over the bears in most of the planning arguments: the spend on pre-roll video advertising for 2009 looks like it will come in at roughly $500MM. The outlook for 2010–depending on which analyst you follow–shows incremental growth. Not a sea change of growth, but hardly a death knell for this ad format.

The eternal pre-roll optimist, I firmly believe the format is a lock for long-term ascendency as the ad format for the web. Given several important 2009 industry initiatives, I also see a lot of reason to be bullish about pre-roll’s near-term prospects–even beyond industry expectations.

I must now pose–and answer–the operative question: What happened in 2009 to suggest such optimism for pre-roll on the heels of a down economy?

Pre-Roll’s Growth in 2009
In 2009, ad agencies, web publishers, regulatory bodies and technology vendors made several notable advancements to the pre-roll format that should be recognized as further proof that the rumors of pre-roll’s eminent demise are greatly exaggerated. And while these innovators in our space stepped up and delivered more engaging user experiences and better mechanisms to facilitate scale, other contributing factors to a successful year for pre-roll included both an increase in broadband penetration and an improved technology platform for video delivery. Both factors dramatically improve the end-user experience for consuming video online, and have led to wholesale increases in the amount of long-form video now available. Long-form video is a special key to my outlook on pre-roll’s success, as it allows publishers to build a TV advertising model around their content that, if done correctly, can leverage the interactive qualities of the web (e.g., Flash) and monetize nearly as well as television, too.

For example, let’s take a closer look at premium content publishers like ABC and NBC. Their “branded canvas” and “ad pod” pre-roll products have been a revelation for marketers, a huge financial success for the publishers, and consumers seem to accept them as well. These products enable the networks’ premium full-episode player environments with custom, immersive advertising experiences that follow the same generally accepted rules of television advertising (e.g., ratios of ad content to network content displayed largely consistent with the consumer’s television experience).

But true to the interactive medium–and a quantum leap over companion banners–the new full-episode ad formats integrate the re-purposed television ad within a much more effective interface for user engagement. In some cases, users can even re-play the ad content–another leap beyond traditional “run-and-done” pre-roll advertising (and a reason the term “pre-roll” has increasingly become anachronistic, usurped by the more flexible term “in-stream”).

The Rise of Standards
As publishers revamp their sites around the long-form video content enabled by technology companies like Adobe and Bright Cove, for 2010 I predict big demand for a large-scale roll-out of pre-roll advertising products inspired by the big networks and video ad serving innovators, like Panache and my own company, Unicast. And that brings me to regulatory bodies and the monumental success the IAB has had (and will continue to have) rolling out its new VAST and VPAID standards for video player environments. These provide a framework to ensure interoperability between video platforms and ad servers so that advertisers don’t get bogged down in the technical details of each site’s particular video environment. With a robust adoption program in full voice–including major publishers committing to compliance this year–a problematic landscape characterized by fragmented and inefficient workflow, lack of standard publisher specs and ad hoc and inconsistent reporting, is yielding to a new liquid video environment where buyers can begin to leverage the economies of scale required for video advertising to make faster and more substantive inroads into television budgets.

Buyers Help Build Pre-Roll
Buyers have done their part, too, investing enough in pre-roll to help facilitate adoption of the IAB standards as well as to drive new format development. The best example of agency activism promoting pre-roll in 2009 is POOL, an initiative for finding the new workhorse formats for pre-roll. POOL truly exemplifies the power of collaboration across the ecosystem to further online advertising objectives. Headed by Starcom (partnering with Vivaki, also under the Publicis umbrella) and large video-content publishers and distributors like AOL and MSN, the initiative leverages new interactive pre-roll formats to ascertain how video advertising can scale across multiple platforms while providing users more control and more engaging interactive ad experiences.

The investment promise of the POOL initiative extends well beyond 2010, which further informs my optimism for pre-roll. Starcom surely will look to scale its pre-roll media spend beyond the scope of the first round of investment, or the “swim lane” as they call it, to include new web publishers, especially those with premium content inventory. Furthermore, Starcom already has committed to opening new swim lanes, which most likely will include mobile video, interactive television and social media. And the consumer research collected through the duration of the program surely will feed into strengthening IAB standards and their adoption. More heartening is the fact that other large agencies will feel pressure to match the efforts of Publicis, just as more web publishers will look to compete with the first adopters by supporting the new formats. The additive effect should bode well for the pre-roll bulls.

Commendations for Creative
Those responsible for utilizing the richness of the new pre-roll ad formats, the creative agencies, also must be commended, not only for effectively exploiting the creative potential of the new pre-roll formats, but also for contributing to their overall design and, in some cases, deployment. Take a look at the quality of creative content around Lost episodes within ABC’s full-episode player, for example. Here you’ll see excellent rich design, innovation (a lot of AS3 executions) and consumer engagement, particularly with games and other interactive features. Plus, in 2009 more and more video ad content was specifically produced for the web medium. This effort–though still finding its profitability legs–challenges the conventional wisdom that the most bang for the buck simply requires 15- and 30-second TV spots to be re-purposed for the web. While original content produced solely for the web might not rise from a niche pursuit, the scalable middle ground is probably a combination of re-purposed video within an interactive framework akin to full-episode products.

Together, these achievements in pre-roll advertising represent a compelling synergy of highly coordinated innovation, investment and industry standards that have begun to overcome the legendary bugbear of video advertising–lack of scale–and put to rest the criticism that pre-roll is dull, passive and annoying to users.

Challenges Remain
That’s not to say 2009 removed all hurdles to online video advertising. Remaining challenges include a recognized lack of premium video inventory, a static if not falling interest in advertising against short-form video, advertorial pre-roll of the same duration or even longer than short-form video (a common consumer frustration), a flawed and inefficient selling model that depresses prices for content as it syndicates across competing sites and the vexing question of how to monetize popular but seemingly unsellable user-generated-content video, just to name a few.

But thanks to a very successful 2009, we will be sure to see new technologies, research and investment set the stage for continued progress toward the type of monetization (and increased TV budgets) that only improved scale and user experience can bring.

Predictions for 2010
Look for formats that enable consumers to select the advertorial content they wish to see instead of being fed the same 30-second spot again and again. Expect to see dynamically enhanced video formats that improve relevance as well as formats using engaging 3D navigational elements and effects. In terms of pricing, I expect to see evolving models around consumer engagement, view durations and even conversions. Also look for new research and standards. But most notably, I predict a far better monetization of premium content throughout its distribution channels via better-structured syndication deals.

When we launched our first pre-roll product in 2003 at Unicast, we had confidence–as did everyone else contributing to the video market at that time–that we would see a critical mass of publishers and advertisers propel pre-roll and video advertising into the top echelon of online advertising formats. While that has not yet happened fully, 2009 ensured that pre-roll advertising is well on its way to taking its promised place in online media spends. In 2010, it’s going to continue to grow.

Caleb Hill is SVP of product at Unicast, a leading rich media and video ad server and service provider. He can be reached at chill@unicast.com.

January 2010 – Feature: An Eye Toward Performance

Pay-Per-Performance Models Represent the Next Wave in Online Advertising

By David Szetela

The online advertising industry is undergoing the same kind of evolution and maturation one sees in every new industry. But change is happening at Internet-speed, and those companies who don’t understand and can’t adapt to these changes risk being marginalized.

Companies of all sizes have rushed to the online advertising space, spurred on by the measurably superior ROI of paid search advertising. The recession has only hastened the flow of ad dollars away from difficult-to-measure, low-ROI media like TV, radio and print. While advertiser understanding of online advertising best practices and techniques has grown proportionately, the relative complexity of conducting, measuring and optimizing online ad campaigns is a murky black box for many. This is especially true for advertisers and agencies who have become accustomed (some might say mollified) by the relative simplicity of “placing ad media” and paying (or collecting) based on a percentage of ad spend and cost per thousand ad impressions.

The leading seller and beneficiary of PPC advertising is the sudden behemoth Google, whose self-service advertising platform brought the ability to target and reach customers to nearly anyone who can operate a personal computer. But Google has raced ahead–and stayed ahead–of its nearest competitors Yahoo and Microsoft by maintaining a dizzying schedule of new advertising features, reporting capabilities and tools for testing and optimizing ad campaigns. In one week last November, Google rolled out no fewer than three new search ad formats that provide advertisers with greater opportunities to reach customers with graphic-rich images and messages.

Some technically savvy advertisers and agencies quickly learn how to exploit new features to reach more customers more profitably. But many advertisers are finding it increasingly difficult to assimilate each new change, falling behind in the “feature wars” at the same time that competition is driving up advertising costs. This is driving changes in advertiser and agency behavior, especially related to the online media mix and agency compensation models.

Let’s look in closer detail at some of the changes that have occurred in PPC advertising over the past few years, and how this has shaped the advertising landscape.

Increased Competition Means Increasing Click Costs
During the first few years in which PPC advertising gained in popularity, advertisers could expect to pay pennies for clicks on ads that were displayed based on even the most popular search terms. Companies in competitive industries like personal finance, travel and legal services could pay as little as $.15 to $.50 for clicks on ads triggered by search terms like “mortgage refinance,” “Hawaii vacation” and “injury lawsuit.” Resultant traffic to sites was cheap and plentiful, and profits were sky-high.

Those boom days ended around 2005, when advertisers and affiliates starting stampeding to Google with their ad dollars. In recent years, click prices have risen to dizzying levels. It’s common for advertisers in competitive spaces to be paying $5 to $10 per click to ensure their ads appear in prominent positions on search results pages. The most expensive clicks, paid by advertisers of high-priced legal services like medical malpractice, can cost close to $100.

Whether the top bidders in the search click auctions are actually seeing a reasonable return on their advertising investments is anyone’s guess. But there’s no doubt that the average cost per click has risen steadily over the past few years, and already some advertisers are finding themselves priced completely out of the game.

Increasing Complexity
As mentioned, the search engines (led by Google) have, over time, provided advertisers and agencies with a bigger and bigger set of technical tools for creating, managing, testing and optimizing online ad campaigns. This is really good news for those with a solid understanding of the fundamentals of direct-response advertising and with a sophisticated capability to quickly learn how to master new software and reports.

But the number of experts who can push and pull the increasing number of technical levers has not kept pace with the rate of innovation. Ad agencies and in-house marketing departments didn’t anticipate the need for workers with technical proficiency and analytical capabilities. Just 10 years ago, a typical agency employee spent his or her day calling media properties and haggling over the prices of “ad space.” Today’s advertising expert requires the skillset of an amalgamation of David Ogilvy and Albert Einstein.

Changes
Faced with increasing competition and complexity, PPC advertisers and agencies are facing hard choices. Some advertisers are pulling back from PPC advertising and funneling dollars to other online marketing channels like e-mail and affiliate programs.

Other advertisers are moving to the PPC content networks, directing their ads to appear on sites whose visitors comprise their target markets. As described in my book Customers Now, these networks are available to all advertisers currently using Google, Yahoo and Microsoft PPC platforms. The available number of impressions and clicks is growing faster on the engines’ content networks than on their search networks.

Traditionally, advertisers have shied away from content network advertising since response rates and ROI were proportionately much lower than the results obtainable through the search networks. As described in Customers Now, obtaining acceptable ROI is simply a matter of employing best practices in site targeting and ad copywriting and design. In fact, many advertisers are getting better ROI from content networks since competition has not yet driven up click bids and prices.

Pay-Per-Performance
Ad agencies are finding it even more difficult to contend with the changes in the PPC landscape. Clients are demanding closer attention to the fact that sales volumes and margins are dropping. Agencies are increasingly under the gun to work harder and longer to learn and to exploit new PPC features and functionality.

However, their traditional compensation models may be working in the opposite direction. Most online and offline ad agencies are compensated as a percentage of advertising spend. This is an anachronism based on the fact that for many years, advertising effectiveness could only be measured in the number of eyeballs reached–hence CPM charges from the media to the agencies. Spending more money meant that more people were being reached via ad dollars, so it made sense to reward this way.

While that model made sense in a world where measuring return on advertising spend was difficult to impossible, it may not work as well for online advertising, where ROI of every action can be tracked to the penny. Advertisers and clients are becoming reluctant to turn ad budgets over to agencies whose main motivation is to maintain or grow the size of that budget. Often, this is in direct opposition to the objectives of the advertiser, who wants to minimize ad spend to improve ROI.

For these reasons, agencies including my own have pioneered a new compensation method often called “Pay-per-Performance,” usually abbreviated “PPP.” Under PPP models, agencies charge clients based on the performance of the PPC campaigns under agency management. Typically, this means the agency is paid a percentage of the profit generated by the campaigns, or in the case of campaigns where submitted forms or leads are the success metric, a value per conversion.

The PPP model keeps client and agency aligned and working together toward common goals–usually an increase in sales volume while keeping costs under control. For this reason, there has been an increase in support by leading-edge U.S. advertising agencies–such as Clix Marketing, Location3 Media and Semvironment–to promote a PPP campaign partnership. These agencies are now motivated to take the time to learn and employ new search engine features and functionality for the purposes of continually optimizing PPC ad campaigns–using new targeting techniques to reach more and more potential customers, while using reporting and bid-management techniques to minimize advertising expenses.

Every month, more customers and advertising agencies are exploring the PPP model to forge partnerships that are mutually equitable and allow both parties to achieve their goals. These agencies recognize that the biggest benefit of practicing PPP is shifting the focus from ad spend to the outcome of the ad spend within the contract itself. It is a relationship centered at the core on the organization’s profitability.

The agency-client relationship is quite different under the PPP model. There is much closer and frequent interaction during the planning and execution of well-managed PPC campaigns, e.g., in the designing process and the testing of PPC landing pages. Both parties need to feel assured that site analytics are accurately reporting visitor and sales data.

The extra work is certainly worthwhile for the agency and the advertiser/client. In our experience, clients have enjoyed regular double-digit sales growth while keeping costs tightly under rein. The upside potential for agencies is higher than under percentage-of-spend models. Clients are very happy to spend more on advertising when profitable sales are growing proportionately–and that’s good news for everybody.

David Szetela is the CEO and founder of Clix Marketing, an online marketing firm specializing in paid search. He can be reached at david@clixmarketing.com.

December 2009 – Cover Story: Creating Link Love

Link-building strategies for driving SEO success

By Ken Burke

All I really need to know about SEO link building, I learned in high school. Your site’s global link popularity and the anchor text of those inbound links are two of the most  important search engine ranking factors that you can focus on.  According to Google, “Links are an important signal in our page rank calculations, as they tend to indicate when someone has found a page to be useful.” That usefulness is amplified  when the inbound link comes from a popular site with a high page ranking or with well-established domain authority (one within your topical community that scores well on a combination of popularity, importance and trustworthiness). An effective link-building program can elevate your popularity status–and hopefully your page rank–as well.

While your primary SEO focus should always be content relevancy, developing a link-building program is almost as critical to your success. Once you’ve implemented highly targeted, keyword-relevant content on your site, you should dedicate a percentage of your weekly marketing time to building relationships and links with other topically relevant, high-quality websites.

Below are a few critical points to note when developing your link-building strategy:

Sometimes, Less is More

A few links from high-quality, topically relevant websites are worth more than many low-quality, non-relevant links. Start your discovery process with a combination of the following top link-building sources:

Business partners – Ask a select group of your business partners to mention your company somewhere on their website and provide them with the specific anchor text to use. Beware of placement on link pages that carry hundreds of links to slightly relevant or, even worse, non-relevant “partners.” This type of linking is no longer effective.

Customers - Leverage your best customers and turn them into brand advocates. Reach out to this segment to see if they would be willing to link to your website from their own personal websites, blogs or social networking pages. This may require an incentive. Or, seed them with new products which they can turn around and post reviews on.

Directories - Submitting your website to directories is the most common way to gain link exposure, but is still a valid tactic that definitely works. Just make sure you submit your website to a few (which can vary from about five to a few dozen, depending on the vertical) high-quality, relevant directories rather than auto-submitting your website to several hundred general directories.

Forums – Building links through forums can be very tricky because they are typically monitored by a live person who is watching for advertising misuse. However, it can also be one of the most valuable tactics in terms of branding and the amount of targeted visitors. A popular strategy used is signature-based link building. This is good way to build brand credibility on the forum you’re participating in, as long as you contribute regularly and provide unbiased commentary to earn the trust of the forum participants. Sponsoring a contest is another way in which you can use forums to attract extra links. Lots of forums hold contests (photo contests, essay contests, etc.) regularly. Donate a prize to the winner of one of these contests, and you might receive a link in return.

Guest blogging – A highly effective way to build deep links with the anchor text of your choice is by guest blogging (or guest writing) for other websites. In exchange for writing an original article or blog commentary, most content sites will usually allow you to add a link (or a few) to your own website. Remember that good content can have a viral life of its own and may create greater distribution with no additional work.

Relevant organizations - Industry organizations usually add links to all their members. Don’t miss out on this easy opportunity and make sure that these links do not use “no-follow” tags. Also, determine if any of your targeted organizations provide industry-related content, such as a blog, research or newsletter articles, which you can contribute and pass a link through.

Avoid Buying Links if Possible

It’s likely that these sorts of links come from poor quality, “free-for-all” websites that won’t provide any traffic and could get you banned from the search engines. While some legitimate sites such as Yahoo’s directory charge for submission and can add value to your online presence, link buying as a general practice should be avoided.

According to Google, “Buying or selling links that pass page rank violates our webmaster guidelines. Such links can hurt relevance by causing…false popularity and an unfair advantage.” However, buying links can have other benefits not related to SEO, such as general brand exposure. If you do plan on buying links, make sure that you stay in compliance with search engines’–and especially Google’s–quality guidelines. Google specifically states that paid links be disclosed through a rel=”nofollow” or other technique such as doing a redirect through a page which is robots.txt’ed out.

Optimize Anchor Text Links

Make sure that the anchor text of the inbound link reinforces the keyword(s) targeted on the specified landing page. At a minimum, use your company’s name and avoid generic anchor text links like “click here” or “read more.” A better choice: “This Chicago attorney gave me terrific advice.”

Know What Sites to Avoid

Link building is definitely a resource-intensive task. To make sure that you don’t waste critical resources and to better focus your efforts, simply avoid the following types of websites:

Pages with links inside of frames – These will not pass any page rank and can possibly steal your traffic.

Free-for-all links – These types of sites allow anyone to post unreviewed links which typically result in unrelated and “spammy” links.

Link farms – These are sites with 100 or more unrelated links on a page. (These are banned by search engines and may cause your site to be banned if you link to them).

Sites that utilize “triangular linking schemes” – “I’ll link to your website if you link to my other website.”

A site that has a network of mirror sites with the same links and content.

Sites with a page rank of zero – Perhaps the website is too new or its pages are dynamically generated. Either way, they pass no value to you.

Sites where the link page/directory isn’t linked from the homepage or site map – Search engines simply won’t find it.

Directory sites that make you search to find your site listing – Typically, your link won’t be found by search engines unless it’s on a static, non-changing page.

Pages that would like to place your link using a meta tag that instructs “NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW” or is referenced in the robots.txt* to be disallowed by search-engine robots – Basically, this instructs search engines not to follow any links on that page–and thus, there will be no page rank for your site.

Websites with a long load time (too many ad banners, images etc.) – The search engines won’t wait.

Websites that are poorly designed and have broken code – These sites typically have a difficult time being indexed.

Link-building strategies are key to successful SEO and should be a key focus for online retailers.

Investing time in a well-conceived linking strategy can make a measurable difference in search rankings and–ultimately–sales.

Ken Burke is chairman and founder of MarketLive, a leading provider of e-commerce platforms and services for mid-sized retailers. Contact him at ken.burke@marketlive.com.

December 2009 – Feature: Reputation Assaults

Trolls are no longer hiding under bridges. The are actively lurking online–and ready to eat your lunch!

By Mike Hughes

According to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, in Internet parlance a “troll” is someone who posts controversial, inflammatory, slanderous, irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as a discussion forum, chat room or blog. The troll’s primary intent is to provoke emotional responses or otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion. While most webmasters and forum administrators consider trolls to be a scourge on their sites, some websites welcome them as an opportunity for profit.

As a Peabody Award-winning documentary director for NBC in New York, I strongly believe in protecting free speech and have fought actively over my 30 years in the media to defend it. In traditional media, free speech reigns within reasonable legal boundaries and limitations of defamation laws, which require that the truth be told to the public under threat of legal penalties. Tragically, that is not the case with online media and many American businesses are being eaten alive because of it.

Reputation assaults by trolls represent a menacing and growing problem. Their actions encroach on direct-to-consumer commerce and our entire society’s free speech rights. Slanderous and false online postings are being enabled and protected from traditional slander and libel laws because of what amounts to a legal loophole known as the Communications Decency Act (CDA). Reportedly, the CDA was made into law so our legislators could avoid ruling on the political hot potato of community standards regarding pornography. To date, lawmakers have not been motivated to adjust the CDA to also protect and sustain our expectations of truth within free speech and to keep our rights from being trampled on by free-wheeling, online trolls acting with impunity.

The CDA loophole has allowed a few questionable entrepreneurs to create their own perfect storm of disruption and reputation assaults, inciting and hosting the most outrageous kangaroo courts imaginable. They persecute products and services for their own profit motives–and they have blanket protection under current Internet law. In the 1925 literary classic “The Trial,” Franz Kafka tells the story of a man prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his offense confusing to both him and the reader–a disturbing nightmare.

Likewise, a nightmare of confusion is ruling the day online when it comes to products being crippled by anonymous trolls posting false or dubious complaints about products, services and companies. In some cases, individual entrepreneurs can operate as judges by running their own privately owned and operated consumer complaint sites and using them as their own online fiefdoms.

I can only describe these sites and tactics as “questionable” until the CDA is more fully shaped by Congress to cover online defamation. The broad legal strokes of the CDA give questionable site operators absolute power on decisions about reputation assault postings because of their immunity to slander and libel laws. And we all know what happens when any group of individuals has absolute power.

Most people worldwide look in awe at the American judicial system and view it as the gold standard of legal systems. Consumers with legitimate complaints have many means of addressing their needs, including small claims courts, attorney general offices, state and city consumer complaint mediation, as well as the Better Business Bureau, chambers of commerce and the non-profit American Arbitration Association. The latter now offers professional mediation services online.

Unfortunately, online posting sites have become the go-to spot for consumers who do not have a legitimate complaint and wish to blow off steam about their purchase decision with false reputation assaults and, in doing so, become trolls. American law is sadly lagging behind Italian law, which has wisely banned this online conduct.

To infer that every business listed on a questionable site is a rip-off or every product listed is a scam is no more accurate than using an ethnic slur to describe everyone of a certain race. This behavior replaces truth with emotional and broad generalities. This is always a stupid and often an oppressive and evil thing to do.

The biggest problem is that consumer awareness lags far behind this new reality due to the blinding speed of the Internet. Most are unaware that a posting they may be reading is not even in the same universe of credibility as reports from organizations such as the Better Business Bureau or Consumer Reports magazine. A blistering attack on an unregulated reputation site may have been written by a frustrated, underemployed man who kicked his dog and beat his wife before posting a hate rant about someone he saw on TV whose face he didn’t like.

As Seth Godin writes in his bestselling marketing book Purple Cow, “It’s people who have projects that are never criticized who ultimately fail. Will you do some things wrong in your career and be unjustly criticized for being unprepared, sloppy or thoughtless? Sure you will. We often respond to criticism by hiding, avoiding the negative feedback and thus (ironically) guaranteeing we won’t succeed. The only way to avoid criticism is by being boring.”

It is vitally important that products, services and businesses be criticized truthfully and fairly without a troll escalating the criticism to barroom drama that disrupts normal on-topic discussion and kills the enterprise.

The Damage Done

At ReputationMedia.com we have interviewed hundreds of business owners and have discovered the ravages done to perfectly legitimate businesses that now need professional help to tackle these publicity and reputation challenges. The problems only escalate if the business owner files a rebuttal on a questionable site. This action moves the posting up to a higher search-engine ranking and often angers the person posting the complaint to launch further attack.

An unfairly attacked business owner must recognize when he or she is being “worked” by professionals who own these questionable sites and who may wish to leverage the business owner’s fallen status to gain what might be called “protection money” in the form of counter-posting fees.

Business owners today need professional help and publicity advice–in addition to legal reform. Consistently helpful legal recourse for them has not yet been found and may come too late for them to remain in business. When businesses are forced to close their doors because of a troll’s false posting, jobs are lost and more foreclosure signs go up on the houses in our neighborhoods.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thomas L. Friedman recently commented on Meet the Press, “Online postings should come with the warning, Caution: reading this may be hazardous to your mental health.”

Our advice to business owners is to confront this situation head-on with awareness followed by building a “firewall” of backlinks to positive, “white publicity” stories about your business in advance. Advance backlinking is designed to prevent the first negative comment about a business from rising to the top of Google as fast as a weather balloon. This is one way to protect your marketing investment against trolls who hack into the minds of your prospective customers with mental viruses by posting slanderous or off-topic messages to disrupt normal, on-topic product presentations.

Before launching a new product or ad campaign, ask yourself if it’s wise to build your castle on anything less than a solid foundation. A wise marketer today will consider the precautionary steps of posting hundreds of links every month to positive content about themselves, the product and the company as much in advance as possible to protect his or her investment, assets and good name from a lurking troll. Once an online publicity campaign is launched for only a few thousand dollars, the monthly fee for backlinking to good publicity can be as low as $200 per month.

Winning the War

Trolls and troll sites promoting reputation assaults are unlikely to stop any time soon. On the contrary, they are growing and expanding in scope because unethical marketers now look for the first signs of competitor companies or products impeding their success. Online, success means traffic that can be stolen and more traffic means more business.

It’s simple to divert traffic from its intended destination to a troll’s site by posting a phony online assault sign such as, “Wait! Don’t be scammed–buy our sure-fire humdinger instead.” Sometimes, this is the only way an inferior product can hope to compete with a superior competitor.

The trolls are winning. Every day they become more emboldened and empowered by the growing number of questionable sites which are posing as consumer advocacy sites. They justify reprehensible activities by posing as “the good guys” as they conduct their businesses as wolves in sheep’s clothing. They need to be outed for who they are–the trolls leading the trolls–and they need to be regulated or neutralized in some way.

Questionable sites have empowered trolls with unlimited potential for unethical extortion, which is being used and will likely expand dramatically if not stopped.

Two women recently walked into a Berkeley coffee shop and demanded free coffee, stating that if their demand wasn’t met they would file a slanderous complaint about the small shop on a complaint site.

Business owners are even being threatened with an online slander assault when they simply invoice an individual for a past due account.

Where does it stop?

I believe the following actions are needed:

Increased public awareness through campaigns focused on consumer advocacy fraud.

Direct lobbying efforts toward members of U.S. Congress and to U.S. Senator Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine), a ranking member of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs should call Senator Snowe’s office to ask her to review the Communications Decency Act and to join other professionals in asking Google to end their support of unscrupulous or questionable sites that exploit business owners.

Some sort of plan, executed by an association or organization of Internet properties–including consumer advocacy sites–to promote self-regulation through creating common practices and industry standards, as other association such as the Electronic Retailing Association has done.

The promotion of business owner awareness that a dollar of prevention is worth ten thousand dollars of cure. Using backlinks to accurate, positive content in advance is as vital as computer virus protection.

If you don’t take control, some troll may take control from you–and with it your hard-earned reputation, your income, possibly your health and your hope for continued American small business innovation.

Mike Hughes is a direct marketer, PR consultant and a frequent speaker on Internet publicity. He can be reached at mhughes@reputationmedia.com.

November 2009 – Feature: The Online Holiday Shopping Experience Done Right

Presenting shoppers with personalized offers is the best way to boost sales: try these three insider tips this holiday season–and beyond

By Darren Vengroff

Industry watchers predict that overall holiday sales this year will be down, but that a larger percentage of those sales will take place online. According to a recent survey by Burst Media, some 85 percent of consumers will shop online this holiday season. That means if you’re not doing everything you can to boost sales in the online channel, you’re leaving revenue on the table.

One of the best ways to boost online sales is to personalize offers; research shows that if shoppers are presented with products that interest them, they convert 10 to 30 percent more often than those presented with one-size-fits-all offers. By personalizing offers for individual shoppers based on real-time data like clicks, shopping preferences and browsing behavior–and automatically modeling that real-time knowledge against CRM data, a customer’s individual past purchase information, top sellers, commonly purchased pairs of products and other historic data–you’ll present shoppers with highly relevant offers that interest them in that moment, increasing per-session conversion rates by 10 to 20 percent.

What’s more, research shows that customers who see personalized offers online buy more offline as well–boosting in-store sales during the holidays, too. Macy’s CEO Terry Lundgren recently claimed that every dollar spent by a shopper online drives that person to spend an additional $5.77 in-store in the following two weeks.

Personalization, then, seems like a no-brainer for the holiday season, when you’re looking to boost sales as much as possible. The good news is, you can leverage software-as-a-service recommendations platforms to start offering personalized recommendations almost immediately. That said, personalization during the holidays can be tricky. For one, unlike the rest of the year, shoppers aren’t buying items for themselves. So if you’re relying solely on shopper profiles built over months or years, you’ll be delivering the wrong content and suggesting the wrong products to consumers during the holidays, because they are likely searching for completely different types of items than usual. For example, a female shopper who usually buys lots of trendy clothes and shoes may be looking for toys for her kids, men’s clothing for her husband, housewares and small gifts for friends and women’s styles more suited to her mother. Then, come December 26, she’ll be again looking for bargains on trendy apparel for herself. The four to six weeks around the holidays is the only time of the year when people’s shopping behavior radically changes–so your recommendation systems should adapt on the fly to these micro-trends.

By following a few simple steps, however, you can deliver a user experience that drives sales during the holidays–and long after.

Recommend Gifts
The key to getting recommendations right during the holidays, as discussed above, is to recommend products that people will want to give as gifts. It’s not enough to recommend common gift items like gift baskets, ties, top-selling toys and jewelry; that’s just a start. Instead, make product recommendations that account for users’ present behavior, and not simply based on past purchases. A best-practice approach is to leverage real-time click and browsing behavior, analyze it against past purchases and historical data and come up with product recommendations that suit a shopper in the moment. Make sure you analyze both past purchases and real-time online behavior–and leverage sophisticated algorithms to connect the dots between these data points.

Get Local
Identifying a shopper’s location based on his or her IP address and other information allows you to recommend products apt to sell well in that person’s particular location. Sophisticated retailers are able to set up parameters to recommend certain products to shoppers in specific locations, based on collective purchase data in those areas. For example, you don’t want to recommend down parkas to people in San Diego even if, on the whole, they are your top-selling products of the week. You can also use geo-targeting to capitalize on local micro-trends. For example, if a local celebrity is seen wearing one of your jackets in Chicago, you can set up your recommendations system to promote that jacket to people in the Chicago area for a short period. Or, if a snowstorm hits the Northeast, your recommendations system should recognize a flurry of purchase activity for snow blowers or snow boots, and then recommend those products to people visiting your site from that locale.

If you have a system in place for analyzing real-time user behavior and making recommendations based on up-to-the-minute patterns, you can actually detect and react to events like these without explicitly tracking the media or the weather and then trying to tell your recommendation system what to do. As shoppers begin to react to external events, you detect that change of behavior and put it to use immediately in recommendations you make to the next users who visit.

Go Multichannel
Geo-targeting goes hand-in-hand with multichannel analysis. By automatically analyzing both parameters, you can make extremely accurate product recommendations to holiday shoppers. For example, if you automatically analyze purchase trends at local stores and find that a certain item is sold out, you could then set up your system to recommend that shoppers coming to your site from that zip code buy the product online, mentioning that it’s sold out in stores. Alternatively, you could recommend a similar product that’s still in stock if your purchase data shows the majority of shoppers complete their purchases in-store. In addition, use geographical sales data gathered online to print in-store circulars recommending top-selling products in that zip code. There are sophisticated recommendations platforms that analyze POS, CRM and purchase data–and measure this against zip-code-level geographical trends–to recommend the best products for shoppers in certain areas.

When it comes to the holidays, many shoppers sit down at their computers in hopes of finding “the perfect gift.” Help them easily find it by recommending the right products based on their real-time preferences, location and behavior.

Darren Vengroff is chief scientist at RichRelevance. A renowned computer scientist and technology industry veteran, Vengroff is responsible for the company’s analytical and machine learning development–from high-level strategy and analytics, to strategic implementation plans. Vengroff has designed and built a variety of world-class customer-focused, scalable applications for startups as well as industry leaders like Amazon.com and Goldman Sachs.

November 2009 – Cover Story: Online Video: Blocking and Tackling

Tricks, techniques and best practices for producing professional online video

By Timothy R. Hawthorne

For every well-made, professional video on the Internet right now, there are literally thousands of grainy, poorly formulated clips floating around, hoping to score some eyeballs. A percentage of the latter can be attributed to the do-it-yourselfer who is sitting at home, relishing in the fact that he has an online audience who just may care about what he’s publishing, but many of these shoddy online clips are produced by companies that allocate big bucks to traditional advertising and marketing, however pay no mind to the professionalism of their online video.

With the total value of subscription- or ad-supported online video expected to surpass $15 billion by 2012, the medium has become an important component for marketers looking to add new dimensions to their online strategies. And while rudimentary clips can attract a small audience online, the time and effort put into online videos will never pay off if these shows are lacking in quality. After all, cybersurfers are a discerning bunch who can tell the difference between a cheap effort and one that took some time and money to put together.

To buck the trend and produce a professional video requires some basic blocking and tackling techniques, starting with the video-production process. Whether your videos are as basic as a vlog, user testimonials or a “how to” video, or as sophisticated as a TV commercial or fictional series (”webisodes”), here are 16 points to consider before sending your videos into cyberspace:

Create an Excellent Video Concept
Video production doesn’t start when the camera rolls, but rather when the people charged with creating it sit down and come up with a concept for the video. You wouldn’t slap together a concept on the fly for a $1 million television advertising campaign, so why would you do it with your online video, which conceivably could reach just as many eyeballs as your TV efforts–if not more? To create the best possible concept, take a step back and consider exactly what you’re trying to accomplish with the video, whom you want to target and what value the show will deliver to that audience. Consider the different ways in which the information can be presented–on the ‘net you’ve got a number of concept formats from which to select, ranging from basic to complex (see sidebar).

Focus the Content and Message
Generate ideas that jibe with your online video goals; engage viewers and make them come back for more. If you decide to produce the “minimercial,” the strongest direct response video format, be very specific and communicate your message clearly. What are the three to five key points you want to communicate? How should this content be organized and communicated? Get to the point quickly, and always include a call to action that prompts the viewer to take the next step. A company looking to increase the distribution numbers for its monthly e-newsletter, for example, could produce a two- to three-minute video that shows people what the firm is about, what type of content the publication carries, the value it delivers to the reader and a call to action. By using video to get those points across, you can come up with an affordable, compelling and persuasive message that meets business objectives.

Use a Script
Script writing isn’t for amateurs; be sure to hire a pro. When properly developed, the script will give you a clear idea of what you want to show and tell your viewers, and will serve as the very foundation of your online video. It needn’t be lengthy or complicated, but the script must tell the story that you’re trying to get across. Keep it succinct. Write it in a two-column format (video on left; audio on right) that will be usable when it comes time to shoot the video. Consider word count when writing. A person speaking formal English will typically talk at a rate of 100 words per minute, which means you’ll need a 500- to 600-word script to fill a five-minute video.

Select the Right Camera
Select a video camera that not only produces high-quality pictures, but also produces good sound. With a huge range of choices, as little as $300 can get you great images and audio. And don’t forget to purchase a tripod to avoid shaky images in the final cut–and spend a few extra bucks for one with a leveling bubble, for no-hassle setup. With steady, level images, you’ll immediately vault to the 95th percentile in quality for online video. Eric Rusch, owner of Fairfield, Iowa-based Breadtopia (www.breadtopia.com)–a developer of instructional videos–says he started with a low-end video camera that lacked a microphone jack, and later upgraded to a $600 Canon that shoots in HD and has low-light capabilities and a jack. Now he uses a lapel microphone, producing much better audio than the standard on-camera mic. “When people see my videos,” says Rusch, “they think I’m shooting with high-end equipment.” (Check out camera reviews at: http://reviews.cnet.com/camcorders/.) And take note that, while loads of fun, the Flip and Zi6 tiny, pocket-sized cameras rarely are suitable for professional results.

Choose the Best Talent
Male or female, professional or not? When the company CEO or president isn’t the right person for your latest online video, and when no one else in the company fits the bill, consider the fact that outside help is just a click away. For example, online talent scout Plentitube (www.plentitube.com) has positioned itself to serve as a matchmaker for the online video generation by matching producers with actors and actresses who are paid to star in the online clips. Or call local modeling and talent agencies; you can often find excellent, attractive talent for $300 to $500 a day. Key advice: don’t skimp on talent–they can make or break your video.

Find a Good Location
Many online videos are shot at a desk or in a storage room, with little regard given to the background that the cybersurfer is going to be watching–or worse: distracted by. Consider the location carefully, and don’t be afraid to get creative. To keep viewers interested, for example, you might use two or three different locations and then weave them into one cohesive video clip during the editing process. Remember that your goal is to avoid cheesy, unprofessional videos that scream, “Check this out–we did it ourselves!”

Invest in Lights and Props
No one wants to watch a poorly lit video of someone sitting at his or her desk, talking to the camera. To make your shows engaging, you’ll want to use the proper dose of lighting and an adequate number of props, without going overboard on either one. Rusch says he uses natural spectrum light bulbs screwed into shop lights and covered with tracing paper (to diffuse the light and cut down on glare). “I use a couple of those set-ups in the studio so there are no shadows,” says Rusch. “It’s a $20 solution that works very well.” Or find an array of inexpensive professional lighting kits at: www.tubetape.net.

Consider a Teleprompter
Just like the ones that anchors use on nightly newscasts, teleprompters fulfill a valuable role in the production process by scrolling the scripted text on a dedicated display for use in front of the camera. This piece of equipment cuts rehearsal time and embarrassment if your talent has mediocre memory. Thanks to advancements in technology, producers have several new options when it comes to teleprompters. Vara Software Videocue (www.varasoftware.com), for example, has developed a desktop video teleprompter for Mac-based computers, while CuePrompter (www.cueprompter.com) offers a free online teleprompter application.

Hone Your Camera Technique
You’re not going to become a Hollywood cameraman overnight, but there are some quick-and-dirty tips that you can use to shoot great online video. Make each shot 10 to 15 seconds, for example, and use your tripod and earphones (in order to hear the sound quality) whenever possible. Leave about 20 seconds at the beginning of the tape, and get as close as possible to your subjects when shooting. Avoid pans (horizontal movements of the camera) and zooms, neither of which translates well on the Internet. In your mind, divide up the frames into three vertical strips and put your subjects within each of those strips in order to create screen balance.

Find Testimonials That Add Punch
The television infomercial industry has been using real-life testimonials with great success for decades. There’s nothing quite like hearing from someone who has actually tried the product or service, and who is willing to talk about it. When selecting individuals to tell their stories, choose only those who look and sound believable–and who won’t “oversell” the concept and turn viewers off. A rule of thumb: out of 20 good written user testimonials, you’ll only find two or three that look and sound great on camera. Do your research–or watch your awkward video testimonials go viral for all the wrong reasons!

Get the Editing Right
Once the footage is shot, sit down and edit your video into a short, compelling show that viewers will enjoy and respond to. Top editing software options include Windows Movie Maker, iMovie (for Macs), Adobe Premiere Elements, Final Cut Pro, Cinelerra and Animoto, the latter of which allows users to pick the imaging, select the music, add copy and sit back while the program does the rest. Don’t despair at the high price tags on some editing packages; you may be able to get the same functionalities from a lower-priced option. To edit Breadtopia’s videos, for example, Rusch uses Windows Movie Maker because it’s simple and cheap. “My needs are pretty basic,” says Rusch, “and as long as it’s working for me, I’ll keep using it.” Edit your video much like you’d write an article or whitepaper: grab your audience in the first 10 seconds with something notable or surprising, keep your shots brief and varied, wrap it all up at the end so it makes sense and don’t forget your call to action!

Don’t Overlook Music and Narration
What your viewers hear when they watch your online video is just as important–if not more so–as what they see. To attain the best outcome, you’ll need to dedicate some time to laying down a vocal track that includes music, narration and any other sound elements that you want cybersurfers to hear when they watch your show. Be sure to test the sound, make sure it flows evenly and naturally and that there aren’t any unexpected decreases or increases in volume, either of which can quickly send a viewer packing. Investing in a professional narrator is just as important as your on-camera talent. Call your local radio stations; their DJs often do narration on the side for as little as $200. And remember, you just can’t insert your favorite Black Eyed Peas song into your video without expecting a call from RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). But there are many inexpensive, royalty-free music options online. Check out: www.royaltyfreemusiclibrary.com.

Keep it Short
Stick to videos that are three to five minutes long, advises Rodger Roeser, president at Cincinnati-based public relations consultancy Eisen Management Group, Inc. “Make them any longer,” he says, “and your customers will lose interest and move on to another site.” The idea is to edit the video down to a size that online viewers will sit still for, and to avoid rambling, convoluted messages that confuse viewers and drive them to other, more interesting options. “If the video isn’t concise, and if it doesn’t ask viewers to take a specific action,” says Taylor, “you’ll lose them.”

Avoid the “One-Size-Fits-All” Approach
Your viewers aren’t always going to be sitting in front of a computer, not all cellular phone models support the same video format and all video does not appear correctly on the thousands of different mobile phones that are available on the market today. Be sure the footage you shoot is supported by the audience you’re going after; you don’t want to create content for an iPhone audience in a format that the phone can’t play.” (Test your content before publishing it by going to http://deviceatlas.com).

Put Your Videos Out There
Once your videos are ready for prime time, online venues like YouTube and Google Videos will serve as the platforms where viewers can access, view and provide feedback on them. You will also want to place the videos on your company’s website. Consider carefully whether you’ll want them to “auto load and play” (immediately start upon opening the page). This feature upsets many web surfers, but it’s been proven to drive more response than the alternative. While there’s an obvious “cool” factor to having your videos on YouTube, remember that you have more control over your message, and how it’s presented, on your own site.

Add Fresh Videos Regularly
Companies like Quiksilver and The Home Depot already know that their online visitors want fresh content on a regular basis. You needn’t stick to a daily, weekly or even monthly schedule, but you also don’t want too much time to lapse between videos. Viewers will lose interest and move on to one of the million other websites that does post fresh videos. A good strategy is to create a few videos at once on relevant topics, and then post them on a regular basis throughout the month or year.

As you can see, there’s a lot more to online video production than simply shooting a few hours of footage, picking the best snippets and uploading the final product to YouTube. Teenagers looking to get some attention on MySpace or Facebook may be able to get away with this strategy, but no professional marketer should take this approach. By incorporating good scripts, cameras, editing tools, lighting and sound into the mix, you’ll earn a spot in that very small pool of marketers who get online video right.

Timothy R. Hawthorne is founder, chairman and executive creative director of Hawthorne Direct, a full-service DRTV, print, mail and digital ad agency founded in 1986. A 36-year television producer/writer/director, Hawthorne is a cum laude Harvard graduate.

September 2009 – Online Insights: Emerging Technologies

Reading Your Customers’ Minds

By René Dechamps Otamendi

Some 20 years ago Joseph Carrabis, the founder of NextStage, started working on a new field of technology at the nexus of four well-established disciplines: anthropology, linguistics, neuroscience and mathematics. During this 20-year time span, he not only developed the theory of his “mind-reading technology,” he also refined it through a series of working prototypes that were tested in both academic and small business settings.

NextStage’s Evolution Technology (ET) is now a patented field of “basic” technology that early investors have described as being similar to plastic. Like plastic, ET can shape itself to whatever a client’s needs are. As one early investor says:

“Plastic can do anything and everything from protecting your small child dropping a bottle of juice on the floor (it just bounces away) to delivering life-saving medicine or nutrients to a person in the hospital getting an IV. But it’s not really about the plastic, it’s how you apply it. It’s a base, a start. What you can do with it is limited only by your imagination.”

What is it that ET can do that makes it like plastic? It allows any programmable device to understand and respond to how somebody is thinking.

One application, for example, can be found on websites. A javascript tag is installed that monitors mouse and keyboard activity. With this data, NextStage systems are able to not only predict socio-demographic information about visitors, but also how they feel. ET can tell online retailers what their visitors think about their products, prices, etc. without having to poll them. A few months ago, we undertook an independent test to gauge the accuracy of our predictions. The age and gender of 300 people were predicted by our systems with an accuracy of 98 and 99 percent, respectively.

ET allows clients to understand how their audience is thinking (not merely what they are thinking) and does so without interfering with or interrupting the audience’s browsing behavior with forms, surveys, panels or any other intrusive action. It exists anonymously, so site visitors are free to browse without concern. Industry analysts have labeled ET a “mind-reading technology,” although we certainly do not make that claim.

NextStage’s Evolution Technology is a self-learning engine that gathers the experiences it has with users and keeps a “memory” of its encounters so it can predict the reactions of similar users it meets down the road. Through this methodology, ET is able to predict with high accuracy how members of a given audience will respond to any stimuli or experience.

Another application of this technology is NextStage Advertising Intelligence, a marketing optimizer engine. You can take any marketing collateral online or off (e.g., print ads, online banners, TV ads, etc.) and upload it into our systems. After you define your target audience, our system predicts the level of effectiveness that the marketing material will have with that audience. In addition, it provides suggestions for improving the material to make it more successful.

The applications of this technology are endless and we hope to develop many of them in the future. Here’s a small sampling of a few that could be easily accomplished:

By identifying age, gender and other characteristics, ATMs and online payment systems could recognize users, dramatically reducing card fraud; children’s forums could alert moderators about the presence of adults with immoral intentions; and websites could automatically adapt themselves to better interact with visitors via true one-to-one experiences, ensuring maximum satisfaction.

Years ago, Carrabis spoke at an MIT Enterprise Forum. What follows is an anecdote from “Reading Virtual Minds,” Carrabis’s next book, about that experience and ET’s prediction capabilities:

One of the people attending the MIT Enterprise Forum was Hans Reimar, president and CEO of Market-Vantage. Hans was one of the people who came up to me enthusiastically to talk after that presentation, and we did. We also followed up that conversation with a plan to meet for lunch at his office one day the following week.

It might help at this point to know that NextStage is self-funded, which means I was always looking for creative ways to have ET learn about people. I wanted ET to be exposed to specific types of people for controlled periods of time so that it could learn what makes one group of people different from another. The way I chose to do this was to sign up for contests: Submit your site to a contest for “best website” and you’re going to be browsed by lots of website designers. Submit your company to a business plan competition run by a bunch of venture capital firms and you’re going to be browsed by venture capitalists. Submit your company to an MIT Enterprise Forum and, well–you get the idea. When ET found a new set of psycho-motor behavioral cues and we knew the majority of new visitors were coming to the site based on some contest we’d entered, those behavioral cues were by definition indicative of the people most involved in that contest.

So ET, by this point in time, had learned a great deal about how different people thought, made decisions, learned, remembered, so on and so forth. In fact, ET had learned enough that it could determine what kind of job a visitor would be best suited for should this visitor be searching for a job. No need to submit a resume; no need to fill out a form. ET would automatically make a decision regarding aptitudes and abilities and, if such a position was available at NextStage, that position would be offered to you.

Hans, when we met, had this wry smile while we talked. It was a pleasant meeting and he had some of the other folks in his office come in to say hello. Hans introduced me as the fellow who’d come up with that interesting ET stuff on the website he’d asked them to browse. I noticed that everyone looked at me a little strangely and I wondered if somehow I had once again transformed into Kafka’s bug à la “Metamorphosis.’

Finally Hans told me that he’d visited our jobs page.

‘”Oh?”

“Your site offered me a job.”

I wasn’t sure what to say. “Did you take it?”

He laughed. “It offered me a job in sales.”

I thought for a second. “Isn’t that what you’re doing here?”

Then he really laughed.

Hans noted that his actual title at was director of business development, but everybody knows that means “glorified sales rep.”

One of the people whom Hans introduced me to had also gone to our Jobs page. She was leaving her present position to go to another firm. ET had offered her a position in research and development, something she’d always been interested in. What was she going to be doing at the new firm? R&D.

Now that Joseph has asked me to run his company, I face a great challenge: to productize his technology. The first tools are already in alpha version and currently being testing with clients. If you’re interested in this technology and want to learn more, please visit my blog www.makingmarketingactionable.com).

René Dechamps Otamendi is CEO of NextStage Analytics. He can be reached at rdechamps@nextstagevolution.com.

September 2009 – Online Insights: Fulfillment and Logistics

2010 Cargo Screening Mandate: Clearing Packages for Take-off

By Robert DiVincenzo

In 2007, President Bush signed the 9/11 Commission Act, mandating that every piece of cargo must be screened before being loaded onto passenger aircraft starting in August 2010. This is vital to ensuring the security of the air cargo supply chain and making it safer to transport mail and packages on passenger aircraft.

When this mandate takes effect, shippers face significant transit time increases due to the sheer volume of mail and packages to be screened. According to the TSA, volume is expected to jump from the current nine million pounds of cargo screened daily to 15 million pounds next August.

The TSA recognized early on that screening all cargo through a single point in the supply chain could become a major challenge. As a result, the TSA is working to provide a streamlined alternative for international shippers.

The Certified Cargo Screening Program (CCSP) allows screening of cargo early in the air cargo supply chain by a trusted and audited facility. The CCSP ensures the integrity of a shipment from start to finish through enhanced security standards at Certified Cargo Screening Facilities. To maintain the same level of security in the CCSP program as in screening passenger baggage at airports, each piece on a pallet or shrink-wrapped skid must be screened using TSA-approved methods.

To qualify for the CCSP, facilities must first invest in the necessary technologies and procedures. TSA officials will audit and validate operations across a number of points, including facility screening, personnel security and employee training.

Preparing for the Mandate
To help ensure the security of your mail and packages in the air cargo supply chain and that they reach their destinations on time, e-retailers should prepare for the August mandate well in advance. Here are a few important tips that can help:

Evaluate your international mailing program and postal and carrier expenses – Transit time is key to the movement of mail and packages. Make sure you consider what impact screening will have on your international mail and packages, including delivery dates.

Learn and follow the cargo screening legislation – Education is key and shippers should close any knowledge gaps concerning the specific requirements. Important links and references include www.safetyact.gov and www.tsa.gov.

Conduct a security impact analysis – Evaluate how and when your international mail and packages in the cargo supply chain are currently being screened. If you are working with a vendor, ask what their plans are to ensure compliance by August 2010.

Consider working with a Certified Cargo Screening Facility – Working with a TSA-certified facility can help eliminate delays at air carriers and ensure that mail and packages reach their final destinations on time and in their original condition.

By planning carefully, e-retailers can help position their organizations for future international mailing success. The rewards will include greater efficiency, reduced costs and enhanced security of your mail and packages.

Robert DiVincenzo is president, international services at Pitney Bowes, a leading international mail consolidator. He can be reached at robert.divincenzo@pb.com.