@BasilPuglisi

Content & Strategy, Powered by Factics & AI, Since 2009

Video Marketing

Facebook Marketing Tool: Involver.com

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Noah Horton and Rahim Fazal founded Involver.com in 2007 in efforts to provide a startup that can help brands begin to get a grip on managing their social media channels. Having grown from a company of a dozen employees to over sixty with many offices in areas such as Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Austin, and with more coming soon, it looks like Involver, is in fact, fully involved, with no plans of leaving any time soon.

Involver has four main ways in which they help companies and organizations create rich and helpful experiences all across the social web.

  1. Involver helps to generate earned media by attracting attention from influential sources.
  2. Involver helps to get prospective customers engaged with your products and services through social networks.
  3. Involver can help to reduce marketing cost through a series of fully automated social networking services.
  4. Involver helps to maintain constant and consistent branding and advertisement for your products and services.

This kind of brand management can be critical to a company and its ultimate success online. Those who use Involver will also want to take advantage of the features offered in the applications area.

Flickr

You can bring all of your Flickr photos to Facebook with the Flickr App from Involver. This will allow users to stream their Flickr photos displaying their entire album, or allows users to choose sub albums to categorize their photo streams.

YouTube Channels

You can set your video to directly deliver to your social networks upon uploading. This will help incorporate your YouTube videos into your active marketing campaigns.

With so many more applications available there are bound to be at least a handful of ways to improve your social media interactions in Involvers many apps.

  • Facebook Stories
  • Social Catalog
  • RSS Feed
  • Promotion Galleries
  • Music Player
  • Polls
  • Coupons
  • Static HTML for Pages

Many more apps available make this attractive and professional option in social media marketing and product or service branding an invaluable tool in the likely already full bag of marketers tricks of the trade.

Get 10,000 Fans on Facebook

“It was in November of 2010 that my train baseball fan page had reached 10,000 fans and I decided that I would finally start a business that aimed at helping other small businesses like you get off the ground using tools like Facebook. So this is where things sit today. I’m 24 years old, and get a pretty neat opportunity to help out small businesses make better use of facebook.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mFBa3QVD2Q]

Sources:

Internet Marketing: Watch out, get educated and be an informed consumer!

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University of San Francisco is offering Certificates, and Master Certificates in Internet Marketing, but beware of the rookies trying to sell you, or teach you about what they themselves barely seem to know.

If you find the advertisement on Facebook it seems to lead you to the website usanfranonline.com, however it opens up like any other early year 2000 capture website. It looks to convince you that they are the source for internet marketing, however the website and brand presentation fail on the most basic level. Once you spend a few minutes looking around and realize that nothing is interactive (with exception to the video) you start to get the feeling you landed on an infomercial (and you kinda did).

The video featuring Joe Laratro is the hardest thing I have ever had to watch, here is a individual that is mildly known for being an internet marketing source dragging through one of the worst video pitches . What’s so bad about it? Well in case you didn’t fall asleep yourself, let’s look at how it failed.

  • Video Length: 3:30 Seconds

Well if you can keep them that long, then great.  Unfortunately for most an initial pitch might want to meet the industry standard of 60 seconds.

  • Background: Blurry fake back drop, of what one can assume is San Francisco

Video Media is Social Media, how about a real shot of the San Fran Campus, perhaps a real scene which helps deliver the real feel to what’s going on. This next one really hammers home our point.

  • Message: Speech? Joe is reading off a teleprompt at best! What is worse he is doing a bad job of it, his eyes and facial expressions make me want to cry for him. Let’s try genuine, you know the most important part of Social Media and Internet Marketing back in 2009 till now!

Does Joe Laratro not know enough about what you’re talking about to have real pitch to the camera? If this doesn’t come second nature to him, then he shouldn’t be doing this!

If you are going to do this, let’s get a video shot in documentary style and have him talk to the side angle as if you where addressing someone in the room.

Summary:

While I am sure that Joe Laratro knows something about internet marketing, it’s a lot like watching a newspaper try to launch their first website, cumbersome at best. In this case, it is possible that their program could teach you something, and it better if it’s endorsed by USF. When you visit their main website, it at the very least shows signs of branding and web development that are only few years outdated (i.e. they have social bookmarks at the very bottom of the site, but nothing that allows you to see and interact with what they are doing with the most basic tools in twitter or facebook.

It’s great that someone in academia is trying to get into the digital world of internet marketing, just wish they had learned how to do it for themselves before trying to teach others.

Consumer and Business Lesson:

Do your homework, don’t take anything at face value, while the website may seem impressive even if it does show signs of Social Media and modern internet marketing, dig deeper and find out how they are using it so you are at least prequalifying them before tossing your money away.

In the end this is about protecting your brand, seeing the big picture and looking beyond the fact that the tool works. SEO doesn’t sell anything, SEO or Social Media create exposure which will lead to websites and calls. You have to make sure during execution that the brand image is consistent and shows value to meet a need.

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Sidenote: While this may seem personal, I have never met Joe Laratro or attended any of his meetings. I was drawn to this publically available media based on two concerns.

First, There are many people who have jumped out of the woodworks claiming to be SEO or Social Media experts and business owners should be aware of the most basic tools to determine if someone is credible.

Second, I spent years in student affairs and hold a Bachelors and Masters from Accredited Universities. I  have also studied online with Capella University and Walden University for Doctoral Level classes. I believe in online learning as a tool and when you toss together a program as vague and questionable as USF has here it makes all future programs and online degrees look bad.

***Note my upcoming book will look at this in detail***

How to Protect Your Digital Brand Online

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One of the first things the small or large business manager needs to learn is how to protect your digital brand online. Your digital brand is comprised of everything that is online about you so it is important to know what is already there before going any further.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SRVIuNPCmo]

Damage Control

One of the easiest things to do is to go to a search engine such as Google and perform a search for your name. Googling yourself will give you a good place to start if you need to do some housekeeping on the web. You may be surprised at what you find and see the need to start performing some damage control.

Social networking is the way many people communicate these days and almost everyone has or has had a Facebook or MySpace account possibly beginning in their college days. If these sites do not project you or the brand that you represent in the way that you would like to be perceived, either clean up the site or take it down. Be aware that traces may remain on your friends’ pages.

Don’t Forget About the Good Old Days!

Go back through old history that you may have forgotten and delete comments and pictures that project you in a less than favorable light. You may still appear on your friends pages so if there is something particularly bad, contact your friend and ask them to remove it for you.

Training to Protect Your Digital Brand

When setting up social networking sites for your business, it is important that the people responsible for setting up these accounts realize their possible impact on the digital brand. Twitter can be one of the worst offenders as many business rush to have a brand presence on Twitter. An untrained employee can cause irreparable damage by tweeting unprofessional comments that may poorly reflect on the digital brand.

If you find untrue content on the web that is unflattering to your brand, you can ask the webmaster of the site to remove it. Many will do that just to avoid any possible legal consequences. Depending on your circumstances you may want to check the web for fake sites that are plagiarizing your content or products that can affect how people see your brand. The important thing is to stay informed so you can perform damage control.

Create a Positive Online Image

An online presence is a must for a brand to be successful in today’s competitive marketplace. A positive impact from your digital brand can be expected if you stay on top of the situation and take control. Make sure there are many positive images of your digital brand online which also helps bury any bad content that may exist.

Make sure that those who are trusted with the responsibility of maintaining these social networks are aware of the language, tone, and values that you want your digital brand to project. This is how to protect your digital brand online and make it work for you.

Sources:

Interlude.fm – Interactive Video

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Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could interact with music videos? If you could decide which of the musicians in the band you would like to follow?  If you could choose which version of the song you’d like to hear?

And if you could do that, where will the road lead in brand recognition and advertising?

Yoni Bloch thought it could be great. The young Israeli musician, who happens to be a computer geek, gathered his computer savvy friends and posed these questions to them.

A year and a half later, Interlude.fm came into being. It was first presented at the Techonomy convention in May 2010, and is now gathering more and more interest.

What Interlude does is allow you to choose your adventure and influence what you see. While watching a music video, you are asked, from time to time, to make a choice who you would like to follow.  When you do, you will see a different version of the video than you’ve seen the first time. The beginning and end always stay the same, and the music continues seamlessly without interruptions.

To understand what it means, let’s assume the video takes place at a party. Like in the demo shown at the convention, you can see what happens at this party from different angels, by choosing to follow different band member each time. At times you are being asked you if want to hear the music in a different style, a cappella as opposed to instrumental, for example.

You make your own version of the video, following band member A, then switching to see what band member B is doing, than to a girl dancing in the middle of the room. You can review your version of the music video, download it to your computer and share it with friends on other social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or your blog. There could be hundreds of versions of the same song, the same video, constructed by different people, who share it with one another.

What does it do? From publicity, advertising and brand recognition point of view doing all that prolongs the time a person interacts with the product. When videos are concerned, it triples, on average, the viewing time. The song itself is played many times as the viewer chooses a version of the video he likes best. The product is displayed longer and by being able to influence events, a feeling of familiarity is created.

Interlude.fm took it a step further. Another application of the program targets commercials; If you are looking at a car advertisement, for example, which shows a silver car driving down a road between high rises in an urban setting, you can opt to change the color of the car and you can choose to change the setting in which the car is driving. Now a red car is shown driving by the ocean or in a rural area. You can interact with it; change it over and over again with a simple click of the mouse.

Another feature of the program is the ability to instantly compare versions of the same song, and navigate from song to song to see how different artist performed the same song. Again, the move from one video to the other is done seamlessly without losing a beat.

The best part? Interlude.fm technology can be embedded on any corporate or designed website. The customer can provide the video footage and keep complete creative vision of his product, or he can take advantage of the production services of Interlude.fm to create new footage.

Intelude.fm allows users to create unique versions of a video, using pre-recorded video/audio, and share it quickly and easily with their friends. Users can compare versions and decide which one they like best. The end result will always be greater use, greater play and greater interaction with your product.

How to Use social Media to Spread the Word – YouTube

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Many small and medium businesses try to engage their customers through Facebook and twitter. Another venue you might want to look into is YouTube.

Here are some examples of small and medium businesses who took advantage of YouTube and the results that effort generated.

Case Study # 1:

A hair care product company, operated by the owner a woman from Los Angeles, decided to increase her visibility by going on YouTube. While pocking around in the site, she notices a few questions posted by users of products in her niche. She offered support, advice and suggested trying her products. She urged the users to tell her if it worked for them.

The result? 2 years later there are over 5,000 videos showing people using her product. The attention has helped raise her sales by 40% and pushed her 7 year old company into profitability.  The products are now sold in Whole Foods and Target as well.

And she didn’t post one video of her own. She waited for the video bloggers (vloggers) to do that: “When dozens of different vloggers with their own unique hair types actually video themselves applying the product in the shower in one continuous take, it’s hard to dispute how it ends up looking” She says.

Recently she hired some of the vloggers to help her in her YouTube campaign.

The push shouldn’t be a hard sale. Forum posters can smell those a mile away, she says. Companies have to establish themselves as being helpful so their recommendation will be taken seriously.

Case Study # 2:

A knife company used the same tactic. They didn’t start a conversation about their knives, but they reacted to questions and offered suggestions. They interacted with the posters by sometime offering them to try a knife for free or for a limited time.

Today, there are almost 4,000 video blogs about their company. They make sure to stay on top what is being said. To provide good customer support, the company employees (all 5 of them) are alerted every time a comment comes in and they answer, sometimes from home and in the middle of the night.

Being accessible promotes loyalty to the brand, says their marketing director. Forums reflect that.

Case Study # 3:

Makers of a new, very small, digital camera learned the hard way how important it is not to hard sell. Their efforts to brand the camera on bike riding forums backfired. People were annoyed with them and pointed out foreseeable problems even without seeing the camera up close.

The company listened to the complaints and laid back. The result? 7,500 videos about their camera, done with their camera are currently posted on YouTube. More than 15% of their business comes from YouTube.

Listening to Vloggers helped the company to further develop their equipment into niches they have not thought of. When people talked about mounting their small camera on remote control cars and planes, they manufactured a kit for that purpose. It is one of their best sellers.

You can use YouTube for more than just posting videos. Using their channel system is a good way to find out what people are talking about, what they want and what they suggest. Then you can assess how it pertains to your business.

Promoting a Small Business Without Breaking The Bank

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How do you promote your small business while staying afloat? All you need is a little ingenuity!

The classic promotions options are print, television media and direct campaign. You might think that all these options will cost money, and that you need a large budget to get your message across. Without spending an incredible amount of money, you can attract customers, and have ready to use custom recorded video content for future use, as follows:

  • Cut costs by using your own employees in place of models for print and television Ads. It’s more believable and you stand a better chance of being noticed and remembered.
  • Obtain a database of email address and send your company’s information with links to your site via emails for direct campaign.
  • Put up your promotional videos on your website, with additional content and offers that people can read and watch. Always make sure that your website loads fast, and don’t use too many graphics and heavy content that might slow down the experience for your customers.
  • Spend a little to ensure more traffic to your website. With more traffic you can usually expect more sales.
  • Use social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to advertise your products and services. Even though too many companies are doing this nowadays, you can still garner eyeballs if you package your company’s identity realistically.

What you need to do is to combine guerrilla marketing with traditional advertising strategies to gain exposure and get paying customers by letting the current technology work for you instead of against you. Create interesting and entertaining under 3 minute videos and post them on your site; while you’re at it, you may as well upload them on video sites such as YouTube. Most video sites are free; by posting your videos online, you can create exposure for your company.  Make sure that your video titles contain keywords that are commonly searched by people.

Focus on your demographic; who do you want to target? If you know this already, well and good. If not, consult a good advertising agency to help you define your correct demographic. When you’re on a budget, focusing on your exact target audience will get you more paying customers.

Optimize on television broadcasting by purchasing media time in any locality on any cable network. By doing this, you can run a local cable television advertising campaign in many different cities at the same time. For example, if you know that most of your customers live in large cities, focus only on them. By doing this you can bring down your advertising budget. A national television campaign is way more expensive than a cable TV campaign, and is not as effective either.

Stroome me? Redefining video opportunity…

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It used to be that making videos was the territory of the few. You needed a high quality and expensive camera, you needed editing capabilities and you needed the knowhow in editing. Of course you needed a platform to display your videos.

With the advances in electronics and miniaturizing, cameras have become better, lighter and cheaper. Not the property of the rich and professionals anymore. First problem solved, sort of, because what you are left with is raw footage.

Editing software appeared on the market as well. What used to be programs for professionals only which were rented out, not sold like Avid and Final Cut became affordable the Adobe premiere, Final cut or Avid for home use. Those still are expensive and need a learning period to make them work properly.

With experience comes improvement. Editing the videos you have shot still takes a long time, even after you’ve learned the programs. Here art comes into the equation.

The platform became available with YouTube. Millions all over the world shot what they thought was funny, interesting or smart and hurried to share it with the world. Careers have been made out of home postings, rarely but it did happen (Justin Beiber is a very good example).

But sharing those videos with specific people was still a problem. The video files are heavy and can’t be sent via e mail. They had to be uploaded on a server and could be accessed by people who had the password to that account.

The new trend in marketing is videos. It appears people would rather hear and see instead of read. We have all become film-makers.

Enter Stroome, a site that facilitates making interesting videos and sharing them with friends. Unlike Youtube where you just post the video to the world and let your friends know that you have posted it there, Stroome enables you to post your videos on the site, edit it and share it with others.

Stroome allows uploading of raw footage and mixing it with pictures, other videos and music. The editing program (based on the same principals as iMovie) is simple and easy to learn. The result can be shared with you partners and have them write up notes on what needs to change or they can go into the file and make changes you can view immediately. After the work is finished, you can share that video with a larger group of people via a form of social network.

Stroome, coming from USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, was launched in a public beta in April 2010 and is based on the Kaltura video editing suite but goes further by adding to the editing suite community tools. It facilitates journalism, they say, by letting a few people collaborate on a story immediately without relying on other sources to move the video file around. In Stroome the file does not leave the site, so there are no problems of loading time, downloading time and things lost in the transfer.

Using their site, a group can work on a school project together, friends can share their latest videos, journalist can communicate and work cheaply and efficiently and every small business owner can become a film-maker.

Their ambition is to turn Stroome into a verb; in the same way Google has evolved to become part of the American language. They want people to say “Stroome me and see…”

But please bear in mind – the content is still the king.