Friday, March 13, 2009

A million people

I talk about web delivery in three important aspects - hosted, posted and social distribution channels. If you have read previous posts you know Hosted means placing video on your site or your own video channel. Depending on the relevance and popularity of your website this can be very effective. For example - Vail Resorts (one of my clients) has a very large endemic audience that visits the websites of their mountains. So to post a "snow conditions" video on the homepage and lead people into a video channel works well.

In the case of some of my video channels we know that we have a limited audience who are going to find sites like www.golflifetv.com or hitgolf.com or skitv.com. Just a reality. So instead of putting too much involvement in trying to fight an uphill battle we use Posted video delivery strategies. This is how we have been able to start approaching a million unique views for the past year. Our golf content is distributed across the web and using techniques we have developed we are able to manage many different brand channels and drive branded entertainment to lots of locations where people view video content.

Our overall goal and one we are working on for our own content is to locate and nurture social video audiences so that our content can be delivered in the most effective fashion - Social distribution. With Social we utilize our techniques in publishing and delivery for the other techniques, yet with the same level of effort reach a much more engaged, dependable audience member.

Remember - the key to all of these online marketing strategies is content. This does not mean to have someone go out and start creating video just for video content sake. It means content planning and strategies. My best "free" advise is to look for programming experts as I outline in my previous post. To be successful take one long video and break it into a lot of little videos in a series. Target your audience, think of their needs and what they might watch. Most importantly analyze or have someone who can analyze how to produce and publish content optimized for you SEO and sales goals...make proper call to action and target keywords.

Ok - enough advice - get to work considering a budget to start communicating with video using the internet - it will result in positive lift for your business.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Program Pros

So what do I mean with the title "Progam Pros" - well unless your marketing team is under a rock you might have noticed that video is the hottest thing on the web since people learned more about SEO. Incidentally, video can do very well at driving SEO. So the title of this post is intended to put forth the concept of using Programming Professionals to help you with our online video marketing strategies.

Here is my chance to pitch our company - we are programming professionals and for 17 years we have placed products into video distribution on TV, DVD, CD Rom and Internet. However - don't become confused with the fine work done by people you know who mostly do corporate videos. They also have used many of the media I mention. The difference is the idea of programming and specifically the idea of episodic programming on television and internet.

My point here is that in order to be successful with online video you really need to look at it as a long ever evolving journey and you need to plan for more video and less length. The reason for this strategy is that you will find more viewers and more interest in your messages or information if you can provide a "playlist". Think of it like a television series or a broadcast television network. You want to put you message out in a continual fashion and whenever possible you want to spread you message across as many related videos as you can.

There are several reasons for having a group of videos instead of spending your buck on a few high end videos. First let me say all of your videos must be high quality. Second - forget the idea that you are going to come up with the next great "viral" video. Even the most creative of the creatives in video will no promise you that the video concept they are presenting will be successful as a viral video that takes on a life of its own. If they do - they are not being honest with themselves.

I prefer to encourage people to think of their online video efforts more like a "broadcast network". I use the term Brand Vision - broadcasting your videos to audiences across the web. If you consider that to properly distribute video you need to create opportunities to reach viewers where they are - then you can see that it is important to "program your channels". Our advice is to think of your video messages in more of a stream or series - a video campaign or series of campaigns if you will.

If you have more video to work with you can be more successful setting up video accounts, creating video players, presenting playlists and getting people engaged more thoroughly than with a few single messages. Plus you will ultimately reach a much larger audience with more attainable video goals than the Viral hit discussed above.

So back to the original point of this post - "Program Pros". Our advice is to look for companies with experience creating programming. If you are lucky enough to find someone who has successfully developed and syndicated programs that include a lot of product information and demonstration in an entertaining way, then you are much farther along. Finally - if you can find a group that not only understands how to create episodic product based programming but also has been navigating distribution of content on the internet for a while you have a good chance of success.

These days everyone can do video...but few have generated millions of viewers around a series of videos in an informative and entertaining fashion. If you look you will find those few or if you like you can talk with our company - Action Media Group.

Good Luck.