Great Job By David Tonight!
Fantastic job by David Rose from MagneTVideo.com tonight at our Internet Marketing Meetup on video marketing.

Video Secrets Meeting Summary on ScentTrail

Summary of  tonight’s MEETUP at Atlantic BT is on ScentTrail. Will post a link to David’s presentation.

Martin’s Story
Imagine you are on a beach. Suddenly water moves swiftly away. Fish flop and dance naked in early morning sun. “Tsunami,” we think involuntarily. We live online, via CNN and in a global village so we know a big wave is coming. Internet marketers stand on just such a beach. We face a coming web video marketing Tsunami.

“This is better,” I thought before testing a 3 minute video on the home page of the $6M site I managed as a Director of Ecommerce (before joining Atlantic BT as Director Marketing). “Run it,” I said watching our metrics nervously. Never test in production without a B option you can easily roll back too. Good news this day was I’d learned the “rollback” lesson. In four hours site conversions tanked by a full point (about $3K). “Kill it,” was my next command before the site walked into a end of summer weekend with such a conversion train wreck.

“What happened,” my boss asked me. Ever wish you could jump in a time machine and go back a few years traveling with the knowledge you have now to just such a moment? Here is what I know now that would have helped then:

• Read vs. Video = VIDEO
• 3 Minutes is an eternity online (1 minute or less now).
• Video on the home page is TOUGH (lots of views but converting traffic can easily be lost never to be heard from or converted again)
• Too polished doesn’t work well online – rough edges establish immediacy, authenticity and authority (strangely enough)
• Videos create VERY HOT spots immediately below them, so include a Call To Action (CTA) in the video that mirrors a CTA immediately below the video (or, if video is on product page keep it far enough away from the MAGIC BUY button as to NOT create confusion)
• Videos are EMOTIONAL and that is a good thing
• Videos “SEO” well, pop nice on YouTube, can spring legs and walk around the web (via embed codes) and are easier to get top listing on than text (LOTS EASIER but getting harder as I write this)

This list could get longer, but you get the idea. A quick note about video and SEO. Spiders can’t “see” video so tagging, linking and surrounding text can be very important. I learned another video SEO secret today from David but won’t spoil his January 24th presentation. Want to know a very cool video SEO secret that is EASY and POWERFUL you will need to join us for pizza in a few weeks.

What I know without any doubt is VIDEO is a powerful Internet marketing tool. Powerful enough Atlantic BT is working with David Rose and MagneTVideo.com to learn how to provide video marketing services. The end of my story is we finally figured out a winning video formula (less than 2 minutes, on the product page, make the product the hero and pull in wisdom of crowds reviews). Pays to have a good team, a patient and trusting boss and a B option.

The net of our tests was conversions on product pages with videos quadrupled. New products already on a roll set new records. Older products starting to wane got a new lease on life. How many failures before finding the winning formula? My team created about ten different videos before we found the winner. Who has that kind of time confronted with social search, the real time web and Internet marketing as we know it today? A: No one, thus asking David and MagneTVideo to share “inside baseball” secrets so Atlantic BT can offer easy to buy, effective web video marketing.

There are many great video marketing providers including friends at Atlantic Creative, Big Fat Film and RHEDPixel (they did the work mentioned here). I also have a good friend who runs a cool company called mailVU in Charlotte. We are working with David and MagneTVideo to combine Atlantic BT’s web development and Internet marketing power, learn cool video marketing secrets to share with customers and potential customers and surf the monster video marketing wave coming in the web’s direction.

Hope you can join us for our monthly Internet Marketing Relativity Meetup on Tuesday, January 24 (Join Raleigh Internet Marketing Meetup Here).

Martin

PS. Lifted image at the top from an excellent article “Why Use Video Marketing” by Sneh on Buzzom.com.

Of course, the competition represents only one part of your business you need to keep an eye on. Just as important is keeping a healthy bottom line. As the economy has gone sour over the last couple of years, lots of business owners and marketers have decided to cut back on their web investments. Some did this as a matter of planning; for others, it was a stark necessity. As things continue to pick up, however, you’re going to want to be sure you’re doing all you need to do in order to bring in new sales and customers. Here are four things to consider adding to your business site, if you haven’t already:

1. Links to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and so on.

Social networking isn’t just a newer way to find customers – it’s a different way of interacting with them altogether. But you’re not going to enjoy any of the benefits (like stronger relationships, bigger account values, and increased referrals) if no one ever finds your profile. That’s why it’s so important that you place links to your information at these sites on your home page, and possibly other places. You want to make it as easy as possible for people to find you.

Another reason to take this step, like many on this list, is because visitors expect it. They’ve become accustomed to communicating with friends, colleagues, and vendors in social networking formats, and so if you aren’t there, they might wonder whether your business is staying up with new ideas and processes.

2. Video.

The recent increase in availability of high-speed Internet service, not to mention the lowering prices, has meant that online videos have become more cost-effective than they were just a few years ago. While video used to chew up too much bandwidth to effectively convey even the simplest of marketing messages, these days cell phones, netbooks, and other low-end computers can process longer clips easily.

The uses for video on your business site are almost endless. Besides creating sales materials, you can also release instructional pieces that show your customers how to use and maintain your products, introductory clips that draw visitors deeper into your site, and even “viral” sketches that spread your brand quickly from one user to another.

3. A blog.

There aren’t many companies or self-employed professionals who haven’t at least tried blogging, and for good reason: blogs allow you to communicate with your customers informally while helping your search engine optimization efforts at the same time. To get the most out of yours, though, you need to do more than make the occasional post. Instead, make sure visitors can find it easily, and then post fresh content at least a few times a month. Blogging might not be new, but it’s still growing; you can’t afford to miss out on the benefits it can bring your business.

4. A newsletter or free giveaway.

Unless you work for an enormous company with nearly unlimited resources (and maybe even then), getting people to your site is probably expensive and time-consuming. Because of that, it’s imperative that your visitors not leave quickly.

By using blogs, video, and social media, you should be able to hold more of their attention than you have in the past. But don’t stop there – make it easy to follow up with them later. Studies have repeatedly shown that it usually takes several contacts to make the first sale to a new customer, and yet many marketers give up after the first try. Whether it’s a free e-book, special report, newsletter, or other promotion, make sure you’re not letting traffic slip away without gathering a bit of information; you work too hard at finding people not to come any closer to a buying relationship.

In web marketing, or any marketing for that matter, there aren’t many “must try” strategies; what works for one company might not make much sense for another. You should try putting these four into play on your website, though. None of them is difficult or expensive, and they can keep you from falling behind the competition as buyers come back to the market.

It’s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.

Prepared Remarks of President Barack Obama
Back to School Event, Arlington, Virginia
September 8, 2009

And how.  We sure do communicate with each other differently now.  This speech even before being delivered caused such a stir and as an involved parent of a child in school I of course was naturally interested in what the president had to say and what he was going to say about learning in school.

But from a technology perspective think about how amazing that above quote is.  The president is immediately drawing a comparison between our founding fathers, the “Greatest Generation” and the Geeks that have changed us forever.

Twitter is being used by Iranian demonstrators to organize, Facebook has changed the way we organize our lives, and Google helps everyone find what they are looking for.  I went to college in the early 90′s at the dawn of what I like to call the first Internet-based technology revolution and the dawn of the “internets.”  I can’t help but think that we are now involved in another.  Can you believe that information from http://www.whitehouse.gov can be disseminated via a RSS Feed, a Tweet, see pictures on Flickr, or watch a video on Vimeo.

Everything around us is changing at a lightning pace, what will the next tool be?  For those of us in the technology world when we are not shaking our angry fists into air complaining about some nasty serialization issue, I hope we all can take the time to think about what an amazing time we are living through and how these tools can be used to bring us all closer together.

So get out there kids and go create something that will make this crazy world a better place!

Full text of the remarks can be found here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/MediaResources/PreparedSchoolRemarks/

There are many different ways to retrieve Twitter user information, one of which is using the Twitter API. The Twitter API provides a variety of functions that can be used to retrieve a user’s account data.  On one hand it is very beneficial to use these API functions by reducing in-house programming, but on the other hand making multiple calls to an API from a site that has a large volume of traffic can cause issues like affecting download times and generating errors.

In our development group, when we need to implement a Twitter feed and not affect performance of the site we prefer to cache the information in a database.  We do this by writing a script that runs as a scheduled service from the database.  This script makes a call to one of the common Twitter API functions to retrieve the user’s timeline.  In this post I will be specifically focusing on the .NET framework.

ABT_Twitter t2 = new ABT_Twitter();

string timelineAsXml = t2.GetUserTimeline("username", "userpass", OutputFormatType)

Now that we have the data we need from Twitter we can begin picking apart the data to store into our database. In this case we chose XML as the OutputFormatType so first we need to create a XmlDocument to store the local string variable.

XmlDocument xmlDoc = new XmlDocument();

doc.LoadXml(timelineAsXml);

The next step is to create a simple DataTable that will store each of the desired values to be retrieved from the Twitter API, then we need to add the columns for the values we choose to cache.

DataTable tweetDataTable = new DataTable();

tweetDataTable.Columns.Add("value1");

tweetDataTable.Columns.Add("value2");

The next thing to do is to loop through each XmlNode in the XmlDocument we instantiated earlier for each node in a certain xpath.  Inside this loop we are going to create a new DataRow and set the values of the columns we added to the tweetDataTable earlier to the nodes we are trying to retrieve.  Once all of the values of the columns in the DataRow have been set we will need to add this new row to the tweetDataTable we created.

foreach (XmlNode node in xmlDoc.SelectNodes("xpath")

{

DataRow tweetDataRow = tweetDataTable.NewRow();

tweetDataRow["value1"] = (node["desiredNode1"].InnnerText);

tweetDataRow["value2"] = (node["desiredNode2"].InnerText);

tweetDataTable.Rows.Add(dr);

}

Now we have retrieved the information we need from the Twitter API and placed it into a DataTable. Also, we will perform an if statement to make sure that our DataTable has information in it to keep our script from performing unnecessary actions.  We will need to truncate the table that we are storing our Twitter information in to eliminate the possibility of redundant data.  After the table has been truncated our script will now loop through each row in the tweetDataTable we populated earlier and insert data associated with each “tweet.”

if (tweetDataTable.Rows.Count > 0)

{

SqlCommand truncateCommand = new SqlCommand("truncateStoredProcedureName", connectionString);

truncateCommand.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure;

truncateCommand.ExecuteNonQuery;

for (int i = 0; i < tweetDataTable.Rows.Count; i++)

{

SqlCommand insertCommand = new SqlCommand("insertStoredProcedureName", connectionString);

cmd.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure;

cmd.Parameters.Add(new SqlParameter("@parameter1", tweetDataTable.Rows[i]["value1"]));

cmd.Parameters.Add(new SqlParameter("@parameter2", tweetDataTable.Rows[i]["value2"]));

cmd.ExecuteNonQuery();

}

}

And voilà! Now all of the information has been retrieved from the Twitter API and cached into a local database.  The idea behind using this method to retrieve the user information is to only call the script on a scheduled service so the service is not called every time the page is loaded.  Now that the data is stored locally it takes a simple database call to retrieve the information.

Help add to the list!

Chad OchoCinco (Bengals)
Follow Chad @OGOchoCinco

Chris Johnson (Titans)
Follow Chris @ChrisJohnson28

Ryan Grant (Packers)
Follow Ryan @RyanGrant25

Larry Fitzgerald (Cardinals)
Follow Larry @Lfitzgerald11

Roy Williams (Bengals)
Follow Roy @Datboyie

Aaron Maybin (Bills)
Follow Aaron @aaronmaybin58

Antonio Pierce (Giants)
Follow Antonio @AntonioPierce

Knowshon Moreno (Broncos)
Follow Knowshon @KnowshonMoreno

Terrell Owens (Bills)
Follow Terrell @terrellowens

Mark Sanchez (Jets)
Follow Mark @Mark_Sanchez

Matt Leinhart (Cardinals)
Follow Matt @MattLeinart

Devon Hester (Bears)
Follow Devon @D_Hest23

Matt Forte (Bears)
Follow Matt @chitownforte22

Jason Witten (Cowboys)
Follow Jason @JasonWitten

Randy Moss (Patriots)
Follow Randy @r81m

Drew Brees (Saints)
Follow Drew @DrewBrees

Maurice Jones-Drew (Jaguars)
Follow Maurice @Jones_Drew32

Andre Johnson (Texans)
Follow Andre @johnson80

Reggie Bush (Saints)
Follow Reggie @reggie_bush

Darren McFadden (Raiders)
Follow Darren @dmfadden20

Shawne Merriman (Chargers)
Follow Shawne @shawnemerriman

Along with this new policy, the NFL has a current policy in place that bans cell phones, PDA’s, and computers on the sidelines, in the locker rooms, and coach’s booths/press box.  This new policy applies to all players, coaches, officials, and football operations personnel.

“League policy allows for the use of social media or networking sites (including Twitter and Facebook) by players, coaches and football operations personnel up to 90 minutes before kickoff and after the game following media interviews.”  (Source: Associated Press)

For those that  follow Twitter and the NFL knows that Chad OchoCinco is no stranger to tweeting his mind.  A few weeks ago, Chad announced that he will be tweeting during the Bengals games.  Regardless of the new NFL social media policy, number 85 said that he will not stop tweeting.

Furthermore the league states:

“Longstanding policies prohibiting play-by-play descriptions of NFL games in progress apply fully to Twitter and other social media platforms. Internet sites may not post detailed information that approximates play-by-play during a game. While a game is in progress, any forms of accounts of the game must be sufficiently time-delayed and limited in amount (e.g., score updates with detail given only in quarterly game updates) so that the accredited organization’s game coverage cannot be used as a substitute for, or otherwise approximate, authorized play-by-play accounts.”  (Source: Associated Press)

With not only NFL players joining the Twitter scene, but MLB, NHL, and NBA players getting involved, it is only a matter of time until the other sports organizations start implementing their own social media policies.  Sites like Twitter and Facebook have also been helping by cracking down on users who pose as a professional athlete by creating a profile using their name, team, or jersey number.  These impostors have been gaining thousands of fans this way and have been leveraging players fame to promote products or companies.

Read the full article.

Social networking sites started with a simple concept: people want (need) to stay connected. Can you say what you need to say in 140 characters or less? Or do you pick up the phone and potentially have a 30 minute conversation? As they say, time is money. Back in the day, texts were just used for grocery reminders “need milk” but now they’re used for fairly personal concepts like “Happy Birthday!” When you care enough to “text” the very best (Hallmark). Hey, at least some contact is better than none, right? Facebook has a similar attribute, you can do a quick drive-by on your old childhood friend’s page and say “Hello” without the obligation of waiting for a response. That’s the great thing about social networking you aren’t committed to the conversation. It’s a way to contribute and have a one-way conversation. Really it’s a form of broadcasting. It’s an efficient way of saying what you need to say without all the fat.

The same holds true for businesses using social networking to stay in touch with their base. In a case where you are using Twitter, there’s a competitive advantage when you can share your message and reach a qualified audience very quickly. For example, you “tweet” an article to your group of followers. It can then compound very quickly if it just gets “re-tweeted” once or twice by your followers’ followers. It can spread like wildfire. I should mention this only works when you have something to say that’s worth sharing.

I feel digital forms of communication aren’t directly replacing verbal forms of communication, because they are filling a gap that wasn’t widely used before their inception. People don’t verbally communicate in fragments (only if you’re a robot) like you would in a text or an instant message. People don’t call to share articles or blog posts they are reading. If anything social media has allowed phone or face-to-face conversations to be much more meaningful. They hold much more weight when you take the time to pick up the phone and invest in the conversation.

An email, text, or tweet can’t share tone of the message or inflection of their voice, they can’t tell you if the person is happy or sad (regardless of smiley face options available). That’s why social networking sites won’t ever replace in-person or phone communication because they are fragmented thoughts and can only occupy one dimension of a conversation. But what they do well is they allow you to stay in touch with a large mass of people without the commitment.

I can presume I’ll have a different viewpoint when video chatting becomes much more prevalent.

Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, actually spoke up, and spoke out about all these rumors that have been flooding the news blogs as of late, and it looks like the short answer is this:  Twitter is not for sale…yet.  Here’s what Stone had to say:

“We’re really optimistic about becoming a successful profitable independent company and we believe there’s high potential here. That’s something we really want to see through.”

See it through they will, but that doesn’t mean they’ll always be that “profitable independent company.” He mentioned that he would be very interested in some sort of partnership with Google as currently they do all search-engine operations in-house using a company they acquired last year, Summize.

On top of all this, is the importance in making Twitter better for businesses, and helping businesses become more profitable.  That has been the goal of Twitter for quite some time, and if and when that occurs, I think their “worth” will go up even further.  Nevetheless, Twitter remains not for sale…for now.

According to reports:

Earlier today, Google users experienced a massive fail whale. Gmail was down, search was slow, Google Reader, YouTube and image search were all sporadic. Even Google Analytics and non-Google sites with AdSense ads were  reporting issues. Of course, most of the complaints could be found on Twitter. If you do a search for Gmail down or Google down, you will still find a storm of chatter.”

In a word:  Yikes!  The question this brings up isn’t really “what happened?” but more, where do you go for information on something like this when the place you’d usually go for information on anything is the place that isn’t working.  Google, as we all know, has long been a staple at finding anything, at any time.  When it goes down, where do users turn?

Looks like for now, they turned directly to Twitter, which was absolutely abuzz with information today.  Everyone, everywhere that was experiencing anything that remotely resembled issues with their Google-related service was Twittering it, and it rapidly became the best place to find updates, and other people that were struggling just like they were.

Things are back to normal for Google and all Google products, but it is still interesting to see what a world without Google would look like, even if it was just for a moment.  That world, in simplest terms, would be very different.  After all, it’s hard to optimize for search engines when the search engine itself is not working, now isn’t it?