Business Quality Video

[00:07]
Matthew:  Hi everybody.  This is Permission TV Live.  Today is May 21st and we’re coming live from Waltham, Mass.

[Applause]

[00:16]
Matt:  Great audience we have here today.

[00:21]
Matthew:  Thanks a lot guys.  Appreciate that.  So, before we get started, just wanted to remind everyone that we are on social media sites for you to contact us.  You can find us on Twitter, I’m MSMamet…

[00:34]
Matt:  I’m MPKaplan.

[00:35]
Matthew:  And you can Tweet to us live during the show by the PTV Live hashtag.  You can also find us on Facebook, you can find us on LinkedIn, and you can find us on iTunes as well.  So, the links are all available for you to find us – so, hope to find you out there on the social websites.

So, starting off today’s show, I thought we’d talk a little bit about conversion rates.  There was an article I found on Smashing Magazine, which is more of a design/usability site, and they had a – for those of you who don’t know Smashing Magazine, great site talking about how to use the web to get your message out, convert users, build community, and to use, you know, various design techniques as well as layouts and user experience techniques.  So, check it out.  This one was all about conversion rates through layouts and design.  Towards the end of the article, they talked about using video to drive conversion rates.

[01:30]
Matt:  Right.  And the one that stands out the most is, his fourth bullet here – video is often a silver bullet.  And that’s not something you hear all the time – that something as simple as putting video on your page is actually going to provide incredible value, no matter what.

[01:45]
Matthew:  And the reason why they mention that is, if you have a product or service that requires a lot of, you know, detail or explaining what it is, or how to use it…rather than try to figure out how to get that information assembled on the page, laid out on the page for all the different audiences and personas that may want to read it and assimilate it, you can just create a quick video and dump that on the page.  And that’s a quick jumpstart to get your message across.

[02:15]
Matt:  And for video marketing, like we talked about in the past, many people think that video is a very expensive way of creating marketing material.  In fact, when you think about how video has evolved over time, video is primarily used in television commercials and has been expensive.  A 30-second spot can run hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars to produce.  That’s not the kind of video we’re talking about, right?  We’re talking about online video that is, and we’ll talk about it a few articles going forward, but, it’s business value associated with video.  And here, there’s really some great examples of consumer companies and business-to-business companies using video really to provide a much better way of communicating their products and services.

[03:02]
Matthew:  Sure.  So, some of the stats that he mentions – a survey that was done in Germany – is almost 60% of all retailers surveyed indicated that they plan to increase their efforts with video.  So, you know, more of a B to C approach.  One of the case studies that he gives in the article here, is by a company called Pleo(?) – a company that sells a kind of robot pet that looks like a dinosaur.  And the way that the robotics of this particular animal were built make it a little more advanced than your average walking, talking pet.  Rather than try to explain that in text, they just shot some video, and we’ve got some playing up behind us right now, of how this thing interacts with humans.  And further on in the video they show it playing around with a cat…and it kind of looks life-like.  And this is a feeling that you just couldn’t get by reading text on a page.  You have to see it to believe it.

[04:00]
Matt:  And that’s the thing.  You know, we try to figure out – what is it about video that makes it a more compelling medium?  You know, our brains, the human brain is wired for sight and sound and motion, right?  That’s what we do all day long.  And so, I think when you’re looking at video here, there’s an emotional connection that is created.  Because you can understand, you can see it, you can visualize it and you can hear it as well.

[04:22]
Matthew:  If you look at, so this is a YouTube video, and if you look at the comments, they’re all centered around “Isn’t this cute.”  You know, “awwww…this dinosaur, isn’t it cute.”  That is an emotional engagement that you couldn’t get by reading a blog post.

[04:34]
Matt:  That’s right.  So, this is great.  We’ve seen other stats as well from the Video Commerce Consortium about sites that have, that are selling products online where they see a 40% increase in conversion rate.  That’s tremendous…huge numbers.  Because they had a video on their site.  We talked about that.

[04:53]
Matthew:  And you probably can’t see the video too well because it’s on the plasma that’s behind us, but it’s pretty low-budge.  Again, so getting back to what you said about what’s the level of effort and commitment, or investment we need to put into this, it’s pretty low.

Another great example, probably the best one that I’ve ever seen, is Cindy Bigelow, who runs Bigelow Tea, went out on the streets of New York and started talking to whomever about tea.  A great example of just grabbing a camera and spreading the word.

[05:22]
Matt:  And what he says here, it’s very important to understand that videos don’t have to be full throttle studio productions with enormous budgets.  Again, we’ve talked about this a lot, with video marketing, one of the laws that we’ve identified is understand the business value associated with the video.  And before you go out and shoot, you could save, even if you’re using a handheld camera and some simple editing software, you’ll waste your day if you don’t understand what are you trying to achieve with this particular video.  And we say this all the time – Experiment.  Experiment with trying it.  Maybe your audience will react differently to different types and styles of videos.

[06:06]
Matthew:  Absolutely.  And the article just ends with a slight opinion on the technical piece which is – there’s only one format for online videos these days, and that’s Flash.  Only Flash allows video to be seamlessly embedded into a webpage and integrated with other elements.

[06:22]
Matt:  Microsoft might disagree with that.

[06:25]
Matthew:  I think there was an article that was released, or rather some statistics that were released by Microsoft claiming that Silverlight is more installed than Firefox, Chrome, and one other browser combined.  But Adobe Flash penetration rates are pretty high too.  I think it’s like 74% for Flash Player 10 and 99% for Flash 9.  So, I did bring that up to say that, right now, obviously Flash is everywhere.  You know, you don’t have to worry about Flash, but there will be competitors.

[06:58]
Matt:  Of course.  And as a video marketer, I think what we like to talk to our customers about is really focusing on not getting lost in the details of technology.  Focusing on the business factor and what’s driving the business goals and objectives.  In this case, going back to the article, it is about conversion.  It’s about getting people on your site to take an action – whether it’s sign up for a newslette
r, buy the product outright, or ask for more information.

[07:28]
Matthew:  Absolutely.  So if you have some examples of business quality video or maybe, not low quality video, but say, medium quality video, that was either done for a specific campaign or to build community or to drive an action, we’d love to hear about that.  Tweet the links to PTV Live and we’ll talk about them on the show.

[07:50]
Matt:  All right.

[07:51]
Matthew:  Moving on is the article from RealSEO about how to produce business quality online video and this really is kind of the meat of the show today.  And I know you want to talk about it.

We’ve seen with the cost of creating content – video content – going down, it was only a matter of time before people started to catch on to this idea of a business quality video.  And essentially what the article talks about, I think it’s Grant who writes this one…yep – Grant Kroll.  He’s identifying that there’s two things that are emerging.  One is a type of new professional – he calls it the video-ratti, which is an homage to the digi-ratti that came out a few years ago.  He defines it as a video professional and publicist skilled at more than one job that relates to their business and their online community.

[08:42]
Matt:  Yeah, you know, we’ve seen this before.  If you sort of come from the video world, a term that has been used quite a lot in that world is the Executive Producer.  It’s the person that’s responsible for telling the cameraman go over there, helping setup the lighting, and really produce the whole show or production as well as really working on the script, the storyboard of it, and then working with the editors down the stream.  So this concept of somebody that really is managing and producing the entire episode.

[09:14]
Matthew:  I think that, if I could interrupt, what Grant is saying is this video-ratti person is really that PLUS the ability to use digital marketing tools, social media tools like Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook, understanding business goals as you mentioned.  So, not only does how does this content get produced and recorded, but how does it fit into my marketing campaigns or my marketing programs or my sales efforts.  In reading that, I thought, I think I could be one; I think you could be one.  I think we could be the kinds of people that he’s thinking of.  I don’t know a whole heck of a lot about the executive producer type stuff that you mentioned, but I know enough to setup the camera and get it streaming live and then talk a little bit about Twitter, a little bit about Facebook and use those tools.  So it’s an interesting idea.

[10:08]
Matt:  It is and I think we’re going to see more and more of this type of role evolve with people studying film and video alone in colleges.  I don’t think that’s enough now.  I think you need to understand the application of video in the online world and online context.  We were at a conference a couple months back and one of the participants raised their hand and said “Where can I find somebody like this?”  I think Children’s Hospital was looking for a producer – they call them a producer, executive producer – really somebody that’s going to manage the entire process but also figure out how to get it online, promote it, measure the results.  And it takes somebody that’s skilled in both the creative aspects of video production and sort of the technical aspects of online and digital marketing.

[10:58]
Matthew:  And as with any new medium, these people are hard to find at the beginning of the rollout of the medium because it’s new.  But I think Grant’s right.  Soon, a couple years from now – one or two years from now, there’ll be many of these folks because the need to create this video is going to go straight through the roof.

[11:15]
Matt:  Absolutely.  And in the meantime, what we recommend is, obviously there are companies out there that provide these types of services – video production services and digital marketing services.  So if you are looking to produce or create a video marketing program or a campaign or program, really look for those that have a blended experience.  Between digital marketing, online marketing, social media marketing, and video because if you are only video and now you’re trying to make the leap into digital or the digital agency and trying to do video…

[11:50]
Matthew:  It won’t be integrated.  On the one end of the spectrum you’ll have a square box that’s the video plunked into your website.  There’s the video, I created it.  And then on the other end you may have a great website with maybe a YouTube video plunked in which is, you know – it’s there but it’s not taking advantage of the latest tools to get video interacting on your website.

[12:11]
Matt:  Exactly – and going back to the previous article about conversion – that’s all about digital marketing living up to its potential on your site.  How does video play a role in that?  You need to know how to produce video so that it does drive conversion, conversion rates.

[12:26]
Matthew:  He then goes on to define this term that he’s coined – this business quality video: Business Quality Video is content that achieves a proper scale of good production, so that’s kind of ambiguous…it’s good enough is how I read that…and content for its intended audience – so, as a marketing person, you should know your personas, know who you’re marketing to, who your video is for…with an expected result from the audience related to whatever your goals may be.  So this is something that you talk a lot about – Drive the visitor to action.

[12:57]
Matt:  Right.  You know, it might be one of these things where you don’t know it until you see it.  Sort of like business casual dress.  What is it?  Well, we’re dressed in business casual.  I think that…

[13:09]
Matthew:  I think I’m more Shabby Chic today…

[13:10]
Matt:  I think you are.

[Laughter]

[13:13]
Matt:  You’re always that way Matthew.  I think it’s important again, business quality doesn’t just mean quality of the video production.  It means, as he says, it means that it’s connecting with the audience and it has the expected results you want.  It’s focused on the business need.

[13:30]
Matthew:  Yeah, and I think there’s just a level of medium quality.  Much like there’s the business class airfare – you know, not quite economy, not quite first class – but closer to first class than economy.  I think that’s what business quality is.  And I would suggest again that that’s probably what you’re watching right now.

[13:47]
Matt:  I’m hoping that’s what they’re watching right now.

[13:48]
Matthew:  When I’m looking at PTV Live as a watcher, it clearly looks a lot better to me than say a YouStream or a YouTube or some of the other live streams.  I’d say that this is business quality.

[13:58]
Matt:  And we focused on that.  When we put together this production, we made sure we had a decent camera, one that could give us a good quality picture, we have a good service for streaming it and we have decent lighting as well.

[14:13]
Matthew:  So, we’d love to hear your opinions as well so Tweet to the PTV Live hashtag.  What do you think the proper definition of business quality video is?  Give us some examples and let us know if PTV Live fits the bill.  Is that where we’re at?  We just said we thought we were, but we’d lo
ve to hear what you have to say about it.

You want to talk a little more about this article before we move on?  There’s a lot here and I encourage you to read the article, it’s on the website.

[14:39]
Matt:  Yeah, Grant’s a good friend of PTV’s, great article, I encourage you to check out RealSEO more.  He produces some great material and these strategies are all here.  A couple of them…capture what’s online – this is strategies for producing quality video on a smart budget.  And what he says is capture what’s online using, we’ve talked about this many times before, use tools like Camtasia(?) to grab what’s on your screen and make it into a video…a very low cost way of being able to explain your products.  Particularly for software marketers, a lot of our clients have software products, and being able to talk about your product and have people see it and you explain what’s happening on the screen is a very low-cost way of doing that using something like Camtasia.

Also, building the brand around it.  Giving your video a style of its own.

[15:42]
Matthew:  And there’s a lot.  I don’t want to necessarily read the whole thing.  I want to move onto some of the other things.  It’s a great article – I have to agree with you.

The next thing I did want to get to was a trend that I’m seeing – it’s almost every week that I can find at least three or four articles that talk about the convergence of online video and social media.  And they really have become one thing.

[16:06]
Matt:  Didn’t we invent…I thought we invented that?

[16:08]
Matthew:  With Twitter on the Live Stream? 

[16:10]
Matt:  Yeah, live stream Twitter…we’ve had this for a couple years now, right?

[16:13]
Matthew:  A couple years?  Yeah, yeah…back when I was a young lad.

You know, with that said, I’m glad that were part of the first movers on this, but it makes me even happier to see how it’s catching on.  And so I just pulled together three quick articles.  First one is BlipFM adds YouTube videos.  So BlipFM, I don’t know if you’re familiar with it, but it’s basically the Twitter of music.  You can login and you basically Tweet, or you send out a quick message that shows what you’re listening to and now they’re linking that to music videos.  So, the free service which allows users to listen to songs and share them now includes a window for watching the videos as the songs play.  It’s sort of like an on-demand social MTV.

[17:00]
Matt:  Right.  Not to be confused with BlipTV which I don’t think is affiliated with this at all.  This is a service from fuzz.com.  I checked it out, I’m not a user of it so I couldn’t tell you if it’s something that I would find useful…

[17:15]
Matthew:  Well, we’ve got it up behind us if you can see it.  Basically you just click on the video and YouTube plays in the lower right.  You know, nothing groundbreaking but just further evidence that these two mediums are coming together.  People want to be social and they want to be part of everybody’s activity and life streams and they want to get a little bit more out of it than just 140 characters.

The next one is Twit-Matic which is a Twitter/Video search engine.  So, this is an article which I picked up from some…Mashable.  The new TwitMec exponentially improves its former offering and becomes a viable platform for video search and viewing Twitter videos associated with trending topics.  I went onto Twit-Matic and I searched for Permission TV and lo and behold we found some videos and I think that John has got some that he’s playing right now, or soon to be playing.  As soon as you type in the search term, the tweets come up where people talk about our videos and if you click play, our player actually plays on Twit-Matic which is kind of cool. 

[18:14]
Matt:  Yeah, it’s great.  I found it pretty interesting to use it.

[18:19]
Matthew:  Hey, look at that handsome guy.

[18:21]
Matt:  Hey, all right.  (laughter)  I don’t know if it’s going to catch on, per se, but Matthew’s point is that these technologies, capabilities are coming together.  It’s like peanut butter and chocolate.  We talked about James McQuivey(?) of Forester(?) uses this analogy which is like you got peanut butter over here and chocolate, video is peanut butter and social media is chocolate and you got my video and my peanut butter and my chocolate…

[18:50]
Matthew:  I get it.  I think it’s going to last.  Maybe not as a standalone service.  You know, Twitter might turn right around and say hey this thing seems to be catching on, why don’t we do it.  I can’t imagine it’s very technically challenging to build this level of integration.  But, hey, we’re talking about video is the best way to engage.  I’m looking at this now and saying why did only three of our videos come up when I searched for us.  We’ve produced a whole lot more than three videos.  One of my action items for next week is to make sure that we get more of our videos out on Twitter.

[19:24]
Matt:  Interesting the way they sort of took a page out of the Twitter playbook which is basically they have to answer the question, what do I want to watch right now.  Which is…

[19:35]
Matthew:  And then the final article is another, I don’t know if you want to call it phenomenon, but another thing that I’m seeing which is community around watching video whether it be watching TV in your living room and then Tweeting about what you’re watching or doing it online.  This is a website called Watch It Too which creates instant community around online video.  This is a private beta site, we don’t have an invite – so if you work at Watch It Too, send us one – I’m MSMamet(?), he’s MPKaplan, I’d love to get in there.  Basically, it lets users create real-time community around web content.

[20:16]
Matt:  You know, this has been around for a while, this concept.  Lycos, I think 2 to 3 years ago had their cinema product.

[20:25]
Matthew:  I think it just shut down recently.

[20:27]
Matt:  Did it really?  I didn’t know that.  But really what they did, what Watch It Too is doing is trying to create a destination for people to watch with each other, to watch videos with each other.  So, I’m not sure if it’s going to stand the test of time.  At the end of the article it says it’s pretty cool and impressive when it comes to functionality and we recognize that there are a multitude of uses, we think the site might have a challenge attracting a large audience and retaining users.  So, not quite sure if their business model is right and whether it will work but again, it’s social/video, you know, being combined.

[21:04]
Matthew:  A lot of these sites that we talk about, no offense, but they have a pretty low probability of success.  They’re trying to catch a wave and there’s great technology and there’s audience but whether or not they can connect the dots, that’s a challenge that they have to overcome and I’m sure they all understand that.

[21:24]
Matt:  One of the things though that they are doing, which we talked about when it happened, is the integration with Facebook connect.  We talked about when CNN did their live stream of the inauguration…

[21:33]
Matthew:  Which was right about the same time that we launched our Twitter player.  I remember how excited we all were.

[21:42]
Matt:  We were scoop
ed by CNN, right?  It happens to the best of us.  Anyway, I think what’s important here is, also related to video, is think about ways you can integrate social media and social communities into your video experience.

[22:00]
Matthew:  I mean, you talk a lot about the evolution – starting out where video is a passive experience, you’d get online, you’d sit there and watch it.  Now, video is an interactive experience.  Companies like Permission TV and others are enabling you to actually interact with some of the elements of the video onstage.  It was only natural that the interaction that was happening around the social-sphere would start to get video in it.  So video is a new medium that’s penetrating all different avenues and all different areas.
 
[22:30]
Matt:  There’s been discussions whether video is actually a form of social media marketing in a way, because video brings the human – personal side out.  We had our webinar a couple weeks ago about online marketing with a human touch, really, we were discussing, this is with Mike Loose(?) from Awareness, discussing both how video and social media are actually bringing the human side or personal touch back into digital marketing.

[22:59]
Matthew:  Yeah and that webinar is available to watch, a recorded session, it was really great.  We did it here at the office with Matt and Mike and John, if you could get the link and Tweet that out that’d be great so people can sign up to watch the recorded webinar.  I think it’s permissiontv.com/go/awareness – so just to get that out.

The last article which is a totally different subject.  If you can consider Watch It Too and these other social sites as taking advantage of a wave that’s happening, Ohm from GigaOhm is talking about what’s the longer term evolution that’s happening over the internet.  We talk a lot about Web 2.0 and Web 1.0, he’s trying to understand what’s going to be Web 3.0 or some version of that beyond.  In another very dense article in terms of content and another one of these articles where the comments are just as good if not better than the actual content of the article, so again, I’d encourage you to read this.

But he tries to distill it down to three points that he sees is going to happen in the future.  First, the web is transitioning from mere interactivity to dynamic real-time web.  So if you follow TechCrunch or any of the major blogs like GigaOhm, this is probably not news to you.  Moving away from search and find to real-time web activity streams feeding you results.

Two, the complete desegregation of the web in parallel with the slow decline of the destination web.  And then three, more and more people are publishing more and more social objects and sharing them online.  That day to day luge(?) is creating a new search opportunity.  So if you kind of add up these three ideas or movements what you get is what he refers to as a river of news – a kind of like online dialog that’s constantly happening.  There’s people just kind of coming in and leaving and just dipping their toes in sometimes and then jumping in some other times.  And he mentions a conversation he had with Dave Winer(?) where he says that overload isn’t a problem anymore since we have no choice but to acknowledge that we can’t wade through all of this information.

[25:25]
Matt:  You know he sort of talks about the stories that flow like a river and you would dip in and drink what you want.  That’s sort of what we do with Twitter a lot is we go in there and we listen…who’s talking about video marketing and other related things and how then can we respond to that.  It gets a bit overwhelming because there’s all this stuff going on…

[25:47]
Matthew:  And these tools that are getting created try to help you make sense of it.

[25:50]
Matt:  Exactly.

[25:51]
Matthew:  But they’re not quite there yet.

[25:53]
Matt:  Exactly.  And so, one of the things, and you’ve talked about this before in terms of social media, is just the ability to know that these conversations are going on all the time and you can’t possibly be a part of all of them.  You can try your best to do that…but let’s go back to the video production side of things, what this says to me is as a video marketing company or marketing organization is what you need to do is continue to produce video content and feed that river all the time.

[26:26]
Matthew:  And the act of producing video content is going to help to cut down a little bit on the amount in the river.  Because, again, video is a much cleaner and easier way to get your information from Point A to Point B…rather than having all these white papers and blog posts and RSS…we can sit down and distill, how many articles did we go through today?  We can distill 5 or 6 articles that were 4 or 5 pages apiece down into a 30-minute show.  And if the tools are there to be able to jump to certain points and understand when we talk about what you can make it a lot easier for that kind of dipping, that kind of toe dipping as opposed to saying, look, I can’t read all this stuff and I’m going to miss it all.  Video is an effective way to just get your message out in a cleaner, simpler way.

[27:12]
Matt:  Absolutely.  And again, going back to sort of the video production process when we think about traditionally producing video, it’s sort of this huge effort or undertaking – we got to write a script, we gotta hire actors, we gotta do all these things and the web and what he’s talking about and the acceleration here of producing content more rapidly is we have to change the way we produce video content.  We can’t do it the same way, we have to produce and we’ve called this before, smaller video chunks…video snacks that can be consumed in different ways so somebody can go into your website, grab a snack, a video snack, consume it, that was pretty interesting, tasty…I’ll go back and get some more.

[27:54]
Matthew:  Your website should have paths to allow people to select the appropriate size of snack they would like to consume.  There’s no reason to say that hey, that 2 minute piece didn’t whet your appetite enough, here you can click into the full webinar or the full hour long symposium or what have you.

[28:14]
Matt:  I think we, as marketers, we have the potential of doing the same thing as the Internet has done which is just produce gobs of content and not help people make any sense of it.

[28:28]
Matthew:  Each passing day that gets more and more a problem.

[28:31]
Matt:  Exactly.  Websites are sort of becoming, I think sometimes, loaded with a lot of content – put up the white paper and the pdfs and this and that and now it becomes sort of your own challenge to organize it all.  But what if you could actually simplify it?  What if you could make the experience – what if you could use video on your website to actually take people on a tour, a navigation, through your website.  A much cleaner, easier way, much like we talk about, when you walk into an Apple store – people look at that and say oh, there’s a guide that takes you through various parts of the store.  Hey come check out the iPods, come check out the iPhones…

[29:10]
Matthew:  Mike Lewis has a great blog post on the Awareness blog about the Apple Store, the Sony Style store, he talks a lot about that.  So, yeah, I’d definitely check that out too.

Just wanted, before we sign off, to mention that next week we actually have a big day in the morning, or early afternoon, we’ll be down filming another webinar.  This one with Constant Contact as well as the
folks from Kramer Online about e-mail marketing and conversion rates, how to use video to increase your click through rates.  There was a study done by the E-Mail Standards Project – we talked, actually on this show with Eric Aaron about that study that showed that video calls to action actually get a 5x as high clickthrough rate – so check that out.  John, just go ahead and Tweet that link out if you haven’t done so already.  And then we’ll be back here, we’ll run right back here to do the show in the afternoon – so the show will go on.

[30:06]
Matt:  Hope there’s no traffic on 128.

[30:08]
Matthew:  I hope there’s no traffic on 128.  If not, we may have to call in the B Team.  Dave, get ready.

[Laughing]

So, thanks a lot everybody, we’ll see you next week.
[30:18]
Matt:  Take care.

[Clapping]