Just back from attending HiveFire’s user conference for content curators. Content curation has taken off! My learning from the conference is that the reason why has much to do with TRUST!

What is content curation, you ask? Simply put: content curation is the process of sifting through the boatload of information “out there”—blog posts, tweets & news feeds—and passing on the golden nuggets others in your network find valuable.

After sitting in this curation conference and being bombarded with the “T” word, I was struck by the incredible potential content curation has for salespeople to virtually build trusting relationships as the foundation for generating sales and referrals.

I found this trust theme particularly interesting having just read a blog by Steven Woods, CTO at Eloqua, on “Trust, Reputation, and Inside-Sales”.

“There is a significant shift underway in how we establish and build trust… [having] numerous profound implications for society in general, but more specifically, it is causing significant shifts in the way that people buy… the evolution of trust is opening up new opportunities for inside sales teams.”

“As the emphasis on face-to-face interaction as a way to build trust decreases in lieu of other ways of building trust, the need to be “in the field” also decreases. It is unlikely that field sales as a discipline will disappear any time soon, the economic bar at which a face-to-face interaction is “necessary” is in the middle of a dramatic shift.”

Marketers are all over the power of content curation for building trusted reputations of brands and products. According to Hivefire’s B2Marketing trends 2011 survey, 82% of B2B marketers now use content marketing as a strategy in their marketing programs. Forrester Research cites the use of online content curation to build thought leadership and authority relationships as one of four critical emerging technologies for B2B sales and marketing.

Posting a Youtube video occasionally on Facebook to share with friends or sharing links to articles of interest with your network are forms of content curation. Chances are you already do this to some extent. Now think about someone you know professionally you consider as a go-to person or expert. My guess is that they regularly share information on a particular topic you find valuable. By doing so consistently, they’ve established themselves as a trusted source.

Bottom line: every communication you send—and online interaction you have—is an opportunity to build trust capital you can leverage strategically to boost sales. Continuously earn deposits in your prospects’ trust banks by routinely sharing valuable, golden nuggets of information. Here are a few content curation tips to help you get started:

1. Add real value by selecting content of specific interest to an individual prospect or customer. Make sure it’s information your reader truly cares about; do not be guided by what you find interesting or stimuating.
2. Less is more—don’t overload your prospect with too much information.  Remember, too much information and they will shut down (read more in my previous blog).
3. Don’t be afraid to share information about your competition; it is a critical way to show that you are trustworthy.  Nobody wants to do business with an “information censor”.

Stay tuned for future posts with additional practical tips to help you create a simple, disciplined routine for continuously discovering and sharing valuable information with prospects and clients.

How are you building trust virtually? Is content curation one of the trust-building tools you use?

Peggy Kriss, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist in Newton, Massachusetts and a consultant to VisibleGains. Stay tuned for more psychology informed blogs by Dr. Kriss.

Today I was watching a tutorial on Yahoo Pipes for an upcoming project. The tutorial was great and was very educational, however the related video area was not as flattering. When you use free platforms like Yahoo, YouTube or Vimeo, you’re subjected to the way they want to treat it. Like this example where I was offered a video tutorial on having sex in a car. Get Control Over Your Video!

Whether you are getting started with making a business video or you’re an expert, it is important that you know how to measure your success.  Every video solution and almost every website analytics solution has some flavor of video measurement, but there are few standards.  In this post, I’ll try to cut through the noise and provide 3 simple tips for measuring.

We like think about video measurement similar to how you think about website measurement.  How many people came to your site, what did they do while they were there, and did they take one of actions that you wanted (i.e. signed up for a webinar, took a free trial, downloaded a white paper, etc.)?

1. Start by measuring the number of views

This is the most popular metric and also one of the most important.  Obviously, if you post a video on your site and you are getting very few views, there could be a problem.  Is it below the fold?  Is the call to action not strong enough?  Or, does the topic of the video not work in the context of that page?  For example, we see very few views of the customer testimonial video at the bottom of our homepage.  The biggest reason for this is that it is a customer testimonial and website visitors landing on our homepage are problem not ready for a testimonial quite yet.  When we’ve embedded testimonials on our pricing page, the number of views were much higher.

In the VisibleGains product, we measure number of views, but also the “Opt-In” rate which is a simple calculation of # video views/# page views.  This basic metric helps our customers to understand whether they are getting better over time or with different placements of the video.  If you use YouTube and Google Analytics on your site, the opt in rate can be calculated pretty easily using the number of video views from YouTube and the number of page views from Google Analytics.

2. Measure your viewers’ engagement with the video

Depending on your video solution, you will likely have a unique way of measuring engagement with your video.  They all pretty much do the same thing, but have different names and look & feel.  YouTube, for example, has the Hot Spots feature which show the most interesting (hottest) parts of your video.  Another visual is that a lot of the web analytics systems have an engagement graph where you can see where viewers are dropping off.

I believe these are interesting tools to use, but they are more complicated than needed for most business video amateurs.  We suggest you start out by simply measuring the average amount of time viewers are spending in your video.  With this metric, you can get a pretty solid understanding if the video is interesting.  Once you get some experience, it might help to dig into the Hot Spots or drop-off charts to further optimize, but we do not recommend them for most early customers due to their complexity.

3. Measure the success your video has on your website conversions

At VisibleGains, we always coach our customers to start with a video to help increase conversion.  The first time you make a video, it can be daunting, so we want to make sure that you can easily see if the video worked.  When video achieves a goal, it makes it easy to justify doing it again, both to yourself and your management team.

If you use VisibleGains or another video solution that has built-in calls-to-action and lead capture forms in the video, you should measure how many video views lead to a click on the call to action or to the lead capture event.  If your solution doesn’t include those features, then you can write custom reports in your website analytics solution to correlate conversions to video views.

Conclusion

Depending on your video solution, you will likely be overwhelmed by the options for measuring video on your website.  When you get more experienced, you can dig into all of the advanced features, but when you are just starting out, it is important to keep an eye on the simple metrics above.  For a good example of these metrics in action, check out this video on a landing page promoting an upcoming webinar.  This was a very easy to make and also had a very short life-cycle.  This made it easy to quickly understand the impact video could have on the customer’s key metrics.

P.S. If you are interested in some of the more advanced topics in this post, let me know in the comments and I will write an advanced video analytics blog post in the coming weeks.  Thanks!

A few years ago, so-called “user-generated content” emerged. Today we now accept that blog posts, tweets and other nuggets of insight are trustworthy and, in some cases, highly entertaining. In the realm of video, YouTube not only made digital expression accessible to all, it forever changed the expectation for video content. YouTube proved that simply-produced and authentic video could be as, if not more, engaging than professional content.

Despite the popularity of social media (what is essentially evolved user-generated content), businesses were, until recently, reluctant to adopt the more freewheeling and often spontaneous sensibilities YouTube-style video. Today, however, erstwhile “corporate video,” often highly produced with b-roll, scripted actors and music, can seem disingenuous and inauthentic. Consumers – even buyers of technology and business services – have come to expect a more authentic dialogue. And this is good news for businesses that want to use video to engage and convert – authentic video can be easier and less costly to produce!

So, we are often asked, how much authenticity and simplicity is enough? After all, we’ve got we’ve got a valuable brand here, and we can’t risk undermining it. Although every company is different, we start with three simple rules for an effective video:

• Meet basic expectations for lighting and sound. Make sure that faces aren’t in shadow or direct sunlight, and be sure ambient noise won’t drown voices out. If you’re thinking of buying a digital video camera, consider one that has an external microphone jack.
• Feature real people from your business talking about subjects for which they are truly passionate. Don’t worry if they’re not Al Pacino. Do worry if they don’t convey authentic enthusiasm.
• Make the video more conversational and less scripted. Talking points are better than a formal script. Don’t let message perfection be the enemy of authenticity.

Some companies may have a budding Leonardo DiCaprio or a closet Apple Final Cut Pro editor, but you don’t need that level of talent to get started. You simply need to find your company’s comfort zone for quality versus expediency. It’s best to start small and experiment, proving to yourself – and your management team perhaps – that a simple, authentic video can actually convert online leads into sales. That’s reason enough to give it a try.

To read about other tips for using video to convert online visitors to leads, please download our eBook, Best Practices for Using Video to Convert Visitors to Leads, here.

And be sure to come back to our blog for more tips and tricks.

One question we often get is “why do I need anything besides You Tube for my video?”  With the phenomenal success of You Tube, this is a natural reaction.  As with most marketing questions, however, the right answer really depends on your specific goals.

Digital marketers generally have three high-level goals  – create awareness, engage prospects and convert visitors to leads.  The good news is that video can dramatically increase your results in all three areas.

You Tube is a great channel for achieving the first goal – it’s built for generating awareness.  Millions of people go to You Tube to look for relevant videos. Posting your videos to You Tube is an easy, inexpensive way to be discovered.

But engaging and converting prospects requires a more considered approach. Digital marketers typically spend a great deal of time and money to attract visitors to their websites, as well as optimizing that experience for conversion. To maximize your investment, you want your video content to be a vital part of that overall experience and conversion process.  Keeping prospects engaged on your site gives you more time and opportunity to convert them.

If, on the other hand, you send those hard-earned prospects off to You Tube, you may risk degrading their experience and lose everything you’ve already gained.  Yes, they see your video, but they’re no longer on your site, and you have lost control of their experience.  The prospect is now open to presentation of irrelevant content or, even worse, to content from competitors.

Once a prospect reaches your site, your goal should be to give them an experience that is tuned to their needs and enables them to easily take action that converts them from a suspect to a lead.   At a basic level, this requires interactivity and integrated calls to action.

Finally, whenever you do engage prospects on your site, you want to measure those interactions so you can constantly tune your efforts and programs to maximize conversion. Leading marketers are now successfully integrating their overall tracking and individual user actions within marketing automation (e.g., Eloqua, Unica, HubSpot, Marketo) and sales automation (Salesforce.com) systems. This ensures that the process of creating awareness, engaging prospects and converting visitors is properly executed and measured from start to finish.