News Blog

Here is an often recited quote, attributed to comedian Red Skeleton about the well-attended funeral of Harry Cohn, the tyrant president of Columbia Pictures:

“Give the people what they want to see and they’ll come out for it.”

Now how is this pertinent to your product, service, and marketing — specifically your video ads?It is, as an axiom for most businesses. If you provide a quality product or service that people truly want, and offer it at the right price, success is a much easier fish to catch. The last piece of the success puzzle, of course, is that people need to be made aware of what you offer and have warm fuzzy feelings about it.Unfortunately, when it comes to promoting one’s products, services or brand, Skeleton’s quote is too often forgotten. Marketers tend to play the game of “ I made you look” by placing ads in front of, next to, on top of, and behind the content that users actually want to see.

What if only there were a way to get users to willingly be exposed to your message?

One of the great things about the Internet is that it provides a ready-made way to target pockets of users by interest. Portals, niche publishers, and community sites attract and organically sort audiences for you into similar-minded groups. Technologies that help users share information also make it possible to grow communities around each piece of relevant content.The opportunity now exists for you that, rather than pushing 30-seconds of hard-sell messages to an audience who is probably not be open to it, you can now offer engaging, interesting, entertaining, and relevant content that your potential audience will willingly return to, again and again.

Consider these examples:

1. Car makers can sponsor a 3- to 5-minute series about how to maintain the health of a car or a scripted comedy about a zany group of friends who decide to drive around the world in 80 days.

2. Hotel chains can produce shows about the off-the-beaten-path restaurants and hot spots in the cities they service.

3. Tool and appliance makers can offer video craft workshops or integrate their products into relevant programs.

4. Financial services can sponsor thought-leader interview series about tried-and-true methods to make your small business grow

5. Lifestyle brands can entertain their audiences by sponsoring events that feature talent geared toward the interests of their target markets.

6. Start ____________________________________ filling in here NOW how you could create videos to entertain and help your current and potential customers.

This IS a win-win-win scenario.

You get exposure in front of organically sorted, similar-minded groups and raise goodwill by giving something of value to them. Your audience gets relevant entertainment without being force-fed a commercial. Web publishers increase the stickiness of their site when they supply their users with great content.So as Red Skeleton was saying, if you give the people what they want, (relevant and interesting video content … or a dead studio executive) they will gather to view it. For you, sponsoring or integrating into that show means capturing the eyeballs of an engaged audience.

I have just completed a post here about the awesome power of viral marketing. I have shown three examples of videos that have been watched over 1,000,000 times apiece!! In fact, one video has been viewed over 60,000,000 times on its own! The perfect example of friends telling friends. Mind you, those friends have been told for a very good resaon, as the up skirt shots (sorry girls) are hilarious (and yes I admit, quite sexy), as is the evolution of dance. But that is not the reason for this post.When video first came online it was relatively easy to get your videos on page 1 in Google. Then of course, everyone started to do it and Google changed their algorithm. It then became a lot harder to get your video on page 1 and you had to do a whole heap of other stuff, including probably the hardest of all, namely getting your video popular first, without the aid of a page 1 listing.Then Google bought YouTube. It took a while, but Google looks after Google.

Things have changed my friend — just look at this for evidence:

If you click on the image, the full size image will open in a new window. There you have it. My two videos occupying no. 1 AND no. 2 spot for a lucrative search term. There are many more examples I can show you, but I’m not going to give all my secrets away here.Tell you what I’ll do though, if you sign up for the pre launch list at TellAFriendzy (it’s free), I will tell you the exact steps I took to achieve these spectacular results. Sign up today!!Technorati Tags: tell a friend, tell a friend forms for marketing, tell a friend email, free tell a friend, tell a friend script, viral marketing, viral marketing examples, viral marketing and sports, viral marketing campaign, marketing viral, online viral marketing, viral marketing software, word of mouth marketing, word of mouth  

Source: online viral marketing 

When was the last time you did anything different in your internet marketing life? When did you last think, ‘Hey, let’s try an experiment to see if that idea I thought of last week would actually bring in more sales.’When was the last time you added a different way of advertising to your usual promotional mix?We tend to get stuck in a rut so easily that we barely notice it’s happened until long after the event itself. But staying fresh is half the battle in making sure we can earn the biggest amounts from our internet marketing efforts.The problem isn’t even so much that we get stuck in that rut, it’s that we can’t see that we’ve stopped while everything else is still moving. In short, it’s easy to get left behind… and when we finally realise we’re lingering in other people’s dust, it takes some time to even catch up again, let alone overtake them.

The World Of Internet Marketing

I make a point of spending a few moments every day or so just surfing any interesting sites that are related to my work. I’m probably not much different to you - I subscribe to a few good email newsletters that are related to the world of internet marketing, in the hope that I’ll learn a thing or two every now and again that I can apply to my own business.Make sure you keep that fresh input of ideas and information coming in – it helps to prevent ‘rut’ syndrome and keeps your brain active. That in itself should give you some ideas to experiment with, but always make sure you continue to push the boundaries of what you are doing, and try new methods and ideas of making a little more (or a lot more) cash from your efforts.Even if you can only come up with one new idea every day, and only one of those ideas works each week, that’s fifty two new ideas every year that you can set to work to improve what you’re doing and earn more money from.Sean RasmussenInternet Marketing BlogWealthCreationAffiliate.com © 2007 - 2008

Bookmark this:

Source: Internet

First, my heartfelt condolences go to all the families who lost loved ones in China’s biggest earthquake in three decades, killing more than 50,000….

I’m told our new member advertiser, Global Travel Hotspots, will dedicate advertising revenues, earned through placing their truly amazing ad with us, to rebuilding schools in Sichuan province. I ask that you too lend them a helping click now!

Incidentally, this also puts us over the 100,000th pixel mark … which, considering the state of the U.S. and global economy in the last eleven months since we opened, we are very satisfied with.

If you are active in the online video scene, i.e. produce your own videos alone or with the help of sites like iMoondo this should be an easy leap.  

  

Especially, if you are also a seller on eBay the question becomes: Could adding videos to your profile and products bring you more credibility and sales? To find out, ask yourself:

1. How effective are your current classifieds?
2. Is it easy for you to produce your own videos?
3. Would you benefit from showing a video in your classifieds?
4. Would your profile be more persuasive with a video presentation?
5. How easy would it be to add video to each of your items on eBay?
6. Do you expect social networking sites to follow suit?
7. How soon will online classified ad sites include videos?
8. Should you jump in, prepare for, or dismiss this development as a gimmick?

I see video included in classifieds as a very positive development. While you certainly would not benefit from seeing a video about a baseball ticket you are purchasing (unless it links to a previous game in which your team pounded the living daylight out of their opponents), you would most definitely benefit from seeing a video about a piece of furniture, a vehicle, or some other more tangible product.

Much like virtual tours have allowed home buyers to be much more effective when searching for a property on real estate Web sites, the same could potentially be true for consumers of miscellaneous goods and services.Moreover, the challenges eBay is facing with less traffic and strikes by its sellers, this could be a great way for them to drive additional revenue. They could charge fees for hosting your videos or highlighting your items, service, and profile with them, as they do now with more “plain vanilla” listings. This would give you as a merchant and your visitors a more pleasant and hopefully informed shopping experience.

Enabling a better, more personalized look at you, as the merchant, is just as significant as researching the products the you are selling. After all, the feedback and ratings for sellers are so important for this online community.

Craig’s List is in a different proposition because of its lack of interest in fully monetizing the site; however it will be interesting to see if - more like when and how - they decide to leverage video as well. Social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook are already hosting so much user generated video, they could easily build the web apps to integrate them with classifieds. Even better, they can have third party developers on their platforms create them.

The eBay and Craig’s Lists of the world should be concerned about the intentions of the social networking sites to branch into e-commerce. It would be a natural progression for them with a lot of profit potential for their users and themselves. 

The most-damaging, viewership-lowering, ROI-suppressing issue facing tv and video content owners today is that promotion, particularly for scripted series and episodes, does not work. At best, all it does is remind the relatively few people who watch a show to tune in again; by definition, it cannot motivate non-viewers to sample. How can you turn this around?

Ask yourself:

• Are We Set Up to Motivate People?
• Do We Have an Outdated Strategy That Keeps Our Content Hostage?
• Can We Achieve Effective Promotion Via Massive Sampling?
• Why Is a Hit the Rarity?
• Is Viral Sampling a Solution for Me?

and jot down your answers after reading this article, so you can analyze them.

Are We Set Up to Motivate People?

This leads me to ask: in an era containing hundreds of viewer options, what good is investing millions upon millions in content and delivery systems, if you can’t — or worse, are not set up to — motivate people to sample the content? In turn, why should advertisers invest in your content, unable to deliver effective advertising? After all, more people sampling your means more can become loyal.

Do We Have an Outdated Strategy That Keeps Our Content Hostage?

The role of promotion is to build value into your programming. The outdated strategy of keeping your content hostage until its debut falls well short of that goal. Look at ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC as examples. Each has a billion-dollar promotional budget in paid media plus the value of promotional spots on the network if sold to advertisers. Yet, for Disney, Viacom, News Corp., and GE, it is irrefutable that their promotional messages are totally ineffective. For cable and digital networks, the budgets might be smaller, but the results the same. As for VOD and Pay-VOD, getting people to watch or even fork over money for a huge special or “The Sopranos” is not that hard; the real challenge is: How do you get them to tune into or pay for a new series they have not seen?

Can We Achieve Effective Promotion Via Massive Sampling?

Without effective promotion from massive sampling, all your expensive content can do is maintain viewer loyalty after that initial trial. Everything else is a waste of time, money and effort. In fact, I’d argue that many canceled series do not fail; rather, their promotion did not take advantage of free viral sampling on the net — if they did, many more programs would have been successful.

Why Is a Hit the Rarity?

When you do not “know” the characters because you have not seen the show, the promotion might as well be in Greek for all the good it does to bring new viewers to you. With a comedy piece, you cannot find the humor. With a drama, you cannot appreciate the intrigue. So all the money spent on promotion only remind existing viewers, who “know” the characters, to watch a show again. This ensures lower viewership and quick cancellation. In this scheme a hit is the rarity, even for great content.

Is Viral Sampling a Solution for Me?

Is there a solution to this problem? Yes. The pool of potential samplers must be dramatically expanded from just those few people who have seen the show (prior to its debut, no one is in the pool) to include those who have not. How? Through the adoption of a new promotional model reflecting today’s competitive environment. Holding on to the thinking used in the three-network 70s, both pre-premiere and episodic, is totally counterproductive and the single greatest suppressor of revenue and stock prices.

500% Gain in Online Viewership Is Very Feasible

Ironically, since loyalty to most tv programs is weak and the act of sampling is so easy (the viewer just has to click the mouse or hit the remote), viewership gains of 50-to-100% or more in broadcast and cable and 500% or more in digital are very feasible. This only requires one simple thing: a commitment to make adjustments in the outdated content development-promotion-sales model. Because once the promotional problem is addressed, you’d be amazed how many others will evaporate.

Online video is growing in popularity, but the vast majority isn’t getting anywhere near your TV screen.A survey conducted during December 2007 by Macrovision (commissioned by Harris Interactive) says that only a small number of adults who download video from the Internet play it on a TV or DVD player.

Specifically, the survey of 2,254 adults in the U.S. found:

1. 43 percent download some form of digital media
2. Over a quarter said that they download TV shows regularly
3. 15 percent download full-length movies
4. More than half said that they only watch the downloads on their PC
5 ONLY five percent said that they watch video on a TV or other video-playing device

No surprise here - most content providers use some form of Digital Rights Management (DRM) in such a way that it makes watching video anywhere other than the PC inconvenient, if not downright impossible. For example, video from sites like Hulu can only be watched through a browser, so the only way to watch it on a TV would be to use a computer connected to it (something that the majority of users don’t have).

While downloads from NBC Direct may not be limited to the web, they can still only be played on a single authorized computer at a time.Downloading from places like the iTunes Store or Xbox Live Video to the Apple TV or an Xbox 360 make this possible without having to use an HTPC. Still, even though these solutions make it easier to watch downloaded content on the big and small screens near you, they clearly have yet to hit it big with the general public.

Only five percent of those surveyed said that they watch video on a TV or other video-playing device regularly.In fact, while conventional wisdom says that users would love to watch downloaded video content on the television set, Macrovision found that only 10 percent of those surveyed said that they have any desire to do so. The company was surprised to learn this: “While people very quickly figured out the music scenario—either legally or illegally—they haven’t figured that out for video,” observes Macrovision chief evangelist Richard Bullwinkle.

As online video continues to expand, content providers will have to face the consequences of their own restrictions on how viewers use content. Making it easier to transfer files to portable devices and set-top boxes will help drive viewership.One way to do that is by mimicking the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) experiments by Canadian, Norwegian, and other European broadcasters, who offer completely restriction-free downloads. That might be a bit too much for most U.S. networks to swallow now. On the other hand, if they don’t drop DRM and embrace alternatives soon, they will continue to lose viewers to free-for-all video sharing sites like YouTube/Google, AOL, Yahoo, MSN Video as well as other, less-legitimate ways of acquiring video content.

Well, what do you know? I learned this from Lori Moss of Cellfab, who decided that I was displaying too much ignorance during one of our discussions:

“Although no exact number can be given, the order of magnitude of the number of cells in a human body can be approximated to about one hundred trillion cells. Then there are about 210 known distinct human cell types. On top of that, the human body contains 20 times more microbes, which are single-celled organisms, than it does cells.”

I spare you the rest. Suffice to say it’s a pleasure to have Cellfab as a member advertiser!

A growing number of digital video and ad providers are challenging TV’s hold on visual quality with better technology and services. The quickened pace of High Definition TV deployment was expected to slow the exodus of viewers to online offerings.The reason this strategy doesn’t seem to be successful so far is that the online tv and video sites are also upgrading to HDTV quality webcasting. And they have a built-in advantage: the cost is much less and the technology much more flexible, being mostly software based, than the mostly hardware based infrastructure necessary for the broadcast and cable companies.

Examples abound:

1. THE TOTAL NUMBER OF VIDEOS viewed was 10.1 billion during a record-breaking December 2007, according to the comScore Video Metrix service.

2. YouTube.com accounted for 3.3 billion videos viewed online in the U.S. in January.

3. Google sites once again ranked as the top U.S. video property in January with nearly 3.4 billion videos viewed (34.3% share of videos), gaining 1.7 share points versus the previous month.

4. Fox Interactive Media ranked second with 584 million (6%).

5. Yahoo! sites served 315 million videos (3.2%).

6. Microsoft sites came in with 199 million (2%) videos watched in January.

7. Vimeo, a video-sharing site owned by Barry Diller’s IAC, began distributing user-generated videos in HD late last year.

8. The peer-to-peer-powered Web TV startup Joost also offers high-resolution content.

9. Just last week, the NBC/News Corp. co-venture Hulu.com launched to the public with limited HD content, as one of the first tests of the new Adobe Flash Player, which supports streaming HD.

10. Rumors are also flying that Yahoo intends to integrate video into Flickr very soon, perhaps in the next three weeks. Part of the delay may have been a long internal debate about how to make Flickr Video special and distinct from what YouTube already offers.

BrightRoll CEO Tod Sacerdoti actually believes the Web is better suited for delivering HD content than TV. “HDTV penetration is just 33% of U.S. households, while right now advertisers can use HD content to reach over 65% of all Internet consumers.” Sacerdoti says. BrightRoll is an online video advertising firm founded just two years ago in 2006. As an ad serving company they must have the ability and the need to track video viewing statistics and trends very closely, so I’d condider their numbers pretty reliable.

Guess what? Fifty seven percent of U.S. Internet users watch videos online and most of them share what they find with others according to a recent Pew Internet and American Life Project report.     

It’s just the first decade of the 21st century, yet technology is already king and video is its queen. Sounds good? Cliche? Both? So what?

So, if you want to reach the Tween, Teen, and Twenty-something market heavily into this web video scene, you must have:

1. A website that loads in ten seconds or less or
2. Videos (that also load quickly!)

The new generation is not accustomed to waiting for anything. Now, whether this is right or wrong I’ll leave up to you, but it is true - to capture their attention video is the way to go.”Three in four (75%) say they receive links to watch video that others have sent to them,” again from Pew Internet and American Life Project report. Video is fast, engaging, and most importantly viral. I urge you: If you do not have a video on your website, look into producing one, because in this day and age this is a business must.