Today, I’ll offer some tips on how marketers can create videos that consumers will want to receive via email and watch online. I’ll aso explain explain how marketers can analyze the results of their video email marketing campaigns with mobileStorm’s technology.

Because some companies might not have tried their hand at creating videos, here are some things we at mobileStorm learned while making our online commercials and comedy shows.

• Online video is not the same as a feature-length movie or network TV show. Its purpose is to quickly pique interest in a brand. Thus, it should start off with a “bang” and not be much longer than a few minutes.
• Links should either lead to a video posted on a site like YouTube or MySpace, or else should lead to specially-designed landing pages. Never use embedded video in email!
• Providing your video in the smallest file size possible, but still retaining a satisfactory image quality, is part of best practices for all Internet video. Flash compression is often the best comproise of file size and quality, making it ideal for online media.

Once you’ve deployed a video email marketing campaign, you need to determine how well it did.

Our platform allows you to see the success of both your videos and your email messages:

• Create stunning charts that track videos or video publishers.
• Compile aggregated video analytics that track across online sites including Google Video, MetaCafe, MySpace, AOL, Yahoo!, Revver, YouTube, and more.
• Find out how many people clicked on a particular link in the email–not only how many people opened the message, but also those specific addresses.
• Determine ROI on an email campaign by using Conversion/Clickstream tracking options.

Email marketing is extremely common these days. To stay competitive, every company in any industry should utilize it. To stand out from the rest, and to better engage your customers, you should seriously consider adding video to your email messages. Higher click-throughs, and commensurate ROI, will be your reward.

Eydie Cubarrubia, Marketing Communications Manager, mobileStorm
“I’d rather you text me”

We’re so forward-thinking that it’s only been recently that the rest of the marketing industry has caught up, and realized that–like chocolate and peanut butter–video and email can be combined into one message to really entice consumers. Two great tastes taste great together, indeed!

• According to analyst David Daniels at Forrester Research, putting a video link within an email, such as a clickable screen shot, “can increase click-through rates by two to three times.”
• Mr. Daniels also notes in his recent report that between July 2008 and July 2009, 17 percent of marketing executives surveyed planned to use video in email. Marketers are getting competitive with video email!
• Meanwhile, Nielsen Online reported that in April of this year, 119 billion unique viewers watched 7 trillion total streams during the month; total streams were up 24 percent from a year ago, while streams-per-viewer are up 27 percent and time-per-viewer is up 58 percent. Consumers love watching online video!
• Technological advances make viewing video in an email more seamless for the consumer. For example, Gmail Labs now has a feature that allows users to turn on previews of YouTube videos. Once consumers set this on their accounts, they’re able to watch YouTube videos from inside the email message. As word spreads, marketers will reach increasingly more Gmail users with video emails!

So savvy marketers will want to beat the competition before it beats them. This requires them to: (1) post videos where they can easily be found, and (2) incorporate video into their email marketing messages. This may be easier said than done, but with mobileStorm’s technology and expertise, it’ll still be relatively easy.

mobileStorm Video allows clients to broadcast videos to more than a dozen of the most popular video sharing sites–all in a single click. After posting videos, marketers can insert the links from YouTube, MySpace, etc. into their email messages. Meanwhile, consumers who are not on one’s email contact list will also see the videos. (These people may even be enticed to sign up to receive a company’s future email messages and videos.)

It’s important to remember that one should NOT embed a video within a message. To do so goes against email marketing best practices. Most ISPs have a limit to how much information can be in an email, and an embedded video would far exceed this limit. Instead, just include links to the video within the message. Again, one of Mr. Daniels’ suggestions is to use clickable screen shots; consumers click on the image and it will link to a video already posted online.

(Next week: Part 2 will explain how to analyze results of a video email campaign; and will also offer tips for creating marketing videos.)

Eydie Cubarrubia, Marketing Communications Manager, mobileStorm
“I’d rather you text me”

I definitely understand the group’s concerns. As spokeswoman Denise Pesich said, “We want to make sure that whatever the girl is doing is integrated into the program that she’s studying, we want to make sure we are in the development stages of a technological platform that will integrate it and be fair and equitable for all girls. But more importantly, it’s girl safety at its core.”

However, everything Ms. Pesich noted absolutely can be achieved in a digital marketing campaign, as long as best practices and the right technology platform are used. Here’s how:

• Create an online form in which the customer has to input his or her contact information, including email address and perhaps cell phone number, as well as order information such as what kind of cookies and how many boxes. The form should be sent to a database for cookie campaigns. In this fashion, no personal contact information for any girl or troupe is ever given out.
• To make sure that sales are attributed fairly, the orders can be sorted via zip code or city that the purchaser inputs. Thus, each sale would be credited to the scout troop that is local to the buyer.
• If revenue is supposed to go toward a specific program for a certain troupe or individual scout, then instead of having a generic online form for the entire Girl Scout organization, the Scouts’ website should first ask a potential buyer where he/she resides. Then the buyer should be served up a form that was created for the troupe closest to his/her location. This way the form would earmark that order for that particular troupe’s coffers.
• Have a messaging system in place that, once the cookies have come in, will notify customers that their orders are ready, via email or SMS (whatever method the customer chooses). This message can also specify the time and place where they can pick up their goodies, perhaps in front of a local supermarket or another public place. Since the orders are sorted by locale, it will be easy to give each consumer the proper pick-up location–outgoing messages too can be sorted according to zip code or city. Troupe leaders and parents can hand out the boxes along with, or instead of, the girls themselves.
• The Scouts can save customers’ contact information and, come next cookie season, can send out an email or SMS message asking if they’d like to pre-order their Thin Mints and Tagalongs.

The preceding can be used for both pre-orders (the traditional method of hitting up friends and neighbors and asking them to order what they want) as well as for the buy-in-bulk method (in which troupes buy loads of boxes and then sell them at public places). As a consumer who doesn’t personally know any scouts, I’d love the latter–that way I don’t have to worry about driving around supermarkets and shopping centers trying to find a cookie table.

Meanwhile, I think Wild’s dad was on the right track with the online video commercial. After all, 700 boxes were sold before it was yanked! Such an ad could be created by an entire troupe; this would make a great project, as would creating the order form. And if using the right platform, the advert could be distributed to the top video upload sites with the same technology that handles the online sales form and order notification messages.

Too bad this isn’t happening already. I’ve got a hankering for Samoas and Lemon Chalet Cremes!

Eydie Cubarrubia, Marketing Communications Manager, mobileStorm
“I’d rather you text me”

If you missed my previous posts about local search marketing strategies, you can find them here and here. After you get caught up, check out the following additional suggestions.

Create a directory—or better yet, a portal—devoted to your location. You can base it on your own site or have it as a separate resource. If your marketing budget allows it, you might want to consider buying such an existing portal. This solution is great even though it takes time and can be costly. It will allow you to drive targeted traffic to yourself easily. And then you can sell to this audience all day long.

Create a newsletter about local news related to your niche, as well as news about your own business. This will definitely increase conversions or revenue. Even a monthly newsletter can bring great results—there’s no need to bother the people on your list too often.

A great idea is to always include your local data in your signatures. And I don’t just mean email signatures, but also in blog post signatures, forum signatures, signatures used when you write articles for external resources, etc.

The web is increasingly moving towards video. People like watching information rather than reading it. So it’s time for you to get involved. Start making videos about your local business, place them on your own site, and also promote them through a good number of video resources available on the web. (A comprehensive list of video-sharing websites can be found here.) By the way, a little-known fact is that video results in the general search results page (SERP) are clicked much more than the text results, no matter what position they take on the page. Little video windows do stand out from boring texts, and that alone attracts people to click on them. (Read more about this fact here.) Because of this, it may be worthwhile to use a solution that posts a video to all major sharing sites at once.

One more interesting trick you can use in local marketing: Offer a locals-only discount. This is especially good if most leads you get are locals anyway. They’ll feel special and that will increase their signup chances for you. When I planned to go to Sea World in Orlando, I was pleasantly surprised that there is a permanent discount to Florida residents. Of course, I purchased the tickets right away.

More strategies are coming soon! Until then,

Shavkat Karimov, Internet Marketing Manager, mobileStorm
“Every problem comes with a solution”
SEO Consulting

It’s true that in the short term, we’ll see a slowdown of online video ad spend. AccuStream iMedia Research says that growth of such spending will decrease in 2009 to 22.5 percent, down from 36 percent growth in 2008. Figures from eMarketer are even more dramatic, predicting that growth will slow to 44.9 percent in 2009, compared to 81 percent growth in 2008. It’s easy for a marketer to look at all this and say, “Well, why should I use video for advertising and marketing? It doesn’t seem that my competitors will.”

But that’s short-sighted.

First, online video spending is bound to grow again–and the wise marketer will be ready when it does. Consider that both AccuStream and eMarketer say that online video ad spend will increase again in 2010 (to 28.2 percent, AccuStream predicts).

And online video is becoming increasingly more important to consumers–even elderly ones! The Pew Internet & American Life Project found in its catchily-titled report, “Generations Online In 2009,” that the majority of people in many demographics enjoy online video. Among those ages 18 to 32 (“Generation Y”), 72 percent watch videos online. Of those ages 33 to 44 (“Generation X”), 57 percent do the same. More interestingly, the number of Internet users ages 73 and older who download online videos has increased significantly–to 13 percent, from 1 percent in 2005. Those ages 64-72 also increased their video downloading behavior to 13 percent of users.

So it makes sense to have a video marketing plan in place. For example, you should know where and how to place your videos so that they’ll gain the greatest viewership possible (mobileStorm Video, for example, lets users broadcast their clips to all the major online video sharing sites in a single click). These videos can be used to draw consumers to a brand–perhaps by advertising a short code to which they can send a keyword to subscribe for special messages; or by directing them to a Web site where they can fill out a form for an email message subscription.

True, it may not be the most important aspect of your overall marketing strategy. But considering consumer usage and expected growth, you can’t afford to ignore online video either.

Eydie Cubarrubia, Marketing Communications Manager, mobileStorm
“I’d rather you text me”

The news story was on President-elect Barack Obama’s video “fireside chats” dropping 50 percent in popularity within three weeks. “I’ve heard a lot of puffed-up rhetoric about how this is going to change the face of politics and how it’s going to be FDR’s fireside chats. The data doesn’t back it up,” said TubeMogul’s David Burch.

However, it may be too early judge the effectiveness of the videos. Sure, the audience dropped to 153,333 views for the third Obama video, down from 789,868 views for the first. However, that third video was posted during Thanksgiving week, the biggest U.S. holiday, during which time many people travel to visit family. And note that the fourth video had some 370,000 views by Monday evening.

Still, marketers should heed Burch’s words. After all, President Franklin Roosevelt had a fairly captive audience with his radio firesides, since TV hadn’t been invented and everyone was too shook up about World War II to engage in much extracurricular activity. So it’s almost unrealistic to hang the same expectations on the Obama vids.

Instead, video should be seen as a way to engage people already interested in a brand, or to entice those new or on the fence. It should be part of an overall multi-channel strategy.

Would that simplify the life of an SEO expert? Of course, not—everyone will have to become wiser about using optimization and link building techniques for not just textual content pages, but also for videos, images, blog posts, press releases, and books. We now need to expand our skills and be able to optimize external pages and objects that will eventually bring us traffic and leads. We need to expand our expertise to other fields and fight for rankings with all these forms in the SERPs (search engine results pages).The competition now isn’t the first ten places of text results on the first page. Now, it might be just four or six text results, plus image, news, or video results.

Other search engines besides Google are trying universal search. Yahoo’s cool-looking Alpha Beta is a strong competitor. Live.com and Ask.com are implementing universal search as well.

The SEO implications of universal search becoming the standard will turn out to be even more complex, because of its influence on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Universal search means fewer paid clicks and more value in organic results. It might also mean no more cheap clicks for PPC newbies. Now every paid click would matter when this advertising space decreases in size, because non-regular search results will draw more attention since PPC will just be text. This will again increase the natural search competition. For example, video search results (actual videos in the SERP, which are sometimes playable) are catching the searcher’s eye much better than text results. So if your keyword is good for searching videos, there’s a good chance that video results will appear along with normal search results. In this case, try doing some video marketing, which I wrote about here and here.

When products from commercial sites appear in your search query results, you need to make sure those products are yours and not your competitors’. If there are books in the search results, try to see if you can get your link or your ad on the page of that book. Or write a book or buy the rights for one, and make sure it ranks high for your keyword in the universal search results, to make sure you get all that traffic.

Press releases and news stories are even more complicated as they are the most time-sensitive. You need to act fast and actually get mentioned in the news pertaining to your field.

As a general advice: study the search results of your keywords and if it’s a universal SERP, see what you can do to outrank each search results category: Videos, images, news, blogs, shopping, books, and local maps; and even codes, patents, and stocks if possible.

Hope this helps your SEO endeavors in the universal search era.

Shavkat Karimov
Internet Marketing Manager
mobileStorm, Inc.
Every problem comes with a solution
SEO Consulting

The one thing I want to reiterate from the previous blog is that just like there are many cameras on the market, there are also numerous lighting solutions. These solutions, depending on the amount of light you need and your choice of brand, can range from hundreds to thousands of dollars. Purchase only what is needed to accomplish your shoot professionally while staying within your budget.

In the production world, many people say that lighting is the trickiest, most complex aspect of shooting. This is definitely true if you are not prepared. Today I will go over the preparation, set-up, and equipment needed to accomplish a professional-looking web video. With that said, let there be light!

Preparation

I want to start this by saying, “No, it can not be fixed in post!” When preparing to go into shoots, don’t assume that any problems with lighting (or the camera) can be fixed with the editing software. You should always go into the shoot knowing the look and feel of what you want, then plan on the best way to accomplish it. If you must rely on the computer software to fix your problem, expect a longer time spent editing and cleaning up.

Benjamin Franklin said, “By failing to prepare you are preparing to fail.” I mean, you wouldn’t run the NYC marathon without training, or enter into a business presentation without doing the research. First and most importantly, know the environment where your shoot will take place. Is this shoot going to be outside or inside? If shooting outside, what time of day? It’s difficult to go into all scenarios, so for the sake of not writing a full essay, I will focus on setting up lighting for an indoor shoot. If you plan on shooting outside, there are many great books including Film Lighting and Lighting for Digital Video & Television. Both are great references, which were required reading for me back in graduate school and which I still use today.

(Quick tips on shooting outside: Shoot on a partially overcast day, when the much softer light makes for a nice even tone. When shooting on a bright day, try to shoot near the beginning or end of the day, rather than midday when the sun is directly overhead—that’s when images tend to be blown out and uneven.)

Shooting inside, as I said before, is much easier due to your ability to control the environment. First, make sure there is enough room. When setting up for something like a newscast, in which there will be only one or two people, you will likely need three or four lights, depending on space. So make sure there is enough room to set up the lights and give the effect you desire. There is nothing worse than a tight, closed-in room, especially with lighting equipment heating it up like an oven. (You should always turn your lights off when not being used for long periods of time.) So make sure to choose the location wisely.

Second, close all blinds and turn off all overhead lighting, especially bad fluorescent office bulbs. You want to control the light, not the earth’s rotation: The sun moves throughout the day causing shifts in light, while overhead lighting is fixed and tends to make rooms too bright and uncontrolled.

Last, make sure the shooting area will not be affected by random events which can change the light. People moving around the room can sometimes throw shadows—so no walking near the lights while shooting is going on. Air conditioning can move objects such as plants or light objects in your frame, causing uncontrolled shadows—so make sure to turn it off before you begin shooting, not only for lighting but also for sound issues. Just try to keep your shooting space controlled.

Setup

Placement of the lights depends on the mood you are trying to present. Are you doing a stylized vibrant news show, or a critique of your favorite horror movies to post on a blog?

Keeping it simple, let’s go over a static shot where there is only one or two subjects. Again, you will most likely need only three to four lights, depending on room size. One or two lights should evenly light your background, depending on the size of frame, while one or two lights should illuminate your subject.

Now, your desired mood will determine the wattage of bulbs and placement of lights. Try using 150w on your subject and 150w -300w for background. Play around to find the tone you want while giving a nice depth of field and an even light on your subject. You don’t necessarily want to use direct light on either your background or subject, so it is best to use umbrellas (available in most kits) or a reflective surface (more on that in a minute) to spread the light evenly. When you have the desired setup, make sure to either mark the floor with tape or take a picture—this will ensure continuity throughout your future shoots.

Equipment

As I mentioned before there are a lot of lighting solutions. I recommend going with a simple kit at first; most of the time this will solve most of your needs. You will most likely only need to purchase a few soft/indirect subject lights and reflectors to achieve your desired look. There are some great kits on the market for a very reasonable price.

For soft and even subject lighting, Dot Line Corps 2 Umbrella Kit or Wescotts Portable Studio Lighting Kit should do nicely. For the background, depending again on the camera framing, try Smith–Victor’s Photoflood Light Kit. All of these lighting setups will definitely work, especially in the world of online video.

As I mentioned above most light kits come with an umbrella for indirect lighting, though you can also purchase a reflector that best fits your budget. When it comes to reflectors, I say go with the good old poster board—it is cheap and disposable. But if you want something with a little more staying power and versatility both inside and outside, go with a collapsible reflector. You should also purchase a few extra light bulbs.

If you really feel lost trying to find the most cost-effective and sturdy setup, talk to a local or online store and explain your needs. RitzCamera, B&H, and Samys are all competitive online stores, and most of the time they have what you need is in their vast inventory. Another great thing about these places is that you usually can bargain between them. My advice is look into the exact setup you like, then have a little bidding war between the stores. You will be surprised how much the price can drop.

Lighting a video shoot does not have to be a tedious, stressful ordeal. Just remember to prepare, have backup bulbs, and always keep your lights off when not in use for long periods of time. The last thing you need is an unprepared shoot in a confined space where your actor is sweating like he/she is in the Sahara. That is just not good for anyone!

More to come…

Alex Gans
Senior Video Producer
mobileStorm, Inc.
Without humor, life would be a joke.

Ipsos MediaCT—which researches the media, content, telecoms and tech industries—says that early this year, online video viewership rose while viewership of other types of media fell. Among those surveyed:

My takeaway from the Ipsos report? Plenty:

No doubt about it, video marketing is rapidly growing—especially for marketers who want to reach busy and/or thrifty consumers of all ages.

Eydie Cubarrubia
Marketing Communications Manager, mobileStorm
“I’d rather you text me”

* Kidd Video was a Saturday-morning cartoon in the mid-1980s that featured a pop band getting sucked into an animated video world somewhere in the ether. Digital video was non-existent back then; ironically the premise is more relevant today.

As a result, companies trying to establish their particular format as the standard tend to dismiss the other proposed suggestions. So-called “early adopters’ are used to such shifts but by the time a particular technology reaches the mass consumer audience, normally one standard is established… hopefully.

Digital marketing channels are no different when it comes to standards, both good and bad. Some communication vehicles are more or less uniform in their standards but others offer digital marketers a sometimes bewildering array of options, causing many to go with the less common denominator approach. To help sort through the mess, here’s a quick guide on how various digital marketing communications deal with standards, from the easiest to the most contentious.

RSS

RSS or Really Simple Syndication has been around for years but has only just started to reach beyond the techies thanks to applications like Firefox and Outlook which now the incorporate the technology. RSS was born out of several failed attempts to syndicate online content and has the most stable set of standards among digital marketing channels. Yet, there is a competing version of RSS called Atom, which was created by a group of developers who felt the standard RSS format was too limiting. Fortunately most RSS readers are able to interpret both formats, making a digital marketer’s job a whole lot easier when deploying RSS campaigns.

Online Video

Just a few years ago, online video was probably the most dysfunctional of all when it came to standards with such incompatible formats as QuickTime, Audio Video Interleave (AVI), RealVideo, etc. etc. While these formats all do still exist, the explosion of such sites as YouTube have made it all a bit more tolerable by more or less standardizing on Adobe’s Flash Video. This was important because the Flash player was already practically a default install for the vast majority of online consumers.

Still, many marketers prefer to use the other, more high quality (but not as universal) format like QuickTime and Microsoft’s AVI. This usually results in sites having to list 2 or 3 different options to view the video, which can be a pain for the consumer but is still considered to be fairly nominal.

Email

As one of the older forms of digital marketing, you would probably assume that email would be one type of communication that would have a true set of standards in place… and you would be wrong. While it’s true that all email uses a standard protocol – Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) to manage transmission, when it comes to the actual successful delivery of email campaigns, the variety of methods can be maddening.

I won’t go into detail about the various forms of email authentication as I have already written about this in a previous blog entry. However, just as a quick overview, there are currently 4 main “standards” (obviously I use that term loosely here) that are being used by the ISPs.

The Sender Policy Framework (SPF) was the first attempt and is still widely supported but was quickly adapted into a more secure option backed by Microsoft called Sender ID. Not to be outdone, Yahoo! developed yet another format called Domain Keys, and Cisco created their own called Identified Mail. Mercifully, the two companies agreed to merge their respective protocols into a single format, known as DKIM. It looks like it could be years before a true standard is decided (if ever) so digital marketers should be aware that all of these formats need to be implemented in order to reach as many potential inboxes as possible.

Mobile

When it comes to text messaging, like email, mobile marketing does at the very least have a standard protocol for the transmission of such messages. The Short Message Service (SMS) has a limit of 160 characters per message and is supported by all cell phone carriers. Unfortunately, that is the only true standard. Everything else when it comes to mobile marketing is fractious at best.

As previously noted, one of the main reasons standards take so long to be established is because of the desire for companies to maintain a competitive advantage over each other. This is especially true when it comes to the cell carriers. Some of this is due to the unique nature of mobile marketing as the only form of digital messaging that has a cost to the consumer (either as part of their cell plan or individually via premium campaigns.) The Mobile Marketing Association has published a set of guidelines that should be followed, but some carriers have additional requirements.

This is especially true when it comes to premium SMS campaigns. Recently, AT&T and Verizon increased their requirements to approve such campaigns, and more carriers are expected to follow suit soon. Individual submissions must be made to each carrier, which can cause the entire process to be bogged down, so be prepared to wait awhile for certification.

Mobile content is even more contentious as each major provider in the US has their own preferred format to use – from BREW or J2ME for Web applications to a variety of mobile video options. To make matters worse, each major carrier has their own portal, called a “deck” which can only be accessed by their subscribers. Marketers therefore have no choice but to work with each carrier individually to get placement on these decks.

All told, when it comes to digital marketing, standards are few and far between. Marketers need to be constantly aware as various standards evolve and new ones are created. The consequences for not doing so can prevent their digital marketing initiatives from being as successful as planned.

Steve Chipman
COO
mobileStorm
Analog thoughts in a digital world