Ever met an attorney that isn’t “prepared to fight hard on your behalf?”
Neither have I.
This week we turn our eye towards the attorney video. You don’t have to have been injured in an accident to learn some great lessons in engagement, calls to action and general bombasticity (not a word, I know). Last week we talked about how advertisements are a one-way transmission in a two-way world.
This week, ask yourself, which one of these attorneys promotes dialogue, engagement and still gets the tough results that you deserve!
In the video below, Tim Sulak answers one of the most commonly asked personal injury questions. This clip is one of a series of FAQ videos designed to help potential clients make informed choices before they set foot in the attorney’s office. Calm, cool, and collected, this attorney helps prospects understand their rights.
In order to gain your attention, this firm has provided a dramatization of their journey into the courtroom. They’ve got muscle, talent, results and a catchy “No Fee, Guaranty.” Does this inspire confidence? Does it help you with your problem? How’s the call to action?
As this video shows, you don’t have to be on the island in LOST to have parallel narratives collide in personal tragedy. If you were watching this video online or on someone’s website, would you sit through the set up? Consider getting to your point so your customer can get value quickly.
Apparently, we have two Texas Hammers in my hometown of Houston, Texas – Tom Delay and Jim Adler. I’ve been watching Jim Adler commercials for years. Repetition works. I repeat. Repetition works. Jim Adler is the hammer and you’re the nail, dear reader.
Here’s an old trick in the independent film world. Spend the majority of your budget on an actor that’s past his/her prime but still has a lot of recognition just so you can get their picture on the cover of the DVD box. That way, when your audience is wandering through the video store, they’ll see a face they recognize and (hopefully) rent the movie.
Here’s an example of the same thing applied to attorneys. William Shatner shares his Ethos with Goodman Acker.
When I was a kid, we had a fig tree on our farm in Schulenburg, Texas.
Every hot, searing July, when the figs were ripe, I’d transform into a monkey and raid that poor tree for every one of its delicious gems. I loved it. The tree wasn’t tall. Neither was I, so the rewards of my adventure were easy.
What does this have to do with Video SEO?
It’s low-hanging fruit.
People usually consider loading up their video to YouTube as the final stage of their production process. It’s this gap in their cycle where you can reap the easy rewards of video distribution. By researching your competition’s videos in YouTube and applying a few simple SEO techniques you can gain a serious rank advantage in both Google and YouTube search results.
At this point it may sound like a platitude, but understanding what your audience wants to learn about is the first step of any content creation process. If it’s good for people it’s good for the search engines and thus good for your rankings. One place to start is with commonly asked questions.
If you’ve been in your industry for a while, then you’ve probably developed a gut sense of the top 10 questions that your prospective clients always ask. Believe it or not, they’re asking those questions online as well. Nobody sits down in front of Google unless they have a question or a problem to be solved. Take a look at companies like DemandStudios or 5min and you’ll see that the majority of the videos focus on “How” to do something.
Remember that YOU are not your customer. What you may find valuable could be completely irrelevant to your constituents. One way to get over this hump is to create a buyer persona. Personas are a written representation of your customer that you’ve created from conversations or interviews with them.
At their base level, personas encapsulate your customer’s demographics, thoughts, fears, questions into one document so that you know always know who you are talking to. For more information on personas, read “Creating Personas 101″ from GrokDotCom.
There are two types of research that you need to do here – keyword and competitive.
Keyword Research
Remember what we said above, “You are not your customer.” Don’t assume that you know what your customers are looking for. They could be looking for “roofers in Austin,” “How to know when you need a new roof,” “How to fix roof hail damage,” or “3 dimensional shingles versus metal.” The possibilities are infinite.
Brainstorm all the different phrases your customer would use when speaking about your product. Get very specific. People don’t think in generalities, they think about specific problems. In the roof example, we’re talking about types of shingles, metal roofs, materials, selecting a roofer, leaks, how long it takes, etc. Consider doing some competitive research to see what other people in your field are talking about for ideas as well.
Once you’ve got a list going, use a keyword tool to identify more options. A free tool that should be in everyone’s toolkit is the Google Adwords Keyword Selection Tool. Even though it is designed for Adwords, it will give you new ideas as well as tell you how may searches are being conducted per month, and how competitive the phrase is.
The columns in the image above are the results for the phrase “Austin roofer.” The columns tell you:
1) Keyword: New keywords you haven’t thought of. These may or may not be relevant to your customers. You can probably ignore “Austin restaurant guide.”
2) Competition: This column shows the number of advertisers bidding on a keyword relative to all the keywords across Google. Again, this is for paid search, but you can easily see that “Austin roofer” is very popular.
3) Local Monthly Searches: It gives you an approximate number of times people searched for in the last month, within your specific country.
Pull this list into a spreadsheet so that you can organize and rank them according to relevance, number of searches and difficulty. SEO Chat provides a free keyword difficulty tool. 
Don’t be confused here. 50% means that the phrase is pretty competitive. That doesn’t mean, of course, that anyone has made a video (or optimized it properly) yet.
Once you’ve identified your big list, select 10-20 phrases for which you want to be found. Choose a mix of general and specific phrases. The more granular you get, the more likely you are to rank highly and bring in more qualified traffic.
Competitive Video Research
YouTube gives you a variety of options for doing video competitive research. Let’s take a look at them.
In the image above, you have four fields and the option to refine your search by location:
All of these words: Tells YouTube to find any video with the words “Austin,” and “roofer” in the title or description. It will also find variations of a word, like “roof.”
This exact phrase: Finds any videos have the exact phrase “austin roofer” in the title or description.
One or more of these words: When you choose this option, you’ll get videos that have the words “Austin” or “roofer.” You’ll see some really irrelevant results with this option.
Refine your search by location: This choice displays videos that were loaded up in your neck of the woods. Type in Austin, Texas to see what your local competition has created. Remember that a clip could have come from anywhere. For example, if your competitor chose a national video provider like Yellow Pages, the file could have come from some place like Nevada.
When you get your results, you’ll see a screen like this:
Let’s take a look at what the competition is doing so that you know what you can improve upon.
Title: Move your keyword phrase to the front of your title. Google spiders like important keyword phrases to be towards the beginning of titles. You can see that the second and third results have done that.
Description: Place your keyword towards the front of the description and include a hyperlink to your site. Adding a hyperlink may not help with link juice directly, but if your customers like what you have to offer, they need to contact you right?
Also insure that your exact phrase is in the description. Note that none of these companies have done that. Don’t be too spammy, but be sure to include the phrase you want to rank for.
Timeframe, Number of Views and Ratings: Here you can see how popular the video is and how active your competition is. YouTube uses a variety of instruments to determine the rank of a video – title, tags, description, number of views and ratings. In order to get the last two, you need to go back to step one and create something your viewers want to watch.
Ask yourself if your customers would “Like,” comment on or share an advertisement like we see in the first result. If you’re going to make a video, why not make it engaging and helpful? Ads are a one-way transmission in a two-way world.
There are some opportunities for improvement here.
Hyperlink: Note that the hotlink is buried at the bottom of the description. Let’s move that up toward the front. Remember how you first saw the video? It was in a results page that only had a few lines of description text. You only have a few seconds to grab your customer’s attention, don’t waste your energy by hiding your light under the bushel of the description.
Category: I have no evidence that getting your category right will help with ranking. I do know, however, that if your customer is looking for roofing in Austin, they’re not looking for a night on the town.
Tags: In the tag field, make sure that you have your keyword phrases by entering “Austin roofer” into the tag field. It will give you some extra terms that your competitors aren’t using.
Filename: Before you load up your video, rename your file to something like “austin-roofer-how-to-select-a-roofer.mov” or something topical. See the pattern? Make sure that your most important keywords are in the filename and towards the front.
Not long ago, YouTube automatically started adding captions to videos. There is some recent evidence that Google is indexing this information. Most people aren’t looking at their own CC (closed-captions). Use it to your advantage.
The easiest way to spruce up your captions is to follow these steps.
1) Log in to YouTube. Go to My Videos.
2) Scroll to your recently uploaded video.
3) Click Captions
4) Download the file “English: Machine transcription.” It will be in .SBV.
5) Open your file in a text editor.
6) Clean up the ums, ahs and make sure your keywords are in the copy.
7) Save the file as .txt with your keywords in the filename.
8 ) Go back to YouTube and click “Add new Captions or Transcript”
9) Select your file to upload.
10) Click the “Transcript” radio button
11) Click Upload
12) Select the new track and de-select the old track
Video sitemaps are another way that you can get your video searched and indexed by Google. The video sitemap allows you to publish and syndicate online video content and its relevant metadata to Google in order to make it searchable in the Google Video index.
The big plus of course is it get your video listed so that you can increase your search rankings for your keywords.
The video sitemap will require a location for your content or a location for the player. Barring having the content or player on your own site, YouTube always works in a pinch, and, well, with a hundred million unique viewers, it’s still pretty much the market leader.
How To Create The Video Sitemap
a) The first bit tells Google that this is a a video sitemap and gives the location of the file.
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:video="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1">
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/videos/some_video_landing_page.html</loc>
b) Next, you’ll tell Google where the content and the player are located.
<video:video>
<video:content_loc>http://www.site.com/video123.flv</video:content_loc>
<video:player_loc allow_embed="yes">http://www.site.com/videoplayer.swf?video=123</video:player_loc>
c) For good ol’ Video SEO you’ll tell Google what the title, description, and tags are.
<video:title>Grilling steaks for summer</video:title>
<video:description>Get perfectly done steaks every time</video:description>
<video:tag>meat</video:tag>
d) Finally, you’ll tell Google that you’re closing the file
</video:video>
</url>
</urlset>
e) Save the file as .xml
Submit Your Video Sitemap
After you’ve created the file, load it up into your root directory and then log in to Google Webmaster tools. Once you’re there, submit the file as you would normally submit a sitemap.
After this point, it’s all downhill. Grab your embed code from Google and place it on your page or blog post.
Search engine spiders don’t actually crawl video files. Rather, they look at the text that surrounds the embedded clip. Add copy to your website that describes the content in your video.
Once you’re done use a tool like Onlywire to submit your page to all of the major social bookmarking sites. OnlyWire gives you a one stop shop for submission to multiple sites.
Though it may seem complicated at first, researching your competition and keywords can be a quick way to gain an edge on your competition. Most people consider it an afterthought, but with a few tweaks you’ll be able to make pie while your competition is still chewing on the pits.
What have you tried that’s worked for you?
Grills, hot dogs, sales – it’s Memorial Day Weekend. Take a break. You deserve it. But take a moment between bites and ball games to think about the people who died in the service of our country.
They deserve it too.
After that, when you get back to work, weave these lessons from across the web into your projects.
Have a great weekend.
Readers return to blogs because they are able to deeply explore a particular topic. Your job, dear publisher, is to provide your constituents with content that they can search, use, share and augment.
In this post Valeria Maltoni provides a structure for a platform of content development that dives deep into individual topics – something to which both you and your community can contribute.
Don’t let the B2B in the subject line fool you.
No matter your industry, the tips in this post on SEO success are something that everyone can use. I’ll summarize here, but you should read the entire post for more detail.
Video is like any other content that you produce and optimize for the web. It has its own quirks, but at the same time it requires that you follow many of the same basic procedures that you do for every thing else. In this post from ReelSEO, they cover the blocking and tackling of keyword research that you can apply to video as well as other digital mediums. I’d suggest you take a look at the SEOMoz series on keyword research that goes into a little more detail, as well.
Did I mention that we produced a guide to help you gather your tools for your first video production? It’s pretty darn good. Get your copy of “17 Essential Tools You Need To Produce Your Own Videos” here.
Dovetailing nicely with Valeria Maltoni’s post above is this post on social media production from Junta42. A small sampling of the most salient points (oh, there are more):
This is a beautifully illustrated explanation of how search engines evaluate links from SEOMoz.
Image credit: The US Army
This week, I thought that I would show you a few samples of what companies are doing with their videos. From services to products, businesses are finding clever ways to integrate video into their content. How could you use one of these examples in your business?
A while ago, David Meerman Scott coined the term ‘brand journalism.’ According to his site, “Brand journalism is the creation of videos, blog posts, photos, charts, graphs, essays, ebooks, and other information that deliver value to your marketplace. “
Here is an example of what Boeing is doing to explain how things work behind the scenes.
Note the narration and content below the video to give every visitor (and spiders) something to nosh on.
When I’m Emperor, every wall in the world will be covered in this stuff. Ideapaint produces a paint that turns any wall into a dry erase board. In the clip below, they integrate their product with a simple whiteboard demonstration video. Peruse their blog and you’ll discover some other innovative approaches to stirring video into your content mix.
Last year, Samsung released a challenge to their audience, “Figure out how we shot this video.” What followed was a viral hit that actually became the catalyst for the term social video marketing.
WARNING: If you’re squeamish about seeing ham hocks and slabs of beef being cut in two, don’t watch this clip.
Two handed machetes aside, if you have a group of rabid fans that love the quality of your work, there’s no better way to nurture them than to do a ‘live’ demonstration. The folks at Cold Steel know their audience and give them what they want. Repeatedly.
Miller Welds is a poster child for content marketing. A quick glance under their resources tab reveals a video library that explains everything from how to TIG weld to how to uncrate your new welder.
In this clip, a Patrick Ossowski, at Hendrick Motorsports (the folks who make cars for Dale Earnhardt), explains how easy it is to use this welder on the track. Note that he doesn’t work for Miller Welds or the company who makes the welder.
We talk to a lot of small business owners, entrepreneurs and marketing
professionals who want to shoot video for the web.
They’re non-technical, creative and don’t have much of a budget. But they know that video can broaden their audience, increase traffic to their site and improve conversion rates.
And the first question is always, “How do I get started?”
Well, here’s how. We’ve put together this toolkit of bare essentials that you’ll need in order to begin producing your own videos.
You’ll learn about tools, prices and where to get to get the necessary equipment that will have you distributing videos quickly and easily.
Here are a few of the things you’ll learn in the guide:
We’ve also added a shopping list at the end of the toolkit to make purchasing your new equipment easier on you.
If you want to make great videos, you have to watch great videos. Here are this week’s offers for your consideration.
This clip always makes me tear up. It was started by the mysterious MadV, a YouTube magician who inspired the web to play along.
What can you do with a Sharpie, your hand, a camera and your community?
Speaking of Sharpies…
You probably saw this little viral sensation last week. Got talent around the office? Show it off (but maybe hold off on the Jason Bieber haircut).
Why not allow your CEO to set a few things on fire in the backyard?
Take a look at the shows and commercials that surround you. What are you taking for granted? In this clip, Alec Brownstein pokes fun at “To Catch a Predator” and places the alleged perp in a pair of Nikes.
Web video production and distribution is a multi-functional process that spans all aspects of the new media game. Here are this week’s most interesting posts about getting your videos produced and found.
Robin Good is one of the best sources for new media tools and tactics. He’s also a great curator of content. This article by Ross Dawson is an excellent example of a thoughtful and useful post on content distribution.
Here’s the summary from Robin:
Which are the top content distribution strategies for an online publisher? In this in-depth report authored by new media and future treneds analyst Ross Dawson, you can find a thorough analysis of the present online content distribution paradigm as well as a set of useful guidelines and examples to make greater sense of content distribution. If you are interested in content distribution standards, aggregation, syndication and versioning trends, this is a must-read document.
Chris Ming Ryan always produces great stuff. In this addition to his canon, he gives you the simple, zen-like basics for your next video production.
Did you know that YouTube released a free PDF entitled “YouTube: Best Practices for the B2B Marketer“? It’s a concise document that covers the basics of content distribution-
Karen J. Bannan, at B@B Online, provided the link and a great article to go along with it as well. Tips include
If you haven’t figured out that YouTube is a great way to build awareness of your brand, then maybe this post from ReelSEO by Morgan Brown will point you in the right direction.
Key points:
First, you start with a customer who has a problem.
Then, you solve it.
If you want people to find out about what you do, you build content based on their search terms. Here’s a juicy list of Keyword Tools from Search Engine Journal to help you identify what you need to be talking about.
Image credit: hiddedevries
Looking for inspiration in your next video production? Try these on for size.
Short, funny, engaging, authentic (and a little adult), these clips really say a lot in about 1:30.
Borrowed liberally from a popular beer commercial, this parody incorporates employees from the Bazaarvoice team.
From the site: “The video series that offers a refreshing look at an age-old craft. Marc delivers solid woodworking advice with a sense of humor. The show is funny, unapologetic, and smart. ”
Shooting most of his videos on an HV30, Matthew Brown produces beautiful and atmospheric pieces.
AUTUMN from Matthew Brown on Vimeo.
A tongue in cheek interview done with Philip Bloom (he’s actually the guy with the microphone). Need some spice in your interviews? Notice the cuts to black and white.
Philip Bloom @ Vimeo HQ from Sam Morrill on Vimeo.
Rob Leavitt has been writing about the lure of cheap content for the last couple weeks.
His latest post reminds me of an old plaque that often hangs in tattoo shops, “Good Tattoos Aren’t Cheap. Cheap Tattoos Aren’t Good.”
B2B marketers can learn a lot from this old saw. My partner in crime often says, “Tattoos can be removed, but Twitter is forever.” Bad tattoos will eventually embarrass you. Great tattoos spark years of post dinner party conversion. Same goes for content.
But what makes an outsourced content developer worth your while?
Any product or service with a great value proposition succeeds because it’s ’simply better.’ And being better means that your service is supported by at least three pillars:
1) The product consistently performs as it should.
2) The product is easy to buy and operate.
3) The product is backed by great customer service.
Ask yourself, “Does my cheap content provider match up?”
Content should attract links
And where do links come from? People. Even if you’re optimizing your content for the search engine spiders, the days of gaming the system are quickly setting. Sure you can add links to your industry directories, but if your content isn’t catching the eye of real, live people with authoritative domains your search ranking will steadily fall behind other companies who are.
Cheap content doesn’t earn the votes of thinking, discerning beings. If a cheap blog post isn’t getting links, reconsider your choice.
Content should attract and retain visitors
Links help customers find you. Links get people to your site. What keeps folks coming back for more is remarkable, ‘purple cow’ content. Designing purple content requires a deep understanding of what’s important to your customer and why they find it valuable.
At a minimum you’re solving an immediate problem with a simple How-to guide. But customers, especially B2B customers, have complex systems, value chains and organizational decision trees that require your attention.
This kind of insight comes from your own halls or from a developer who has spent time creating in your space. Take a look at your analytics. What keeps them coming back for seconds? Can your firm do that repeatedly?
Content should convert customers
We’re playing this online marketing game to solve a problem and make money, right?
That means converting customers – either enticing them into a nurturing cycle or convincing them to open their wallets.
Managing conversion requires an understanding of personas as well as how people buy online. If your content provider isn’t thinking about the flow of persuasive copy and is only churning out keyword dense blog posts, consider looking at someone who can help you with a broader strategy.
In the context of content, I’d say that ‘buy and operate’ can be translated to ‘consume.’ Every human being learns differently. That means that we need to create multiple forms of media – from copy, to video, to audio, to charticles that transform data into something your audience can understand and use quickly. Using only one medium is a missed opportunity.
Going to a $5 a post firm isn’t going to get you the variety of content you need to capture the minds of your customer. Multiple forms of specialized content takes time, thought, and dialogue to create.
Considering that you need more than just a lot of blog posts to keep customers happy, is it worth it to work with a firm that only requires a credit card number to get 12 articles?
You’ll still have to invest time creating something remarkable.
From awareness to satisfaction and reviews, customer service should pervade the entire sales cycle. If you’re not satisfied with the work, what happens? A fire and forget mentality from your provider means you’ll be hunting out another vendor in no time. And if the instant chat on your vendor’s site makes you feel super special, how does their content make your customers feel.
On our own sites we can all learn a little something from Zappos. Their story is legend. And in B2B we often miss opportunities to translate their lessons into our processes -
- How does your content allow your customers to “try it on”
- Do your operations back up your promises made in every whitepaper or video?
- Is the voice on your blog the voice of the real people behind the screen?
- How does your content surprise and delight?
As we adopt inbound marketing strategies, we’re repurposing and optimizing our content. It will be crawled, indexed and cached. Is your provider going to help you make sure you don’t wind up on the marketing equivalent of http://ugliesttattoos.com/?
Image credit: Inked by Design
Our friends at campus2careers.com recently announced the employer launch of their new job matching community.
What is campus2careers, you ask?
Here’s a snippet from their website:
campus2careers is the first online career community that matches students and recent grads with small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) for internships, entry level jobs and more. More than a job board, campus2careers uses preference and skills-based matching, enhanced filters, and rich digital profiles so companies can source, screen and select talent without leaving their office. campus2careers moves on-campus recruiting online.
If you’re a small business owner in Central Texas and you’re looking for talented students, do yourself a favor and sign up for the community.
Oh, check out the video we did for the website:
Our friends at Phurnace Software asked us to help them create a show that highlights their ability to automate java application deployments. Phurnace builds software to help companies automate the deployment of J2EE applications and configuration of WebSphere, WebLogic, JBoss or WebSphere Portal.
Shot on a Canon HV30 and performed by Larry Warnock and Jessica Gass [...]
Our friends at Phurnace Software, who make Java application deployment software, are gearing up to announce a new “rollback” feature in their Portal Deliver product at the next Websphere Portal Excellence Conference.
They asked us to put together a quick promo piece to invite people to their booth.
We are gearing up for a great [...]
We put together a book trailer for the book “Smoke Screen” by Sandra Brown.
Ms. Brown isn’t a customer of ours, but we felt like playing around a little with graphic animation, and intrigue. You can find out more about the book and the author over at Barnes and Noble.
The Pink Slip Festival in Austin, Texas provided free live music, family fun, cheap beer and hotdogs for Austin’s unemployed families. Dan Dillard of Amplify Financial created the Pink Slip Festival as an Austin styled response at to the down economy. The Pink Slip Festival was held at the Spider House coffee shop and featured [...]
It’s no big secret that @bigmanweston and I like to eat.
My wife is a killer cook and Weston’s culinary paramour, @girlblake, can make a mean Sunny Side Up-Cake.
So when she decided to take her cupcakes on the road to the Cupcake Smackdown 1.0, we thought we’d tag along with a camera.
There were many entries. [...]
This is a promo piece that we shot for our friends at Amplify Federal Credit Union.
The 30 second commercial aired in Austin captures Rob Harbison’s testimonial about Amplify’s new “Free All ATMs” campaign. That’s right. All your ATM transactions are free with Amplify.
Go Amplify!