TwitVid = Twitter + Video

Twitter is cool, right? Celebrities, businesses, non-profits and average-joes all use Twitter to spread their message 140 characters at a time. Web video is cool too. You can use it to advertise your products, ask for money, rant about politics, and show cute kittens.

What if you could combine the two? That would be internet coolness squared! Or would it?

TwitVid combines the two social media applications nicely. TwitVid has some interesting SEO tools, time saving integration features, mobile apps, and general buzz. TwitVid makes it easy to share videos with your followers and generate discussion amongst your friends, partners, clients, and customers. It has stuck around longer than most other Twitter video services and received a lot of capital investments. TwitVid has some impressive business and celebrity users and partners.

Building a service around Twitter seems a little opportunistic: take something popular and add video to it. That’s bound to be a success. The trouble is there are many other services doing the same thing and it won’t be long until Twitter makes its own video service. Maybe that’s the founder’s plan: get bought by Twitter. It also lacks Twitter’s original communication gimmick that made it so popular: restrict messages to 140 characters.

We’ve been sharing our videos and clients videos through links on Twitter for a few years without this added application. You can post advertisements, marketing videos, video blog, and all other business video tools to Youtube, Vimeo, Facebook, etc. and link them on Twitter. SVG embraces social media and marketing trends in our work everyday, but TwitVid leaves us feeling a little underwhelmed. With so many other social media options you have to manage your outlets carefully. It may, however, be the greatest web video service of all time.

We’re going to try it ourselves for some of our projects and see what you think. Follow us on Twitter for updates on TwitVid.

The Trouble With Social Media

I could start by talking about why you need to embrace Social Media at your business, but someone else already did that here. If you already do, good for you; call us for a video sometime. If not, it’s probably because you think you don’t have the time.

Is it really that hard to do social media?

If you look at lists like this and don’t know where to start (or stop), it can be. As your company expands its social media web to more sites it can be difficult to maintain all of them. Luckily most websites offer automatic integration. With integration one Tweet or blog post or video is reposted automatically to all your accounts. One click will update five websites.

Even better, though, is to figure out which sites best suit your company rather than try to use every one. Are you a non-profit?  Perhaps Kickstarter will connect you to other fundraisers, donors, and young idealists. Want to reach the college crowd? Try Facebook. If you are an artist you could use tumblr to host your daily portfolio additions. Want to converse with celebrities and try to get them to endorse you (good luck)? Try Twitter. Is your company involved in current events, news, and the law? You could you could host relevant articles and columns with your commentary on del.icio.us. LinkedIn is practically a requirement for B2B organizations looking to find new clients and partners.

The trick to making social media easy is finding your audience on the web and setting aside a little time for conversations with them. You can do as little or as much as you’d like, but you need to do something. Soon. This is what we do everyday at SVG: help companies and organizations communicate.

It can’t be harder than this, right?

How Video Ties “Past,” “Present,” and “Future” Marketing Together

“Is the Corporate Website a Digital Dinosaur?” asks ClickZ author Lauren Price. Well? Is it?

Executives might think  company and business Facebook pages will “soon replace corporate websites as the center of the commercial world,” or that Twitter will outperform traditional websites. But whatever the latest medium, social video marketing has a proven record to reach perspective clients online with outstanding results.  The beauty of internet marketing is that you can combine all the elements in a unique, purposeful way. Draw your clients from your corporate website videos to your twitter page; link to your blog and videomercials; and stay connected to the marketing strategy of the future with Skillman Video Group.

Who Needs Social Media Marketing? Everyone.

Why has your video only received 42 views when YouTube gets 3 billion views a day? Users upload 20 hours of video onto YouTube every minute! How can you compete with that much adorable kitten footage? You might be missing the “Social” part of a well managed “Social Video” campaign.

Social Media acts like an international word-of-mouth campaign. People from everywhere can follow your company’s work through blog posts, yelp reviews, and so forth and pass word on to their friends. It’s about shares, not clicks. If you can get followers on Twitter, fans on Facebook, and linkers on LinkedIn you can get customers and partners. If you just have a website or just have a video you are missing out on some huge Social Media benefits:

1) Most importantly, a Social Media campaign it improves your company website’s SEO. Every page link, share, and repost will move your company up in search rankings, along with all the text and crosslinking your social media campaign already creates for itself. When you frequently use keywords in your Social Media updates that also raises your page rank. So when someone searches for “Massachusetts Custom Cheese Danish Fabrication” on Google or Yahoo your company will appear ahead of all others.

2) It engages your customers, partners, and prospects. Active Social Media transforms your company image from simply a website or banner ad, into a voice. It’s like when the owner of the restaurant greets you at your table, asks about your service, talks about the impending first day of school, and so on. He is forging a relationship beyond customer and company to encourage your return. Social Media creates a forum or comunity where your audience can interact with each other and with you. The audience becomes the content itself, not just consumers.

3) Visitors to your website will see that your company is active and invested in modern technology. If you don’t have a frequently updated blog or lack a Facebook landing page, they will assume your company is dated.

We believe that Social Media is key to marketing your company, not just for promoting your SVG-produced videos, but also for the reasons above. We set our clients up with a Social Media campaign that will promote their company, boost SEO, and encourages client retention. We can help shape your content, choose your SEO keywords, and find new Social Media services that cater to you and your clients. It’s so easy that there is no excuse for avoiding it especially when other companies and organizations have been using Social Media for several years.

This is why Skillman Video Group provides Social Media services to our clients. It is key to a successful marketing campaign. When combined with SVG-produced videos and web design your company gets a complete marketing package.

New Social Media, Branding, and Website Services at SVG

Is your company or organization looking for new marketing ideas? What comes after we shoot your video? SVG now offers a number of new services that might interest you. If you are reading this blog or following our tweets then you have already seen a few of our new services in action.

When was the last time you updated your website? Gitte Lindgaard of Otowa university found that web surfers judge your website within 50 milliseconds. In that time you have to show your visitors that you are active, up to date, and care about your image. If your visitors judge your website as old and unattractive they might go elsewhere. If your website still looks like it’s hosted on geocities it is definitely time for an update. Many companies update their website every two or three years just to avoid being seen as stale. SVG can build you a new website with a Content Management System that allows your to integrate your video and social media campaigns.

Do you have a social media campaign? Not only can you keep current customers up to date on new products, events, services, developments, etc. but you also show visitors that your company is active. SVG will set up your Blog, Facebook landing page, twitter feed, marketing emails, and any other social media outlet you want to investigate. SVG will collaborate with you to find the best social media outlets to reach your potential customers and open new markets.

Web design and social media play a huge role in our most important new service: SEO. SVG has an SEO guru who can leverage your blog, website, and video to boost your company’s visibility on search engines. SVG can help your customers find you on the web.

SVG works with our clients to develop your brand, website, and social media to create the first impression you want. We have the resources to give you a total marketing package — a serious advantage. You can read more about our services here. Take a look at our portfolio to see how we’ve helped other clients market themselves.

Twitter Can You Hear Me?

Twitter users have a question: Will the businesses whose brands we follow start to answer our questions? More specifically, can we trust businesses who tweet to accurately and timely to address a question about their products or services?

Currently, Twitter users are asking their followers questions, often to extremely prompt responses. An article on eMarketer.com, highlights statistics indicating that eight in 10 individual Twitter users think answers to the questions they ask a business directly are trustworthy. Most users would be more likely to follow a business that responds to their inquiries.

Social Media interaction among peers and businesses brings a new dimension to the field. It’s a progressive concept for consumers and the brands produced and services provided by companies around the world to have a direct, civil conversation. It’s a symbiotic relationship that sites like Quora, a Q&A forum and InboxQ, a business feed service, want to help sustain.

Growing and maintaining a following on Twitter or any Social Media site can be daunting for any small to medium sized business that has never explored it before.  A lot of questions can arise on how best to create and disseminate new and engaging content that will draw new customers to you.  Call Skillman Video Group today to learn more about our service Social Video Marketing.  Social Video Marketing, is a comprehensive service that offers a proven, all-in-one solution that taps into the tremendous power of SEO, blogging, social media and video to drive more visitors to your website.  Professional branding, web design, video / animation content then converts web visitors into business prospects as they gain the full and immediate experience of seeing a company’s/organization’s services or product at work.

Link to article.

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=100844

SVG Social Media Platform of the Week: “Postling”

It is clear now that social media is here to stay and represents an important way for any business small or large to connect with their customers. It seems like every so often a new social media platform pops up that everyone must be a part of in order to be successful. Facebook started it, but not long after Twitter and LinkedIn became essential as well. That is why the focus this week will be on “Postling”, a free program that functions to allow you to view and update all of your social media accounts from one website.

Since we operate multiple social media accounts here at SVG, we understand it can be very inconvenient and often times frustrating to have to sign in and out to 3 or 4 different social networking accounts every day putting up pictures and videos, tweeting, retweeting, posting blog entries, responding to any comments, and the many other never-ending duties that go along with maintaining a social presence online.

As mentioned, what “Postling” offers is the ability to see everything that your business does with social media all on one page. One of example of how it can help is that it supports websites such as yelp, so a company can receive notifications when someone writes a review about them. Overall, it should cut down on the amount of time that needs to be spent going back and forth between social media outlets all day, because while social media may be important, people still have businesses they need to run. So for those who have troubled being organized or want to be even more put together with their social networking, “Postling” is something to check out.

Let us know about any other social media management sites you may have heard of and what you think about our “Social Media of the Week” posts.  Remember that Skillman Video Group can help you craft a Social Media and Video Marketing campaign that will not only increase traffic to your site, but also increase conversion rates from web site visitors to business prospects.  Call today to learn more!

Cick the link here to see a complete list of all Social Media Management programs: http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2010/03/19/list-of-social-media-management-systems-smms/

SVG Video of the Week: Old Spice Man Demonstrates the Power of Social Video Marketing

In 2010 Old Spice unleashed a commercial featuring a shirtless actor named Isaiah Mustafa who became famously known as the old spice guy turned into a viral video sensation. In case you missed it, check out the original commercial here:

Recently a new Old Spice commercial has been released, and below is a video with a behind the scenes look at what went into creating the 30 second spot. Looking back on what Old Spice was able to accomplish with Viral video marketing, it is important to point out the great decisions they made.

First and foremost, they created the original commercial, which was funny, clever, and garnered multiple viewings once it was put on Youtube. After that, Old Spice capitalized on this success by filming short clips of the Old Spice Guy answering questions sent to him via Twitter. These weren’t questions sent by anyone however. The Old Spice Guy was creating video responses to famous people such as Ashton Kutcher and his wife Demi Moore. In the Twitter world, Ashton Kutcher has about 6 million followers, which means that when he tweets about the Old Spice Guy responding to his question, a lot of people are going to see it and then watch the video. In doing this, Old Spice used celebrity Twitter user to generate an enormous and invaluable amount of free advertising.

The is just one of the many success stories of online social video marketing and just another reason why it is important to have an online video presence.  What’s great about Social Media is that it completely blows open the box of traditional TV or radio advertising.  The sky is the limit as far as what can be possible in marketing business of all sizes.

Small Businesses and Social Media

On February 22, the Boston Globe’s Metro section featured an article about the impact social media is having with small businesses. The focus was how although some small business owners have not always been very tech-savvy in the past, they can no longer ignore the benefits provided by social media sites such as twitter, facebook, and even foursquare, which allows customers to “check in” wherever they are and send their location out to friends who also use the website. In turn they receive points and promotions for checking in.

The article highlights one company called “Mike’s Automotive Service”, located in Somerville, MA that has always prided itself for being on top of technological trends. They talk about using social media, saying,  “Twitter, Facebook, Groupon—the whole thing has gotten a lot more sophisticated. It’s kind of forcing my hand to get involved.” The point here is that in the next couple of years, small business will have to learn how to use social media to their advantage in order to stay ahead of their competitors. As the owner of Mike’s automotive put it, it will “force their hand”.

It’s also important to note that as these small businesses use social media to drive customers to their website, just getting them there will not be enough. Once more and more businesses discover the power of social media, the playing field will level out and their will need to be other ways to differentiate one company for another. This is where video pays a very important role in site visitor conversion into actual business prospects.  That is why at Skillman Video Group we believe that our service Social Video Marketing will go hand in hand with the rise of social media in the small business community.

Read the entire Boston Globe article here: http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2011/02/22/small_businesses_learn_to_tweet_post_and_blog/

A Comparison of Video Search Engines

As a continuation of my previous blog post on video search engines, I thought it would be fascinating to test out a couple video search sites to see how their results differ. As I wrote in the aforementioned post, video search engines can be classified as either independent or proprietary, depending on whether or not they are biased toward their own hosted content. Here, I set out to find just how different the results are between various video search engines by making a comparison between Google Video Search, Blinkx, and Truveo.

In order to obtain meaningful results, I wanted to test a keyword that was related to business marketing, as well as geographically specific. I decided on Boston house painters. A Google video search for this term produces 679 results. Around half of the first-page results are from YouTube, while the other half are from a variety of different sources. Relevance to the search term seems to drop sharply after the sixth page of results. Searching for Boston house painters on Blinkx (an independent video search engine) produces many more results: around 29,000. However, only the first three pages of results seem particularly relevant to the search terms. Another independent video search site, Truveo, produces disappointing results. Truveo does not tell users the number of matches for a particular query, but I did notice the majority of the results after the first five were not relevant to Boston house painters.

In terms of ease of navigation and usability, Google wins hands-down. By having the cleanest interface, as well as a plethora of options to sort and filter search results, Google video search is the most pleasant to use of the three I tested. The Google results can be sorted by video length, date uploaded, relevance, video quality, or source. Meanwhile, Blinkx’s interface is a bit cluttered, and I did not appreciate the fact that the top result begins playing automatically, causing longer load times. Truveo looks clean and well organized, but there are few options for sorting or filtering results.

In summary, the three search engines found very similar results, but placed them in a different order. There was no significant difference between the number of videos from a particular source (i.e. Google did not list a disproportionate number of videos from YouTube). This experiment demonstrates the complexities of video search. With each search engine being differentiated, it is growing increasingly complicated to place your site to the top of the results for each of these sites. Although Google is currently the undisputed “king of search,” it could be dethroned at any time by a start-up with a few innovative ideas! Your business needs to be prepared for this possibility. Let Skillman Video Group take care of your video optimization needs, and keep your business ahead of the curve!

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