Advice on Video Search Engine Optimisation

The aim of video SEO is simply to make it as easy as possible for both YouTube and Google to understand all video content. And why wouldn’t you? With Google being the largest search engine and YouTube being the second, it is more and more important that companies now factor online video optimisation into their marketing efforts.

Since Google can’t fully understand what your video is about without help (not yet, anyhow) optimising your clip currently means providing as much textual information about it. This is so that search engines can properly index it and then show it in their relevant search results.
My advice here is therefore:
Creating an optimized title is perhaps the most obvious thing to do, yet is probably one of the most overlooked. The clip title should be several words long (we tend to keep to the same 55 – 60 character range we recommend for web page title optimisation) and include the major keyword(s) you want to your video to rank for. Note: There are differing opinions on whether the keywords at the beginning of the title give more of a boost than those added subsequently… but I have found no definitive proof of this.

Description
Insert as much text as you realistically can into the description field of your clip. Add words about the video content, the people or characters, the situation or product it shows, and the usage or benefits being explained. In short… consider this a blog post and use several hundred words if possible. Obviously, any content placed in the description needs to include your targeted keywords from your SEO strategy, plus don’t be afraid to sometimes repeat keywords or derivative terms here
If your clip contains people speaking (e.g. a voice-over or some dialogue) strongly consider obtaining a transcript of the text and inserting this in the description too.
Don’t forget the transcript can also be:

1. Used to correct or improve the closed captions, which you must consider - Sure, YouTube can auto-transcribe your audio content, but not any visual content than you may also want to describe
2. Added as additional content into any web page that embeds this video clip (potentially providing some on-page SEO help too)

Video Tags
There is growing consensus in the SEO community that tags for YouTube clips have minimal optimisation benefits (but they do help with cross-linking between clips with the same tags). So still use them to describe your content in the same way you would a social media or blog post. However, remember to use those tags which highlight the uniqueness of your video (and therefore avoid very generic and therefore very competitive terms).

  

Title information

Remember to provide bespoke information about each different clip uploaded.  Don't upload the same clips with different info title & descriptions.

(Although I have no personal proof that this is "black hat" SEO activity... it does go against the very premise of what Google is trying to do. Plus, if it was suddenly treated as such... it could have a lasting negative effect.)

Comments

Encourage comments, ask for them and respond back when you do get them.

Social Media in action – CalMac Culture

As some readers will know, one of our clients at Ideal Interface is Caledonian MacBrayne, the ferry company known as CalMac. Based on the west coast of Scotland, they are the UK’s biggest ferry operator by size of fleet and cover 60,000 square miles of land and (mainly) water.

One of the initiatives that I’ve been involved with has been CalMac Culture #calmacculture – an online competition to find original singer / songwriters, leading to a slot in several of Scotland’s key festivals (e.g. Tyree Music Festival, etc.)
If you happen to be online tonight, you can see the ‘Battle of the Bands’ being streamed live from King Tut's Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow:

Take a look:
https://www.youtube.com/user/calmacculture

Social Media Training - do you really need it?

It's almost shocking to see the number of "introduction to Social Media" courses still being touted about. A quick search on Google highlights just how seriously the suppliers of Social Media Training are right now:

And a quick look at the term "Social Media Training" in Google Trends shows that the term is predicted to grow in the number of searches over the next year, albeit less so than when it first appeared on Google's radar back at the beginning of 2009.

So given all this supply and searching for the term, just who are the intended recipients?
I'm sure I can't be the only person who must assume that anyone who wants to understand the fundamentals of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube must have got to grips with the basics of each by now?

Becoming a top UK blogger

Blogging is its own reward. I blog here because I want to and for no other reason.

However, I was nicely surprised to be included in a list of one of the top UK online marketing bloggers; recognised not just for blogging but for my overall social sharing about online marketing.
http://www.toprankblog.com/2013/01/online-marketing-bloggers-uk/

This list was produced by Lee Odden from TopRank for his presentation to Search Engine Strategies in February and after its publication I was contacted by Lee for my perspective on the following questions:

Q: Please share one tip for others that are trying to stand out in the online marketing space. How do you become one of the most influential people about online marketing or whatever thing you want to be "known" for?
A: The best way to stand out from the crowd is to have a well thought-out perspective on a topic. It is not enough to merely copy what others say or even to aggregate lots of other sources. It’s your voice, use it. In my blog I try to go into some detail on specific subjects, which means I not only have to understand it, I have to be able to know it enough to explain it clearly to others.
(This actually helps me develop a rounded knowledge rather than just facts)

Q: Content is the vehicle for connecting with fans, friends and customers. Share an example of really creative digital content that you've seen from a UK company. It can be something you've worked on for a brand, or just something you've seen in your experience as a digital citizen.

A: For me, although 2012 was dominated by everything quintessentially British… The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in the rain and the Olympics where nearly every person in the UK was stunned at how well we did…. for content marketing it wasn’t a British thing that I was most impressed with. It was the Red Bull Stratos mission where Felix Baumgartner’s jump from space saturated digital channels such as YouTube (where it was shown across the world) and obviously across Social Networks. Red Bull has now completely turned itself from a drink (via being a lifestyle product) into a brand that creates its own events and consequently generates a whole raft of content behind it.

Getting recognised for being a top UK online marketing blogger is a huge accolade and one I'm incredibly grateful for, thanks.

My favourite error page

OK, not the most inspiring of blog titles, but bear with me....


I was about to watch some stuff on Youtube earlier today, to catch-up on some videos posted by far-off friends, when I got the message below. Now an Error 500 on a website is usually a sign that something is wrong... its the online equivalent of a car breakdown. Its not like its stablemate, the 404 (page not found) error... which is the web equivalent of a dead-end sign, an indication to metaphorically turn around and retrace your route using the back button. Oh no... the 500 error says to the user "something so important has gone wrong, that even we don't know how to fix it".

So its actually quite welcome to see a company at least communicate that its aware of the issue and (albeit jokingly) planning on doing something about it.

Well done Youtube for dispatching a team of highly trained monkeys to deal with my problem. I'll be back soon.

Measuring Social Media activity across your business

If you work for a larger company with multiple divisions (and marketing initiatives) then there is a good chance that you have more than one piece of social media activity going on at once.

There's also a pretty good chance that these different initiatives are not connected and may even be duplicating effort (or worse, working against each other).

So what do you do?

1. Audit all activity
Firstly, do an audit of all activity involving social media across your company.  Create a list of everything from those business Twitter accounts in the USA office, through to those Facebook Pages created by the German Marketing team.

2. Measure reach, impact and engagement
How? Well, for reach, its a numbers game. With services such as Twitter its easy to see the number of followers an account has and its just as easy to record the number of Facebook 'likes'. Counting up the number of people who have 'like'd each clip* or are following your channels on YouTube is obvious. Also most blogging platform now either provide statistics for the number of visitors to your blogs or allow you to integrate Google Analytics or other stats package into each page.
*YouTube also allows users to give each clip a 'thumbs down' plus has basic stats built into it now

However measuring impact and engagement is a different matter and I would therefore suggest you look at these methods as a starter:

• Twitter: 
• Look at the number of re-tweets each account gets, this will give you some idea of how valuable the followers regard the postings.
• Measure clicks on hyperlinks. You can do this either by looking at your referrer information in your site analytics package (assuming the links point back to your own site), or if you use a service like Bit.ly which integrates with Twitter, this will show you the clicks on each Tweet.
  Hayden's tip: Use Google link search to see how many people hyperlink to your Twitter account e.g. http://goo.gl/6hkt
• 
  
   Facebook
• 
  
  Look for the amount of comments and 'likes' on postings. Obviously the more followers you have, the greater the likelihood of having comments and 'likes'...
  Hayden's tip: To get a real measure, work out your average number of responses per posting and divide this by your total number of followers.. and then measure this over time.
• YouTube, Flickr, etc.
• Both these sites allow commenting on each respective file uploaded and YouTube even allows video responses to be posted. Reviewing this feedback over time will give you some idea of the content that people find interesting (in a positive or negative way - so remember to )
  Hayden's tip:
• Blogs
• Comments are the obvious way of measuring engagement with your blog content and because they are easily spider-able by search engines and social tools, you can use a variety of methods to understand the quality of the people contributing to them (e.g. http://socialmention.com/)
  You can also use your analytics package to measure more factors about engagement such as the amount of time spent on each page (paid for analytics applications may even have a specific way of working this out, such as this method from WebTrends)
  Hayden's tip: Again use Google to measure the number of inbound links to each blog: e.g. http://goo.gl/tjTn

There's obviously lots of other social networks to assess and the ones you audit and measure will depend upon the countries your business is active in. But without first taking stock of your entire social media presence, there's no way you decide which efforts are working and which are not.

The digital PR toolkit

In recent posts I've provided my thoughts on the convergence of digital PR, Marketing and Conversion.
Post 1: Discussing how the roles now blur
Post 2: Covering how SEO is no longer just for marketing
Post 3: Showing the AIDA customer acquisition process
Now I've gone into a fair amount of detail about the process of customer acquisition that they all contribute to and the overlapping roles they play in this process. But now I'm going to cover the respective digital tools and methods that each role can use, based on the model that I created in my previous posts.

The first one up is digital PR and to illustrate this I've provided the diagram below with the simple key:
The things you can do on your target site are within the circle and the tools used off-site are logically outside it.
(Note: I've also tried to group these tools near to similar or relevant ones both on-site & off)

The respective digital PR tools that I believe you can use are:

On-site:

• Keyword targeted content
  Are you producing content that whilst being readable also focused on specific keywords typed into search engines?
• Blog/Editorial
  Have you considered that writing a blog - with whatever name you give it - will also creates great content that user like to read - as well as for search engines - and that could deep link to interesting useful content around your site?
• Analytics
  If you don't know what works (gets more traffic, converts more users, etc.) then how are you going to do more of it?
• Press & News Content
  If you're not using this on your own site to highlight your own successes, then you should. If you don;t want to set up your own content managed press area on your site, then either create one using a blogging platform or even just take a relevant feed from your PR company's site.
• Community
  Providing forums or even just a place for users to comment on articles and blogs gives a sense of community to visitors. Rewarding frequent ones goes a step further. These user generated comments are not just great content to read and spider, they are great PR fodder.

Off-site:

• Link building
  Encouraging sites to link to yours in their news items and articles (although try to avoid reciprocal links)
• Social News & Social Bookmarking
  Posting your Press Releases to Digg, Delicious, etc. is a way of getting your story to a wider audience
• Email
  Both one-to-one and more general email marketing techniques can be used to announce news to those who want this form of communication.
• SEO
  This speaks for itself and I've covered this already in a number of topics. But if your PR company doesn't already understand and use SEO techniques......
• Feeds & syndication
  An RSS feed empowers those who want to pull this information and consume it (or re-publish it) in their own way, rather than via email or traditional means.
• Social Media Press Release
  Consider posting your Press Releases online, with other useful information such as: RSS feeds, links to previous relevant releases, imagery, audio & video, etc.
• Blogger engagement
  Look for them, understand them, communicate in a relevant manner and build up engagement with them.
• Twitter
  Make sure you are promoting your releases via this important medium. Also use it to build up a community of followers who you can ask things of (e.g. feedback).
• Social Media monitoring and tracking
  Listen in to blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc and find out who is saying what.
• Photo sharing
  Use sites like Flickr.com to build up an online PR image library
• Video sharing
  Use sites like YouTube.com (although personally Vimeo.com is my choice) to build up an online collection of suitable video clips.
• Facebook
  Its pretty easy these days to build up a Facebook presence and grow a community. Its also quite easy to integrate Press Releases (potentially with comments allowed) and other content from different sources into this popular social media site.
• Online surveys
  This is a quick way to understand if your content is reaching it required audience and finding out what other information or data they would find useful.

Video interviews - the way forward?

I'm a great beleiver in the power of video to make an impact and using it online is no exception. That is, until I'm the person the camera is being pointed at and then I do question if everyone is cut out for a career in front of the lens.

Well recently I was asked for my thoughts on modern business communications & social media. These answers were then filmed ready to be put up to YouTube.

Travel and Social Media - Part 2

It was over 3 weeks ago now that I attended to Tnooz Barcamp 2 following the Travel technology Show at Earls Court in London. It was then I promised in a short blog posting (written on the way home from that event) on the use of Social Media in the travel market.
This is that eventual article.

Now the main purpose of an company using social media must be to create a dialogue with customers (past, current and potential).

Top of all the social media use by travel companies must come blogs. The web log (hence 'blog) was meant as a living diary of things done, so it comes as no suprise that trabel and blogs go hand-in-hand. In fact blogs now contain thousands of travel commentaries and reports from travellers who provide open, eye-witness and contemporary review points.

I'll not try and list my own favourites, so here's travelblog's list of the Top 100 Travel Blogs this month:
http://travelblogsites.com/2010/03/03/travel-blog-top-100-march-03-2010/

Note:
Its therefore a little hard to understand why the Travel Social Nework 'Where are you Now?' (http://www.wayn.com/) isn't more popular than it is. However it seems that during 2009 new registrations to WAYN grew significantly and new registrations in the site reached nearly 10,000 in December.

And suprisingly some of the other social networks I would have expected to have been popular with travellers, such as Twitter and Flickr (the most popular photo sharing site, now owned by Yahoo). These two sites came comparatively low down the ranks of usage when compared to the giants of Facebook and video sharing YouTube in a recent Hotelworld survey;
http://www.tnooz.com/2010/02/23/news/twitter-way-down-list-of-social-media-sites-used-by-budget-travellers/

So what's next for Travel and Social Media? Well... I've a hunch its going to involve innovations such as real-time geolocation based services (e.g. foursquare.com, where you tell friends where you are right now) or even the new planning / event / location based service http://plancast.com/

Adverts now target YouTube audience

TV is getting more and more aware that Internet advertising is eating its lunch (Online Marketing spend is now second behind TV and now ahead of Newspaper, Radio and other main-stream media).

But you can't help but feel that recent TV adverts such as those done by T-Mobile or Cadbury's (see below) have been done as-much for their online viral capacity as for their immediate viewing impact.

Barclaycard have now gone one step further and set up a competiton for people to create their own advert, based upon the very popular (and memorable) 'waterslide' campaign.

Rather than YouTube being a Parasite, could it be that TV adverts developed for an online / multi-channel audience are the saviour of the commercial TV networks?

T-Mobile and the buzz

Those who are not from these shores ("what shores?" I hear you ask, "a pint please" is my reply), will not have seen the flash-mob-dancers of the T-Mobile TV advert that is costing the mobile telco a fortune right now.

If you haven't seen it (or if T-Mobile haven't already copied the format to another country), take a look here:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=VQ3d3KigPQM

So? What makes this campaign so interesting? Well its getting a lot of very positive mentions online, e.g. on Twitter:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=t-mobile+advert

There's even a YouTube tutorial video of how to do the dance:

The growth of online video in 2009

All signs are that 2008 was a growth year for online video and www.youtube.com in particular. A report this week from Comscore stated that that U.S. Internet users viewed 12.7 billion online videos during November 2008, an increase of 34% from the same month in 2007. This report gives some pretty impressive statistics about America's digital video viewing habits, such as "the average online video viewer watched 273 minutes of video".
However the market is more fragmented that I first imagined. Although Google sites (Youtube, Google Video) take the lions share of 40%, all other players are represented in single-figured percentages.

And the signs are that this increase will continue into 2009. Video should also increase in length, with companies now realising that its just not enough to post all your previous 30 second commercials up as a public archive of your historic agency spending. This trend should evolve into something better and richer for the viewing customer. E.g. A firm's Corporate Social Responsibility video, the CEO's keynote / shareholder address or a public response to a critical (and hopefuly wrong) YouTube posting.

Or perhaps the increase will just be fueled by so many people now "doing personal projects from home" during the economic downturn!

Is TV worried by YouTube?

Surely there is nothing better to arouse suspicions like a senior company executive adamantly denying something? Especially when it’s the executive chairman of the UK’s largest commercial TV company denying that YouTube is a threat.

But imagine he went one step further and started to throw insults about?
What if he claimed YouTube is a “parasite”, living off of TV shows produced by ITV?

You’d then have to believe he was worried, especially when he’d seen its share price drop considerably in the last 6 months (Note: before anyone starts saying that its price has recently rallied, I’ll point out that this increase in price is only fuelled by speculation that its due for a takeover).


Its a shame, especially as ITV recently claimed it needed to extend from 2010 to 2012 the date it would reach it online revenue target of £150m.

Happy 10th Birthday Google

On 7th September (last Sunday), Google was officially 10 years old as a business and its the most successful web company ever.

However, we should remind ourselves that Google is not as large as some would have you believe and that there are still 3 technology companies out there with a market value larger than Google’s: Microsoft, I.B.M. and Apple (in that order). To put this in perspective, Google's net income in the last year has been: $4.85 billion, compared with Microsoft’s of $17.6 billion.
(You'd think they could therefore come up with something better than the 'Bill & Gerry' advert then wouldn't you?)

So, what has Google provided the corporate landscape with so far then?

1. Google AdWords
   The definitive PPC (pay Per Click) advertising model, envied and copied by the competition. Ignore this acquisition model at your peril.
2. Google Talk
   A VOIP (Voice-Over IP) and messaging client (that hasn't taken off as much as Microsoft Instant Messaenger or Skype)
3. Google Picasa
   Their version of Flickr, a photo/image sharing site
4. Google Chrome
   A browser, claimed to be developed for the modern online application (it will be interesting to watch its growth in uptake in 2008)
5. YouTube
   Purchased by Google at the end of 2006, this king of video sharing sites has changed the face of online broadcasting. (What will happen to Google's original video sharing site Google Video in the long run is anyone's guess)
6. Google Docs
   A free word processor, spreadsheet and presentation application that may yet challenge the dominance of Microsoft Office.

Oh, and just so happens to have almost 70 percent of the search market sewn up.
So happy 10th birthday Google.

Visual Networking

I came across this phrase whilst learning more about the merging worlds of communications and entertainment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_networking

In essence it a cross between social media & video. YouTube is perhaps the first real mainstream Visual Networking tool, but here's a clip to give you a better explaination:


What does this mean for a new generation of users & customers?
It means a new way to engage and influence each other.

(Online) Video Killed the Television Star?

There are two views on how TV and YouTube will get along in the future

1. YouTube is a threat to TV and will become its demise
2. YouTube is an additonal channel to TV and the two will eventually create a hybrid media source

I personally believe that the latter viewpoint is true. My hunch is that the Internet will incorporate more and more video content in time, as:

• Video cameras become more commonplace & cheaper (quality of mobile phone video)
• Methods of posting video content to the internet become easier
• Broadband continues to increase in speed and overall usage
• People find it more acceptable to communicate and interact in this way

Note: This has already been covered intially in my post 'This time the revolution will be televised', so I'll not go into it again.

But on the other hand there are those who believe that Online Video will bring about the death of TV, particularly in the guise of YouTube. So are we right to ask Buggles to rewrite their song? Or is everyone just getting a little too paranoid?..... errr.... YES!

A recent study by IMMI found that 20% of primetime television viewers are watching some episodic television online and that this grou (the majority of them women) don't have the time to catch everything, so use the online episodes as a way to catch-up on the ones they missed live.

Here's their full report: ttp://www.immi.com/pdfs/OnlineViewership.pdf

As eMarketer agree, there is no reason to believe that the increase in online video is causing a subsequent drop in TV viewing:

It does then beg the question of where these extra hours are coming from.... perhaps they've stopped listening to 80's radio stations!

More examples of Citizen Journalism

YouTube Citizen News:
This service by the biggest video site on the web appears to be a altruistic go at empowering citizens to tell their own stories.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQkON7NN6WY

A potentially better attempt to harness this phenomenon though is http://www.nowpublic.com/
NowPublic has created a "less-amateur" citizen media by inserting a layer of governance and checks from a known group of experienced volunteers (including a former BBC News head) who oversee and manage content quality.

As we see more of these services start and grow, you do wonder if this is Press 2.0 in action...

The student YouTube generation

The students of Michael Wesch, an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University have made: A Vision of Students Today, a video which summarizes how students learn in the modern world.

There's no doubt in my mind that TV as a media and the Internet as a delivery mechanism will become far more intertwined in the future. How we make sense of this and use it most effectively will surely be the next challenge!

Video, its all about YouTube

There are a number of video websites out there and there is a lot of viewing going on. In fact online video is being blamed for the demise of traditional USA TV watching.

In a recent survey by Universal McCann on Social Media, to the question "Thinking about using the internet, which of the following have you ever done?", the number of people who have watched video clips online is:
Daily: 22%
Weekly: 37%
Monthly: 16%

That makes a total of 75% of the 'Active Internet Universe' (their term, not mine) who watch clips relatively frequently.

However if you're considering where to put your video company assets online are only two rules you really need to know:

1. It’s all about YouTube
2. It’s all about YouTube

Following its now somewhat distant acquisition by Google in October 2006, YouTube has continued to rule the online video landscape. Today in the United States, YouTube dominates online video more than Google dominates search.

But brands are making big waves using online video, either is an entirely positive way or otherwise. For example, this clip of disney videos is corrupted in a powerful and wonderful AvenueQ-type way. In no way is this part of the original Disney philosphy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GGGAJ_2TvQ

However, if you are new to online video and want to know how you can still produce cost-effective clips at reasonable quality, then this guide by Duncan Riley may well help.

This time the revolution WILL be televised

My belief is that video will become the main media of the internet eventually, just like it has now dominated consumer media. This is because:

• It gives instant gratification
• It combines audio & video to give a proper 'multimedia' experience
• It requires as much interaction or engagement as the viewer wants (from nothing upwards)

Professional media organizations will therefore have an enormous role in the future of the Internet. Although the technologies that make getting video on the Web are easy and inexpensive, having the skills to use them correctly need to be learnt over time and require effort. Creating good quality video is generally hard and generally expensive.

So.... what should a company do about this?

1. Produce different quality video based upon the expectations of your audience
   E.g. if it is a 'grass roots' video for a YouTube clip, then there's proabably no real reason why it can't be shot in-house
2. Learn what you can do in-house and cannot
   The cost-effectiveness of building your own in-house video capability depends on the use you're going to put it to. Most companies cannot and should not do this as it requires a huge commitment. Use smaller dedicated agencies can provide this.
3. Understand how video fits in across you media landscape and how you can share in its production & usage
   e.g. Use and reuse clips, capture what you can and store it in the best possible format for possible future use (it will quicklt become a valued reference)
4. Measure it
   Understand how your users and audience are consuming it, then work out what works best