1. Your Customers Do the Selling Partidatequila.com’s “Video Confessionals” and “Bartender Confessionals” series ask for customers and bartenders’ best tequila drinking stories. Viewers get the drama and laughs you’d expect from a good night out with tequila while Partidatequila.com got a 200% growth in their Web site traffic. View the video»

2. Your Viral Marketing Takes Off Toyota wanted to show off the strength and power of their Tacoma by having the mid-size truck do something extraordinary. So, they dropped a Toyota Tacoma into a World of Warcraft video game where it takes out a mean-looking dragon. Looking as if it may be user-generated (it’s not), the video garnered more than 3 million views and made the Tacoma the best-selling truck in its class.

3. You Create Buzz with an Inside Look Author Scott Sigler found fame (and a publishing deal) by making his first book available only by podcast. Now he’s at the forefront of Web video book trailers, designed to entice readers to buy his newest published book, Infected. In the trailer, Sigler gives fans a taste of the book to come, divulging heavy plot points and character introductions. As Sigler says, “If I have a video that blows up on MySpace, I could have 100,000 people see it in four hours." Watch the trailer»

4. You Establish Yourself as the Expert (A VideoBloom Showcase) VideoBloom helped authors Joseph Sturniolo and Dan Christopherson create a series of author interviews to promote their newly released book, The Caterpillar That Roared. VideoBloom’s easy-to-use platform gave the writers multiple opportunities to discuss different aspects of the book, including how to apply the book’s parable to real life situations. By discussing the book’s evolution and its overall concepts, the authors not only generate interest in their book but also strengthen their credibility as knowledgeable experts in the self-help field. View the video»

Tips, Tricks and Tools

You’ve worked hard creating your Web video; now you need to make sure people see it. Enter in Video SEO, or video search engine optimization. Video SEO can be as simple as making your tags and descriptions relevant and compelling or as complicated as restructuring your entire site’s architecture. Here’s a quick list of easy and inexpensive ways you can increase your online video’s exposure, as well things to as to avoid.

DO: 

1. Specify and pursue a target audience- Know who you want to watch your video, and more importantly, who will want to watch your video. Because drop offs, or people who stop watching your video because they are uninterested in it, negatively affect your search returns, you want make sure your video is placed where only truly interested viewers will see it Additionally, understanding your target audience allows you to generate appropriate titles, tags, and descriptions.
2. Make relevant and enticing titles, tags, and descriptions for your videos- Titles, tags, and descriptions make up your video’s metadata, which is the primary tool that traditional search engines use to index and sort through videos. So, you want to make these items as efficient as possible. Titles, tags, and descriptions should accurately reflect the content of the video in a succinct way. For example, a tag that reads ‘an instructional lecture by John Doe about the proper way to do yoga’ would get less hits than ‘instructional, John Doe, yoga’.
3. Contextualize the page around your video - Video search engines also search the text and content surrounding videos and index it as part of the video’s metadata. So, placing relevant material, such as articles, blogs and images, around your video will increase its search returns.
4. Allow and encourage interaction with and sharing of your videos- By making your video easy to email, link, embed, and post on social networking sites,you increase your video’s opportunities for exposure. You’ll also increase the video’s ranking within the video search engines by generating more in-bound links to the page hosting the video. In addition to sharing your video, encourage users to comment on and rate your video. This can spark conversation over your videos and increase traffic to your site, once again improving your video’s ranking in the search engines.

Be Wary Of:

1. Tag spamming- Tag spamming occurs when a video publisher loads their video unrelated tags to increase their search returns. While this has increased search results in the past, video search engines have developed ways to identify tag spammers; once they have been identified their rankings within the search engine drop severely. Also, keep in mind that when a user stops watching a video before the video is complete, it negatively affects the video’s search returns.
2. File conversions- It is highly likely that at some point in the publishing or distribution of your video it will be converted to a different file format. While file conversion is somewhat inevitable, you need to check your metadata when this happens, as often times, the metadata stored in the file will be lost or damaged. So it is important to check, and update if necessary, your titles, tags, and descriptions after any file conversions occur.
3. Using pop-up video players- Aside from running the risk of your video being blocked by increasingly prevalent pop-up blockers, pop-up video players take the video away from any surrounding contextual information that could increase the video’s search returns.
4. Flash-only video players- Flash-only video players can only display a file’s metadata dynamically, which unfortunately is unreadable by search engine spiders. If you are using a Flash-only player, make sure that you incorporate your metadata into the page surrounding the video.
   No time to learn about tags, RSS feeds and video SEO? Leave it to us. When you work with VideoBloom, we help you tag and upload your video for the optimal search returns.

Innovation Watch

Thought you needed a fancy camera to capture your online videos? Think again. With big name directors such as Spike Lee popularizing cell-phone-created movies, mobile devices are fast becoming the newest way to get online video onto the Internet in a hurry. Read more»

Just Released from VideoBloom

Don’t know your pixels from your aspect ratio? Don’t worry! We’ve just released our WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) Video Resizer. Acting much like an object in Word or PowerPoint, the instant video resizer lets you simply click and drag the sides of the video to your preferred size, even while the video is playing. You can then copy the given code and paste it into your Web site, allowing for painless Internet video embedding.

Because the instant video resizer automatically resizes the video dimensions, you no longer need to understand pixel measurements or aspect ratio, previously necessary for video resizing.

We developed the video resizer tool after finding that many customer questions involved determining the right size of video or the correct aspect ratio of video for their Web sites. "We wanted to take the guesswork out of video resizing," said VideoBloom CEO Antoine Toffa. "Most people simply want video to fit on their Web site or blog and they aren't concerned with what 320 pixels x 240 pixels looks like. With our video resizer, users can get the video resized and up where the public can enjoy it, in an instant."

Popular Happenings in Online Video: Politics

Last month, President Bush gave his first ever, online interview to Yahoo News. Politico’s Chief Political Correspondent Mike Allen and the President discussed issues ranging from global warming to torture to Saturday Night Live.

While it took President Bush until the last year of his term to get involved with online video, presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and John McCain are already on board as was the recently resigned hopeful Hillary Clinton.

Senator Obama welcomes you to his Web site, www.barackobama.com, which is complete with a Barack TV, a full Web video channel featuring rally and speech footage and voter testimonials.

Similarly, Senator McCain’s Web site, www.johnmccain.com, features a video center in which he showcases his most recent speeches and commercials, including versions in both English and Spanish.

Senator Clinton had used her “Hillary TV” web channel to speak directly to supporters with targeted messages about issues, interviews with concerned citizens and political endorsements. Now she is using online video to urge her supporters to shift their support to Senator Obama.

The Bottom Line: Minimizing Costs With Online Video

With the word “recession” on everyone’s lips, online video provides a great alternative to traditional marketing, allowing marketers to reach targeted consumers affordably and easily. And while it can be easy in these uncertain economic times to justify sticking to more traditional forms of video marketing, online video, when utilized correctly, can be more effective at a fraction of the cost. Here are a few ways that online video can be a superior distribution technique for the cost conscious marketer compared to say, traditional TV distribution:

• You can maximize your exposure with your videos at multiple locations on the Web.
  • The same video that plays on your web site can also be playing at any number of video sharing sites.
• It is usually free, or very cheap, to place your videos on video sharing sites.
  • Compare this to the cost of purchasing time slots for TV spots.
• Users can access your Web videos whenever they want, as many times as they want.
  • With TV your videos will only be viewed during the specific time slots you've paid for. Online your videos have virtually unlimited potential for viewing.
• Web users can distribute your videos for you.
  • Through the use of embed, link, and "email to a friend" tools, Web users do your video distributing for you. This not only saves you money, but also time and energy.

Toyota Tacoma’s humorous spoof on World of Warcraft (discussed earlier in the newsletter) went viral through sites like YouTube and generated over 3 million at virtually no cost to Toyota. Imagine reaching thousands, if not millions, of your potential customers for free!