The History of Social Media

A great INFOGRAPHIC courtesy of Skloog blog – too good to not pass along!

The “Obvious” Test of Your Marketing Idea

I was just starting to listen to a book [on AudioBooks] by Jack Trout – of marketing fame, called “In Search Of The Obvious“. Early in the book he quotes a very old source – a book by Robert Updegraff called “Obvious Adams“, originally published in 1929! One core point of the book is that a great idea, when explained, will seem obvious – evoking a “Why didn’t I think of that?” kind of reaction.

Does your proposal pass the test?

Test One: The problem when solved will be simple. The obvious is nearly always simple–so simple that sometimes a whole generation of men and women have looked at it without even seeing it.

Test Two: Does it check with human nature? If you feel comfortable in explaining your idea or plan to your mother, wife, relative, neighbors, your barber and anyone else you know, it’s obvious. If you don’t feel comfortable, it probably is not obvious.

Test Three: Put it on paper. Write out your idea, plan or project in words of one or two syllables, as though you were explaining it to a child. If you can’t do this in two or three short paragraphs and the explanation becomes long, involved or ingenious–then very likely it is not obvious.

Test Four: Does it explode in people’s minds? If, when you have presented your plan, project or program, do people say, “Now why didn’t we think of that before?” You can feel encouraged. Obvious ideas are very apt to produce this “explosive” mental reaction.

Test Five: Is the time ripe? Many ideas and plans are obvious in themselves, but just as obviously “out of time.” Checking time lines is often just as important as checking the idea or plan itself.

Jack Trout said: “To me, those five principles are worth a thousand books on marketing, mine included.”

Blogology 100

A Short Introduction to Blogging
• A Blog is your newspaper column – without the need of a newspaper.
• Unlike a newspaper column though, Blog entries, or ‘posts’, usually just stay there, forever, but always moving farther ‘down’ as you write new posts.

A BLOG – a blend of the term web & log

• Also unlike a newspaper column, a Blog benefits from being a web-based entity, in that is accessible from anywhere on the planet, and also in that anyone can comment on it. You can screen and remove comments as the author.
• And speaking of the web, or as it is sometimes called, Web 2.0, where the ‘Pull’ paradigm is displacing the ‘Push’ of the older broadcasting model of marketing, a Blog provides an excellent mode of association with the author for purposes of learning and sharing – not just selling.
• Of course, having established yourself as a helpful entertaining, knowledgeable resource, people who could well become your clients will see you in a better light. And existing customers have something to send to colleagues to recommend you.
• A Blog can be a website, or it can be part of a larger website.
• Some Blogs today have more readers than the New York Times, while others are only read by the author, and maybe his mother.
• A Blog can grow into a key part of a company’s web presence if it publishes useful content on a regular basis. There is no substitute for quality content.
• The Blog Title is also important, as that is what people see when they will do a search. So remember the newspaper column analogy – title the Blog to attract readers – use humour, be a bit outrageous, or at least a bit exaggerated – GRAB their attention.
• Another device is to insert an interesting image into the first part of the Blog. A picture instantly communicates. And when you have attracted the searcher, you want to hold their attention – so start with a very interesting fact or observation. Get them into reading what you have to say.
• It is quite normal for the company Blog to be written by [perhaps with the aid of a ghost writer] the CEO.
• The Blog can be like a mini-newsletter, commenting on company doings, but much more frequently than one would publish a newsletter.
• More successful company Blogs, however, go way beyond company business, and deliver useful, interesting and timely content about trends or events of interest to the company’s clients.
• A Blog can be a good way to promote the CEO, or perhaps someone else in the company, as a subject-matter expert, who comments on developments in the field, beyond even the products of his company.
• Another excellent strategy is to read and comment on other people’s Blogs, referring, where appropriate, to a recent post of your own.
• If you have written articles for SEO purposes, there is no problem in extracting large sections of those articles for Blogging purposes. The articles are much more static and are sent to different places and searched for in different ways.
• Indeed, Blogging is a must for SEO, as each post can contain a link back to the company’s main website. And due to frequent updates, the Blog will be better noticed by search engines.
• Companies usually want to host their own Blog within their domain. This allows the Blog to have a simpler and better-branded URL. If the company website is http://www.business.com, the Blog might be just business.com, or http://www.businessBlog.com.
• WordPress and other services will host Blogs free, but then the URL will be business.wordpress.com. You can pay WordPress to host your Blog and then the ‘wordpress’ drops off. WordPress-hosted Blogs have limitations on appearance, but this might be a good place to start. Posted content, comments, etc., can all be transferred later to another hosting arrangement.

The Web is rich with Blogs and Blogging instruction. Search on “Best Blogs”, or “How to write a Blog” every once and a while and you will be rewarded. But the best reward will derive from your own consistency and talent, as you see you readership stats go up over the months, and comments coming in. Then you know that your Blog is being talked about, generating that word-of-mouth awareness that money can’t buy.

Happy Blogging!
http://www.massoutreach.com

Kaltura – An Online Video Platform With A Difference

Below we present an interview with Kaltura President Michal Tsur.

Kaltura is an Open Source Online Video Platform [OVP]. An OVP is a Software as a Service-based solution that offers video file management and publication services to organizations. By services here we mean things like Media Asset Management, Encoding, Video Players, Video Editing, Web syndication, Analytics and metrics of content served, Application Programming Interfaces (API), Hosting and Distribution of Video Content.

For an explanation of what distinguishes Kaltura we’ll let Dr. Tsur do the talking.

So, why wouldn’t you just use YouTube you say? Why go through all this hassle, and pay!? Of course, you should always BE on YouTube, that is a way to be found, and known out there. But if you start getting into using video to do business, then you will notice that the YouTube offering will start to cramp your style. For one thing, you are limited to exactly what the YouTube player looks like. You can’t add anything at the beginning or end. If you decide to improve it or update it some day, then your new improved YouTube vid gets a new URL, thereby zapping everybody who favourited you, or embedded your work of art, in their site, blog or whatever. Also, you will want to know a lot more than the YouTube analytics tell you – like when people stopped watching and what did they do next. And most of all, you are in the YouTube world when it comes to advertizing and interactivity – not your own.

The Shortest Ever Tutorial on SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

(Courtesy of HubSpot)

You might not want to invest a lot in search engine optimization services, but you must – at least – do what is below. It is easy and without it, your website may as well be on one of the moons of Saturn – no one will ever find you.

1) Find keywords. Pick a list of words relevant to your business. Think about which words are most likely to get people to do what you want them to do (convert into leads) and focus on those words. Then pick one word (or phrase) to use on one page of your site.

2) Put keywords in Page Title. The Page Title is one of the most important things that Google and other search engines evaluate to determine what is on a web page. Put your keyword or phrase in the title, keep it short.

3) Put keywords in Page URL. Google and other search engines also use the text of the URL of the page to determine the content of the web page. You should use your keyword or phrase in the URL of the web page – either the folder/directory structure or the HTML file / page name itself.

4) Put keywords in Meta Data. While the page metadata (Page Description and Keywords) are not nearly as important as they used to be, they still count. Take advantage of them by putting your keyword or phrase there. The description should be readable by a person and make sense and the keyword metadata should focus on your keyword or phrase – do not make it long, less is more.

5) Put keywords in your H1 text. The H1 text is usually the title of an article or some larger bold text at the top of your page. Google and the smaller search engines can see this and they put extra importance on the words in the H1 text. Make sure your keyword or phrase is there.

6) Use keywords in the page content. Putting the keyword in your page content also signals to search engines that the page is actually about the keyword and should show up in search results. We have heard from “experts” that you should use your keyword anywhere from 4-6 times to 10-12 times. Hubspot’s advice: just write naturally.

7) Monitor your rank. Give the search engines some time to do their thing (couple days) and then keep checking your rank to see what happened and track your progress.

For lots more see: HubSpot

One down, 2 to go. Kaltura and Brightcove coming soon.

Video & Vzaar – Both Growing FAST

Forrester Research recently forecast that online video content consumption was growing faster than all other categories and would soon be number one in Western Europe [and probably everywhere].

 

Forrester – Video Growth Forecast to 2014

The growth in online video is good news for companies that have gotten into the “Online Video Platform“, or OVP, business. One such player is Vzaar, a London based company founded in 2007 by Ken Moss (now Chairman) and Adrian Sevitz (the current Chief Technical Officer) and Ian Snead (VP, Sales).  In August, Vzaar signed their 1,000th business customer, a significant achievement 3 years after launch.

In mid-October we interviewed Vzaar CEO Stephen McCluskey, who shared his insights into the state of this fast-growing and more and more strategic market.

For more information see  http://vzaar.com/

And for more information about the great video content we can work with you to create, please contact us at brian@massoutreach.com

Great Online Video Interviews Coming Soon

Matt and I attended the London Streaming Media Conference [see http://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/conference/2010/] last week and video’d some top people from three of the leading Online Video Platforms [or OVPs – if you’re keeping track of TLAs [Three Letter Acronyms].

 

Dr. Michal Tsur – President, Kaltura

 

Q. What’s an OVP?

A. An Online Video Platform is like your website hosting service. If you have a website, you pay someone to host it – right?  Well, if you have some video on your website, and especially if you have lots of videos, but even if you just have a few but you want to make sure that your viewers all over the world see your stuff the way you’d like them to – as in not jerky, not taking so long to load that they click outa there, then you won’t be happy with your average website hosting performance for your video content. You will need to invest a bit more to ensure that your videos are seen the way you want them to be.

WHY 1:

• because your prospects have different Internet bandwidths available to them from kinda slow basic, rural or 3rd world, to very fast broadband in major economies, like The Netherlands; and
• on different platforms – from the iPhone’s tiny perfect screen, all the way up to BIG flat screen HD TVs.

 

Cameron Church - Europe Technical Director, Brightcove

 

WHY 2?

Because video is

• BIG – REALLY BIG, and BIG file sizes are hard to push through little Internet pipes. So you need to be smart about how to do it efficiently, and smart about how to get the best quality available for a given situation – and that situation may even change while the video is playing. That’s way more than your website hosting can handle; and
• there are lot’s of different formats. Everybody’s [FLASH, HTML 5, H.264 …] got their own brilliant idea of how to code/decode and stream [send chunk by chunk for your clients to watch] video.

 

Stephen McCluskey - CEO, Vzaar

 

So using a one-size-fits all approach will frustrate a lot of your viewers. If you really want good performance, you have to go beyond your own website hosting services. And you don’t [unless you’re really big] want to figure this all out for yourself, or pay to have some techie on staff or on contract stay up-to-speed on that always and quickly changing environment.

And even though you have to be on YouTube to be seen and found, you don’t want that to be the only channel for showing prospects your main products and services. It’s too tacky – to the point of maybe showing an ad for a competitor, or something distracting them from your message, and YouTube hosting is performance-challenged too. So if you are emerging from being a small player and want to distinguish your services you must upgrade.

For an informed, inside story from 3 major Online Video Platform spokespersons, stay tuned, we’ll have our interviews posted in the next week or so. And say “Hello” – here, or at http://www.massoutreach.com

TV Beats Web 158 to 3

As a true believer in the power of “New Media”, Massoutreach is always happy to announce the latest statistics about the takeover of online communications. But the truth is a bit more complex that that.  It is true that some “Old Media”, like regional newspapers [UK data: 2010 forecast -7.5% ] are dropping like a rock in terms of advertizing spending, as are national newspapers and consumer magazines. A lot of the slack, and a lot of the money, is being taken up by online vehicles like Google’s adwords. And it is also true that growth in online video is spectacular: for example, Comscore reported recently that the number of people who watch video on retail sites [US data] jumped by 40% between July 2009 and July 2010. All those trending numbers mean that a big change is afoot. However, one old medium – TV, is doing quite well. Our Blog post title – 158 vs. 3, shows the number of hours of TV watched monthly by the average American, vs. the number of hours of video watched online [numbers published by Nielsen]. More numbers: in China about 30% of people regularly use the Internet vs. 93% who watch TV. In Brazil, TV advertising was worth 15 times as much as Internet advertising last year.

The Good Old Days (Still)

Of course, most of you cannot afford TV advertising – at least the kind that would have a noticeable effect on your business. And most of you are very happy in the knowledge that your precious marketing dollars are not being sprayed at lots of people who are not interested – who have zapped past your ad spot, who are in the kitchen making a snack while your ad shows, etc. No. Your online ads are seen only by people who are in your market, people who choose to watch. Online video marketing has some far superior characteristics to TV.

The interesting statistic about Internet advertising is always the pace of change: it is growing rapidly – stealing from newspapers, radio, and in some niche areas TV.  People might see something for the first time on TV and then go online to complete their research, comparison shop, and buy. So your prospects need to see and learn what you want them to via your website, even if they originally heard something on TV that started them off. Performance-based ads – like Google’s pay-per-click service grow every year, and competitors arise monthly.

Online video, within the social media context, is the new word-of-mouth.

So, the Old Media, TV anyway, seems to be holding its own, for now. And New Media – online video, is growing exponentially.

Where do we think this is going? Let’s look at 3 prime areas:

• Social Media
• Interactivity
• Mobile

Social Media – While TV is still pervasive and dominant, the growth in Social Media like Facebook, with over 500 million members, is becoming more and more a part of more and more people’s lives. Online video, within the social media context, is the new word-of-mouth. The trend is for people to be more savvy about buying, and more ‘allergic’ to advertizing generally – unless it’s very well done and packaged. TV video is that now. Web video is getting there.

Instead of putting a video into the website, you can put a website into the video.

Interactive video – an already visually interesting video story, overlaid with a click-and-get-action-NOW interface, is a very powerful medium, just getting set to explode. TV – as in Google TV, is going to move into this for sure, but the online implementation will be better.

Robert Scoble Interviews Veeple CEO

Mobile – witness the uptake of the iPad. Check out the amount of video watched on the tiny perfect screen of the iPhone. It is very clear that another trend is rapidly accelerating here: delivering content wherever you are. And delivering content relevant to where you are is happening too. And that’s not TV.

If we consider cost factors and trendlines, we see the importance of new media and online video. Online video can do you some good today, and tomorrow the action will move more and more to new media. And yes, you’ll still kick-back and watch TV some of the time too.

Some stats from an article in the October 2, 2010 issue of the Economist “The Box Rocks”.

See the Veeple Interactive Video Demo at

Cool interactive video tech from Veeple