Video & Your Website – Philadelphia Web Design and Internet Marketing

As a business owner you realize the value of running a commercial on TV, it’s the single most effective way to sell your product. All the elements are there, a large captive audience (or too bored to change the channel), targeted demographics, visual branding of your logo and products/services, and the opportunity to put a face to that Yellowpages listing you shelled all that money out for.

But advertising on TV is expensive and unless you have a serious budget dedicated to it, this is out of the reach of most small businesses and professionals. End of story, you no longer think of video as part of your business plan and so for years have let the idea molder away in the back of your brain.

Well wake up.

Somewhere in the past 5 years the majority of Americans switched from Dial-up internet service to Broadband. During the era of Dial-up, video was not an option, it took far too long to load and play. But with the rise of Broadband came a greater capacity for dense media to be viewed and thus the creation of Youtube, Viddler, Veoh, CBS Online Shows…etc.

It cost companies thousands of dollars to put an ad on Television.
Get the video shot by a professional videographer: $2000
Buy ad space on television: $5000-Millions

It cost companies hundreds of dollars to put an ad on the Internet, sometimes LESS!
Get the video shot by a professional videographer: $2000
OR Shoot the video yourself: $0
Place on your website: $200
Place on Youtube: $0

It is cheaper than ever to get video to your customers and because of the distribution of online content it can reach a broader audience than TV ever could. Let’s also be honest with ourselves, TV is going to become just a facet of the internet in the very near future. So it’s time you figured out how video on the web works so that you can make the transition.

Online Video is low quality: If it wasn’t it would load slowly, skip, pause, buffer and generally just get in the way of your message. Shoot low quality, save yourself a few bucks if your hiring someone to do your videos. Many high quality videos that are converted into low quality just look terrible, so start at low quality to get an idea of what your getting.

The Blare Witch/ Vonage Effect: Camcorders are your quick and easy way to funny, viral and personal video. If your one of the many service contractors out there you want a one-on-one, personal connection with your clients, nothing gets more personal than talking to your camcorder as if it’s a home movie. Get real. You shoot a video that looks like stock footage, with happy shinny actors and you will exude a feeling of fakery. People these days want to see the real company, the real stuttering, sweating, but generally good nature guy who’s trying to provide a beneficial service to people. For examples see: Youtube… you may have heard of it.

Attention Spans or a Lack thereof: Keep it short and to the point, unless your doing an information based video. If visitors aren’t there to learn something then they have the attention span of goldfish for specials, coupons and you screaming SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY! I suggest something funny, as it sticks in people’s heads better and has a high ‘did you see that video’ factor for friends and family.

Go Viral: Create a video that makes people want to show it to their friends and then make sure they can send that video everywhere. Providing a link, the file itself or tags from Youtube will allow people to pass your video along via their regular communications and blogs.

So go buy yourself a digital video recorder ( I prefer “The Flip”) and start shooting video.

Comments on Blog

My fault, I left the comments on for this blog. You have to ask me for a link before I allow thoughtful comments. If you have something to say that's of note or that you make a good point I'll publish it in a post, request a link by clicking the Contact link on the right.

I appreciate and encourage comments, just don't think I'm going to let just anyone link off of my website. This blog is not an SEO tool, it's for informing my clients and interested parties.

Social Media Panel - Philadelphia Internet Marketing

I've been invited to sit on a panel of experts to talk about social media, here in Philadelphia. Local IT professionals and entrepreneurs are going to be populating as small conference room looking for advise on how to use social media as part of their internet marketing programs.

I'm having trouble coming up with what to say. Not because I don't have a lot to say on the matter but I hold a negative view of social media as an advertising market. Most people who go and speak about this sort of thing, at conferences, are the usual Twitter fiends who are happy to ride the bandwagon of 'future promise' and 'incredible traffic'.

The problem with utilizing social media as an advertising tool is that it's not made for it. Most social media: blogs, myspace, shelfari, 43things, ListofBests, Twitter were created primarily as a way for people of similar interests to get together and talk about what they love.

Not a whole lot of people go to a social media outlet with a desire to have some company selling at them. "Hi! I'm R00f3rman345 and I wanted to drop you a line about this great shingle rebate!" Who wants to get that kind of stuff in their message box? That's spam.

If you create a a full profile for your company on myspace and you sell filing cabinets, how many people do you think are going to visit you? What's their interest? If a person is looking for a filing cabinet they're going to look for one on Google or Staples.com, nobody thinks to go to myspace. The only people who can successfully get sales through myspace are music bands and magicians.

People visit social media because they have a shared interest. AND YES, there may indeed be a dozen or so people (at most) in a geographical region who want to learn about 'Deals on Wheel Alignments', but the number is so puny as to not even pay for the effort of setting up a profile to begin with. Especially if you pay someone to set it up, you're never going to see a return on that investment.

The only social media I can see of relative use to a business is a blog. Some place where people can read interesting things on a daily or weekly level. Some examples of interest would be 'Contractor Reviews' (still kind of boring), Expert Opinion: Ask Yea Old Pluber Man (more interesting especially if he has a voice), About My Business (like this blog, learning about how I do things and talk about tech trends).

You may make the argument that it doesn't matter what you put on social media, you're just posting up a profile or an article for a good inbound link (search engine optimization). To that I say... SPAM spam Spam SPam sPammmmm. Way to go, you've just helped to devalue search engines and your own business a little more with each slapped together article you post. There is a reason that Google has to keep changing it's algorithm to get relevant results, and it's you.

A little advice, there are two ways to run a business: Milk a business or Grow a business. If you're just sticking things in social media for a link then your looking for a short term profit without a long term agenda. Give it enough time and you'll tank your business and deflate any trust between you and the consumer. Think long term, earn a consumers trust, Grow your business and the referrals will keep rolling on in.

Inevitable Evil of 'Local Listing Sites'

I'm fuming mad this week, I've had it up to my ears with listing sites who scrape the yellowpages and toss together sloppy and innacurate information about my clients. Spelling errors, incorrect phone numbers, misdirected email addresses, wrong street address, wrong catagories of services... it's unbelivable.

The focus of my wrath today is BytheZip.com. At first glace this is an everyday local listing website that promises to get you ranked well on search engines. Benine, no big deal, lets see what they can do for us... right? WRONG. (My client signed up for their service without talking to me first, so I take no responsibility for getting in bed with this company)

After three weeks I started my usual quarterly session of Googling my client's name to see what comes up. Well let me tell you I've found a load of crap that I'm very unhappy about. First off BytheZip.com uses, what i now call, a 'lazy link' on it's website and other affiliate and third-party sites.

What is a 'lazy link'? It's a link that was put together by a lazy code monkey that looks like this:
See more about PJ Fitzpatric here: http://www.bythezip.com/Companies/1000011804.htm

When it should look like this:
See more about PJ Fitzpatric here.

They use this lazy link everywhere, they're spamming the following websites with poorly crafted and often outright wrong articles and listings:

• Technorati.com
• yourvirtualmainstreet.biz
• wordpress.com
• localbizpress.com
• philadelphia.craigslist.org
• delaware.craigslist.org
• gtrends.4rev.net (dig link)

They wern't given permission to do this, they are just doing it over and over again. This makes my client look like a real tool to these online communites. Also, nothing written in those articles is approved or goes through myself or my client before it's published. If it had they wouldn't have started a blog with Guard spelled as Gaurd or placed us on a national Dig link when we're a local company. This kind of blatent misuse of name for better rank on a search engine is unethical and worse, damaging to the reputation of my client.

And there are tons of these sites doing this every day. Here is a list of some of the worst offenders:

Yellowbot, Superpages, Hotfrog & Insiderpages.

The problem is, you can't stop them from running around posting up incorrect phone numbers all you can do is go to their site and complain or join their services and correct their incompentence yourself. So every 4 months I have to get on search engines and fix the crazy, lazy, irrisponsible websites out there.

Lesson to take away from this? Google Thy Self. Frequently.

Misleading Terminology and Statistics: Philadelphia Internet Marketingd

This week I'd like to point out a few misleading ways some companies sell their online services to 'internet virgin' businesses out there. Most business owners don't know anything about search engines, websites, blogs, social media or even how to properly use their own office computers. So it's no surprise that certain online service providers use misleading sales tactics to secure some 'sucker money'.

First off let me say that I'm not talking about the crazy local web dude who charges you a massive lump of cash and then disappears the next day.

I'm talking about BIG players, who should know better but employ tactics that are unethical to get the maximum profit off your ignorance. Yellowpages.com (a subsidiary of AT&T), InsiderPages.com, BytheZip.com, ServiceMagic.com... mostly listing sites although I'll cover a few points that independent operators use as well.

1 ) Raise Your Rank on Google by using our listing service.
Let's start with SEO (search engine optimization), the term most used is 'raise your ranking' on Google/Yahoo/'insert search engine name'. Listing sites employ a sales tactic in which they tell a business that by getting their website listed on there's that it will improve your rank on search engines. The misleading part of this sentence is that it's not YOUR website that is getting better ranking but rather that they use THEIR website to place high on a search for say... 'swimming pool contractors'. That may be a bit confusing so let me use a visual example:

Go to Google and do a search for 'swimming pool contractor':


You'll see I've circled in red, "ServiceMagic.com", this is one of the listing sites I mentioned. You pay Service Magic a monthly fee and then their website comes up when people do a search for 'swimming pool contractor'. Not your website, in fact your website just gets a link off the servicemagic.com website... next to all your competitors. Your business website IS NOT getting a better ranking for being listed here AND your competitors are all lined up right next to you when people click on this link.

1) Impressions
Another misleading tactic is how some companies bandy about the term 'impressions'. An impression is how many times somebody has viewed something. So say if your website on google got 23K impressions that means 23K people looked at your listing on Google... they DID NOT go to your website. If they had went to your website it would be called a 'click' or 'visit'. Impressions are simply an indicator of the amount of potential traffic on a search engine, not actual traffic.

However if we're talking about an Online Newspaper, you're very interested in Impressions. You want to know the average rate of impressions to get a feel for how many people visit their website, and whether it is worth your time to buy ad space there. Now the way I handle this is that you should always take the number of impressions a website gives you and cut it by 1/2. So a website that says it gets 10K impressions, should be reduced to 5K impressions.

Why do I cut it their number in half? Because Impression tracking doesn't take into account multiple visits to the same page by a single visitor. So if you assume that everybody visits a page at least twice then you get a more (but definetly not perfect) accurate number of real traffic.

3) We're ranked 16th most popular website on the Internet
This is a despicable tactic used by Yellowpages.com and I encourage you to spread the word wide and far. Yellowpages.com is indeed a very popular website... Nationally. However most businesses don't operate on a National level, they service a local area. Do not be swayed by arguments that they're going to generate tons of sales leads for you because of their popularity. Ask for specific numbers of visitors in your service area, whether by state, county, city. If they can't give you a hard number then don't bother. Unless you're servicing a major urban area you're going to find the numbers in say... southern Delaware, less than stellar.

That's it for now, my little daughter Maya (8 months) is being demanding today. I'll check in next week as usual.

A Conversation I Had This Week...

"Below is a response to some questions I received about Wikis and MMORPGs in regards to business..."

Wikapedia is an online encyclopedia, so unless your contributing information that is of an educational nature you can't use if for business. However anyone can build a Wiki, for any reason at all. Wikis do have a high learning curve for creating one yourself, you have to learn how to code them and then upload them to your server. However there are services like: www.wetpaint.com that will allow you to use their pre-built templates and software to make creating a Wiki very easy.

I think you mean MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games), nobody i know uses the term MMOLGs, that I know of (and all my friends and I play these games quite a bit). The majority of people who play MMORPGs are gamers and play game oriented MMORPGs. The economies for these games are tied to the game in such a way that any real world cash that is made is simply to improve your gaming performance (Ex. selling 'gold' for cash so that people playing World of Warcraft can buy better armor and items). What your talking about with Neuromancer is a slightly different type of MMORPG called Second Life (the largest of a handful of this type). There the purpose is not so much a game as interaction with other people. Whether that is to sell things that you make, teach a class online, show off your nifty avatar or play games made by other people. You CAN make money in Second Life but the Linden Dollar has a poor exchange rate compared to the US Dollar. I think this is the game you want in investigate, it's free to download but has options for monthly subscription for more features www.secondlife.com (anyone can join).

My experiences with Second Life (about two weeks of monkeying around) leave me with mixed feelings. On paper it's a very good idea, but in practice it isn't quite there yet. Most of the people I know who have tried it only lasted about a week or two and then got bored with it. My one friend Don actually tried to turn a profit by selling credits to play a game he built inside Second Life and charging people a fee to sit in a chair and watch movies. He's the 'get rich quick' type and he kept at it for about three months, in the end he wasn't making enough to justify the time he was spending at it.

Problems with Second Life:
1) User created items requires a certain amount of craftsmanship and creativity, it's very 'artist' centered.
2) Second Life can't maintain a population, I'd say only 5% of all MMORPG players still play it. It's just not that great.
3) Linden Dollar transactions for cash are low so it's hard to make a buck.
4) Visuals and lag are not very good.

That being said there are a ton of possibilities for MMORPGs and if designers start really thinking about it they can be a huge resources to just about every business sector out there. You had mentioned that there is a huge amount of people playing MMORPGs (not to mention games in general), which is true. I missed opportunity I saw recently is Budget Hero, which is a game that was created to inform people about how the US budget is spent each year. It allows you to choose several goals and then allows you to make changes to try and balance the budget while trying to meet those goals, without busting the bank. Now if this game had actually been a little more comprehensive and if they had set up a way to retain the data of each individual who played it, the government could use thousands of people's ideas on how to fix the budget. Among all those entries I'm sure there would have been many options that a politico might not have thought of. Co-op gaming can be used to gather all kinds of data and idea like this, creating a hive mind to answer questions and accomplish goals. If a website like http://galaxyzoo.org can help scientists identify a million galaxies in record time, utilizing online participation, why couldn't there be a game to do it even faster?