Social Media | Glenn Ward

Integrating Online Video into your Digital Marketing Strategy

Also see,
Introduction to Search Engine Optimisation
Beyond SEO – The right traffic to your site
An Introduction to Google Webmaster Tools
Introduction to Google Analytics and other website analytical tools
Introduction to Pay Per Click Campaigns
PPC Pay Per Click Marketing and purchase process
Integrating online video into your digital marketing strategy

Everyone is banging on about the power of video and how companies can use it in deliverables, and as part of their Marketing collateral and I agree, it is a powerful tool, without it I would be jobless, but before you start to plan your next epic, pause to think about it’s delivery and the cost implications of this.

I have spent a year now developing a video service in a company and to some extent an industry that until recently could not see how video could benefit the product. The main issue has not been producing the video or encouraging execs to come up with new ways in which to use video, it has been the means of delivery. Like any digital marketing there is absolutely no point in producing something that is not viewed by a high volume of people and more importantly, performs a function. Similarly to the everyone creating a Facebook page merely because they can mentality, putting video out there and doing it badly has the adverse effect on proving your understanding of the landscape and damages the brand rather than enhances it.

So what are your options? Well of course you can invest in a bespoke video delivery platform, buy something off the shelf that meets the companies needs but this is large initial step and a large spend, especially if you have not been involved in video in the past. Much like eBay is no longer an online garage sale, blogs are no children’s online diaries, Youtube is definitely not an online repository for unprofessional home videos, in fact Youtube is now one of the largest online search engines and any digital marketer cannot ignore this.

So how do you make it work for your product? Well, while you cannot set out to make a viral video, you can maximise the exposure you receive from your production by setting clear objectives and planning far beyond that of uploading your one video to an account on YouTube and hoping people might come across it. My biggest rule is allowing people to decide upon their own browsing habits. Don’t dictate to them how they should arrive at your product because you’ll loose them at the first awkward click routine or navigation that takes more than a few seconds of their time. Although many of the online spaces provide a quick and easy means of providing link building to your website, pay every one due attention, think about the usability issues and make sure there are no awkward, dead or complicated links to your pages. Don’t presume that a person will take the time to navigate to the correct page on your site if you dump them on your homepage. More often than not they won’t complete this part of the journey.

So, back to video. Take time producing your online space whether it be on YouTube, Vimeo etc. Remember that just uploading it is not enough, promote your video with appropriate means, social media, press releases, email marketing etc. If you have produced your video well and it does the job then send the user to the relevant page on your site and to your product.

If you are in doubt about your video, usability or quality of the landing page then don’t do it! Unfortunately it’s far easier to damage a brand than it is to build it.

Understanding RSS feeds and making them work for you

RSS feeds even now are something that people don’t really understand and utilise to their full advantage. Twitter is a great example of a site that took this sort of concept, created a searcheable platform, easy to update that users just seemed to just get, possibly helped by the status update function of facebook. So, how does RSS work and how can you make best use of them?

As a user they are a stream of information that you can subscribe to, the provider then adds to their stream on a regular basis but rather than you having to check back from time to time to see if their is new content, you asign a desktop program or website to do that for you. Each time you load that software it will check the feeds address to look for update and download them for you, just like your emails. This means at a glance you can see there is new information and read it at your leisure, or not.

As a provider you should consider RSS feeds for exactly the reasons above. Your users often will not have a not in their diaries to check your we site once a week to see if you have any updates, if they are subscribed to your feed they don’t have to, but they are as up to date as they possibly could be. Also a major point to note that search engines favour sites who’s content is continually updated and RSS feeds provide a simple and efficient way to do this. Granted, many won’t be able to write the XML document that powers a feed but there are programs and integrations that will simplify this process, I’ll save that for a different post but if you are keen to get started and add an RSS feed to your web page or website but do not have any coding knowledge why not look into a blog such as WordPress or Typepad as your RSS engine. That way you have a nifty little editor that will allow you to create fancy looking stories and your subscribable RSS feed will be created as you go.

iTunes (podcasting)
My first engagement with rss feeds and XML for that matter came about while studying my Design for Digital Media degree at Chichester University. I made it a personal learning project completely understand the workings of video podcasts, not using a third party solution but using a host, writing my own XML document and uploading my videos to a website. So podcasting is another great example of RSS feeds and uses the iTunes platform as the RSS reader, each time you load your iTunes the program checks your subscriptions for updated content and downloads it, simple as that. Don’t be scared of them!

Keeping up to date with technology and software

No matter how much time you manage to save through innovative thinking, technology improvements etc you always manage to fill the saved time with something new. So, how do keep up with technology and still do your day job. The short answer is with great difficultly but I shall share a few things I do to make life easier and a few things to think about for the future.

Firstly, I have a few magazines that I really identify with, I currently read .net magazine, stuff, wired digital video (when I find somewhere that sells it) video editor and the online Layers Magazine. Granted I don’t often manage the time to read them cover to cover but Reading the articles that really interest you watching a few tutorials and trying out the trials softwares usually keep my brain ticking over. The trick is to use the time that you would otherwise be waiting around, I sometimes put video tutorials on my desktop and delete them as and when I have watched them, this provides me opportunity to make use of passenger time in the car, on the train etc. Also if you keep up to date with softwares make the first thing you do when you get hold of a new version, watch the video tutorials and have a play with the additions. Often they cover all the major improvements to that version and keeps you up to speed.

If I’m honest, I am not a newspaper reader but recent shifts in social media has enabled me to absorb news type information that I choose to on the train at a glance. I use my Twitter account in conjunction with my blog, which I’ll get onto in a minute but by following some carefully chosen twitterers I can quickly browse and read the things I want to read about very efficiently. I also sign up to groups on website such as chinwag, this way I get continuous emails from the conversations going on from people like me talking about subjects that are relevant to what I do, there is no need to feel you need to take part but it’s a great way to keep up to date and possibly make new connections. At University I was not a massive fan of blogging, I thought blogging about my weekly progression about my digital media course was completely pointless and never received any viewers. I now have my own blog, as you know! Mainly to share the things I have researched in the past in order to hopefully save time learning, but also I regularly visit choice sites that I know write in a succinct manor and are up to date with the latest software, technology and goings on in Market Research world. I currently read TechCrunch, The Tech Sage among others and continually check back to the Apple site, Adobe, Revostock, and my favourite tech brands.

Although the aforementioned social media platforms provide an alternative networking platform I still think face to face networking is invaluable. Attending trade shows, going on training courses and showing your face at events is a great way to keep in touch and up to date.

One of my biggest time savers is not where and how to find the data but automating your daily routines that eat up your time. For example, getting to grips with RSS feeds and establishing an RSS reader that you are comfortable with (a post on RSS feeds to come soon) this means that information is delivered to you and you do not have to go out and fetch it, it also means that you can read it at your leisure when you do not have an Internet connection. Another prime example is the amount of time I spend on eBay, to speed things up I save my regular searches, motorbike, favourite windsurfing brands etc and set the interval for eBay to email me a summary and an end date for the emails to stop. Similarly write routines on your operating system, I use automator on the mac to get the computer to work for you, open programs, perform backups etc if you regularly do it, automate it!

Beyond SEO, getting the right traffic for your product

You may often wonder why you might get such a high bounce rate on your websites pages and how you can improve this. For those who religiously follow their web analytics and spend time and money on ppc accounts, understanding your organic traffic can also help improve the quality of your traffic. When I first started to look into search engine optimisation I presumed it was all about achieving perfect accessibility, perfect code and checking in an seo browser to make sure your title, meta, and content achieved 100%. I later moved into the world of ecommerce and realised that it’s all very well being optimised, but it was as important, if not more so to be achieving high positions for the right search terms and following this up with content. A real life example I thought about recently, came about when walking past a little arcade that contained a computer shop / repairer. In the window he had placed a remote controlled helicopter. I went in and asked if he had any more helicopters to which he replied, ‘no… I just put that in the window to get people through the door’. My point is that the likilyhood of someone in the market for a helicopter is unlikely to just pop in and want their computer fixed or to buy a stick of ram. So, this is where it gets even more time consuming and complicated, whilst you think about all the points made in the introduction to search engine optimisation, you must also be thinking about the copy on the page and the words you use. For this reason, it always baffles me when companies offer to come in and optimise your site, unless they completely know your product and industries, they will optimise your site but you will attract all the helicopter buyers!

So, you will develop your own technique to get the balance right, you will often have no choice on the content of your page if you are running somebody else’s site, but you must insist on the freedom to rewrite the content. Use google adwords keyword tool to assess the key words you have used and use the traffic estimator to best drive traffic. Once you have your content choose the highest traffic drivers (keywords) to build into your h1 tags, follow this up with a similar technique for the page title, then for now copy this page title into your meta description. Based on your choice of keywords for the page content, copy 5 to 10 of the most used AND most relevant to your site into the meta keywords. Don’t make the mistake of listing as many possible keywords as you can think of into the meta keywords this will have the opposite effect and google will see it as spamming. Give it a few days and check the site in domain tools to see how each individual element we have just talked about scores. Once you start tweaking things, monitoring is extremely important, record your figures and make one change at a time, if you see an improvement then implement it site wide. If you see things get worse you know what had this effect and you can change it straight back.

Intoduction to Search Engine Optimisation – SEO Learn at lunch

Using free VOIP and online chat tools to improve your companies communication

Companies often seem afraid of the word free, it seems that a paid for product and someone accountable is the popular choice, but the Internet has brought about companies that have re-invented their business model and found new ways to make their businesses profitable, which provides us with a solution that far exceeds that of a conventional business. Software is a prime example and should be used to best effect. At about the time companies banned MSN on the work computer there was a bigger lesson to be learnt from this. Employees were spending more time chatting to the friends because it was easy and a relatively private affair to do so. More importantly one of the largest companies in the world were researching how the user interacted with the platform, which led to the ability to include status updates, so others new that you were out to lunch or busy.

I recently attended a training course for an ecommerce software platform and the company had embraced free applications. Every employee on a 3 story building had Skype installed on their PC and they all had a Skype account using their work email address, resulting in that anyone could sign in from any computer (improving the ability to hotdesk for starters) but here is the scenario that got me thinking. During the session (from the training room on the bottom floor) I posed a question that the tutor could not answer, he looked at his Skype and said “frank” is away from his desk at the moment but I’ll ask home and we’ll come back to it. So, what were the real world solutions in that situation – blag an answer? A popular choice! Pick up the phone only to realize that “Frank” is not at his desk? Or physically go to the first or second floor leaving the trainee alone in the room only to find that “Frank” is currently tied up on a conference call and cannot be disturbed. In the new scenario we were able to maintain the flow of the session and when “frank” had finished having a cigy he was able to report back, the tutor was able to read the information and relay it back at a convenient time.

Sure these things have security implications but we shouldn’t be put off by the fact that the software, because of this companies have far outgrown the competition that charge for a similar service. During times of travelling budgets being cut and volumes of money being spent on video conferencing systems, there are relatively few issues to overcome to integrate into your business and how cool would it be if in later releases you could call direct to say a Polycom unit, with the simple addition of a webcam this could in theory be possible and would encourage breaking down the fear of using the high tech solutions in the workplace.

Yes, there will be bandwidth issues and a peripheral cost but I’m guessing for small companies this would not cause too many problems with modern day broadband speeds and depending on the communications set up a of larger companies you may need to increase the allocation or re-balance the bandwidth allocated to data, that’s not my area of expertise, but I have spoken to the people in the know. Admittedly, I have not calculated the ROI, but the improvement to efficiencies and potential large scale cost saving make this concept a very interesting proposition for consideration.

In particular in the context it is important to make clear your intentions of quick and easy contact with your customers. Even today there are websites out there who believe it would be more efficient to bury their contact details and even then only make an email address or contact form. Although many security fears have been broken down with shoppers and shopping online, this is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. Shoppers browsing a new store online will want to know if they can return an item and and exercise their consumer rights if something goes wrong. If you have a high bounce rate on your product landing pages and do not freely present your contact details, this is often the problem. At the same time it is important not to bombard your customer, provide them with the popular and most accesible means of communication and allow them the choice. If you have a chat assistant installed, watch your customers as they browse your site and identify those who need help before you initiate a chat. Undoubtidly for the less tech saavy, you are more likely to scare them off than encourage them to buy if they were not looking for assistants.

Just a thought!

Work Arounds – Getting imapmyrun to work on your iPhone

Although imapmyrun is buggy, I still like to use it for the social network benefits as it seamlessly notifies my map my run account, Twitter and Facebook when I hit save.

The only error I have not found a fix for is the spiking of the GPS, sometimes I get to the end of my run and the Reading will show something ridiculous like 72 miles. I think this may be down to other applications running simultaneously.

The main issues are the weak GPS signal, which if you start the app a few minutes before setting out it often fixes, although I start it off with a weak signal and it is fine.

Make sure you have your data push turned off. I think we are asking to much if you expect your poor iPhone to handle iPod, iMapmyrun and receiving your emails at the same time.

The other major bug is the saving of the run via 3G. My first run ends at the gym where I wish to save. Every time I receive an error when I try. The only way I have managed to get around this is to come out of the app and reload it, when it restarts you will see the message “you have unsaved runs” hit save and more often than not you will be successful.

An annoyance that should also be addressed if the developers read this post, is the fact that after you hit stop the pace and time continues to count. Alongside the save error issue this produces an inaccurate recording nearly every run.

My experience of Social Media and how I predict the linking of online spaces and applications.

My first experience of online Social Media was Myspace. After being introduced to the promotional power of the platform through a friend in the music industry I thought I’d give it a go. Although I think if I am honest the the largest breakthrough for me in keeping in touch with my friends had to be in 1998 when I got my first mobile phone and discovered text messaging (this will become apparent later), I later discovered Facebook and used this for my personal social networking mainly because it excelled in the uploading and tagging of pictures which far exceeded the capabilities of Myspace. I had no need for flicker or other image banks because as far as I was concerned Facebook did it all and I soon reduced my usage of Myspace. I was aware of twitter and until recently didn’t see a purpose for a platform that merely mimicked the Facebook status field, although I was fascinated that it could be updated from a mobile phone whilst going about your everyday business.

It all became clear when I recently upgraded to an iPhone. I already used a PDA phone that integrated well with my PC applications but was always keen to take this further, the iPhone allowed me to do this. The free internet access made a huge difference but it was as I installed apps I realised the true power.

My prediction: Quite obviously we see trends in social media and if you read the magazines they will say this one is in and that one is out, which I believe is true to some extent. My prediction is linking, not just that of your online spaces but also the linking of your devices (which is why I mentioned the forgotten mobile phone earlier) and now apps that offer massive extensions to your device. Here is an early example; I use mapmyrun to work out how far I run, which in itself has become a social network site with profile and the ability to share runs and view others, but none of my friends are on Mapmyrun!! So I installed iMapmyrun on my iPhone which automatically maps my training using the inbuilt GPS then sends my data to the site when I complete my run, upon receiving the data the website then updates my tweet on twitter and adds it to a box on Facebook, Genius! And all I needed to do was hit save, a perfect example of the linking of web 2.0 and mobile applications.

So I have Facebook, I have myspace, twitter, mapmyrun etc, but I do not have the time to maintain them all. As an experiment I have taken this one stage further. I have set up my first blog to provide the link in the chain (in fact I think this will be my first post). In theory my twitter which I can operate from my phone now updates my Facebook status and is included in a mini feed both on my Facebook page and my blog, this is also fed by the app iMapmyrun which also populates a space on my Facebook. Facebook will also offer a direct link to my Myspace profile and each blog entry now offers the option to post to Facebook and the users can post each blog post to their own profiles using “share this”, now one update from my phone will spread across my own network. I also have plans for my Youtube and Ebay accounts! But I am aware of how much I have written! This will all be monitored with Google analytics installed on the blog and sitemaps regularly submitted to all major search engines.

A little bit round the houses but here is how I think this has implications on research. I recently researched QR codes, one of the largest mobile phone functions in Japan that despite been taken onboard by some large UK companies still doesn’t seem to have caught on. As I discussed with a colleague this in itself has research implications although I think it carries a greater message. It offers a choice to the user that they do not receive when they are stopped in the street, answer a call or a knock on the door. In an age where most now fear identity theft and not all are embracing shifts in technology, I believe it to be beneficial that the user now believe it was their decision to be forthcoming with information and this is where apps, applications and social network style platforms can play a role.

My final thought and an example of how this has been achieved is Pruhealth. I found out through the Martin Money Saving Expert website forum that I could achieve free gym membership if I signed up for Pruhealth medical insurance and became a frequent user. They have designed a point scoring system whereby the more points you score the cheaper your gym membership. The clever trick is that my Pruhealth account links (reoccurring theme) to my nectar card and Pruhealth know when I buy fruit and veg (I’m sure they know when I buy chocolate bars and pork scratchings too, but I don’t get points for that). Pruhealth also follow my ebay account and know when I buy sporting goods, again I’m sure they are not just watching my healthy purchases. Most importantly and in my case, every time I swipe my card at Nuffield Health Centre formally Cannons gym and for others it might be Virgin Active or LA Fitness they know about it. This has allowed for me to achieve £4 a month health insurance and free gym membership, but most importantly this is achieved because Pruhealth are safe in the knowledge that I am a low risk customer.

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