Video: The Next Digital Marketing Frontier

The numbers to quantify the shift speak for themselves.

• YouTube receives more than 100 million unique visitors and streams more than 6 billion videos monthly, according to Nielsen.
  
• Users viewed 33.2 billion videos during the month of December 2009, according to comScore.
  
• 86.5 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video in December 2009, according to comScore.

Manny Rivas, Search Engine Watch, Apr 8, 2010

Read the Article [Click Here]

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U.S. Internet users watched 32.4 billion videos in January with Google Sites ranking as the top U.S. video property with 12.8 billion videos. YouTube.com accounted for nearly 99 percent of all videos viewed at the property.

Wow these are incredible numbers

Comscore Report [see here]

So why is having a Social Media presence important?

According to a recent post by By Tessa Wegert, ClickZ, Apr 8, 2010

New Reports Underscore Benefits of Social Marketing


1.Trusting Brands more when they use Social Networks too.
The first is a study executed by custom market research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey >>CONSUMERS ENGAGED VIA SOCIAL MEDIA ARE MORE LIKELY TO BUY, RECOMMEND<< [read here] and iModerate Research Technologies that reveals consumers are considerably more likely to make a purchase from a brand they follow on Facebook and Twitter, as well as to recommend that brand to friends. Among consumers polled, 51 percent of Facebook users and 67 percent of Twitter users said they are more likely to buy from the brands they "friend" or follow, while 60 percent of Facebook users and 79 percent of Twitter users are more likely to recommend those brands to others.

2. Second: Digital Face = Authentic!
Consumers found that Internet users now expect businesses to have "some digital face - whether it's on FB or Twitter," otherwise the opinion may be that they are "not really with it or in tune with the new ways to communicate with customers." REPORT>>Comparing User Engagement across Seven Interactive and Social-Media Ad Types.<< [read here]

Finding>> "respondents indicated that they would be most likely to buy products from a brand with a corporate profile with fans, as well as recommend that brand to friends."

Read more of Teresa's missives at [Tessa Wegert on ClickZ]

Time Spent on Social Media Sites up 82% Year over Year

What are you doing to be part of this revolution?
Look at these numbers by Nelisen (respected survey and media use advocate)

...consumers spent more than five and half hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in December 2009, an 82% increase from the same time last year

Neilsen Report [read here]

SEO: Key words and other considerations: by Mark Jackson ClickZ March 31 2010

Here are some basics that all web sites should have... I have taken some of the most salient points from a recent article by Mark Jackson and reproduced them here...he is very succinct in a couple of paragraphs.
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Search Engines are simple creatures that are simply trying to deliver the most relevant results for the searcher. So, if you're trying to make your Web site show up for keywords which do not accurately describe what it is you do or sell, please try again.

Step One: Keywords

Before you even get into writing a bunch of copy or changing your title tags, research the keywords you want to target. There are many, many tools that can help you with keyword research (and a lot of SEOs use more than one). One free tool is Google Keyword Tool [try it here]. Keep things very basic; let's be sure that we find two to three keywords/phrases that accurately describe each page of your Web site. Let's be sure that these are words which aren't merely important to the CEO, but that there is actually search volume behind these selections. If you want to take things to the next level, also look at things like Google Trends [go here] to make sure that you are selecting keywords which are perhaps growing in popularity rather than on their way down.

Step Two: Competitive Analysis

Again, keeping things simple (you can really get into the weeds here), get your spreadsheet open and make a list of the top 10 or so Web sites that you often see ranking for keywords that you are interested in targeting. Do what you can to remove personalization from your search results. Once you've created your list of targeted competitors, let's at least check a couple of things to see if we can compete for these keywords. The simplest thing to do is a site:www.nameofsite.com query on Yahoo Site Explorer. To do this, go to yahoo.com, type in (without the quotes; obviously replacing "nameofthesite" with the actual URL of the competitor) "site:www.nameofthesite.com," and hit "Web Search." When you do this, you will get a list of the pages that are shown in Yahoo's index. You will also see the number of "inlinks," as well. To check the inlinks, you'll want to use the drop down to select "except from this domain" so that you are not counting links from that domain, but rather links from other domains.

Competitive analysis is important because you want to spend your time focused on optimizing for keywords that you have any chance - at all - to rank for/get traffic from.

If your Web site is a meek 10 pages deep, and the competitors are averaging 500 pages of content, more than likely, you are going to need to create a lot more pages of content or select keywords that aren't as competitive. If the competitors that you are targeting have over 1,000 links from other Web sites (not that quantity is everything), and you have five, chances are you are going to have to select some less competitive keywords or find creative methods for generating some link love.

Step 3: Title Tags

In our "E-Commerce Site Clinic," there were many, many Web sites that shared a common issue. Horrible title tags.

So, what makes for a good title tag? SEOs will debate this, but in my opinion, you want to write a title tag that has your most important/competitive keyword (phrase) listed first. You want to limit the title tag to around 66 characters (including spaces). Some SEOs practice writing title tags that read very naturally. More often than not, I recommend writing title tags which look a little something like this: "Keyword Phrase 1 | Keyword Phrase 2 | Keyword Phrase 3." Sometimes there's only one keyword phrase targeted to a page and sometimes I will recommend three.

I don't recommend having a home page title tag that reads something like "Company A - Home Page." You would be surprised by how many title tags actually do say "home page."

Make sure that every page of your Web site has a unique title tag which is actually descriptive of the content on that page.

This brings me to my final point...

Step 4: Content

When you review e-commerce Web sites, you will see a lot of Web sites that are strong in images and weak in text. Every company will say the same thing, "images are what tell our story." Well, the truth is, text can tell a story too. Your product pages should have some descriptive copy to accompany that image. Try to write at least 200 to 250 words of copy for each page of your Web site. Perhaps, even more for your home page. Don't get spammy. Just write something that is descriptive of what you do, what your product does, what your product is made of, etc. You never know when someone is going to search by color, size, or other descriptive terms.

[read more]
Author: SEO: Dynamic Field, for Sure...But Some Things Never Change
By Mark Jackson, ClickZ, Mar 31, 2010

Social Media Marketing Rules (by Harry Gold - ClickZ March 30, 2010)

I have yet to find a better statement about what a company should be doing regarding Social Media and why it is important. Long live the social networks... down with Marketplace sites!

… you can't run a social media marketing program without a strong knowledge of SEO (define). Without SEO expertise, you lose the extra benefit of universal search [Defined] and inbound links [define backlink]…

Social content development: SEO or social media marketing? Both. Video production, tweeting, and Facebook posts are not just for SEO - that is a huge amount of effort just to get links. We do it to create a powerful standalone social channel. However, that does not mean it should not be infused with keywords, links, and content that drive the search rankings [define Page Rank] of your site and help that content to pop in Google Universal Search [Google Press Release], like video and image results. You want your socially distributed content to help your site pop and you want it to pop in the engines on its own!

Go to article [click here]
(click on the link to read all of Harry's rules)

Search and Rescue: How to Become Findable and Shareable in Social Media ~ by Brian Solis of Searchengine Watch March 2010

As many of you know I read a lot of newsletters about how to market on the Internet… probably too many.

This article I have attached, “Search and Rescue: How to Become Findable and Shareable in Social Media” By Brian Solis, one of the leading authors on the subject, reviews relevant trends that show why and how our program is the most effective way and the way of the future to get a message (listing) in front of a consumer (prospect).
1. Consumers are relying less on “marketplace sites” like AutoTrader, cars.com, Zillow or Trulia to find their information
2. Social Networks (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter…) are more relevant than Google
3. The interconnectivity of a program is key to success.. you need to be posting to all of these to be effective and create the “Hub effect”

Core Quote:
“As social networks gain in prominence, the amount of relevant information within each ecosystem increases in value and, as such, we deliberately seek content within the networks in which we engage…Destination sites (Zillow Trulia) across the board are losing traffic and ultimately favor, simply because destinations are obsolete as intended or designed. The days of the traditional "start page" are coming to an end, only to be replaced with the "attention dashboard" -- a dedicated application that aggregates the activity of those we follow in social networks into a series of digestible streams.

Don’t miss the side bar in the link provided below about “Competing for Attention”

While this article gets a bit technical it offers the core insight and validation about an approach many of us are taking to help our clients and now exposes it as a MAJOR trend in the marketplace.. of which we were ahead about 18 months… nice to see it coming out in print.

Go to article [click here]