Quotes Of Note

"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

 Albert Einstein

A Small Business & A Smart Marketing Model

This is a great example of how a small business can engage customers. Take a look and see if you can find a way to relate this to your own business!...Bet you can!

Chicago-based custom camera package sales and rental company Zacuto has put forth an interesting marketing model for its business: a slate of original web series programming focused on content creation which highlight the store’s products and resources. According to the “Content” page on the Zacuto website, “Not only do we provide excellent customer service for our customers, but we strive to be a information resource in general. Whether it be current topics of the day we discuss in our FilmFellas webisodes, or testing the newest cameras and providing real world results and experiences through many of our videos.”

Do You Have A Social Media Strategy?

A recent study by  R2integrated took a close look at the differences between the marketers who had a solid social media strategy in place versus those without one.

One major finding was that those who responded that their company had profited or increased revenues using social media were almost twice as likely to have a formal social media strategy.

R2integrated CEO Matt Goddard says, “The data compiled suggests that marketers clearly recognize the need for, and see the potential of, social media, but are still trying to develop models that increase real engagement which then leads to profitability.

The overall study took a close look at the differences between the marketers who had a solid social media strategy in place versus those without one.

Another interesting fact from the study was that the perception of social media differed depending on whether the marketer had a social media strategy in place.  Check out the chart below to see how the two different categories perceived social media overall.

Useful Research Tools Your Competitors Don’t Know About

Optimizing web content for the keywords and phrases that your prospects actually use to search is standard operating procedure for anyone wanting to draw search traffic.

Every SEO expert will start with this kind of research as the foundation. The problem is that competition of these phrases can be fierce and keeping up with changes and trends is tough.

Smart marketers are digging deeper and deeper into the emerging heap of real time search data and finding golden opportunities to grab trending topics, news, and unique ways to create and optimize blog posts, videos and web pages based on the conversations that are hot and happening right now.

Below are five relatively unknown tools that can give you insight and a competitive advantage when it comes to determining the best topics for your new content and how to adjust existing content to rise in the search engines.

1. Topsy – Think of Topsy as a people trend engine for Twitter. Topsy looks at the way people are connected and the conversations they are having with each other all over the web.

2. YouTube Keyword Tool – Most people are familiar with Google’s keyword research and related search tools, but did you know that YouTube (the second largest search engine) has the same tools? By visiting and using these tools you can find some great insights about video topics that are hot and ways to optimize your video content to take advantage of what people are searching for on YouTube.

3. Facebook Posts by Everyone – There aren’t many ways to track what’s going on inside of Facebook (unless you are a large advertiser) but you can use the search function to do searches and get some insight into who is talking about key phrases and how you might join those conversations. Make sure you click on the posts by everyone and not just your friends. You might also consider taking a look at the search tool Kurrently.

4. WordTracker Question Search – WordTracker is the paid keyword research tool of choice for most serious SEO folks, but they also have a number of great free tools. One of my favorites is the question search tool. A growing number of searches are questions posed by folks looking for something. This tool allows you to find search volume for questions related to your key phrases. When trying to determine blog post content, this is a killer place to look. If you can answer the questions people are asking most, you’ll score some big long tail search results.

5. Bing xRank – xRank is focused on capturing what’s hot right now. There are a number of trending monitoring tools, including Google Trends, but Bing’s is a sleeper and returns richer results in my opinion.

Finding ways to mine and monitor the real time conversations and using this data to inform your content is a powerful way to stay on top of what your market is looking for and one step ahead of your competition.

How Important Is Marketing On YouTube?

 Will Richmond/VideoNuze

Want a sense of just how far YouTube has evolved from its scruffy user-generated roots to a premier site for big brand launches? Then head over to YouTube.com now and you'll see huge rotating rich media campaigns running for VISA, with a tie-in for the new Disney/Pixar film Toy Story 3 (opening tomorrow) and for Xbox's new Kinect motion-sensing feature (the "Wii-killer" unveiled earlier this week at E3).

From a brand launch perspective, these are about as big as they get, with huge money and franchises at stake for all of the companies involved, not to mention the positive or negative career impact for the marketers driving the media strategies at these companies. The fact that both are advertising prominently on YouTube says volumes about the site's importance in the online advertising world and its evolution from its UGC start.

It wasn't that long ago when YouTube was derided an un-monetizable jumble of amateurish clips. It's also worth noting that, as best I can tell, neither the Kinect nor VISA/Toy Story 3 campaigns are running on Yahoo, AOL or MSN right now, the traditional online homes for big brand launches. Now imagine when YouTube is available on TVs via Google TV and you get a sense of just how important YouTube is going to be, and how strategic it has become for Google which is trying to expand beyond search ads.

Quotes Of Note

On how Social Media has changed the world of marketing:

"It's Not Who You Know Anymore....It's Who Knows YOU!"

Rocky James/West Gate Media

2010 Promises Massive Digital Video Adoption — and Advertising Potential

Meghan Keane/Econsultancy

If there was any doubt among media buyers about putting money into online video advertising, 2010 should be the year to change that. Consumers are increasingly turning to the digital space to watch video. Moreover, the influx of professionally produced content is making the digital space more friendly to large advertisers.

As with most any medium, if the eyeballs are there, advertisers will follow. Now it's just up to the medium to deliver on the predictions coming in for the next year.

According to a new survey from eMarketer, video content is being consumed online at a rapidly growing clip. eMarketer found a quarter of Internet users were watching TV online in 2008. Almost 30% did so in 2009. And 77% of all internet users in the U.S. will watch videos online by 2014.

Hulu has played a huge part in expanding the audience for online video viewing. According to comScore, Hulu ranked second only to YouTube in overall streams viewed in April, with an audience of 38.7 million monthly unique visitors.

In the past year, the quantity of professionally produced "made-for-online" video has greatly expanded.  And because the content is improving, digital is no longer a place that advertisers are wary of. User-generated-content has long been a topic that scares brands. But even YouTube has greatly expanded its inventory of professionally produced content online. In addition, Netflx' streaming video option is getting users more comfortable watching feature content online.

Among people who already watch video regularly online, half are streaming TV shows according to eMarketer's numbers. In 2011, that number will jump to 56%.

And those numbers get much higher for younger viewers. A recent report from Retrevo found that 29% of all people under 25 get all or most of their TV online, compared with only 8% of the entire video-watching population. Meanwhile, Andersen Analytics' recent survey of 1000 college students found that 86% of 18- to-24-year-olds surveyed identified as online video watchers. But in the previous week, 69% of respondents had watched an entire TV episode or movie online. That's a significant number for advertisers to take note.

And the growth in full-length video watching is not limited to younger viewers. According to Ipsos, the number of people watching full-length movies online more than doubled between September 2008 and October 2009.

Advertisers are taking notice. Chris Allen, director of video innovation for Starcom USA, tells MediaPost:

"It seems to be an advantage to bring digital along with TV as we start to get into pricing discussions.

Of the 361 industry executives surveyed for MediaPost's "Video Marketplace Study, a majority of respondents who currently are not involved in online video campaigns plan to work on them in the next year.

With adoption of devices like the iPad on the rise, the case is increasingly being made for digital video advertising. Interaction rates (which measure the number of people who expand and engage with ads) ranged from .9% to 1.5% in the first month after the iPad release, up to 6 times the number for comparable expandable ads on desktop computers. The iPad is just one way that the digital video viewing experience is being streamlined and improved. And though currently high interaction rates may be due to the novelty of the platform, the improved experience for watching video and surfing online is prime for advertising. An idea that has not gone unnoticed among advertisers.