Tuesday, August 31, 2010

It’s time for the anti-social media guru meme to die

When I’m about to deliver a presentation at a conference or meeting, odds are I’ll be introduced as “a social media guru.” I cringe at the reference. The first thing I tell the audience is that I’m not a social media guru; I’m an organizational communicator specializing in online communication and social media has naturally evolved as a focus of my work.

My defensiveness is a reaction to the assault leveled at anyone calling himself a “social media guru.” Need proof? Alex Blom thinks they should be trampled by elephants. Search the blogosphere for the phrase and you get headlines like…

• The Wicked Lies that Social Media Gurus Weave
• Social Media Gurus—How to Spot a Scammer
• Dear Social Media Gurus, Ninjas and Dragon-Slayers: Please Go Away
• Social media “gurus” and bloggers are egotistical jerks

Who would want to be lumped into that group? On the spectrum of despised professions, social media gurus fall somewhere between Washington insiders and oil-and-gas executives.

The hatred isn’t reserved only for “gurus.” Ninjas are also called out, as are mavens, masters, experts, jedis and rockstars.

Interestingly, all of the vitriol aimed at social media gurus is coming from social media…um….experts. Here’s how the authors of each of the posts listed above describe themselves in the bios on their blogs and websites:

• CEO of…an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization
• Marketer extraordinaire and social media addict
• Deploying Social Media strategy for Silicon Beach Training
• ...a particular passion for social media, mobile technology, politics, and marketing. With experience on capital (sic) hill, in nonprofits, PR, marketing, and activism, he’s seen social media and mobile technology used in a variety of contexts and is constantly looking forward to the future
• ...journalist, producer, and owner of the custom publishing and social media firm…

That’s right. Everyone calling BS on social media gurus is a social media guru. They don’t use the word, but I’d be willing to bet real money that often they get introduced that way when they speak. (And I can’t resist calling out someone who attacks social media gurus, has experience on Capitol Hill but can’t freakin’ spell it correctly on his own freakin’ website.)

The hypocricy is so thick you can almost cut it with a ninja sword.

Nearly a year ago, Jason Falls asked, “Can we please get off the ego-driven, high-horse pedestal and shut the hell up about ‘social media gurus?’” Falls wields a lot of influence, but his plea has gone unheeded.

I’m renewing Falls’ entreaty. It probably won’t do any good because the ego-driven on their high-horse pedestals tend not to pay attention to reason. But here goes anyway: Shut the hell up about social media gurus. Don’t you have anything useful to blog about? Personally, I would never hire or recommend anyone who has posted an attack on social media gurus. Here’s my reasoning:

Gurus who aren’t

I know that much of the criticism is leveled at people with limited experience who hang out a shingle proclaiming themselves gurus. The self-proclaimed legitimate social media experts who author these anti-guru screeds appear to be warning prospective clients to beware.

But do you really think anyone who’d hire an unqualified contractor is reading the kinds of blogs that include posts blasting the blogger’s lower-caste competitors? Not likely. More realistic is that they were introduced by a colleague who went to school with the guru. They probably found the consultant that way because they don’t use social media themselves and don’t know any better.

There are also plenty of unqualified hacks who aren’t independent consultants and who don’t give themselves titles like “guru.” They work in marketing, advertising and PR agencies. They have titles like “account executive” and “creative director.” They have plenty of experience; just not with social media. They hate the idea of leaving billable hours on the table and figure social media can’t be too different from any other new channel that’s come along. Those clients the real experts are so worried about wouldn’t have a clue that they shouldn’t hire these pretenders because they haven’t had the temerity to print “guru” on their business cards.

This being the case, just who are these anti-guru posts aimed at? It seems to me they’re mainly written by insecure practitioners trying to bolster their own egos and puffed-up prima donnas lording their superiority over their peers in the echo chamber.

 

People who hire unqualified consultants

The real experts who vent against gurus are laboring under the mistaken belief that the gurus are using jedi mind tricks to dupe otherwise competent, savvy clients into hiring them. The fact is, if someone hires a social media consultant—regardless of what they call themselves—without checking their qualifications, they’re probably failing to check qualifications for everybody they hire. Hiring anybody to do anything without making sure they know what they’re doing means the client is equally clueless and deserves what he gets. Besides, it’s more work for the rest of us when we get called in to clean up their messes.

High praise

There’s a certain amount of hubris at play for anybody who calls himself a guru. But I’m done getting exercised when I’m introduced that way. If somebody else applies the label to you, it’s praise and you should accept it graciously. A guru, after all, “is one who is regarded as having great knowledge, wisdom and authority in a certain area, and who uses it to guide others (teacher),” according to Wikipedia.

Horrors! Who’d want to be known as one of those?

Lots of people would when they show up on a list like “40 Social Media Gurus to Inspire You on Satisfying Saturday.” Not one of those listed left a comment rejecting the label. One did say he was flattered to be included.

Don’t judge based on a title

Nobody would suggest that Shashi Bellamkonda is an unqualified hack. Bellamkonda, who manages social media for Network Solutions, has been honored for his work by organizations like the Society for New Communications Research. He has produced measurable results for his employer. He’s widely respected and often quoted. He also bears the title, “Social Media Swami.” Is it fair to dismiss Shashi’s qualifications because you think his title is silly?

Fast Company magazine used to run a feature about offbeat job titles. The column included real titles of real people like Intangible Asset Appraiser, Project Meanie, Director of Ethical Hacking, Idea Ambassador, VP of Happiness, Knowledge Sorceress, Creator of the Enlighted Orchard, Director of Emerging Thought, Digital Yenta and Cultural Czar. Before you make fun of any of these, read the accompanying articles to see what the individual with the offbeat titles does and the value he or she provides for his or her employer.

It’s another reason to judge people based on their qualifications, not their titles.

Enough already

It’s not that there aren’t good posts out there about what to look for when hiring a social media consultant. These add value. But the over-the-top attacks (trampled by elephants? really?) remind me more of playground chest-thumping and high school jocks arguing about whose is bigger. The authors of these posts may be thoroughly qualified to work in social media, but it doesn’t make them professional. In fact, I’m hard-pressed to find better examples of unprofessionalism than consultants who write these savage attacks. I’m sick to death of the anti-guru meme.

Surely we have better things to write about.

Monday, August 30, 2010

Infamy and Internet infamy: Is there a difference?

While taking a qucik glance at news headlines at the MSNBC site, I stopped to click through on one that read:

“Cat Bin Lady’s” Internet infamy grows

In case you missed it, this is the tale of UK resident Mary Bale, who gained notoriety after a video showing her dumping a cat in a garbage bin was posted online. Facebook groups have formed calling for a prison sentence. She has received death threats. Parody videos have appeared, including one in which someone wearing a Sylvester (of Warner Brothers cartoon fame) costume dumps a woman wearing a grey wig into a bin. The Sun developed a video game for its site that lets users slam a garbage bin lid on Bale every time her head pops out of the trash.

Ample content has been produced about Bale, her action and the firestorm it has unleashed. Less has been said about the idea that a story like that that once might have remained contained to the Net will now invariably cross online boundaries and reach people who aren’t spending time online. Is there another kind of infamy these days besides “Internet infamy?”

The headline strikes me as one that would have made sense five or 10 years ago. “It’s not a real scandal,” I used to hear people say, “it’s just the echo chamber on the Net.”

Today, though, the Net and other media through which scandals propagate have been so thoroughly mashed together that it doesn’t matter where one begins; it’ll spread through the Net, drawing even more attention from mainstream media and building into an avalanche. This is the consequence of an undeniable critical mass that has been reached online, evidenced by (among other things) half a billion active Facebook accounts.

In Bale’s case, it was 4chan that got the ball rolling. 4chan is an image-based bulletin board where anyone can post an image (or a video) and others can comment on it. According to a Gawker article, the video started out on YouTube where it “went viral” (I wsh there was a quantitative criterion for what that means) before it appeared on 4chan. It took readers only about four hours to identify Bale, leading to all manner of harrassment finally driving Bale into hiding.

There are points to be made here about privacy, as well. The video, captured by a family’s closed circuit TV camera used for security purposes at a nearby house, shows Bale on a quiet residential street, where most of us would presume, in the absence of a Google street view van, that we weren’t being recorded. And Bale was no doubt shocked to have been identified in less time than most police departments need to track down a suspect. Even her employer’s name and phone number were made public. As former Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy so famously pointed out more than a decade ago, “Privacy is dead; get over it.”

But the point here is that you can no longer relegate scandal or infamy to the Net. If it rises to the level of the scandal or infamy, then it’s everywhere. If you doubt it, check out the 500-plus mainstream news articles covering the story. From an organizational standpoint, shrugging off an online scandal could cost you precious time you could be spending communicating in order to protect your reputation.

The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #562: August 30, 2010

Content summary: Follow-up on survey samples; correction on Disney blog aggregation story from last show; listener comments discussion; 5 minutes on… the Oxford English Dictionary may become an online-only publication, ghost-blogging firms, new thriller sells more e-books than hardcovers, how the public views PR/advertising; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; News that Fits: Burson’s "State of Mobile Communications" report, Michael Netzley reports from Singapore on Pakistan and floods, meet the Chief Listening Officer, FTC issues order to PR firm to remove fake reviews, Dan York reports on video pictures books and more, Mark Story reports from inside the US federal government on enterprise 2.0 and gov 2.0; music from Alyshen; and more.

Get FIR:

• Download the MP3 file (26.1Mb, 65:09)
• Subscribe to the RSS feed
• Get the show at iTunes
• Get the FIR app for your iPhone

Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir; and Pollstream: helping you transform your communications goals into exciting strategies that will enable you to engage, educate and inform your customers and employees online, pollstream.com/fir/.

For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for August 30, 2010: A 65-minute podcast recorded live from Concord, California, USA, and Wokingham, Berkshire, England.

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the show notes home page for info.

• FIR #562 show notes at The New PR Wiki

Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

To stay informed about occasional FIR events (eg, FIR Live), sign up for FIR Update email news.

So, until Monday September 6…

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

If you’re not participating, you’re invisible

Much has been made of Leo Laporte’s screed against social media. Most intriguing to me is the action Leo is taking in response to the circumstances that motivated the post: giving up on Google Buzz and reactivating his semi-dormant blog.

In his post, titled “Buzz Kill,” TWiT network honcho Leo (of whom I’m a big fan, by the way) chronicles his discovery that none of the posts he made to Google Buzz have gone live since August 6. What distressed him was the fact that nobody noticed his absence:

It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves. All this time I’ve been pumping content into the void like some chatterbox Onan. How humiliating. How demoralizing…Social media, I gave you the best years of my life, but never again. I know where I am wanted. Screw you Google Buzz. You broke my heart.

I’m intrigued because blogs, last time I checked, fell under the social media label, as do podcasts—especially Leo’s shows, which are broadcast live to an audience that interacts with each other and the hosts in a chat room in addition to being available as recordings for subscription. And while you can’t leave a comment on the show notes page, there’s a FriendFeed room where conversations about show content take place.

For what it’s worth, Google reacted quickly, identifying what the company described as a “rare” bug: If any of your Buzz followers deleted their Google accounts, Buzz would automatically stop sending posts to the rest of your followers. Google is working to fix the problem.

Whether that explanation will soothe Leo’s ruffled feathers remains to be seen. By Sunday’s TWiT episode, he had retreated somewhat. In the meantime, reactions to his original post range from strong agreement to claims that Leo has become something of a prima donna. Doug Haslam’s contribution to the conversation makes some good points, notably that you shouldn’t blame the entire social media ecosystem just because one element failed. “If something is not working for you, move on,” Haslam writes.

Indeed. But there’s another important lesson that emerges from Leo’s experience:

If you’re not part of the conversation, you don’t exist.

I’ve heard this from a number of sources. It’s what Jack Holt, senior strategist for new and emerging media, told me when explaining the U.S. Department of Defense’s policy of encouring DoD personnel—from generals at the Pentagon to soldiers in the field—to participate in social media. The DoD is making Facebook, Twitter and other social destinations accessible through its own networks. It’s also what Katie Paine, the PR measurement goddess, has told recent audiences. Katie recounts how she reached out to her Twitter community for laptop recommendations when hers perished. After buying one, she wondered whether Lenovo and Toshiba had gone out of business. After all, nobody responding to her inquiry mentioned their products, which meant she didn’t explore the possibility of buying one.

The fact that nobody noticed Leo’s absence from Buzz isn’t surprising. He attributes this to “a vast echo chamber” in which “everybody is too busy shouting.” While that may be true of some people in some instances, in general it’s not the case.

First, “echo chamber” is a term that’s overused and misused. It refers to situations in which ideas, information or beliefs are amplified and reinforced within an enclosed space. That may have characterized social media once, but any review of the numbers of people engaged in social channels should make it clear that we have moved beyond a closed space.

Second, most people aren’t shouting. They’re sharing.

To be honest, I don’t check my Buzz stream very often. Buzz never really resonated with me. I only have 163 followers on Buzz, compared to nearly 9,000 on Twitter. It’s a no-brainer for me to concentrate my efforts where my followers are. I do cross-post to Buzz occasionally, which is ridiculously easy thanks to TweetDeck, and I’ve set up my tweets to show up on Buzz.

But if Buzz were important to ensuring people were thinking of me, you can be sure I’d pump up my activity there. And you can be damn sure I’d make sure my posts were appearing. These rivers of updates go by pretty quickly. Most people, even celebrities, are not conspicuous by their absence in these channels. As I glance at Buzz right now, this very moment, I see posts from Phil Wolff, Paull Young, Robert Scoble, Dagan Hdnderson, Tac Anderson, Tom Raftery, Chris Abraham, Shonali Burke, Pete Blackshaw, Rex Hammock, Anna Farmery, Todd Defren, Steve Lubetkin, Rob Clark, Irene Koehler, Dan York, Ron Ploof, Chris Brogan and Neville Hobson. I see the headlines, I make a judgment about whether the post would be interesting. I don’t wonder why there’s nothing there from Thomas vanderwal, Jeremiah Owyang, Kami Huyse, Chip Griffin, Guy kawasaki, Jeff Jarvis or even Leo Laporte. What’s there is there. What’s not is not on my radar.

Mark Ragan, who uses Twitter to drive traffic to Ragan Communications content, has this figured out. He schedules tweets throughout the day promoting the same links to ensure that the most number of his followers will likely have seen them. With nearly 20,000 followers, Mark hasn’t alienated anybody with his duplicate posts, most likely because most of them don’t see every tweet, just the ones flying by while they’re looking.

Blogs are different, as are podcasts. You publish once (although you can use Twitter and Buzz and the like to promote the posts). It’s likely to be one of only a few posts you’ll contribute all week. People follow your blog through RSS subscriptions and other means because they’re interested in you. With Twitter and Buzz, it’s more likely that they want to add you to the collective.

Using social media for business is a strategic activity that requires knowing what each channel is good for, noting putting all your money on one horse, and monitoring to make sure what you’re publishing is showing up where it should.

That way, you’ll exist.

Monday, August 23, 2010

The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #561: August 23, 2010

Content summary: Listeners’ comments and discussion; 5 minutes on… Have you heard of Facebook Stories (and Twitter Tales)?, books disruption: Seth Godin will no longer publish the old way and ads are coming, Disney invites bloggers to get aggregated, Skype etiquette; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; News That Fits: Dan York reports on serendipity and discovery, Michael Netzley in Singapore takes a look at mobile communications in Indonesia; music from A Band Called Quinn; and more.

Get FIR:

• Download the MP3 file (26.8Mb, 66:56)
• Subscribe to the RSS feed
• Get the show at iTunes
• Get the FIR app for your iPhone

Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir; and Pollstream: helping you transform your communications goals into exciting strategies that will enable you to engage, educate and inform your customers and employees online, pollstream.com/fir/.

For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for August 23, 2010: A 67-minute podcast recorded live from Concord, California, USA, and Wokingham, Berkshire, England.

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the show notes home page for info.

• FIR #561 show notes at The New PR Wiki

Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

To stay informed about occasional FIR events (eg, FIR Live), sign up for FIR Update email news.

So, until Monday August 30…

Friday, August 20, 2010

An overview of video SEO for communicators

I was struck by Shmulik Weller’s introductory statement in a recent Search Engine Land post on search engine optimization (SEO) for video:

This is the year in which we will see video grow from a “frill” some businesses occasionally include on their websites, to an essential, competitive differentiator that drives SEO and increases brand identification.

I agree unreservedly. Video is becoming a critical element of online communication. We’ve all seen the various numbers that support the trend, but it never hurts (and is kinda fun) to revisit some of the key statistics:

• The average Internet user watches 186 online videos each month (Source)
• 100-plus hours of video is uploaded to YouTube about every 4 minutes
• YouTube exceeds 2 billion views each day
• Cisco Systems anticipates that video will represent 90% of all consumer IP traffic and 64% of all mobile traffic by 2013.
• YouTube is the second-most used search engine after Google
• Facebook’s video views are up 239% in a single year; Facebook users watched 245 million videos in May of this year (Source)
• E-commerce sites that use product videos sell up to 45% more product, according to Internet retailer ReelSEO

You’ve no doubt seen plenty of other mind-boggling video stats.

User-generated content accounts for some of the surge in video, but the popularity of Hulu and the importance of video on ecommerce sites support the importance of institution-produced video.

The communications connection

While PR and organizational communication professionals probably won’t be shooting the videos that describe product on ecommerce sites, there’s plenty of opportunity for video to support other online communication. The Mayo Clinic’s Lee Aase, for example, uses a Flip camera and the Clinic’s YouTube site for brief interviews with doctors involved with new research. These videos have appeared in places such as The Wall Street Journal health blog.

Too many communicators—and their organizations’ leadership—still view video as something that requires a sizable budget for a production company. Marc Price, who produced the movie “Colin” for about $75, is encouraging teens to produce their own films considering the quality of the video cameras in their smartphones is better than that of the video camera he used to shoot his film.

Just about any PR-focused communication can be enhanced with a short video. And, as Weller argues in his post, optimizing that video for search is as important now as SEO for text became several years ago.

According to Forrester Research, videos are 53 times more likely than a traditional web page to get an organic first-page ranking. However, most organizations aren’t optimizing video for search, so you have a unique opportunity—for a while, anyway—to make sure your videos achieve that prominent position on the first page of search results.

Video SEO can be daunting for communicators who already have more than enough to keep them busy, but even if it’s a task that’s delegated to IT, outside support or somebody else, communicators still need to understand the options and how they work. Think about it like printing. A quarter century ago, it was a rare communicator who knew how to operate an offset press, yet any competent professional knew the ins and outs of printing in order to manage projects and ensure the product came out the way it was supposed to.

I’m no video SEO expert, but after reading Weller’s post, I decided to do some research so I could be conversant when talking video with clients and audiences. What follows combines the wisdom from a good two dozen posts and articles I read about video SEO. If anything you read here smells wrong, please leave a comment.

Links to the most useful of these appear at the end of this post.

The basics

The fundamental elements of video SEO—things you can do without turning to a coder or an expert—include…

• A page for every video—The videos you embed on your site should each get their own page and their own URL. At the end of the page title (that information that goes in the HTML page title tag), add an underscore and the word video, as in consulting_firm_mini_documentary_video.


• Search engine submissions—Submit each video on each search engine, being sure to check the submission and XML-seralization guidelines.


• You first—If you can, post the video to your site before making it available on the file sharing sites or embedding it on other sites.


• A dedicated video directory—If you have a lot of videos on your site, consider putting them in a dedicated directory on the server. Consider a subdomain, like videos.acme.com, or getting a .TV domain for your videos, like acme.tv. (You can link to your videos from your main site.)


• Use a descriptive title—Give your video the same kind of descriptive title you’d give a typical HTML page.


• Use tags—The video sharing services—YouTube, Viddler, Vimeo and the rest—provide you with the ability to add tags. Make sure they’re descriptive and include at least one that defines the nature of the video, e.g. how-to, funny, announcement, description).


• Make it match—Make sure your video title and the title tag match. While Google’s algorithm includes all kinds of secret sauce, it’s known that, for video, the video title is vital.


• Multiple versions—Consider producing multiple versions of the same video. You can include condensed versions, for example. One site recommends that you include a video that’s only available on your own site as a premium item to complement the video you added to YouTube. Several sites also advise that you make videos available in multiple formats (like AVI, MOV, MP4, WMV, etc.). Each one would include the same SEO elements.

The really geeky stuff

With the basics out of the way, we can move on to the more technical elements of video SEO that will most likely require working with someone who knows how to code and deal with the highly technical tactics required to execute these techniques.

Sitemaps

Creating a video sitemap is one of the most frequently cited recommendations I found. These XML-based sitemaps are video-focused versions of the sitemaps most sites have employed. The idea is to put all the information about the video you’ve published in a single place, making it easier for search engines to find your videos. Here’s tutorial and example.

Robots.txt

Robots.txt is text file that sits on the server and is generally used to tell search engines what parts of a site they’re allowed to visit and what parts are restricted. For video SEO, this file includes information that lets Google ascertain that the locations where you’ve submitted your videos are legit; they also let Google know that the pages contain the appropriate embed codes that verify the existence of the video.

Captions and Subtitles

Captions and subtitles appear in the video itself, along the bottom of the video window, but are generally called from a separate file that can be searched and indexed. In addition to the SEO benefits, these techniques also make the video accessible to those with hearing impairment. If you produce them in other languages, you expand the audience for the video and make it more discoverable by those searching in that language.

Here’s a brief video of how to produce captions:

Besides the manually-produced transcripts, YouTube can produce captions automatically using a voice-to-text routine, which could require you to go in and fix the usual errors such a process inevitably generates. Here’s a video that covers automatic captions and automatic timing. The video notes limitations on the use of automatic captions, but this has now been opened to all videos:

Alternatively, there’s a service called Speakertext that will launch soon. Speakertext will be free if you provide a transcript you produced yourself, although the company works with the people who peruse Mechanical Turk looking for quick jobs that pay small amounts, like transcribing. Once SpeakerText has a transcript, they enhance it for SEO with a technique called “QuoteLinks.” When you get your speakertexted video bac, you can embed it on your site and attach the transcript. People who view the video can choose a segment of the transcript, copy and paste it onto their own site as a link to the precise spot where the quote appears in the video. People who click the link will go to the version of the video on your site instead of the YouTube site.

Transcripts

Even if you don’t combine a transcript with a video to create captions or subtitles, including a transcript will ensure that the words in the video are captured by Google (and other search engines), drawing visitors to the page where the video is embedded.

Alternative HTML Content

SWFObject is a JavaScript library that allows you to create alternative HTML content to Flash videos. It’s a complicated procedure covered by a tutorial from ReelSEO here. Even though Google has been crawling and indexing Flash content for a while now, several experts recommend this approach of providing alternative HTML content in addition to the Flash file itself.

In-File Metadata

A number of the more commonly used video formats let you attached metadata to the file itself; this is known as “in-file metadata.” Some search engines are able to glean this information from the file. Adding in-file metadata, as near as I’ve been able to discern, requires that you’re using Adobe Creative Suite, which includes a tool called “Bridge” that lets you add metadata to AVI and MOV formats. Again, ReelSEO has produced a tutorial on how to do this; you’ll find it here.

RSS and MRSS

I hope you’re already conversant in RSS, which can accommodate enclosures for multimedia. Sometimes referred to as MRSS—Media RSS—these let you add text to your feeds that provide information about your latest videos. While these tend to limit online information to your most recent videos (not as comprehensive as a video sitemap), it does get the information out onto the Web in close to real time.

Yahoo! SearchMonkey

Google will recognize Yahoo! Searchmonkey tags and index them. SearchMonkey is a service from Yahoo! that lets you use structured data to make search results from Yahoo!, Google “more useful and visually appealing, and drive more relevant traffic to their sites,” according to Wikipedia.

The upside of using Searchmonkey is that your tags (and the code in which they are contained) go on your own page, leading Google to find your video without you having to submit other feeds or sitemaps.

Some Video SEO Resources

In my research, these sites, pages and posts provided some of the best information:

• A technical guide to video SEO from Yoast
• Video SEO Guide from ReelSEO
• Mashable on how Web video SEO is coming of age
• Search Engine Watch on getting video SEO right

We’re not done…

As mobile increasingly becomes the place for both consumer interaction with online content and technological innovation, it’ll be vital to optimize video for search over mobile platforms. The number of people who watch videos on mobile devices is expected to grow nearly 30% this year, up to 23.9 million people in the US, according to eMarketer. While that’s a mere 7.7% of the overall population, and under 10% of people with mobile phones, we can expect those numbers to surge over the next few years. Don’t wait until everybody’s already using their phones to watch videos. As soon as SEO techniques emerge, start employing them.

As I said, I’m no expert; this is all just the result of some research I did for my own benefit, and consolidating it into a post helps solidify the concepts in my own mind. So, what did I miss? What did I get wrong?

Monday, August 16, 2010

What we can learn from the Old Spice response campaign without being copycats

Copycats were expected in the wake of the Old Spice response campaign, in which the Old Spice Man responded to tweets with brief YouTube videos. After all, despite a few party poopers who didn’t like the campaign and a few misguided claims that the campaign didn’t produce results, ad agency Weiden & Kennedy has shown that the campaign, including the Twitter-YouTube effort, has paid off in a big way:

We weren’t disappointed. Daniel Frelich has produced a television commercial that parodies the Old Spice Man in his campaign to unseat Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy in the upcoming primary election. Cisco Systems took a crack at the response campaign while paying homage to the Old Spice success, as characterized in the example below:

More copycats, parodies and outright ripoffs of Weiden & Kennedy’s creative campaign are inevitable. Unfortunately, most organizations are missing a huge opportunity that the Weiden & Kennedy—unwittingly, perhaps—has uncorked.

The online social world is one of mixed media. It was not always this way. When blogs were the center of the social media universe, a blogger wrote an article and readers commented directly on the blog. It was a neat, packaged model for interaction. As more diverse social tools infiltrated the Web, comments became disassociated from the source material. A blog post could inspire comments on Twitter, Facebook or a number of other channels. Marketers began to complain about how difficult it was to track engagement.

What companies should learn from the Old Spice response campaign is that it’s entirely fair—and probably effective—to respond to customers in a forum other than the one where they initiated the conversation.

Organizations increasingly are tapping into Twitter for customer service. Comcast kicked off the trend with ComcastCares, but these days even some of the major airlines are getting into the game. Yet it doesn’t seem to have occurred to anybody that a query from Twitter doesn’t need to be answered entirely on Twitter. Why not YouTube?

The best response to some customer inquiries and complaints could be visual; text could be inadequate. With the increased use of inexpensive digital cameras like the Flip and the Kodak Zi8, along with screencast software like Camtasia, GoView and Jing, customer service and tech support departments could quickly knock out a video that responds to a tweet, post it to YouTube, then respond via Twitter with a link to the video.

I’m not talking about trying to be funny or clever or support an advertising campaign. Instead, I’m talking about a true dialogue, real engagement. Here’s a scenario:

An unhappy customer of a wireless company tweets that he’s having trouble with his phone. Through routine monitoring, the company sees the complaint. One customer service rep grabs her Flip and shoots another rep tapping his way through the screens required to solve the problem.

In the unrehearsed video, the customer service rep would say, “Hi, Mary. We understand you can’t get your Acme smartphone to connect to WiFi, so I’m going to walk you through the steps you need to take to fix this problem.” At the end of the video, he could add that Mary should let them know if this fix doesn’t work so they can continue to troubleshoot.

The video would then be uploaded to a YouTube channel dedicated to customer support responses; alternatively, the company could set up a customer service playlist in its primary YouTube channel.

For software issues, a quick screencast could do the trick.

Then, the company would reply on Twitter with a message like, “We have a video showing you how to solve your problem: shortened URL here.”

In a mixed-media environment like the web, there should be no reason to confine ourselves to a single medium to respond to customers. I’m surprised I haven’t seen anybody doing this yet, but it’s only a matter of time before some company realizes that the real lesson of the Old Spice response campaign isn’t that you need to be funny and clever, but rather that you need to help your customers using the best medium.

Let me know if you’re aware of an organization already taking this approach.