Tag: video

Get Smart! Video from DC Social Media Week

Thanks again to everyone who braved the DC traffic and wind chill to join me in Georgetown for DC Social Media Week and my presentation, “Get Smart! Make Better Social Media Decisions through Analytics”. For those of you who weren’t able to catch the “show”, here’s the video:

Get Smart! Make Better Social Media Decisions through Analytics from APUS on Vimeo.
YouTube Features Marketers will Appreciate – New and Improved Annotations

YouTube is rolling out new features for their partners enabling them to use a new form of annotations. Previously, I felt that the annotations feature was a bit limited. It was designed to keep viewers on YouTube.com by only allowing video owners to link to other YouTube videos and no external sites. With this enhanced annotations feature, you can now link to sites outside of YouTube.com. This is great for promoting products or content. This joins other features for partners such as enhanced page layouts, custom thumbnails, unlimited length videos and more. Google is really starting to roll out some great features for YouTube which has really lacked the bells and whistles of many other platforms. These features are being rolled out in typically Google fashion, so partners will need to be patient.

Here’s a great article on ClickZ.com about the new features.
Revisiting a great TV commercial

Sometimes the “best” TV commercials don’t require million-dollar budgets. Just great stories.
Social Media Week DC – Value of Like Recap
Thanks to all my fellow DC social media gurus for coming out to Manassas and completely filling the conference room on Wednesday. What a thrill. We had standing room only!

When I originally agreed to host a session, we had booked the University’s conference room which can hold about 40-50 people. I’m glad we moved down the street to the Holiday Inn so we could squeeze some more folks in to the session.

We had a lot of great questions and I had a good time sharing some of my tips and strategy for measuring and reporting on social media ROI.

As promised, I’ve got some great “takeaways” to share with you from the session:
And finally, if you missed the session, you can watch it in three parts on Vimeo:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

If you have any feedback regarding the session, please feel free to post your comments here or tweet them to me @Dan_Soschin. If you have an upcoming conference that you’d like to have me participate in, just drop me a line.

Thanks again for making our session so wonderful! Until next time…
YouTube Upgrades Insights into Robust Analytics
YouTube’s effort to remain the dominate force in streaming video received a nice boost today with its upgrade of the legacy-driven “Insights”.

The old Insights dashboard which provide somewhat rudimentary data such as number of video views, geographic preferences and how viewers found your video has been significantly enhanced – both in how the data is presented, but also what type of data is provided.

Take a look at the new YouTube Analytics dashboard:

The New YouTube Analytics Dashboard

The first thing you’ll notice is that the data is presented in a similar manner to Google Analytics (I’m still unsure why they don’t straight-port GA’s functionality to YouTube, but that’s for another day to discuss).

What I’m really digging is the “engagement section” which shows you how many video likes/dislikes you’ve received, along with comments, shares and favorites. This type of engagement data is more in tune with social media’s role in the discovery of video.

You’ll also find data on how the videos are being watched… be it on a mobile device, embedded player on a website other than YouTube, and so on.

The entire suite of analytic data is just fantastic. Plus, you can select a host of date ranges for analysis (including custom ranges) through a more intuitive data selector). Here’s a quick breakdown:
- Views – let’s you examine how many views your videos are receiving
- Demographics – gender and geo data
- Playback Locations – YouTube vs. embedded players, mobile, etc.
- Traffic Sources – how folks are discovering your videos
- Retention (a favorite of mine, somewhat unique to video) – shows how people drop off your video over time
The next set of reports are called “Engagement Reports” and include:
- Subscribers – basic data on subscriber counts
- Likes and dislikes – counts of likes and dislikes
- Favorites – counts of how many times your vids have been marked as a favorite
- Comments – data on your comments
- Sharing – data on how viewers are sharing your content
All in all these upgrades are outstanding for YouTube content providers and businesses. Congrats to the YouTube (and Google team) for making a very wise investment in analytic data and making it easy to use, navigate, export and analyze.
Shortcut to SEO Success – Video

If you have keywords that are highly competitive (and these days, who’s keywords aren’t), then you might want to think about repurposing your existing web content or blog post into a short, optimized for SEO video. Video results in search can catapult you ahead of many other types of content because users are drawn to video more so than plain old URLs.

Of course, you’ll need to produce quality video that presents the user with relevant content. This will be the biggest challenge. Provided you can overcome this obstacle, the rest is easy.

Here’s a great post to help you get started with making sure your video content is SEO-ready by Marcus Tober: http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/7929-how-to-rank-highly-in-youtube-searches. Follow his advice and you’ll be well on your way to moving up in the keyword rankings!
Video Production Tips for Newbies
Derek Gordon makes a great case for using video as part of your content strategy. I recently conducted a webcast on this very topic to train a client’s staff on how they could incorporate video into their content strategy, even if they had never produced a video before. We gave them a series of tips to get started, in an effort to lower the intimidation factor (barrier to entry) and encourage them to get filming.

The bottom line is that you can find a number of free resources online and a good place to start is YouTube, which has a full section on how to get started, tips and tricks.

I recommend a couple of purchases too:
- A good headset if you are going to narrate video, record Skype, or record a podcast. You don’t need to spend more than $50 on a USB Logitec headset
- A webcam ($50) if your laptop/monitor doesn’t have one already. Of course if you are going to be filming more than just yourself or your screen, you’ll need a video recording device such as a “flip cam”. These can run about $100-$200 for a decent one… They film in HD and have a built in close range microphone as well as storage and transfer the footage via USB. If you get a handheld camera, then you’ll need a tripod too. You can pick one up for about $25.
- For editing, there are some great free tools: Windows Media Maker, Avidemux, Wax, Zwei-Stein
- There are some better tools that do cost a few bucks: Camtasia, Adobe Premiere, Vegas, Final Cut
Tips for filming:
- Location
  - Indoors
  - Quiet
  - No extras (co-workers, friends, family, pets)
  - No background distractions
- Camera Angles
  - Straight or 3/4 front
  - Don’t be too high or too low
- Lighting
  - Directly ahead or 45-degrees on the side
  - No back light (from the windows or sun)
  - Don’t spotlight – not needed and will washout your video
- Audio
  - Quiet room with little/no echo
  - No dogs, babies, phones, TV
  - Do not adjust mic during recording
- You
  - Dress appropriately (no PJs)
  - Relax
  - Be yourself
  - Smile
- Do multiple takes
- Have a lead in (intro) and lead-out (outro)
- Cut out major mistakes >5 seconds (use a transition effect that is simple)
- Fix any major audio issues (software can do that for you
- Don’t worry about the little stuff as you are getting started; that just demonstrates genuine/honest quality of the video
- Keep clips short (under 5 minutes) for best consumption/watching on YouTube, etc.
- Graphics
  - Keep it simple
  - Static slides as necessary between live video
  - Find a simple, clean, professional template
  - Avoid cheesy clip art
- Audio Quality
  - High standards; you must be able to hear the clip perfectly!
  - Avoid cheesy music and sound effects
  - Overlay music is not recommended
  - Playback volume should sound good at 50% level
- Don’t over produce with too many bells and whistles, focus on the content
Special thanks to Noah Shunfenthal for assisting with this presentation.
3 Must Reads on Social Media

1. Maria Ogneva’s post on “How to get your employees on board with your social media policy“. I’ve written a lot about this topic and constructed pages upon pages of policy for organizations, including development of a training program. Maria’s post is a great place to start.

2. Watch this video (and share it with your employees) on social media policy. It is one of the best short videos I have ever seen on the subject. Sure, you’ll need to clarify a few sections since this is done for the government employees of Victoria Australia, but overall is is near-perfect.

3. Read David Murton’s article on “8 social media metrics you should be monitoring.” It’s not a definitive list, but a great piece offering you insight on why you should care about these metrics.