21st Century video, part 2

I'm bullish on video for B2B (online) marketing. If it's done right, anyway.

Like when we started building websites 10 years ago, it was easy to get it wrong. Some thought they could just repurpose their paper brochures into a website. Some got caught up in the stuff paper can't do, like animated GIFs and hideous backgrounds.

Video online is different than standard corporate videos of old, or recent, vintage. My tastes in video have changed over the last year, as YouTube has gone from a toy to a staple. In my mind, YouTube is to video as blogs are to press releases.

So, all we need to do is apply the YouTube mentality to our videos, right? Except we've never done video before, and especially never done YouTube stuff. As I said yesterday, "Video is easy now, but getting it right is hard."

Unlike all the bloggers who tried to become blog-consultants, I don't hear YouTubers becoming video consultants. Probably aren't enough of them to go around anyway. But I think for many companies like mine, video has much more possibility than blogs do, so where's the help?

One agency stepping up to the opportunity is The Mothers of Invention, led by Robert Rosenthal (check out his frank blog, Freaking Marketing). They are giving away a free video production, and promoting it with, what else, a video in mini-site Web Liberation Army. See Robert's post for all the links and details, as well as his commentary.

Robert's a upright guy, and I see no problem in entering his contest. The worst that could happen is that you would be ahead of the learning curve.

Can you do it yourself, or do you need an agency? Robert's advice to me, offline, was this: "start with the idea." So, go start thinking!

21st Century video, part 1

I've been quiet. Went on vacation, got geocache #1000, been plugging away at my new website. But when the blog is quiet, I seem to generate interesting emails. Here's one:

"Have you ever dealt with the 21st Century Business, where General Haig and others sell your Company? They produce a video for 4 minutes on TV, advertising in airplanes, etc."

Turns out that 21st Century Business (previously World Business Review) makes these videos into a paid-programming show on CNBC, plus distribution on some airlines video systems. The client gets the video for additional collateral usage, of course, as well as bragging rights for being associated with Alexander Haig (that being a 10 second intro).

Guess how much?? $24K.

Now maybe for some clients the exposure and validation is needed, or the cost is just a drop in the budget, but for smaller industrial marketers like myself (and the submitter), I think its money best spent elsewhere.

The bigger problem is that despite the 21st century moniker, the approach is 20th century. The video is stuffy, boring, and like a lot of CEO interviews, full of good sounding talk that don't amount to much. Here's a sample of one:


I talked about video for B2B earlier this year, in my post: B2B Content 2.0: Video, where I say "Video is easy now, but getting it right is hard.". Please reread that, then we'll get to part 2 of this post.

Universal opportunity?

Maybe you heard something about Google's new "universal results". Its Google's attempt to mix search results from images and video in their normal SERPs. (Search Engine Results Pages)

Well, it made me wonder what might happen to search results of my products. I didn't bother checking at the time, till I found the folks at Industrial Search Engine Marketing Blog call it a new opportunity:

Something New: Developing Digital Content for B2B

"What does Universal Results have to do with B2B? This is the industries’ chance to do something creative, design something unique, start a blog or post a video. There are different ways to capture your audiences’ attention and drive them to your website or to pick up a telephone and we need to explore those areas and branch out.

Our digital content will be found with Universal Search. I’ve seen the changes in my search results already. And personally, I like it, because now I don’t have to use the video search engine to find a related video to my topic. The most relevant result was already posted."

Last year I added short demo videos of specific functions of two of our products, via Google Video. Searching for those products in Google came up with no video links. I'm sure there must be some minimal criteria I'm not meeting. But these are for niche products even within my market, so there probably isn't enough traffic to warrant 'universal results'. Still, they are right, it is an opportunity.

Watchout: AdCenter Pause Warning

I don't pay too much attention to Microsoft's AdCenter account. Apparently, I'm not the only one: Larry over at Flag's Bay (also of 'Motivation on the Run' fame) found out that isn't such a good idea.

Microsoft AdCenter Warning!: "Here’s the warning—Pause Campaign, doesn’t mean pause until you get back to it and make a decision and redesign your ad. With certain settings, pause campaign means pause until the midnight reset, which restarts the campaign. And since billing runs several months behind, you won’t notice it until the charges show up on the bank statement."

Of course the one sneaky thing AdCenter has in common with AdWords is that they bill your credit card without notifying you in any way. Apparently this is what tripped Larry up.

(BTW: This got me to log on to AdCenter for the first time in a while. I forgot my user and password--what a pain in the neck to get that information! The worst part is the password reset email is not hyperlinked...AND they added a period to the end of the URL so they could complete a sentence. That period was interpreted as part of the URL and I couldn't log in. Doh!)

LOL: I can has PO?

Remind you of a sales rep you know? Or all of them?

LOL: Adwords

(And "Adwordz got all my budget", too.)

LOL: ROI?

What's the boss want?

LOL: Sitting on the PO

The real reason why the big order takes so long to get:

LOL: On break

My Bloglines feeds have gotten a bit boring. Summer doldrums must be setting in for everyone, I guess.

So lets have some fun. First of a series:

"The marketing department is on break"

Inspired by the hot trend of "lol cats", "cat macros", or "i can has cheezburger". We marketers and sales guys needs some LOL in our lives, too!

Stay tuned for more!