commbasics

Many companies either shy away from video altogether because they look at the cost of professional-grade production or they drop thousands of dollars into equipment and staging that is completely beyond current web capacity. "You strain at a gnat and swallow a camel!" Proverb describing doing stuff the hard way  Over the past few years we have found remarkable success developing video content that engages customers and drives sales, but we're still finding that companies tend to focus on the wrong issues when it comes to producing content for online videos.  They still think, in my opinion counterproductively, it's television advertising... but that's another story.  What I want to talk about today is the technical aspects of online video and why most companies are overspending on tech while ignoring content. Digital camera technology has advanced faster than semiconductor tech over the past 10 years to the point that what was professional grade ...

The content that matters is not about you. It's about the problems your customers are trying to solve. Over the past few weeks I'm mentioned the changes in search technology from Google (Hummingbird) and how it will affect both B2B media and marketing.  I've also touched on google's concept of the Zero Moment of Decision (ZMOD), the moment when a customer actually decides to Google a company or product to make a purchase decision (which is actually long after the decision has been made). Today, however, I sat down with a good friend by the name of Douglas Alexander, who told me a very interesting story about his product search and selection process.  You may recognize Douglas's name from reading EBN, Electronic Purchasing Strategies or any number of component engineering and design publications.  He's currently writing what may become the definitive educational book on component engineering. I published the audio from the discussion on my Spreak...

I had one of the moments where something I knew to be true in the back of my mind came racing to the front. Most corporate executives, especially in the tech world, have no idea what social media is for. Late last year, the Stanford Graduate School of Business issued a study t hat showed that while 63 percent of executives use social media for business purposes, 59 percent use it to push information to customers and 49 percent use it for advertising. Only 35 percent use it to research customers. Essentially, that means companies are talking twice as much as they are listening. That's wrong. What's even worse, the study said the majority of companies lack social media guidelines, and those that do have had them created by people with no experience int he proper use of social media. But the worst of all is that most companies have no systems in place for gathering information from social media. Then last week, all of this was driven home when I got a call from a company that...

Much marketing strategy in almost every industry is sheer guesswork and, in the past, that was the best you could do. Hummingbird changes that. The web is now more collaborative then competitive and your content strategy must have an element of collaboration in it. The major update in the Google search algorithm , Hummingbird, is not only going to affect the SEO/SEM profession and the online media industry, as I wrote about last week.  It's going to have a major effect on branded content development within corporations. As things were under the old search technology, the branded content movement put current and former advertisers in direct competition with the media supporting their industry for audience engagement.  A reader could put in a few keywords and would find links to both media and corporation content and the reader would have to guess at which was the most appropriate.  That won't work anymore. As I have been saying for several months, keywords m...

Last Friday I posted about the major overhaul in Google's algorithm that is going to cause headaches for SEO consultants and practitioners.  Over the weekend, as I was thinking about it, I realized it is going to cause even more problems for media companies and corporations moving to a branded content methodology.   Lots of media companies, including UBM , Extension Media, Hearst Electronics, Open-Systems and Tech Design Forum are moving to a curated community model where editors spend most of their time managing the content of the community rather than developing original content.  It sounds like a great idea because the plan is that the best stuff (most read, most shared, most commented on) will rise to the top of the community and the least engaging will drop to the bottom. The problem is that most of that content has been vetted by marketing and sales companies to make sure the messages get across, and not according to what customers are actually looking for....

This vid says it all.  And I'd love to dance with her.