Viral

Every time a think of working on this blog what comes top of mind is that I really, really need a tag line. When I first started I thought I needed a good blog name, but a tag line would be better. And for some reason, after years in marketing, I still can’t think of a good one. I do much better at other people’s stuff.

So yesterday I saw Martin Bowling’s Zima Meme Contest (just learned the term meme and it’s not the Grandma who lives in Lewiston, Maine). Off the cuff I twittered I’ll enter anyone for the Zima contest who suggests a tag line. Of course, I got a few right away, because my Twitter community is so generous:

Martin Bowling Loves Zima, even with the cap on.

@robmills: “Teaching SEO Kata” and “Kicking the crap out of search engines”

@chuckallied: “Monica Wright. Never Wrong.”

@mikekirkwood: “monicawright.com: where Monica and good combine into form.”

For each, I’ll twitter a Zima-flavored haiku, keeping under 140 characters, and incorporating their handle. (I’m not going to use the “@” as a syllable, gives me more fodder that way). What I’ve got so far:

1. Teaching SEO Kata.

@robmills now drinking

SEO Zima.

2. @robmills tweets 2 me:

Kick the crap out of search engines.

Zima kicks my ass.

3. @chuckallied is awesome:

Monica Wright. Never Wrong.

But is Zima Wright?

4. @mikekirkwood “me plus

good = form. Zima? Lose

form, balance and cookies.

Btw – don’t you just love the sample images that come with the WordPress Thesis theme? Gotta do something about that too. I’ll work on making that Zima flavored through October 3.

This is a short post about social media going full circle. Not about long lost relatives, or high school buddies, but a story about social network and social media and why people should just get it.

This morning I checked my email to find a LinkedIn request from Jay Ehret. I don’t know Jay Ehret, but thanks to LinkedIn they require a little information to invite connections. According to Jay, I was a “Business Partner” (more like contributor) to the new Age of Conversation book coming out later this year. This is not completely out of the blue, a few months ago I did contact the editors about contributing, but never heard back. In the meantime, I changed jobs — alas, email — and assumed they found better, more qualified, more enlightening contributors than I could ever be.

But wait, there’s this random guy who said I am. So I did a little research, and found my name on a list of 275 people.

So I contacted Drew and Gavin, hoping it’s not too late to provide a chapter for the new 2008 edition of “Age of Conversation: Why Don’t People Get It?”. Of course it is, they’ve tried contacting me at MaineToday.com and never heard from me. Darn. Maybe next year.

But the point — social media was used to connect with me about writing about social media. Even better, the premise of the book is that people don’t get it. What’s not to get? Here’s your example.

And I’m still going to get the book.

Blending listings from news, images, video, local listings and book search engines, Universal Search from Google will be delivering video more often to the top spots. There are steps to take when thinking about marketing video online, which extends a lot further than just creating a channel on YouTube.

Basic SEO tactics still apply – video optimization really uses mainstream search optimization

Write a relevant, but catchy, video title: Use related key phrases that is relevant to your product, service or brand.

Optimize with tags: Tag your video with key phrases that people are likely to use or based on keyword research. No need to hold back on tags.

Don’t forget your video file name and meta description: Use keywords in your video file name. And don’t forget your thumbnails too.

Develop inbound and cross links: Use keywords as anchor text to link to your video from other areas of your site.

Provide transcripts: This may be difficult to put right on the page, but you could provide an outline of the transcript with the option to download the full version. This helps optimize the copy on the page.

Video best practices help with marketing and SEO

Keep videos short: Rule of thumb is five minutes max online. 1-3 minute segments is better. If it’s a longer segment, break it out into multiple clips. Use good titles and tags, and provide thumbnails for each segment with descriptive highlights. It’s easier for users to pick up where they left off without having to go back to the beginning. Also it offers the opportunity to use more keywords, and helps when users are viewing video on mobile devices.

Use video as an entry point to your other content: Post videos on YouTube, vMix, FaceBook, etc. to provide links back to your site and other content.

YouTube it: YouTube own more than half of all video traffic online. If you post to any user-generated video site make it YouTube. Video search engines are already there, including Google.

Try the Google Video Upload Program: it’s a great tool to upload batch video.

Provide a video sitemap.

Syndicate your video with RSS: Use a publishing tool that supports a Media RSS output, and the optional Media RSS enclosures related to SEO. The most important fields for optimizing video data are the title, description, and keywords.

Offer social bookmarking tools: Provide icons and options to digg, StumbleUpon, delicious, technorati (for blogs), Facebook, etc.

Be viral: Provide the option for users to embed the video code onto their own site.

Brand your video: You’re going through the trouble of creating the video and syndicating it, make it yours and put your logo on it.

Allow comments AND ratings: Videos that receive higher ratings from users are the ones that users tend to favorite and save.

Measurement – who is watching your video and how often?

Now that your video is well-optimized, it’s time to do some tracking. Segments you want to measure for video activity include:

- Overall and individual time spent
- Most watched videos
- Videos with both the highest conversion rate (call-to-action) and the highest abandonment rate
- Failure rates (number of people who could not open the video in their browser)
- If you capture ratings and comments, include the most popular videos with the most feedback.

If you can, create a special section for your video content (subdomain, video site map, video archive on your site, etc.), in order to track how many people are watching your videos. Any web analytics software package can measure this, including Google Analytics. And ifyou use FeedBurner for RSS, it offers trackable items the free package, including measuring total subscribers and total downloads.

Need more? Check out other these sources:

SearchEngineWatch.com

BruceClay.com

SEO-Space.com

SearchEngineLand.com

There are many more, please share.