Yesterday, I was at VMX09, a video conference held in Austin. It was an outstanding intermediate-level event. They did a great job blending in marketing and new methods, for people who have been doing video, and then video production and scaling and workflow hints for marketing people who are looking to add video to what they do online. As a marketing person who’s done a few videos from start to finish, all by myself, it was helpful to know that I’ve been doing things right, how to do it better, and how to do it more easily and frequently.

Here are my quick and dirty take away tips:
1. Audio is the most important thing. People will put up with crappy visuals if the audio is great, but make them adjust everything and they’ll abandon.

2. Your content and info can’t suck. Be informative, entertaining, and to the point.

3. blip.tv is your new best friend.

4. Don’t go for the lowest quality. You can’t control where your content is shown. The services automatically compress and serve the right kind of file now, so you want to make sure people using web TV or big monitors have a good experience.

5. Read the Terms of Service for each site before you post anything. Period. Some sites can use your content without notifying or paying you, others absolutely do not allow anything of any sort of commercial intent and will pull your video. Yes, you demonstrating a product is commercial.

If this is something that interests you, or if your company is thinking about adding it, or if you already do it but want to improve production values or know where to spend your time and money to make it better, you might want to check out a few of the sessions. Everything will be available on streaming video next Wednesday here: http://www.vmx09.com/.

The SEO industry is such fun. With a little research and your site’s analytics package, you can figure out what search terms are bringing folks to your site, and then determine if they get what they wanted once they land on your pages.  This article from Chris Smith, writing for Search Engine Land, gives some really great advice:

1) research what users are entering … not what you call your product/service (“divorce lawyer” rather than “family law lawyer”)
2) use geolocation/geotargeting information to get traffic from the *right* parts of the country/area
3) review the design of your landing pages — a simple tweak could easily bring more conversions (make use of bounce rate data)

Are you using your analytics data to improve your site?  Or, like many, have you implemented, then forgotten it?

Seems like all our clients are asking the same question these days. They pay us to give them helpful answers, but hey, it’s a Saturday and I have a little free time (because I don’t have Tweetdeck turned on!). My apologies to the Bard:

To tweet or not to tweet, that is the question;
Whether ’tis nobler to spend your work hours on Twitter
Following news of outrageous behavior and misfortune,
Or to take to your keyboard and get back to work,
And by un-following, end them. To work, or to tweet
No more; and by an unsubscription to say we end
The dull conceit and the thousand unnatural shocks
The web is heir to â€â€� ’tis a mental nirvana
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die to Twitter;
To sleep, perchance to work. Ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep or work, to what purpose our time,
When we have logged off this persistent stranger,
Freedom must give us pause. There’s the disrespect
That makes calamity of online life,
For who would bear the whips and scorns of bloggers,
The anonymous poster, the proud arrogant insult,
The pain of willful misunderstanding, manners’ decay,
The insolence of contempt and the spurning
Of patient merit and reasoned conversation,
When we ourselves can our own quiet make
With a blank monitor? who would follow the chatter,
To linkshrink and retweet instead of work,
But that the dread of being laid off,
The unpaid, inactive state from which
No coworker returns, strengthens the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of…