The Daily MBA

Tips, Tools, and Techniques to be a Better Entrepreneur

Telling Your Business Narrative via Video

A Guest Post by Eric Robbins

“”Those who speak about their limits get to keep them. Those who act upon their dreams get to live them.”

I love this quote for two reasons: it synthesizes how I feel about entrepreneurship and I invented it. Well, technically I cobbled it together during a night out with friends but isn’t that the true nature of invention? And what could be a more powerful invention than the stories we tell about ourselves? Sure, space travel has had some effect on my life, but no where near as much as the stories I tell about myself to myself. Why? Because the stories I tell myself get acted out and that moves my life, and the lives who touch mine, farther than any man will ever travel through space.

And so it is that the stories we tell about our businesses have power. Stories are the caretakers, or nannies, of our inventions. They feed them and help them grow. But our businesses depend on other people hearing those stories and believing in them as we do. And most people know talk is cheap…at least talk that doesn’t come directly from the horse’s mouth. When you see a typical print advertisement for soap, you hear the benefits but do you believe them?

“Confident people, sure people, likable people who like other people are Dial people.”

How about now?

Video has the power to tell stories that effect not just our logic but our emotions. Video touches the senses, auditory and visual, in a way that can override our logic brains. Dr. Albert Mehrabian, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at UCLA , conducted studies in the late 1960’s that concluded when people are confronted with opposing sets of information, they tend to give more weight to non-verbal behavior and tone of voice over words. His 7%-38%-55% Rule is a story about stories – that the way in which the story is told highly affects the way the story is received.

To put it in a business context, the way a story is sold affects the way it is bought. And to succeed in business, especially Internet-based businesses, you got to sell tell a lot of stories and video let’s you do that.

Next time on Bizzy Videos: I will talk more about soap and the ways in which advertisers use Internet video not only to tell their stories, but to prompt customers to tell their stories for them. You feeling dirty?

Have an Internet video topic you want me to discuss? Let me know in the comments below. Yes, contrary to popular opinion, I do read them.

Eric Robbins, Chief Storyteller

Comments

  1. Ariane Fisher says

    Fantastic post. Any tips you can offer about including SEO tags when embedding video in a WordPress blog? Also, SEO pros/cons to embedding video from hosting service vs. uploading directly to a blog?

    Another benefit to online video is the personal connection potential clients can form before even talking with the business. Our small business clients have been able to close deals with out-of-state clients, when they wouldn’t have even been able to compete before.

  2. Jarie Bolander says

    Ariane-

    Thanks for the comment. I think the best think to do would be to put the same tags you would have put in your meta tags and title and then add video.

    If you have the tags in meta data and a pointer to the hosting service, you should be fine because the search engine is going to pick up your meta text and also the link. So, SEO should be fine but Eric is probably the best one to answer that.

    Thanks for reading

  3. Eric Robbins says

    Ariane, if you’re talking about the blog keyword tags, I use the Google Keyword Tool to identify apt, low competition keywords for my clients. I use the same strategy for tagging my videos on the hosting service (e.g. YouTube), although there is a separate YouTube keyword tool you can use specifically for this. I don’t know which tool is better since sometimes people find the video through YouTube and sometimes through Google Universal Search results…I guess I favor the Googlers over the YouTubers since the clients of my clients probably start on Google and work their way in. For me, this is as much art as it is science so take my suggestions with a grain of salt.

    My gut says that embedding video from hosting service (vs. uploading directly to a blog) is the better way to go since you already have SEO juice invested in your YouTube video (and it’s quicker to embed that to upload). I believe it is a better investment to give one video 5 chances to rank higher that it is to give five videos 1 chance each to rank higher in search engine results.

    I hope I answered your question. I’ll ask video SEO expert Mark Robertson of ReelSEO to offer his sage.

    By the way, I’m in the market for a new commercial video music licensing service. Can you recommend any?

  4. Ariane Fisher says

    Eric,

    Regarding licensed music, we use Megatrax Production music. They offer a wide range of high quality music and their customer service is astounding.

    I have been embedding, although not from YouTube. I still upload there for the SEO, but they have placed ads on my videos before, even though I could prove licensing rights. Am I losing any SEO benefit to uploading there, by not also embedding from there?

    I’m using the Thesis theme on WordPress. Now, when you say “tags in the metadata”… do you mean Meta Keywords in the SEO details section? Or can I insert tags directly into the HTML embed code? I currently put tags in YouTube, keywords in the SEO field in Thesis, and sprinkle the text of the post with the same words. I apologize for my ignorance on this. I can make knowledgeable recommendations as to video editing and motion graphics, and a little of XML coding, but WordPress is not my area of expertise.

  5. Eric Robbins says

    Ariane,

    Thanks for the music referral – I’ll check it out. I had been using Magnatunes under a privately-negotiated 25 song deal. It was a little limited in variety and I spent many hours choosing songs but it was royalty-free, unlimited use for a year and a whole lot cheaper than anything else I could find. Plus, I was communicating with humans.

    I have found that my video posts on YouTube, Daily Motion, Metacafe and (now) Vimeo show up most often in the Google universal search results. My instincts tell me that if that is what Google wants, Google gets. Like I said, I think it better to focus on one video platform for all embeds than to spread out your power. The more views and engagements your video receives on a single platform, the greater the chance that video has of rising in the ranks. Does this seem logical to you?

    I try to avoid embedding videos on my clients’ websites that have ads but I don’t mind the ads on the video-sharing sites since that is the business trade off for free posting. Vimeo Plus is my choice for embedding since there are no ads and I own the video rights (Vimeo does not). A more expensive and feature-rich alternative to Vimeo would be Veeple, which gives you ’embeddable objects’ (URLs, .PPTs and .PDFs) that can appear and disappear at any time in the video.

    Sorry, I don’t know WordPress either. I use Ning for my blog (MoveVideos.com) since it is more user-friendly and has a lot more features.

  6. Mark says

    Adriane,

    Im not sure I understand the question – “Any tips you can offer about including SEO tags when embedding video in a WordPress blog”

    Do you mean tags for the head of the doc on wordpress posts?

  8. Ariane Fisher says

    I always embed. The last thing I want to do is put a low-res version of an HD masterpiece on our blog. You’d have to turn a 100MB movie into a tiny few MB just to have it load quickly. I appreciate the link on embed-vs-host, as this is something I can include in my emailed recommendations to clients.

    My question was regarding whether I can add any tags into the HTML code of WordPress to better direct google, et. al about the content of the video (similar to alt text on photos). From what I gather at reelseo.com, the tags on the YouTube/Vimeo site do that for me.

    I agree that ads may be the business trade-off for free posting on YouTube, but as a real estate agent, do you really want your clients seeing ads for your competitors pop-up across the screen as they watch your videos?

  9. Mark says

    Adriane,

    Thanks for the clarification. OK, so – yes, there are a few ways to do this depending on the the purpose and layout of the landing page.

    For example, if this were merely a page with 1 video and very little in the way of text, you could do everything from adding a blog post, description, transcript, enabling comments, etc… all with the dual goals of 1) following general on-page SEO best practices to 2) Adding as much text as possible to the page (assuming that this is relevant, non-spammy text).

    If there were, an issue with adding visible text to the page (lack of real estate, etc…), there are various other methods by which you could include additional information with the video embed itself.

    You could also include additional key information within the sitemap that you send to Google and/or the MRSS feeds submitted elsewhere.

    Lastly, if you provide access to the raw file, many search engines will additionally attempt to ingest the file and analyze it for some metadata as well. So – there’s probably too much to get into here. Suffice to say – YES

    Sorry for any grammatical/speling errors – me tired 🙂

  10. Eric Robbins says

    Adrianne – With YouTube, you have the ability to turn off the advertising for all videos free of copyrighted materials (like music). Videos that YouTube perceives to have copyrighted material, whether you have contracts in place or not, are open to advertising. There is an appeal process so I wouldn’t get to up in arms if your ‘clean’ video get tagged by the YouTube police.

    Mark – Whoa! I didn’t know that search engines were ingesting whole video files – fascinating! How do you know that the raw file for your video is accessible to the search engines? Does the index robot go back to the original landing page where there is a download button (Vimeo, Flickr, ?) or does it just play the video, record the contents and create a new file? Just curious.

  11. Mark says

    @Eric,

    Couple ways – usually though this is a result of giving them the file in your MRSS or sitemap. That being said, Google can and sometimes does reconstruct the embed path (if able to do so) and actually find the file. They ingest it and use object recognition and who knows what else (speech, etc…). Right now all I can see in terms of the obvious usage is to pull a thumbnail which often times will override what you give them in the sitemap. Blinkx and Truveo do some recognition as well. Im certain that in the future, this will happen more and be more effective in helping search engines determine relevance, amongst many other factors.

  15. Mark says

    That is a good webinar to go through but may not answer all your questions. If I understand your question properly Adriane – yes, you can use raw files from another domain.

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