Treepodia – The leading Product Video solution for e-commerce

While the main gist of my writings here have to do with the world of video and eCommerce, I think that the overall world of online video, and how people are using and relating to video as a medium, is very relevant too.

That’s one of the reasons I enjoyed the Marketing Sherpa blog post “Blogger Video Sharing Data.” It delineates, in detail, how, when, and where bloggers are using video in their posts.

Marketing requires analytics as much as content

What I like most about the article, however, is the attention given to measurable metrics.After all the need for good statistics in any marketing effort, i.e. how are viewers interacting with the content, is probably as important as the absolute need for good content itself.

One of the biggest benefits of advertising (or doing anything) online is the ability to generate statistics. How many people actually saw the page on which your video appeared? How many clicked on it? Where do they live?

Detail from the Youtube Insight panel - more on the video at the bottom of this post

The level of detail that we have access to these days is unbelievable. All one need do is look at one’s Youtube Insight panel to obtain demographic data that would have been completely impossible to collect even 3 years ago. According to the Marketing Sherpa post this was exactly what was done in order to generate the report discussed, but on a very grand scale:

“Sysomos analyzed over 100 million blog posts from July to September 2009 to measure bloggers’ video sharing. The report breaks down the bloggers’s demographics and the services they use.”

What the data reveals about video sharing

The information delivered includes amazing facts such as that in the US, “81.6% of bloggers use YouTube to embed or link to video.” Well, that maybe we could have guestimated, but there’s no way we could have guessed New York is the top city for video sharing via blog, followed by Los Angeles and Chicago.

Interestingly, when ranked by state, California ends up as the most video-sharing-via-blog state, followed by New York, Texas and Pennsylvania.

How old are video blog sharers?

The age breakdown wasn’t very surprising to me – turns out that almost 63% of those sharing videos on their blogs are young adults between the ages of 20 and 35, followed by a very distant 25.9% for those 35 to 60.

Back to the basics

But beyond these trivia details my greater point is that online EVERYTHING is measurable. This is perhaps the most amazing promise online marketing delivers on: no more stumbling in the dark, no more “Maybes”, “Perhaps”es or “Possibly”s – just simple measurable and actionable figures that anyone can obtain and use.

This is more than just interesting, it’s the kind of stuff advertisers must know to remain effective and reach their target audience as it migrates online in ever greater droves.

PS

Never checked out Youtube’s Insight?
Why not get the lowdown by watching this 2.5 minute video from Before and After TV:

Ecommerce video myths debunked

I’ve just finished reading a well written post by Daniel Sevitt on the ReelSeo blog titled: “The Three Types of Online Video for Business“. Daniel writes well and covers his subject matter eloquently but when I finished reading I remained with the sensation that I’d been taken for a merry little ride.

Sales Are Only 0.1 Percent (?!?)

I know it’s a heavy accusation, but I can explain:
When someone writes a post titled “The Three Types of Online Video for Business” and mentions in it a reference to someone else’s “Top 6 Reasons B-to-B Marketers Need Videos” I guess I expect the word “Sales” to appear often. Daniel’s post has 2,178 words. The word “Sales” appears twice. That’s less than 0.1 percent…

Apparently the “Top 6 Reasons B-to-B Marketers Need Videos” are, and I quote:

Grab people’s attention instantly

Tell your story in less time

Bring your ideas to life

Make your site stickier

Create a buzz with viral video

Bring your website into the 21st century

What I learned from Eli Wallach about Sales

Call me coarse or unsophisticated if you like, but I’ve always believed there’s a lot of truth in the line uttered by Eli Wallach in the scene shown above, and taken from “The Good the Bad and the Ugly”:

“When you have to shoot…Shoot! Don’t talk”

Let me explain:
With all due respect to the 6 points Daniel quotes in his post, I’d like to make 3 points of my own:

1. The purpose of a business is TO MAKE MONEY.
2. Online retailers make money by SELLING PRODUCTS.
3. The primary purpose of online video for retailers is TO SELL PRODUCTS.

To paraphrase Wallach:

“Pardon me pilgrim but ‘Grabbing people’s attention’ (pt #1), ‘Telling a story’ (pt #2) & ‘Bringing ideas to life’ (pt #3)… Heck, that all sounds like a lot fancy talkin’ to me!”

Although ‘Bringing their website into the 21st century’ (pt #4) sounds really impressive, I’m pretty sure 99 out of 100 vendors would prefer using video to SELL THEIR INVENTORY.

Let’s go back to basics

Video, indeed any form of advertising or marketing, has little or no value for its own sake. Its value is as a means-to-an-end. For etailers that end is TO DRIVE SALES.

By that logic the best way to judge the addition of video to your site is by the impact it has on your bottom line. If you can get a good impact on your conversions for a low investment – GOOD FOR YOU, you’ve done well for yourself.

I might be old fashioned

I might be old fashioned, but getting the best-bang-for-the-buck seems to me to be what a good business is all about.

• Our experience has shown us that adding video to a product’s listing can impact the conversion rates for the product by anything from 35% to 300%.

• We’ve learned that premium & complex products often show greater impact on their conversion rates because clients are more inclined to make a hefty purchase after watching a video that explains a premium product’s benefits.

Going back to my bang-for-a-buck point from before, it’s every etailers DUTY to his or her business to get these conversion rates at the LOWEST COST and effort possible – no small feat when one considers the vast majority of online retailers have over 500 products in their catalog.

When one takes into consideration these facts it’s easy to understand why automated ecommerce video solutions able of creating thousands of product videos in a matter of hours, are readily adopted by retail leaders such as Ice.com, Diamond.com, EyeBuyDirect.com, Elady.com, ElectricShopping.com, and others.

I guess when you’re as successful as these guys you know only too well there’s “A time for talkin’ and a time for shootin’…”

Image credit: Daquella manera

On his popular “DigitalBuzzBlog“, Aden Hepburn recently published a post commenting on the latest video from the gang at Socialnomics:

“Social Media ROI is the hardest job in town”

In the post, largely based on a post published on Socialnomics’s own blog, Aden claims that:

“Everyone knows that trying to measure Social Media ROI is the hardest job in town. It’s so diverse in every application that there is no single (or simple) way to measure all the outputs into a single report, let alone track sales indirectly from the effects of their social presence.”

Granted, a single dashboard for measuring the effects of your Social Media efforts, isn’t something I’ve come across yet. However there are a number tools that can give you a pretty good idea, especially when used together.

Introducing Better Google Analytics

For those of you using Firefox there’s a free and funky solution I’ve been using for a while and highly recommend: The “Better Google Analytics” GreaseMonkey scripts by Erik Vold.

Better Goolge Analytics add, amongst other nifty features, a set of social media related data to your standard Google Analytics dashboard. Since Better Google Analytics is a GreaseMonkey script all you have to do is install the addon and your good to go – simple, quick and zero risk.

Do you Youtube insight?

Another tip is the splendid “Youtube Insight” dashboard accessible with any Youtube account.
Once you have enough volume, Youtube Insight provides great demographic data regarding the people who’ve viewed your videos. If most of the views for your video come from embedded views on your video you can also easily cross reference the Insight data with the any other stats you collect.

Tubemogul for video analytics

My last tip is also related to video:
Tubemogul, an excellent video syndication platform, has a nice analytics panel for following cross domain video campaigns that they make available to free accounts as well. You’re welcome to learn more about what they do from the following video presentation I found on their homepage:

Measuring Social Media ROI – Not easy, but not impossible either

Indeed a 1-stop-shop for tracing and proving Social Media ROI is, as of now, still unavailable. But, if you’re prepared to invest a little extra time, you can piece together a pretty complete picture from the fragments that are available.

Does Microsoft have a LookingGlass up its sleeve?

As a final note, for those of you who remember, in September the web was all a-buzz about Microsoft’s LookingGlass which will supposedly finally answer the market’s need for a one-stop Social Media analytics panel. I Guess we’ll all just have to wait and see…

Epilogue

Funnily enough, an hour after publishing this post I found an excellent post by David Berkowitz that lists no less than 100 ways to measure social media. A day later I ran into a great post by Urs Gattiker of SocialMediaToday, that did an excellent job of analyzing why Social Media ROI analysis often fails and suggested a few point for planning strategy that helps avoid these pitfalls.

image credit: annia316

I recently read an excellent article titled “Lights, Camera, Action” by Newzgeek‘s David Shamah. Published on Israel’s leading English languge publication, the Jerusalem Post, the article’s basic premise was that:

Thanks to the Internet, everybody and his cousin can now star in his own production, using techniques straight out of the Hollywood playbook

Slide, Animoto and Masher – online slideshow tools

Animoto Online Video Slideshow Solution (image credit: mobology)

David then goes on to introduce a number of the online tools available for people who want to transform their photos into smart-looking videos accompanied by music or narration. David mentions Slide and Animoto, which I was familiar with, and Masher, which I’d never heard of before and found to be still slightly buggy.

What if I don’t like online services?

I think that although David’s suggestions are excellent, some people might find working exclusively with an online service slightly frustrating, especially if/when connectivity and speed are an issue. Personally, if your interested in making your own video slideshows, I’d recommend looking at Picasa, Google’s cool photo editing tool which is backed by a photo sharing service of the same name.

Picasa as a video slideshow tool

Picasa has a built in video tool that has excellent support for stitching photos together into a slideshow, and uploading it onto Youtube. This slideshow I created last month for Semantic Web startup Semantinet was done exclusively with Picasa. Check it out to get an impression of what you can expect:

So what are the pros and cons of using Picasa?

The pros are:

• It’s quick and easy to learn and use
• Ample support is available online via Picasa help forums
• You can connect your Picasa and Youtube uploads to your Gmail account (if you haven’t got a Gmail account yet, now’s the time to get one…)
• It’s completely FREE!

The cons are

• Picasa’s simplicity also means you’re offered rather limited customizing options
• Unlike with Animoto and Slide, you have to supply your own music (a great resource for this is FreeMusicArchive.org).

How scalable are these solutions for ecommerce?

If you’re a smal scale operation with only a few products in your store, and you’re only interested in testing what effect slideshow videos can have on your conversions rates, Picasa is a great tool to use and I’d definitely recommend it. For all other purposes however, Picasa still requires far too much human labor to make it effective. Serious vendors are probably best served by automated video solutions like our own, even for the pilot phase.

I try to follow the Video Commerce Consortium blog by Justin Foster on a regular basis. The content is usually pretty solid, if a tad biased due to Foster‘s involvement in the industry (he’s co founder of Liveclicker). Recently Foster published the following video:

After watching the clip I felt some points Justin made regarding automated video warranted commenting:

Automated Video is a Scalable Solution

Auto video is being adopted eagerly by some of the largest online vendors on the web for the simple reason that their product turnover, variety of stock, and rate of inventory changes, makes it, for all practical purposes, impossible for them to cover their range with any other video solution.

Automated Product Videos are an Effective Solution

Interestingly, because we at Treepodia have had the opportunity to work with quite a few top-500 ecommerce sites, we’ve been able to crunch significant amounts of data and test how automated videos affect conversions. What we’ve found is that automated videos rival, and at times beat, production videos in terms of their ROI and the vendors’ bottom-line. I realize, given that this is the Treepodia blog, you might view this fact with skepticism, but you needn’t take my word for it. The web is full of statements by satisfied auto-video clients (our own & others) that back up my claim. Here’s an example from an article on InternetRetailer quoting Roy Hessel, Eyebuydirect’s flamboyant founder & CEO:

“EyeBuyDirect.com…is finding it pays to present & test different formats, says founder and CEO Roy Hessel.
Since launching online videos earlier this year…the retailer has experienced an overall 30% increase in product page conversion rates”

For the record, Hessel’s ecommerce savvy has gotten him interviewed on Fox News…

Automated Product Videos are cost effective & fairly priced

Low production costs allow auto-video providers to be creative with their pricing models. Our own pricing is based on the PPC model pioneered by Google’s Adwords. We let our clients “Pay-Per-View”. You start your account, make an initial deposit, and pay us only when your visitors actually click to view a video. Clear, fair, easy to understand, and above all MEASURABLE!

Recently I ran across a post titled “Is Your Video A Vehicle Or A Destination?” on the ReelSEO blog, which I frequent regularly as it is, in my opinion, one of the finest resources online for following the video marketing scene. This particular post got me thinking about the lingo around video, and people’s expectations of what video should be able to do for their businesses.

The Viral Video Grail

The premise of the post is, quite rightly, that the buzz around video-for-marketing these days tends to focus on what is commonly described as “viral videos” – videos that due to their amusing, shocking, sexy, or silly nature, tend to spread from one viewer to the next via various sharing mechanisms (email, social media, collaborative bookmarking etc.), doing well with social media key performance indicators in the process.

A point worth considering is that “Silly”, “Shocking” or “Sexy” might not be right for your business – The following “Afro Ninja” video from Ebaumsworld has had over 8,000,000 views on YouTube, and while there’s no arguing that it’s a funny 18 second clip, I doubt it’s very useful for selling anything besides slapstick humor…

Is the Viral Video Quest right for your business?

It seems that too much attention many businesses, large and small alike, are giving marketing video is focused on the quest to create THE video, that singular masterpiece of shareable genius that will spread through the net like wildfire through the collaborative efforts of the enthusiastic masses. Little thought is given to the following facts:

1. Just as with any other form of advertising – the campaign is not a goal unto itself. It’s a means to an end. A million hits on Youtube might be great, IF you can harness them to push SALES.
2. These videos are extremely difficult to manufacture and their “viral” component is nearly impossible to predict. The sad truth is that most of the lucky mavericks fortunate enough to have created a video that “went viral” were one shot wonders who were unable to recreate their success.
3. The investment and time spent on attempting to create a viral video will yield a much safer and more predictable ROI when allocated to enriching product listings with video.

Any knight will tell you it's nice to have a steady supply of ale while questing for The Grail

Fame – it’s a good thing.

The thing is, it’s not a goal that suits every business equally – “Too much of a good thing” applies here too…

A small or medium business doesn’t necessarily need millions of video views and is probably ill equipped to deal with the publicity Tsunami that might follow.

What your business needs is to reach targeted audiences and achieve sales conversions in a measurable and consistent fashion. The ability to then recreate this process is infinitely more precious than any singular publicity burst.

In short:

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not opposed to some occasional risk taking, and I certainly respect creativity.

If you’ve got a great idea for an easy-to-produce video that you feel has the potential of exploding online and making you rich overnight – give it a shot!
It’s worth it just for the sake of not denying yourself the joy of pursuing your dream. BUT…

Do yourself a favor and don’t focus ALL of your business’ video marketing efforts around this project – especially if you don’t have a huge budget.
The data proving the positive effect simple product videos will have on your bottom-line is readily available online. ReelSEO and others have covered this subject often.

How often have you won the lottery?

Getting your video to go Viral might be like winning the lottery.
Have you won many lotteries lately?
Why not creating content that actually sells while you wait…

Image credit: Zack Sheppard

This morning I read a great guest post on InternetRetailing by Sheila Dahlgren, senior director of marketing at Adobe Scene7.

Sheila explained the virtues of interactive videos and gave a few examples of vendors already using this technology:

…ONLINE dressing room KnickerPicker allows users to select models and lingerie styles, then zoom and spin to see all angles. Consumers choose the model which most closely resembles their body type to view from all angles how different styles of lingerie would look…

…US retailer JCPenney offers customers the ability to view a runway show and interact by grouping clothing styles, fast forwarding and viewing using a 360-spin and a zoom function.

…AN entertaining example of interactive video use can be seen on French mattress retailer Matelsom’s website. Consumers can select two models — people of all different shapes and sizes are available — and see how their chosen mattress performs when their models sit on, jump onto, or lie down on the mattress. This replicates the in-store experience and illustrates what people do (or would like to do!) when considering buying a mattress.

No doubt Interactive Video is cool

It’s obvious this type of interactivity is fun and cool. I’m even pretty sure the metrics are there to prove it gives ROI.

BUT… Interactive Videos are complicated too

Interactive videos are labor intensive custom tailored solutions that require the involvement of specialists. This means they have relatively long time-to-market, little scalability and high costs. As the examples Sheila provided prove they are currently a solution accessible only to the “big boys”.

Is the effort really worth it?

Is the extra effort justifiable?

Considering “traditional” video enhancements for product pages are a proven method for double digit conversions increases, is the additional expense required for interactive video already justified?

Let me elaborate:
This morning I read on InternetRetailer that Shoeline.com reported a 44% increase in conversions on product pages enhanced by video. Sheila herself reports in her post that eBags.com saw 50%-139% increases in conversion rates for video enhanced pages.

These figures are very much in line with what we at Treepodia have been witnessing with our own clientèle (ice.com, diamond.com, eyebuydirect.com, etc.).

My point/question is:

• We know our clients getting these benefits from using our low cost, automated product video solution.
• We guarantee it can cover a vendor’s entire product catalog within 24 hours from initial contact.
• The effort required on the vendor’s part is nothing more than to supply us with their catalog’s XML.

When all this is taken under consideration, can the huge extra costs required for interactive video, in terms of time, money and complexity, be justified by substantially better performance metrics over “regular” or automated product video?
Image credit: http://bit.ly/4e9I3I