Like Bamboo In The Wind

In 2000, the book “The Cluetrain Manifesto” was published and signaled a change in the way that smart web marketers thought about the upcoming web 2.0 revolution. Cluetrain presaged a shift from a playing field controlled by the marketers to one controlled by the consumers themselves. Among the 95 theses they presented, the rule that really stuck was “Markets are a conversation”. This single thought alone is enough to end all prior concepts about web design and herald a new approach to web marketing.

            The paradigm of web-design developed in the 90’s and still used by most companies looks more much like the approach that civil engineers take getting ready to build a 50 story high-rise. Every link, word and image planned to the finest detail. Of course there is nothing wrong with planning, but the question is, what that plan is based upon. Most likely it is based upon what the designers and website owners want, not specifically what the website visitors want. Remember…Cluetrain said “Markets are a conversation”, and the rigid structure of a 50 story building is NOT a conversation, it is concrete and steel and meant to last unchanged for half a century.

            This desire to control every detail of a website is an extension of the business owner’s desire to control the conversation, to control the playing field. The funny part about this is that at no time in history has the sales process been a one-sided conversation. Now, somehow the internet was going to allow business owners to tell the story THEY wanted to tell in the way THEY wanted to tell it; and still be successful. This approach only worked in the 90’s because websites themselves were so new and unique. Once the number of choices increased a thousand fold, people ceased to read or care about the “about us” page.

            Flash forward to 2011. We are using Live On Page to hold an adaptive and flexible conversation with website visitors. We avoid hyperbole and “ad-speak” in the video spokesperson scripts in lieu of real conversation tone and grammar. If you were to write, word for word, all of your conversations from a day of speaking with co-workers, that written conversation would look terrible on paper. However, it is the way humans speak to each other. Cluetrain predicted the inevitable success of the Live On Page scripting model when they wrote that marketing would be done in human voice.

            Just like the designing of a website, business owners will often script their video spokesperson to say things like “welcome to our website, I hope you feel comfortable and browse around. You will find lots of information in our website, feel free to contact us”. Can you imagine Neiman Marcus spending millions on a structure, millions on advertising, a huge payroll on service employees, PR, marketing, etc. Then imagine that the script above is what their sales staff uses on the sales floor to try and motivate people to buy.

            In a website you only have about 5-10 seconds to grab someone and keep them in the site, do you really want to spend that 5-10 seconds saying a worthless greeting that everyone of us would ignore. The area of our brain that predicts stuff is very good at moving your attention away from the predictable to look for the unusual. Are you starting to get it? Video spokesperson scripts and written content that sound like a brochure doesn’t work. If it looks like a brochure, sounds like a brochure, or reads like a brochure…guess what? It is a brochure! When was the last time you willingly read a brochure? A brochure is not a HUMAN conversation. It is a pile of sales hype and ad-speak. It is a blatant self-congratulatory, self-aggrandizing document that is NOT about the visitor; it is about the company. Remember the old “What’s In It For Me” (WIIFM) principle, it must be your religion to survive the new web marketing world.

Using A Celebrity Video Spokesperson

Using A Celebrity Video Spokesperson

            The use of celebrity spokesperson videos on the internet is an entirely new service offering. It was pioneered by Live On Page, who offers this elite product to some larger companies. These companies are realizing that hiring a recognizable celebrity might be outside their marketing budget for broadcast TV, but they can easily afford to hire the same celebrity for the more limited exposure on their website. This can give credibility and implied endorsement instantly.

            Since the real challenge in any website is to get the visitor to awake from their search-and-bounce stupor, the use of a celebrity video spokesperson might be the ultimate secret weapon. The use of Live On Page video spokesperson leads to a typical 30% decrease in bounce rate from the home page, a 50% increase in visit length and 50% increase in the number of pages visited. Of course all of these results rely on the believability and conversational tone of the script and actor skill.

            Online marketers spend money and time attacking the issues of bounce rate, visit length and pages viewed. However, all three of these parameters are altered when the site effectively and quickly communicates it’s main purpose and the most important actions and options available to the visitor. In other words, effective communication can solve all of these issues.

            To build a site with this strategy in mind, the design centers around the core conversion goal for the site. The video spokesperson scripts and deployment is then built to enforce this core goal for the site and usher visitors along this path. When compared to traditional web design, this is completely upside down and yet it is the design strategy that makes the most intuitive to every person in terms of their own experience searching the web.

            While celebrity actors may not be cost effective for smaller businesses, they still offer the promise of instant credibility and differentiation. When a small business owner can have a famous person stand on heir site, they are certain to stand out from everyone else. The only remaining question is whether the website gets significant traffic. Entertainment media is switching to the internet on sites like Hulu and Youtube. Shows like “The Guild” are entirely viewed online. As the public’s attention shift more and more to the internet, Celebrities will need a new venue to leverage their recognition and companies will need new methods of leveraging celebrity endorsement. A company would never be able to purchase a celebrity to stand at the doorway of their brick and mortar location as a greeter, as Live On Page video spokesperson. but they can hire a celebrity to stand at the doorway of their virtual storefront and do exactly the same thing.

           

Website Video For Advertising

The arrival of broadband internet connections for most computer users, allowed the entry of a richer media experience within the home PC experience. Download times dropped significantly allowing for more complex and hi-resolution graphics as well as flash components. If internet use follows the trend in other media, it will move towards more and more Website Video and away from printed text and graphics.  This is the general trend played out over the past 50 years. The higher emotional impact associated with visual media not only is effective for entertainment, but as a vehicle for advertising.

        Website Video has therefore become the newest form of entertainment and hi-leverage advertising on the internet. The monetization of this media has been difficult to realize for entertainment, however, for advertising, it has been a smoother transition. The appearance of “online commercials”  has brought video advertising dollars to the internet. As traditional forms of print advertising have declined, like yellow pages, newspaper, and direct mail, the number and age range of internet users continue to expand to both the elderly and the very young.  Whereas the internet was possible the secondary source of information about a particular topic it is now almost always the first line of research. Traditional media, considers direct response to be a visit to the company’s website instead of a phone call.

    This wholesale movement to online solutions will only focus an increasing interest in Website Video.  Since there is no standard website design on the web, the presence of live streaming media has become an indicator of clarity and message for many companies. They are using streaming presentations to both entertain and borderless spokesperson footage to lead visitors through the website toward a logical next step.  It is important to keep in mind that this is no “cure-all” for a website. Since visitors are quite astute and experienced the content of the media needs to be relevant to the search keywords and the delivery and production values need to be of the highest standards. Since visitors are exposed everyday to the highest Hollywood production values, their expectations are very high and they consider this type of professionalism to be basic and necessary for credibility.

    Therefore, video can either raise your impact or doom your website to an assessment of mediocrity or amateurish attempt to appear larger than you are. High quality video is a feature that cannot be “faked” and when a spokesperson video has someone obviously reading a script, or lacking sincerity or skill, it is painfully obvious. So in order to succeed using Website Video, a company should make a significant investment to guarantee that the video that represents them to the world helps and does not hurt their image on the web.

The Five Basics For Website Video Success

CDN
Use a content delivery network (CDN). Did you know that size of just one video file is larger than most client websites (all the files and images combined). So now they will be downloading something twice the size of their entire website right on the home page, and you think this won’t affect performance?  The only way to counter this problem is the use of a CDN, flash streaming media platform with co-localized servers all over the globe.
ACTING
When you are looking to put Website Video on your page, acting talent is probably the most critical part of the decision. While business owners have a tendency to view these presentations as widgets or flashy gadgets on their sites, the opposite is actually true. It is just like the difference between what is on TV and the TV itself. Most of us are not really impressed with the technology of a TV, but what broadcast on the TV. The same is true for your site. Your visitors will not be impressed by the presence of a video, only the content and quality of the video.
SCRIPTING
If your script contains elements and phrases that the visitor EXPECTS to hear, then they will discount almost everything in the script. They will equate the message to a simple greeting and assume that no content of importance will presented. Therefore, the script has to be carefully written as if you had only seconds to grab someone’s attention and tell them your story in plain English; without jargon or hype.
READY, SHOOT, AIM, SHOOT AGAIN
You will NEVER find the perfect script for your Website Video on the first attempt. The use of viewing data combined with site analytics will provide you the information you need to re-write and and re-shoot till you maximize the results. It is precisely like a sales conversation. You need to adjust your pitch to match the listener, otherwise you will have NO LISTENERS.
MEASURE, MEASURE, MEASURE
The only measure of success is conversions of a page or lead generation goal. This requires that you have a goal in the first place. Decide what page you most want visitors to reach, or what action you wan t them to take and make sure to use the video to request just such an action. NEVER use a Website Video to just tell people about your company or site. Once you have grabbed their attention you are wasting money and potential to not call them to action.

Website Video Basics

There is a new trend in websites specializing in lead conversion and ecommerce. Online business owners are beginning to use a website video spokesperson to connect with visitors and move them to take action. The use of rich media in websites has come about with the growing availability of high bandwidth internet connections for most internet users globally. 

The primary function of these “talking heads” is to confirm the visitor has arrived at a destination with relevant information about their search keywords. Then the web video spokesperson establishes credibility for the website with testimonial or other background information. The final step is to make a clear call to action for the visitor. 

The use of this web 2.0 technology has been around for about 8-10 years and there is quite a bit of data and case studies available to show that there is a clear and repeatable result from effectively using it.  Users can expect increased page visit length, increased number of pages visited, higher lead conversion, and possibly higher sales conversion for ecommerce sites. 

When comparing this type of service to any other website marketing feature (ie, blogs, twitter, facebook, forums, flash banners, virtual tours, etc), owners find that it is more measurable and direct in it’s effects.  BY asking for direct action from the visitor, it provides clarity to the experience and a impression of connection. 

Drawbacks are centered around something we can call the annoyance factor. This refers to the fact that online browsers do not want an intrusive experience, but instead would rather browse anonymously in websites. While this is a fairly pervasive opinion, it is not relevant to our marketing decisions as business owners. It is the same as TV commercials. It is beyond a shadow of a doubt that they work to drive sales across virtually all businesses. It is also beyond a shadow of a doubt that TV viewers universally dislike viewing them. However they do not dislike them enough to stop watching TV. Likewise, internet visitors do not get so annoyed that they bounce from with this technology.

The most important factor in keeping the viewer from bouncing due to annoyance, it the relevancy of the script and level of acting skill demonstrated.  Cliché riddled scripts and ad-speak are a fast indicator that nothing of value is going to be spoken and will unconsciously tell the view to stop paying attention to the message.  

Therefore, scripting is the most critical element that leads to website results. By constructing content and delivery to mimic real human speech and communication, message will resonate with the viewer, connect and lead them to take action. Of course this, all of this starts to break down as the script length increases beyond 30 seconds.  By reducing the message to a half a minute, owners are forced to refine their marketing message and pick a reduced set of desired actions in the website. Because the owner now understands what they want to happen, the message is clearly delivered to the visitor in a powerful engaging medium as to what the visitor should do in the site. It is no surprise then that the performance of the website increase.