Business Case for Video

Make sure your videos are Relevant!

2009-07-29T09:27:00.000-07:00

The Internet is still a relatively new and rapidly evolving communication medium. New facets are discovered then used by the masses overnight. Digital Video is one of these new mediums. However, video is really nothing new. We’ve watched it in movie theaters and on television for years but now its digital so can be plugged into the Internet. Car dealers and realtors are quickly adapting a technology that converts still images of vehicles and homes into an animated file that nearly seamlessly moves across one image to the next. These animated stills are being plugged into youtube and other video sites as videos.

Animated stills very nicely present images in a new format that is nice but not true video. Ultimately, a labeling decision to allow or disallow animated stills as video will be made by youtube and their visitors. Someday youtube and/or their visitors may "flag" animated stills as inappropriate for the site. Successful businesses will explore and experiment with new communication facets the Internet offers. But don’t forget the Internet moves fast. If people reject animated stills as video it will happen very quickly.

We advocate our customers splice real video into their animated stills plus post real video files. When consumers search for video you’ll give them what they’re looking for and be relevant. Relevance insures your dealership and your videos successfully appear when people search the Internet.

Car Dealer Closings

2009-06-04T10:13:00.000-07:00

GM and Chrysler are closing dealerships to save money. I wonder how much is really saved by cutting back their salesforce and customer service centers? What consumers seem to demand from GM and Chrysler are better products and customer service.

SEO for Video, or "How Do I Get People To Watch My Videos?"

2008-08-19T09:18:00.000-07:00

As video content on the web continues to proliferate, getting your videos to stand out amidst the crowd is becoming an increasingly challenging task. One of the most important recent subjects of discussion regarding video online, is figuring out how to maximize your company’s placement in search engine results and rankings. To those readers new to search engine marketing terms and acronyms, the letters SEO stand for “search engine optimization” and the SEM equates to “search engine marketing”. You’ll commonly see and hear these terms thrown around quite a bit as companies clamor to find their way into viewer’s web browsers.

Here at Test Drive Videos we quickly learned that is isn’t as easy as posting your videos online, then telling people to go watch them. There is a myriad of essential steps you need to take to start the SEO and SEM process. I’m going to list the three basic steps we’ve learned are mandatory and effective in getting the ball rolling. I will also highlight some additional things you can do that are both free and highly effective.

1. Use Descriptive Naming of Your Video Source File. When you’re creating your video file and getting ready to deploy it to your site, e-newsletter or uploading to a web video sharing site, always name the file in a very exact and descriptive manner. For example: in the early stages of our company, we might have named a test drive video we produced “Ferrari_tdv_08.mov”. Where our internal naming convention might have made sense to us for easily managing files – to the outside world it means nothing and is more easily lost in the space. Therefore, a more useful title might be: “2008 Ferrari GT430 Test Drive Video.mov”. This acts as kind of a surface level “tag” that will help search engines find your video.

2. Inserting HTML Tags on Your Site. Inserting HTML meta tags and head tags within each page that describe each video has long been the most important and basic task associated with web development, and making your site visible and searchable online. Additionally, it is recommended that you let each video live on it’s own page of HTML and insert tags that describe what is in the video. One video per URL seems to be a smart rule of thumb. It is also important to surround your video with relevant text about that video. It doesn’t hurt to tell viewers what they are about to see, and further helps the SEO initiative.

3. Initial Search Engine Submissions. Take the time to visit each of the top search engines and go through their process of submitting your website to be crawled, indexed, spidered, etc. Some are easier than others, but this is a crucial step in making sure you get found. Because Google more or less dominates the search engine arena (with approximately 67% of the traffic), and including the other top two (Yahoo and MSN), they encompass about 98.4% of the search engines traffic altogether. Plus, these major search engine directories are shared by many other smaller search engines, including Lycos, AlltheWeb, AltaVista, Excite, Go, Search, AOL, and many others. Once the major search engines have indexed your website, regular search engine submissions are no longer required. We also recommend a one-time manual application submission to dmoz.org. (DMOZ is The Open Directory Project - the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.)

4. Bonus Tip! – Using Web Video Sharing as Free Advertising! Just because you’ve posted your video on your site doesn’t mean you can’t and shouldn’t post that same video elsewhere. By taking advantage of one or more of the many free video sharing websites out there like YouTube, you can help spread your message and your video out across the web. Most of these sites have very robust description and tagging sections when you upload your video which will yield top results and can in return, be linked back to your site. We have had tremendous success in getting higher search results for some of our video content through the videos we’ve uploaded at these sharing and social networking sites. The top 5 video sharing sites that will except most any user-generated content for upload are: YouTube, GoogleVideo, Metacafe, AOLvideo and Revver. There are certainly dozens more, and every indication is that this market is going to continue to grow rapidly as the demand for video on the web continues to flourish.

These are just a few things you should do immediately after deploying your video for an online audience. They are by no means the complete answer as this new media world is changing by the week with new web video search technologies emerging that do things like actually scan the audio and video content to detect if what the descriptors say is in the video, is actually in the video. There are also many other high-level tricks to the trade such as embedding key tags in video Flash files which we hope to discuss at a future date. Thanks for reading and good luck! - E.T. Keeney

Industry Adopts Video

2007-11-05T15:44:00.000-08:00

There are some trendsetters out there. Here are two of our favorites:

http://www.freightlinertrucks.com/ and

its interesting to see how http://www.autobytel.com/ has recently launched http://www.myride.com/.

Autobytel is definitely telling the auto industry that they've got to use video. They're also saying if you don't have your own videos, you can pay them for theirs.

We certainly advocate building your own video asset library.

SEMA

2007-11-05T15:41:00.000-08:00

Jon, Eric, Mark and Bob went to SEMA. We had tremendous interest in our video service from some of the largest players in the industry. More to follow on this. Video is definitely the best medium to communicate with. Soon, we'll post our videos of the show. Check back later.

AAISP Digital Dealer Conference

2007-10-05T17:46:00.000-07:00

I just returned from the conference and was quite impressed with the number and quality of attendees. There was a great show of dealers, GM's, Sales Managers, and eCommerce Managers all eager to learn and try new technology.

The three most important technologies I noticed at the show were:
1. vauto.com - where dealers can check how effectively they've priced their used inventory on-line and in real time
2. ai-dealer.com - where dealers can set-up a shopping cart to permit consumers to actually purchase a vehicle on-line
3. Video - dealers have got to start using it. Don't use video with a computer generated voice. Film the video yourself or hire someone to do it. Its got to show your personality and make you more personable.