SmartMarket Media Blog

We were honored to be the recipient of two Telly Awards for outstanding achievement with our original short online videos for OpenPages (JCSI) and the online branding video series for Waste Management. These were selected for their entertainment and originality from over 13,000 entries sent in from all 50 states and countries around the world. Read the full story and view the award winning videos here.

We just wanted to thank all of our customers, including the award winning OpenPages (JCSI) and Waste Management, for giving us the opportunity to work with them to interpret their message into an entertaining story about their brand. While these awards are an acknowledgment of our creativity, it’s truly a tribute to all of our customers who put their confidence in us to visually illustrate what they want to say.

I’m usually not a big fan of flash mob dance or singing videos, especially as part of a business branding strategy. I get it – the flash mob is a metaphor for community, blah, blah, blah. Chances are unless I know someone in the video, I’m not watching it to completion but if I just watch a few seconds and then click away on most video sharing sites…it is still counted as a view. So if I get a million “views” how many are actually watching to completion or are engaged in my brand?

Nonetheless, this week’s video is a flash mob and probably one of the few I will ever profile because it is very relevant to the subject. This week’s Buzzworthy Wednesday Video is for the “Hammer Pants Dance” promoting MC Hammer’s reality show “Hammertime” airing on the A&E Network following the life of rapper and dancer MC Hammer and his family. The show takes an unprecedented look behind his larger-than-life personality and his life as a business entrepreneur. Hammer, has over 800,000 followers on Twitter and he leveraged his huge social media presence (along with the shiny gold parachute pants wearing dancers in the video) to get over 1.2 million views in 12 days. It was truly a great strategy from A&E and MC Hammer to take advantage of his social media cache and to create a video like this for his connections to share and tell others about the show.

Recently there’s been a lot of talk online about how video can help e-commerce and adding interactivity to video is a natural progression to keep the viewer engaged. There was a great blog post written on effective trigger design for interactive video commerce which answers the question – how should video interactivity be applied to e-commerce video? It’s always been part of my approach on each project, what is the end goal? Are you a non-profit looking for donations, a company selling products looking for a purchase or maybe you are looking for viewers to contact you for more information and become more engaged with your brand? There are three steps (according to the Video Commerce Consortium blog post) to creating an effective trigger or call-to-action, I’m going to elaborate on each:

1.  The trigger must be noticeable. This sounds self explanatory, but you’d be surprised to realize that most consumers are passive viewers of online video content, they aren’t used to interacting with it. It also needs to be blatantly obvious to the viewer that interaction is possible.

2.  The trigger must be associated with the targeted behavior. When you are creating a call-to-action, think carefully about the wording and design because they can have a huge impact on the viewers expectations.  Don’t have a button that says “Product information” really be a link directly to add an item to a shopping cart. As an example, we have a customer who sells generally to engineers who will want to see product specifications before they consider purchasing so we incorporated a “Download Specifications PDF” right into the video. Carefully design the call-to-actions within your video experience to meet your viewers expectations.

3.  The trigger must occur when the user is both motivated and able to perform the target behavior. The great thing about online video is we can be more subtle with a call-to-action. As the Video Commerce Consortium blog post points out “clicking a mouse is still easier than picking up the phone”.  But scripting the video so the ask is part of the story is key, when are your customers most motivated to buy? Is it after a particular product or feature where a button can pop up so they can click that for more information about that feature?

Not sure where your video is peaking curiousity or if there is a falloff in viewership before they get to your call-to-action? Using a video measurement service like Visible Measures can precisely calculate video engagement by capturing every event that occurs within an Internet video player – each play, pause, rewind, fast-forward, share, embed, and more.

Not sure how to build those call-to-actions within your video? I recommend Flimp which has a great WYSIWYG interface to create landing pages and e-mail integration with Constant Contact as well as a few other major email service providers. I also suggest Permission TV which offers an outstanding video platform allowing you to build those call-to-action links right into the video player creating more interactive experiences to everyone who visits your site. Both offer outstanding analytics so you can track and analyze your video’s performance.

Ultimately a call-to-action is useless unless the video itself is engaging and can easily be found. If your video is buried on your website, who’s going to see it? What if the content is so boring no one ever gets to the call-to-action?

What you need to do is to think of the call-to-action within your video and the trigger button or action as one seamless process, not separate parts. That is the future of online video, it’s all part of the viewer experience.

That’s what I think anyway, what about you?

Recent Blog Posts:

Increasing Donations Using Video & E-Mail Marketing

How Much of a Typical Online Video Is Actually Watched?