If a picture is worth a 1000 words, then a video is worth 1000 pictures, or a lot of words. People love videos: it’s more engaging than pictures and text and gives so much more information in a shorter period of time. For years companies have been using video marketing and more than 2/3rds of senior marketing and media executives stated that video marketing will be their main focus in the digital marketing campaigns and budgets.

Creating videos to share your message on the web is simple and easy. Forget overly-polished, high-brow corporate videos – make it short (under two minutes to 30 seconds is ideal), simple (no more than voiceovers and music), and straight from the heart (connect to your audience, show them you’re a caring person).

You can host your videos on Youtube or Vimeo and embed it on your website to make it easy to share your videos and also make it easier for search engines to find. You don’t have to be an expert to make videos; Movie Maker for PC or iMovie for Mac come standard with your respective operating system and are easy enough for beginners to use. Of course you can always hire a professional video production company to make your videos if you don’t have the time.

Here are some awesome ways to use videos to market and grow your business:

1. Introduction Video

When visitors come to your website, they want to know what you do. Simply clicking a video to that briefly explains your business will answer their questions and prompt them to search around your site more. Zendesk is a good example of this.

2. Video Product Demos

People need to know how your product works. Giving them a video demo is like giving them a virtual sales demo. This can lead to higher conversions from your visitors like Zappos, who reported that videos increased their sales from 6 to 30%. Check out how Apple tantalizes its customers with lifestyle product demos. Simply amazing!

3. Video Tutorials

By showing how much your customer can get out of your product, you increase its value tremendously. By developing short tutorials for your online customers, you will substantially increase your product’s usage. Basecamp does an excellent job providing tutorials (they call it tours) to give their prospective customers confidence that they can maximize the products potential.

4. Video Ads

Text ads, picture ads or video ads; it’s pretty obvious which is more engaging. Video ads are effective and growing in popularity in increasing your sales online. It’s far more measurable and specific, accurate and actionable than television. Videos are becoming shorter (15 seconds or less) but more frequent to satisfy the users insatiable demand for new media. If targeted properly in niche markets, Video ads can command the highest returns.

5. Mobile Ads

With iPhones and Smart Phones becoming increasingly popular ways to consume content, making sure your videos are viewable on those platforms is critical. Some video players are flash-based, which may not be viewable on browsers (like iPhone’s Safari for the time being). If your videos are on Youtube, you should be OK.

Video Marketing is a Powerful Tool

Videos are a great way to excite your audience about your products. Consumers will appreciate the extra time you’re spending on creating rich, relevant and realistic content for them. If you want more great resources on online video marketing go check out ReelSEO. All in all, Video marketing is a powerful way to strengthen your all your marketing strategies.

It’s hard to keep up with the pace of innovation like Social Media Education that is coming from the internet. Businesses and education are struggling to make use of new Web 2.0 trends like social media. Social media has enabled everyone to connect and collaborate on a scale so easy and so quickly like never before.

Young students who have grown up in the internet age are used to its fast-paced nature and are already using it for school projects. Unfortunately for teachers and educators, most who have started using the web the last 10 years, fall short on fully utilizing the web’s tools that their students are so familiar with.

Social Media is what’s happening now on the web, and it’s here to stay. Here are some creative ideas on using Social Media Education in your classroom.

1. Twitter-based Classroom Discussions

This is great for big classes or lectures where students might feel shy to ask a question. Set up a class account on Twitter.com and ask your students to ‘follow you’. Make sure they sign up for their own account. (You may have to run a short tutorial on how to use twitter.) Post articles or videos for discussion by your class. Tell your students to mark their comments with a hash (#) tag. Hash tags help twitter to keep track of certain discussion threads and make these conversations easy to retrieve in the future.

You can review all the comments around the hash tag discussion with twitter monitoring software like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite. Simply, create a column to monitor the hash tag. After you can review the conversation with your students.

2. Wikis

Wikis are online documents which are community generated. The most popular wikis being Wikipedia (which your students will be already very familiar and reliant with.) Your students will feel proud to show off the information they find and also feel the responsibility to review their peers’ work.

One ideas is to get your students to collaborate on a major topic in class like a current event, or a textbook chapter. Split up the topic into smaller portions and assign them to groups. Afterwards get the groups to edit the wiki for spelling or grammer mistakes, and of course factual errors.

More great ideas for using Wikis in the classroom (Smartteaching.org).

There are many Wiki communities out there, some free and paid ones are wikisineducation.wetpaint.com (paid), www.wikispaces.com (paid), www.wikidot.com/plans (free and paid).

3. Facebook-Based Discussions

One great idea is to have discussion in the form of comments on pictures or videos you post on your profile. For example, if you are an english teacher, get your students to practice their english by posting their comments on a picture with poor english explaining why it is poor english. Or they can give their suggestions on a video of an english conversation in a restaurant, for example, on how to improve the responses when ordering food. You can review their comments together at the next class.

4. Virtual Seminars

This one’s more useful for distance education. Use online seminar software like Webex to reach out to your students with powerpoint presentations and through voice broadcasting. Since it’s free for listeners, who just listen through the browsers (so no software downloads are needed), it makes it easy and simple for you to broadcast to a large audience.

The cool part is the ability for your listeners to raise and vote for questions they’d like to ask the speaker, in real time. As a speaker you can stop and answer the questions or wait until the end to answer your audiences most popular question. Alternatively you can use Twitter and a hashtag (#) to monitor questions / comments from the audience.

Singaporean businesses are slowly adapting towards web marketing. Even with the hectic pace on this little island, businesses can still promote themselves online with minimum effort. The trick is…where?

Here are the 6 biggest online properties Singapore businesses need to have presence on.

Google

The world’s most popular website with a 78% market share among search engines globally.

Among, Singapore’s internet users, Google is the second most popular site in terms of pageviews and its ad network controls millions of ad impressions each day in the education & training space.

Facebook

Facebook is the world’s second most popular website. Among Singapore’s website users, it is the most popular website in terms of pageviews.

Singapore has 1.6 million Facebook users and that is a huge captive audience that visits the site multiple times each day.

YouTube

The fourth most popular website in Singapore, and the world’s second largest search engine (even ahead of Yahoo Search & Bing). Youtube presents a unique opportunity to captivate audiences.

The strategy for Youtube is to have an offical Youtube channel and duplicating all the video content from trainings & marketing onto the Internet. The key competence required is to upload these videos on the right format and and tag them appropriately so Internet Users can find it.

Twitter

The fastest growing website in the world, among the 100 top trafficked site. It recently announced that it was speeding towards 10 billion tweets from its users!

It’s not uncommon to hear of major news coming from a company or celebrity through their twitter accounts. And by integrating Twitter with Facebook updates, companies can now post frequent updates and remain in the eyes of their customers.

Yahoo & MSN

While Yahoo & MSN aren’t the dominant forces they were 5 years ago, they still hold significant marketing presence. And their search engines still have approximately 25% of market share put together.

When we optimize for search engines, we will also ensure that all the work being done primarily for Google, also reflects for these search engines.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a social media site that has become popular for businesses and business networking. It has been accredited to have brought businesses to the social networking world.

Business professionals should at minimum have an account here with their most recent working experience, and add colleagues to their network.

It’s essential for Singapore business to cover has much ground in the internet, even it’s basic set up of a company account. Even a small amount of time spent strengthening your online presence can result in some enquires.

We barely got a breather from the Google Analytics Master Class in Singapore last Tuesday and we found ourselves on an early flight to Kuala Lumpur in Kuala Lumpur (KL), Malaysia.

Since we’ve never done business in KL (yet!), we didn’t know what to expect at this conference. Last year, the GAMC was only held on Singapore and about 200 people showed up, many of those flew done from Malaysia to attend the event. This year Google decided to hold the event ‘closer to home’ for Malaysian Google enthusiasts.

And what a good move by Google that was! The event was over-subscribed according to organizer. There was difficulty fitting the 500 attendees into the Hilton Kuala Lumpur conference room. There registration line seemed to never end. The response was just amazing!

Like the Singapore event, there was a twitter (#GAMC) feed set up for people share their thoughts during the event. There were a lot of positive tweets about the event, and a more than a few special mentions to Googler Stephanie Hsu, who seems to have a growing fan club in Malaysia.

We had a great time in at the KL event. People warmed up to Rachit’s speech about Price Testing using Google Website Optimizer. And to close off the event, there was a panel discussion with Beth Liebert, Product Manager of Google Analytics, the 3 Singapore Google Analytics Authorized Consultants: Justin Lim from Pointstar, Adrian Tan from ClickTRUE, and Rachit Dayal from Happy Marketer. It seemed that price was a very important issue to Malaysians as many questions were directed to Rachit’s presentation. I’m glad he was asked so many questions, more chances to show everyone that Rachit really knows his Analytics and that he can explain things very clearly. I think in Q&A’s and in consultative sessions about Google Analytics, that’s where he really shines. Awesome job Rachit!

[Update] Here the video of the presentation.

After the event we had time to relax. We went for Indian food with the Googlers and then to Skybar at the Traders hotel. Pretty nice place they got up there.

The next day Rach and I relaxed and went shopping at KLCC and the surrounding malls.

After a relaxing Thai massage we were tired and ready to go home.

It was a definitely a great adventure in Kuala Lumpur. Thanks everyone for the great time at the Google Analytics Master Class!

Were you at the Google Analytics Master Class in Kuala Lumpur? Let us know your thoughts about the event!

Yesterday we were at the Mandarin Hotel in Orchard to attend the Google Analytics Master Class for South East Asia. According to the organizers, over 700 people RSVPed to the event and judging from the turn out, close to 700 people actually showed up! It was a great turn out.

Happy Marketer also had a booth where we got to show off our new banner, brochures and business cards. Sexy!

Almost 20 speakers from Google and Google Analytics Authorized Consultants (GAAC) companies shared valuable insights about Google Analytics.

One of the some of the noteworthy speakers was Barbara Pezzi, Director of Webmarketing & Ecommerce for Swissotel. She was invited back to this year’s event as she was quite popular last year. She talked about the power of segmentation, advanced segmentations and its applications.

According to the event’s official twitter feed #gamc, users said they enjoyed Google’s Jon Stona, Regional Product Marketing Manager who used dating metaphors to explain Google Website Optimizer. Well done Jon, we could relate with your ‘kissing’ or ‘pissing in your pants’ analogy.

Rachit’s speech was well received. He talked about Google Website Optimizer for Price Testing. You can get a copy of his slides here.

The Google Analytics Master training seminar moves to KL this Thursday. More updates to follow!

]]> http://www.happymarketer.com/google-analytics-master-class-singapore-2010/feed 0 http://www.happymarketer.com/google-analytics-master-class-singapore-2010 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/happymarketer/~3/a0IDfdPGYRE/the-rapid-rise-of-google-facebook-in-singapore http://www.happymarketer.com/the-rapid-rise-of-google-facebook-in-singapore#comments Mon, 08 Mar 2010 01:32:19 +0000 Rachit Dayal http://www.happymarketer.com/?p=560

The Slow Death of Linear Marketing

The Traditional Promotion Mechanism That’s Failing Now

Internet Gives Consumers More Choice Than Ever

But today, consumers make their decisions based on their experiences from places that never existed a few years ago, search engines like Google, social networking sites like Facebook, blogs & microblogs like Twitter.

And while the traditional marketing model had to worry about just reaching more Eyeballs, today the Internet ready consumer can get any number of different information at the snap of a finger:

• Opinions of their friends from social networking
• Peer reviews through twitter and other websites
• User generated content through YouTube and blogs
• Competitive alternatives through search engines

And perhaps most startlingly, today companies look for just not consumers on the Internet – but also contributors who can create content and sway opinions of other consumers towards the product in question.

The Disconnect Between Consumers & Marketers

Even though the Internet is the most popular activity of shoppers, the advertising investments are disproportionately low.

A Google / Johnson & Johnson survey in January in 2009 year found that consumers in spend 45% of their time online – a 50% increase on the next most common activity (television). Yet, companies spend only 1.7% of their budgets on online media, while a disproportionate amount goes to television and magazines. This represents a huge opportunity to find the balance and utilize all the time users spend on the Internet for marketing products.

The Rapid Rise of Google & Facebook

In country after country, the two most popular sites are Google and Facebook. And while Google has been building up its dominance in the search engine space over 10 years, Facebook’s rise has been meteoric in the past 3 years.

According to Hitwise’s Singapore stats, Facebook takes the top spot in Singapore (it’s number 2 globally) and Google takes the #2 spot in traffic. And that’s not the end of it – both these websites still have a year-on-year growth that’s far ahead of other websites in the top 50.

In many ways, online marketing in 2010 has become synonymous with having a strong presence on Google and Facebook.

In conclusion, we need to focus on establishing a strong visibility and getting traffic from these websites.

1. Define Clear Goals

This is one of the most crucial aspects of running a social media campaign and is unfortunately the aspect that is most likely to get overlooked. After you define a baseline (your performance before social media) you must determine two sets of metrics involved:

1. Quantitative: website visitors, ad clicks/impressions, customer enquiries, youtube views, number of comments, tweets, number of facebook friends etc.
2. Qualitative: Positive/Negative word of mouth, quality of enquiries, positive press, quality of comments etc.

You can will monitor these metrics through online software like but also through a great deal of human analysis.

After you understand the metrics, you must determine project’s goals.

For qualitative goals it’s a matter of picking a number. For quantitative goals, ask yourselves these questions:

• Are we able to build better relationships with our key audience?
• Participate in conversations where we hadn’t previously had a voice?
• Move from a running monologue to a meaningful dialogue with customers?

2. Observe and Report

This is the entry point for businesses to better understand the behavior of an interactive marketplace. This early form of reporting is designed to provide decision makers with the information they’ll need to explore social media and its potential impact on business.

Listening: Employ listening devices such as Google Alerts, Twitter Search like Hootsuite to track conversations and instances associated with key words.

3. Set Up

Once the initial intelligence is gathered, businesses will set the stage for social media participation.

Presence: Create official presences across one or more social networks, usually Twitter and possibly Facebook , YouTube (, and Flickr . Early on, this is often experimental, and less about strategic engagement.

Analysis: Review activity for frequency (the rate of mentions), the state of sentiment allocation, traffic, as well as the size of connections (friends, followers, fans, etc.). Provide managers with a limited glimpse into the effects of presence and participation.

4. Join the Conversation

As companies take the stage, they will eventually pay attention to the reaction of the audience in order to respond and improve content, define future engagements, and humanize communication.

Conversation: Representative of an early form of participation, this stage usually evokes reactive engagement based on the nature of existing dialogue or mentions and also incorporates the proactive broadcasting of activity, events and announcements.

Rapid Response: Listen for potentially heated, viral, and emotional activity in order to extinguish a potential crisis or fan the flames of positive support.

Metrics: Document the aforementioned activity in order to demonstrate momentum. This is usually captured in the form of friends, fans, followers, conversations, sentiment, mentions, traffic, and reach.

5. Finding Your Voice

Once a company figures out through listening, responding and truly understanding the markets, we can find pain points, ideas, earn inspiration, learn, empathise and related better to them and find a purpose in your social media plans.

You can start to introduce topics of relevant and focus the conversations. You know where to start meaningful conversations. The company starts to explore goals, objectives and value to implement. Companies begin to learn that exchange is based on trust and loyalty.

6. Taking Action!

Once the online community’s ears are open, it’s time to let out the passion of your company.

Empathy: Social media personifies companies. It allows us to see who it is we’re hoping to reach, and what motivates them. Listening and observing is not enough. The ability to truly understand someone, their challenges, objectives, options, and experiences allows us to better connect with them.

Purpose: The shift from simple response to purposeful, strategic communication will be mutually beneficial. It is in this stage that we can truly produce captivating content and messages. In order to hold it, we have to give the audience something to believe in — something that moves them.

7. Redefine Your Company Experience

Conversations are the things that bind us which helps form a community of awareness, trustworthiness, and emotion. Once we understand the needs of those who influence the market we need to establish a persona worthy of their attention. Having a social branding guide or training staff is necessary.

The company will attempt to redefine the experience of new customers, prospects and influencers. It is essentials a brand makeover.

The great thing about social media is that it is new, it is cutting edge and it is continuously evolving as we expand with new technologies and experiences.

But in the end, social media is a privilege, a responsibility and a tool – and opportunity to have a more meaning and relevant business.

So what’s a marketer to do?

No one cares what have to say until they know how much you care about them. Follow this simple tips on how to you can earn your customer’s trust online.

1. Don’t sell.

Customers are frustrated; they hate to be sold to by people who are only after their wallets rather than improving their lives. If you think about it, when people buy from a sales person, many of them buy because they trust the person has the best intention for them. ??If you are promoting a product online, rather then tell people to buy your products, think of ways to spark interest of your product: create videos or articles showing how your product is made or how it has helped people’s lives. I heard a story of sign-maker who gained a lot of attention online by sharing photos on how his signs were made. People became interested about the process and soon were request him to make a sign for them.

2. Be there when they need you.

When people are ready to buy, they don’t need anyone to convince them. Can your potential customers find you easily? Optimize your website for keywords on search engines like Google. For a start think of the top 40 keywords related to your business and make sure your website contains these keywords.

3. Be yourself.

Many companies want to portrait a perfect image where ever they appear. The problem is that corporate marketing talk doesn’t earn trust. People trust people, not corporations, realities not fantasies. ??Connect to your customers by setting up personal ‘company’ blogs. Write it in your own words, be transparent about what you’re talking about. The blog should be centered around people in the company not the company itself. If the product can be improved, mention it and ask for comments. Avoid publishing press releases on blogs, people hate that. Instead talk about it in your own words.

4. Appeal to bigger causes.

I love the ad campaign “The Campaign for Real Beauty” (campaignforrealbeauty.com) from Unilever’s Dove. The campaign hits a chord with women because its purpose is to make them feel good everyday. It made women feel good about their own bodies and many people agreed with that message, and thus they agreed with Dove. ??Volkswagen’s The Fun Theory (thefuntheory.com) is an initiative to change people’s behavior for the better by making things fun. The website invites people to come up with innovative ideas to making simple things like throwing away garbage fun and showing how people react to it. The videos are widely popular on the net and as a result, Volkswagen is now not only associated to making cards, but also to having fun…and people love to have fun! ??Appealing to bigger causes works because your message is received by a broader audience and it show people your company is has a personality that people can connect with and trust.

5. Talk to them.

Show you care by letting your customers know you understand their needs. Reply all your emails you receive, go check out forums (even if you aren’t your own) and respond to their issues. Make a site dedicated to hearing feedback and addressing all their issues. When Dell’s image suffered because it received many complaints about their customer service, they engaged a dialogue with the Dell owners to find out what was wrong. People saw that Dell was taking an effort to improve it’s service quality and its image improved. ??Show that there are people in your company who want to help others. Add places to comment on your website reply to those who comment. Participate in online discussions about relevant topics.

6. Be an expert in your field.

Gain trust by establishing credibility in your industry. Publish articles relevant to your industry in online and offline magazines. Generate an educational report or a ‘white paper’, podcasts or videos and host it on your website. The more value you generate the more people will see the value in you. Give and you shall receive.

The age of interruptive advertising is over. Consumer’s are increasingly skeptical and resistant and have very specific needs. Companies need to move beyond merely seeking attention to engaging a meaningful dialogue with consumers. Markets are conversations, people make up those conversation, and people trust those who participate in those conversations.

David is a Senior Consultant from Happy Marketer a Search Marketing & Conversion Consulting company in Singapore. He is responsible for helping clients attract more qualified search traffic and create more compelling propositions to get more business from their websites.

I’m now a Qualified Analytics Individual, which basically means I’ve gone through a pretty rigorous training to set up, understand and analyze Google Analytics for clients. I’m also talking with Google to get certified as a qualified Agency, but that’s a story for another day.

I’d wanted to take this test ever since Vinny from Google told me it’s available two weeks ago. Then, my desire for the qualification went through the roof when I attended the Google Analytics Master Class last week. Went through the preparation seminars, shivered in my boots for a little while and then finally gave the test! It was nice to get that certificate (image below).

Now, I’m going to find out if there’s a logo that’s associated with this too 

I didn’t really want to admit it, but the process of preparing for the test was quite enlightening. This test was a little bit tougher than the AdWords test, some questions were tricky. And it’s prepared me to take the next Google Marketing Boot Camp to the next level.

Although, I’ll do my best to simplify the complexities of Analytics for the participants in the room, I might just take a little time to introduce them to the some advanced features like Custom Reports, Advance Segmentation, Ecommerce tracking & Filters.

So, that’s the first piece of news. The second piece of news is that the shiny new site for the Boot Camp is up – www.MoreWebBusiness.com!

While the original site was good for info marketers who’re used to seeing long sales pages … the new site is much shorter and piffier. Plus, it looks gorgeous!

So, if you haven’t yet signed up for it – go get your tickets to the Google Marketing Boot Camp – the next one starts April 17th. Ticket prices have been slashed to the ground – they start from just S$195 (the cheapest ticket was $995 for the last Boot Camp).

So, sign up for the Boot Camp – Follow me on Twitter – And stay healthy, wealthy & wise!

We had every kind of business in there – from affiliate marketers, to online product owners, to larger companies who do B2B lead generation to government organizations to advise other companies.

And while I’m not at liberty to give out too many details about what they do – some of the participants did give us some great feedback. We’ll put up those videos pretty soon on the information page for the workshop (www.HappyMarketer.com)

We covered a lot of topics:

• Google AdWords Setup & Optimization
• Google Analytics: Setup & Reporting
• Google Website Optimizer – Testing & Improving your site
• Writing Ads that get great CTR
• Search Engine Optimization
• Copywriting & Headline Testing
• Wireframes & Landing Page Design
• White Papers, Guides & Generation Leads
• Drip Irrigation via Email follow-up
• … and much much more!

There was also a fantastic session from Chandrashekar from Google, he gave us some fantastic stats from the recession trends and strategies for fighting the recession by increasing the conversion rate on Google Traffic.

So, here’s a quick thanks to all the participants for taking in two intense days of my babbling. Thanks to Chandra, the Google guy for coming down and electrifying the crowd. And thanks to David for managing the operations and keeping the cogs turning.

The next Google Boot Camp is going to be in April. That one will be structured slightly differently – It will come in two editions – Silver and Gold. The Silver Boot Camp is going to be just one intense day (Friday 24th April), where we’ll rapidly run through all the strategies you need to know about getting and converting traffic from Google.

The gold edition of the Boot Camp will be three days long. You’ll come on Friday and get the same introduction as the rest of the gang. But on saturday and sunday (25th, 26th April), we’ll blast off into a different orbit and spend two days actually working together to implement stuff on your website. We’ll take your existing copy and rewrite it. Take your existing ad campaigns and optimize them. And take all the brain power in that room, and focus it into bringing results for you.

If you have any questions about the workshop, want to know the pricing, or want to register – email me at Rachit@RachitDayal.com