Episode 183 - Grant Crowell, the “Videologist” on Social Video Marketing Part 2 of 2

Transcript

Susan Bratton: Welcome to DishyMix. I’m your host, Susan Bratton, and I have part two of a two part series on online video with Grant Crowell. Grant is a senior analyst at Reel SEO, reelseo.com. He’s the founder of Grantastic Designs, and he’s the author of a new e-book called A Reel Guide To Online Video For Business. In part one we talked a lot about the levelset of different kinds of videos marketers could use, different formats, production value. Grant gave us some great tips on equipment, things I’ve never heard of – the Blue Yeti mic and a free talk web cam and all kinds of things. And we were getting into distribution and syndication, online video platforms and why ultimately you would want to have your video on your own website. And that’s where we left off, with a recommendation from Grant, but we start with doing your video on your site before you even think about syndication and distribution, and lets talk more about why that’s important by welcoming Grant back on to episode number two. Hey Grant.

Grant Crowell: Hey Susan. I got to tell everybody check out episode number one. It was exciting. There was shouting, laughter, crying. I think heard some gunshots in there, but we had a good time at the end.

Susan Bratton: I think that was a bird hitting my window. No! Poor birdie. So okay, you think that we should start with video on our corporate website or a site where we want people to come, we want traffic, that’s why we’re doing video. How do we do it? How do we appear in the Google search results and why should we start there?

Grant Crowell: Okay. Well you just said the word ‘Google’, and people remember Google is the number one search engine, over two-thirds of the search market. I mean granted, I talk about other search sites, but I always say with video SEO start with the lowest common denominator, Google. Okay, so we’ve settled that. So now it stands to follow, what is Google themselves saying you should do to have video into their search index? Well I’m going to tell this to you right now for your audience: this is how it works; to get your video into Google’s universal search results – that’s where people just go to google.com, enter in there, they’re not trying to image search or anything else – what you first have to do is you have to have all of your video indexed into their video search engine. You see that is a separate search engine, just like they have an image search engine. You need to get all the video indexed in their video search engine for Google Video Search. If you click on the Video link, that is what it is. And what you can do is you can do ‘site:’ and enter your own domain and see what videos you already have in there. When I gave the presentation on search engine strategy Chicago in October, I showed this is exactly how you can find out how many videos have been indexed by Google because that is the only way – I do want to stress, the only way you’re going to get to show up in Google’s universal search results, and that’s considered the holy grail. Well here is what Google is saying you need to do: people are familiar of a site map that they do that is basically a directory that is meant for the search engines to index all the pages on their site. Well you can now do what’s called a video site map. It’s actually called Google Video Site Maps. In fact if you go to reelseo.com and just enter in the search box Google Video Sit Maps, we have a ton of information on what it is, how you can do it. Now here’s the really nice thing. I sat on a panel with a senior developer from Google who gave a presentation on how to do a Google Video Site Map. This is no secret. It is available at Google Web Master Tools. Really, just go to Google in their Web Master Tools area and there’s an area for Video Site Maps and they clearly show how to develop a site map. Now I’m going to explain briefly for your audience what you do. This is really just based on having some fields from where they’re saying they need to find the location of the video. It also allows you if you want to have a special thumbnail, a good quality thumbnail in there, and I say that’s really, really important to do. And what you do is you create an image thumbnail for each one of your videos, and that is what shows up in Google’s search result. I love doing video thumbnails because it’s a great way to challenge yourself with what can you get in a small amount of space to make it sharp enough, so I can be at the bottom of the page but people can look at that over what’s the top of a page. It’s amazing the advantage you have. Video is an advantage for search. So if you go to Google’s Web Master Tools and you look at Video Site Map it has very clear instructions on how to enter this. Now granted the technology hasn’t come just yet where there’s a wig tool. You will have to enter this manually, but I can let you and your audience know this will be coming soon. In fact Reel SEO might be involved in that as well. So Google Video Site Maps, look it up on Reel SEO. That is going to be the holy grail to having your videos show up from your website, and that appears right in Google Search Results.

Susan Bratton: Thank you for that. I am going to check that out today. It’s very interesting to me. Does it work at all for audio or is only video?

Grant Crowell: Well I believe, you know, I’d hate to answer that and go “Oh shoot, what was I saying there”, but…

Susan Bratton: It’s okay to say I don’t know.

Grant Crowell: it does (unintelligible) in Google Video Site Maps. I don’t know, but you know what, I’ll tell you this, you could do it for video and here’s a really simple way to do it for video is you could just have an audio only but just have a static image and make that your video and have that run even though it might look kind of strange, but you know, if you have a whole bunch of podcasts… Well the thing is Susan you already get that. You already get that with places like iTunes where it can have an RSS feed. And just like with Google Video Site Maps, there’s an XML feed. You can even do it as an MRSS feed, which is Media RSS. So I really just been seeing is what can you do for video but technically I have tested it out with just an audio and then I put in a still image and that did show up. So however you define video out there, you can put up a still image but as long as you have it as a video file and the rest is all audio, it works.

Susan Bratton: It totally makes sense to me. Now, all right, so lets just say that we have some video, we’ve figured out how to get it on to our website, we’ve used video site maps and we’re starting to appear in the universal search results on Google’s standard search. But now that we have these videos we want more people to see them than just people who are searching Google. We want to use, lets start with what are the other ways we can get more people to see it, and then I want to end with the social one and I want to drill down into social syndication, distribution, analytics, that piece of it. But give us the top level above social, you know, that social’s one of those ways we can distribute beyond our website; what are the others?

Grant Crowell: I would even say Susan that social is the top level, and it’s going to be having more and more. The longer I get involved with video, the more wary I become of using terms like SEO, which is trying to appeal to a robot, that try as it can, we’re trying to have the best relevancy and behavior based on what people type on a computer, it can never take the place of what you get from somebody who you know or who you trust. And that is where with Facebook – and I’ve been covering a lot on Facebook video marketing and interviewing some great professionals. I mean we mentioned in the last episode Mari Smith who wrote the book on Facebook, Marketing An Hour a Day. And in the interview I do with her she talks about video is the next best thing to being there and sometimes I say sometimes it’s even better than being there. You have a more of a context to the situation that you can step back and observe. Facebook is a great place for if you like a video, well guess what, you can automatically become a fan of that Facebook page, and that is a very, very good tip. So it makes a lot of sense to have your videos in the social media sites like Facebook. I’ve covered Twitter video marketing. I actually show up at the top for that term, because now video can be embedded in Twitter. It’s great to see the social media sites becoming much more inclined to accept video, but if you had to say what’s in between, well look at the same things as who are the trusted, you know, thought leaders? Who are the people out there who can disseminate this to their own audiences? I mean if you don’t have that, then I’d say consider the news release where you can embed video out there, PR Web, Business Wire. Although there are some good ways of sometimes just showing images that link to videos and it can save you some money out there, and again, it comes down to testing. But I am telling you this Susan; more and more it is becoming about social, so much in fact that I coined the term ‘social video marketing’ because video is I could say the best way today of communicating and I say where more and more things are going.

Susan Bratton: So lets go to Facebook and then come to Twitter. So on Facebook I have videos, not me personally, but lets just say, I’m a brand and I have some videos that I have on my website and I want to distribute them in Facebook. One way I can do it is to post the video on my page if I have a page, you know, that a brand fan page if you will, I can do that. So I can post my own video on my own page. Depending on how many followers I have and how good that video is it’ll end up in the news feeds of my followers where their followers might see it. That’s the concept, yes?

Grant Crowell: Yeah, that’s a very good strategy. It appears up on their wall and so they’re disseminating it for you, and again, it’s great when people who aren’t normally your fans, once they like a video of yours they automatically become fans. You know, you can do it for your own business brand, your own personal brand, you can do it around a product. You can also have a tab for videos. And there are services out there; one that I use that a colleague of mine uses is called North Social, that develops a video channel where say you’re on YouTube, it can show all your YouTube videos right on a Facebook age. A lot more video is appearing as a default, as a landing page, so when people go to your Facebook site, if you want to call it, the tab that automatically opens up is the videos tab. You can set these things up and there are lots and lots of tools that are coming out that are geared for video around Facebook. That’s why I love covering social media with video. That’s what I’m assigned to do at Reel SEO, and I’ve done a regular series on Facebook video marketing, a lot more to come, and I would definitely say definitely look to Facebook for new wave of video marketing strategies ‘cause I certainly see that is where we’re going, not just on the technology but just like what you said, the sharing, the communication and getting people to basically, you know, do the marketing for you.

Susan Bratton: So in addition to using video and maybe having a tab on your page or being the top tab instead of your wall or something like that on your Facebook page, what are some other ways you can distribute your video content in Facebook?

Grant Crowell: All right, some of the ways you can distribute your video content in Facebook is, here’s an obvious one, sell your video content. You can actually do this with e-commerce tools, one that is a free one called Payvement, p-a-y-v-e-m-e-n-t, I may have spelled that wrong, forgive me people. But it’s something that I’ve covered out on video and e-commerce, and that is something where you can give people a taste and then they could access the larger part of… It’s something that if you want to make your video the actual content you sell as part of your business. Other ways are to comment on other peoples videos. And then you can basically take people back with a link to their own videos on their own site. I mean this goes back to the era of YouTube is what are you doing to converse, what are you doing to comment, not saying “Look at me, look at me, look at me.” But show people that you care about what they’re doing, and when you show people that you care about the video you’re doing, that’s a great opportunity to take them to a link back to your own video, that can be a response. Another way that I say is here’s what I found successful. I actually did this as an experiment with a person who was a director of persuasive technology for Stanford University, Dr. B.J. Fogg. Throwing out some names there people.

Susan Bratton: Yeah, I saw B.J. at SES.

Grant Crowell: You did?

Susan Bratton: Did you see him speak at SES?

Grant Crowell: Which SES was this one? Was that over in your neck of the woods?

Susan Bratton: Yeah, in San Francisco earlier this year.

Grant Crowell: I missed him. I actually saw him…

Susan Bratton: He was good.

Grant Crowell: at a video commerce event in Seattle and we were right next to the baseball stadium there, Seattle Mariners Baseball Stadium, and there was a video interview with me with him. If you got to Reel SEO, just do Reel SEO, B.J. Fogg, you’ll see me interview him. We’re right by a pool so there’s some noise there. That was the only place to get an interview with some light, but we talk about, you know, what he finds in terms of human behavior. And Susan, good point for your audience, don’t get so fixated on technology but understand human behavior. And he made an excellent point is that we’re going through revolutions in technology, especially with video, and he absolutely loves video. But he says if you really want to understand marketing understand human behavior because psychology, how people behave he says has stayed the same for millennia. So once you understand why do people respond, why do people maybe want to like a video or share a video, do they want to be socially accepted, do they get a feeling of pleasure from it, do they get an instant gratification, do they want to feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves or do they want to just have attention. Once you understand these psychological factors it gives you a very good idea of to use the social networking site Facebook, which plays so well into those psychological factors to have video that gives people an opportunity to respond, to share, to create their own, to participate. B.J. has done several videos where he just asks a question via video versus just a question via text, and in the experiment he did the responses he got from video question was ten fold what he got over text. And this even included asking people to donate for something. Doing a video gets a much better response even towards an intended action you have as a marketer. You can do that in Facebook.

Susan Bratton: It reminds me of three things I want to say. The first is that I’ve interviewed Bob Cialdini, the author of Influence and Persuasion, and that’s a very good interview about human behavior and persuasion, online persuasion techniques. I also interviewed Greg Jarbo, and he wrote the book Online Video Marketing and YouTube Video Marketing or whatever, just one of the wily, you know, day in the life kind of books. And he talks a lot about the strategy that you’re recommending Grant, which is commenting on other peoples videos in YouTube, taking your focus about YouTube less from “I’m pushing content out” and more from “I am a member of this community”, as a strategy for getting good followers and connections that can be really applied to Facebook as well as YouTube. It’s, you know, more human behavior. And then there was one more interview I did with Dave Taylor, and Dave is a big blogger. He has a hell of traffic on his site, which is askdavetaylor.com, and he got all that traffic by commenting on other peoples blogs. And he has some ways that you can track what other people are saying out in the webisphere so that you can keep your commenting going, which reminds me of what you said about commenting on other peoples videos in Facebook. These strategies don’t change; the platforms simply change. So I hear these stories over and over in doing years of interviews about the latest technology, but you’re absolutely right to say it’s the human behavior, the social human behavior that we’re really trying to connect into. We’re trying to connect with an individual with our story to make it relevant and engaging to them. And we can’t lose sight of that in all of our conversations about bits and bytes and technology, right?

Grant Crowell: Well right, and what I find interesting is I purposely put myself in situations from the audience that doesn’t do that and that finds themselves in an old, and I would say outdated and soon to be obsolete form of marketing and networking. And a good example I use is Chambers of Commerce, local Chambers of Commerce. I have actually been a member of a Chamber of Commerce, four different ones over the past ten years. I’ve designed websites for them, I’ve done speaking engagements, I’ve even done speaking engagements on video. But the mentality is so different from what we’ve been describing here. What normally we say to our kids, we say, “Kids, you need to learn to share”, but yet somehow as marketers that are still in the old sales mentality it’s never about sharing, it’s all about “Let me hit you over the head. Let me automatically put you on my email list.” When they do have a Facebook site they add you without asking you or without having anything to say to you, where they might just simply say, “Oh, we’re members.” I mean I’ve even been part of LinkdIn groups where they might be in the space but they don’t think I need to share. Just because they have a LinkdIn profile or just because they have a Facebook page doesn’t mean that they’re social. All it means is they look at it as something like a billboard. And so I still get stuff saying “Well I added you because you’re a member of this Chamber of Commerce and how about I share with you my stuff or how I can make you money on your taxes.” You know, they don’t pay any attention to you. They don’t show that they’re interested in your, or if they do it’s all part of a marketing gimmick, and I so want that to go away. I so want the people who all they want to do is advertise, advertise, advertise for me to say that’s obsolete, and I even want to expose that as if you can’t even share anything, if you can’t even teach the values you want your own kids to have, you really are doing something wrong, and I want the sharers out there – and video is a perfect tool for sharing – to be the ones that rise to the top and for stuff like this I do want to say to be obsolete because if they can’t grow then they’re really not adding and I think they’re just creating a lot of noise. As you can see I have no opinion about anything.

Susan Bratton: Yeah, that was a hell of a soapbox. So Twitter video marketing, I don’t want to leave that thread untied. How can you most effectively leverage video in the Twittersphere?

Grant Crowell: Oh wow. I would first tell people is check out Reel SEO and enter ‘Twitter Video Marketing’ ‘cause I’ve written several articles on this, and in fact if I just type in… You know, now that I think about it just go to Google, enter ‘Twitter Video Marketing.’ Why? I have the top three listings on there. And there’s one thing I have a good article called – if I may toot my own horn, thank you – 5 Top Twitter Video Marketing Strategies For Every Business. It’s actually reelseo.com/Twitter-video-marketing-tips. And what I basically say in here is the strategies you can use is understand the medium of Twitter, real time use, real time information. This can work for a lot of businesses that might have a short run special or there might be a quick piece of news, you know – like the CNN iReport where we’re capturing news, that’s a good way for people to get something short and quick. However, I do see people tend to forget that just because now you can put a video up on Twitter doesn’t mean you should be putting a long format. Make them what Twitter is for bite sized pieces. You can always point people to a longer video, but why are people on Twitter? Understand the type of social network that Twitter is, I want to get a quick feed, don’t inundate me with a long video. So if you go to that, I’ll say the top 5 Twitter video marketing tips are basically this: is first one I say in there, if it’s a live event, if it’s a recurring event, recorded event, is give something, even if it’s somebody else’s video, even if it’s not you, add something to it, you know. Add something that is uniquely your own. Don’t just be somebody who retweets and has nothing to say out there. I always do a comment on somebody else’s video. I even do a comment on my own video, something like that they’ll get just from that place. I mean, second thing use Twitter for your real time news, just like I talked about there. I used a good example of when there was an event where a fire broke out and the news stations couldn’t get there but people were reporting on it, you know, just basically just using their flip cams or their iPhones, were able to cover that in real time and it was very exciting. You can use that as a great marketing tool such as if you’re at a conference, take a little video piece, put it up there. I did this at a conference I was at for another one, it was called a Word Press Camp, and I took a little clip, I put it up there immediately. I don’t like when people just simply take what’s happening at an event and they just repeat what’s being said back. That’s nothing new. Add some of your own personality, your own content to it, you know. And I say in there, number three, create micro videos for Twitter. Keep them short. Number four, resist the temptation of being television chatter, and by that, again, I go back to the same thing as don’t just push your video out all the time. Be careful. Hold back on it, you know. Don’t think “I have to do ten videos on everything that’s happening around my world.” Think quality. And again, what I say is, you know, we also list on here good sites like Social Media Examiner that has some great Twitter marketing strategies. It doesn’t always have to be specifically about video. Look at Twitter marketing strategies from sites like Social Media Examiner or also those that might be covering Facebook, and you can imply to Twitter as well too. That’s just a very good series of okay, not everything has to be about video all the time but you can take what works in our social video marketing and say, “I wonder if I tried video on this”, but with Twitter understand the network is quick, fast, give people bites of it, if people want more they can choose to link to it later.

Susan Bratton: Thank you. I want to make sure that we talk about analytics and legal ramifications. I’m leaving legal for last ‘cause I know you have a lot to say on that. I want to quickly talk about analytics. You mentioned in the part one of the two part series Wistia as a way that you do analytics, time code sharing of comments and things like that. If you have video on your site and you are using some syndication tools – maybe you’ve got something, you know, on iTunes or Blip TV or Viveo – and you also have a Facebook page and you’re putting your videos up on there and you’re tweeting out some of these temporal and succinct video pieces through Twitter, how are you rolling it all up? If the ultimate goal, which if I have my marketers hat on, the ultimate goal is driving traffic back to my website to generate revenue. How are you rolling up all of these activities to see what’s in a perfect world a converting to a customer? Where are the sources of customer conversion coming from?

Grant Crowell: Well for, if it were take people back to our own site, the E stands for that as Google Analytics and if it is you want a specific activity to happen and that can be done on a particular landing page where that video could ultimately be pointed to or residing on, that’s good. With programs like online video platforms, they tend to have very good analytics with them, or we’re talking about things that might be in a $100 dollar or up range a month, granted, but they can be very good at saying how long was the video watched for, you know, what action was taken from that. They could also basically if you go even further some sources like Wistia can also gauge, you know, what are the points where people might drop off in a video. The nice thing is if you even do just YouTube, which you can still feature YouTube videos on your website and those analytics will be tracked from Google Insight. It does a very nice graph or can show, okay, well what was the level of people watching in a high point, what was the level of people going down. It comes down to what do you want to measure? Do you want to measure an actual conversion on your site? Do you want to measure people watching the video up to a certain length or in its entirety?

Susan Bratton: We want to measure conversions to sales.

Grant Crowell: Okay.

Susan Bratton: Everybody wants to measure that. And if they don’t, they’re not measuring the right thing.

Grant Crowell: Yeah, you got to make some money here.

Susan Bratton: Right.

Grant Crowell: But…

Susan Bratton: Everything else is bullshit. Lets talk about what my effort out gets me for revenue end. How do I track that?

Grant Crowell: That’s got to be the name of your new show, Everything Else Is Bullshit. I like it already. Well lets just say you’re a marketer that is dealing with direct marketing and it can be either retail or towards a customer acquisition of whatever level. Then how do you measure from somebody watching a video to taking a desired action that ultimately leads to a sale or acquiring somebody as a customer? I mean for example, the book that I put out I could be looking at somebody orders it and I know they’ve watched a video from there. You can check that in Google Analytics but you can also check that in online video platforms out there, like I mentioned with a Bright Cove or even another company called Sorrenson that does offer these type of levels of analytics, Bizarre is a good one, that can give you enough information to say people watched this video and then did the intended action for conversion towards sales or towards a customer acquisition. So it is a good investment if you want to find out what’s working. With some of these you can even rotate videos out so you can see like maybe if you’re selling something in volume what videos tend to convert a lot more sales than others. It’s just like, again, with other types of marketing; you’ll want to be testing, you’ll want to find what people respond to. And here’s a really good idea: ask for customer feedback. Why not make it available for each time you do a video to get comments around that. Because when customers feel like they can talk with you, then they become more engaged and then they become more likely to take the conversions you want to help run your business.

Susan Bratton: Okay. That was good. I really want to get right into the reasons why we need legal guides with all of this video. That is one thing that we have to deal with. And when I was reading through your overview of your new report that you have coming out, and I was looking at some of the legal issues like copyrights, licensing, fair use, the right of privacy or publicity, defamation, fraud, employee conduct and social media policies, trademarks, trade secrets, you know, all of those gatches, the things that are waiting to jump out and make a miserable day or week in your career, because you didn’t think ahead and you don’t have your stuff organized, this is such a big subject. There’s so much here that you actually have to know. Is there any way that what you could do is give us a “Here are the three things you better get figured out before you start posting all of your video stuff wherever you decide to post it”? Is there some way you can keep us out of trouble and premeditate our problems for us?

Grant Crowell: Well I can’t necessarily keep you out of trouble, at least not you Susan. I know what a crazy woman you can be. But with online video most people are just unaware. You know, just like my early days of doing websites and searching in front of websites, I had people steal all the time from me and my site. We’re talking 1997. It even got to a point where I was writing articles on copyright thievery on my own site that was getting picked up by other attorneys. I heard all kinds of excuses from them. Most people just didn’t that just because it was available online that you couldn’t just take it and claim it to be your own and market your own business with it. I mean,  heck, I even had a pastor come and take my entire glossary of web design and search marketing terms and use it for what he called ‘Christian-based Web Design’ and basically said he was just doing a test. But then I had somebody else say, “Well you did such a good job I assumed you stole it from somebody else.” So what this means is most people are still unaware. Some people are just shady characters. Knowing this in mind that there is always people that are just always going to go out for making a buck and see what they can get away with it and make it hard for other people, that’s why you have to protect yourself. I mean Susan, it doesn’t even matter if you’re not doing any video. Somebody else could be doing a video of you. Everybody has this same possibility of becoming a victim just like a perpetrator. What I want to show in this book is through my own experiences over a decade before online video, but legal issues of this isn’t as daunting as it sounds, the first thing is just learning how to be socially responsible/legal responsible and the purpose of the book is to get people directions. It’s called You Sued: Why We Need A Legal Guide To Online Video and that’s the white paper, and it’ll be followed by an e-book in the months to come. First I want to let people know what are the issues and why should the be paid attention. But what can people know, what are you getting at? Well first thing is if you’re doing a lot of video I always tell people budget something aside to talk with an attorney who specializes in internet law and intellectual property, who deals with copyrights, who can also advocate for you as a defendant, as well as a plaintiff – what if somebody’s suing yourself, but what if also you have to be using stuff and you want to basically say you have the right to put it out there. The best thing to do is go in with an attorney – just like I tell people, you know, go in with a marketer and somebody else before you start producing a lot of content. If you already have it out there great, but before you start marketing it further, talk with an attorney about making sure you have rights and permissions for whatever’s in your video. For example, did he get waivers and releases from people who are in your video? Are you using third party footage? If you are talking about something that might be somebody else’s copyright, do you have what’s called ‘fair use’ where it can be argued that you have a legal right to disseminate it for under certain guidelines? A good attorney will explain these things to you and a good attorney will also be out in the space. They’ll have their own Facebook page. They’ll blog. They’ll even do videos themselves. I had to leave my own attorney because even though they were a good attorney in intellectual property, they weren’t in the space and I could tell they weren’t really getting it. So I had to work with somebody else who was actively out in the space. That’s the first thing. What I hope my book is going to do is say Here’s the issues and basically say because the law is evolving this is for everybody. It’s even for judges, it’s even for legislatures, as well as attorneys and certainly, most important, marketers out there, and say understand because these are the issues to be aware of. Whatever time you put into it is up to you. Whatever decisions you put into it on whether you do a video or not, whether if you go after something or not is up to you, but understand what is the risk level of what you do or what you don’t do out there. It affects your reputation. If you don’t do you could be fined, you could have all your video taken down. It can basically hurt the relationship you have with clients. I’ve seen people get sued. I’ve even seen people get criminally prosecuted. I understand the mentality that most people just don’t know any better and I want this to be about awareness education. I want this to be empowering, and guess what, understanding legal issues of video can be very entertaining.

Susan Bratton: No they can’t. It’s horrible. But you have to do it anyway.

Grant Crowell: Sounds like somebody’s been affected.

Susan Bratton: No. I never have. I just don’t like legalities and contracts and, you know, all that finite stuff because I’m a much more kind of intuitive people person. You just have to find somebody out there who really likes to do those things. I’m not sure that a lot of times it’s marketers who are such good communicators, who love to work in the world of contracts. I think the biz dev people like that, you know?

Grant Crowell: Yeah, they do…

Susan Bratton: They’re comfortable in the contract construct in legalese and things like that.

Grant Crowell: Yeah, well this isn’t meant to be understanding all the different types of licenses and contracts. I’ve had to put together my own contracts, so I don’t like it. And one is I do feel empowered from it because I do have a law background. I’m not an attorney but I’ve covered legal issues for over a decade. Most marketers, heck most people would be intimidated by this kind of stuff. So what I plan to do with this is how do you make it entertaining and engaging and stuff like that a layperson could understand. This is not meant for somebody who has a law degree; this is meant for people who can market or say, “Okay, yeah, now I get it”, and how are we going to do that? Well Susan, we’re doing it with video. I had videos of the attorneys who were working with this on me and I interviewed them and we talk about this. So you’re watching the video, you see the graphics, we have fun with it. We have fun talking about these legal  issues so it doesn’t become intimidating. When you use video it becomes a good way of recollection, but granted there are those people who don’t, you know, process video as well, so we do have the e-book. We want to make it interactive where you can watch the video along with the text and also take it to the next step – you know, we have the Facebook page, we have the legal video guys, basically a podcast series and a video series that’ll be coming out in early 2011. So we can talk about the news. We talk about issues. Why Susan? Because we’re hearing more and more about this in traditional media. You hear about somebody whose reputation was slandered, they decide they want to out for YouTube and release the names of this. We hear about, you know, trade secrets of the iPhone captured in a video. This is becoming a reality and marketers are going to have a responsibility but also an advantage if they know what those legal issues are, just like they’ve had to know the legal issues with things like search and social media. It is empowering, and my goal is to make it fun.

Susan Bratton: I want to squeeze in one last little tiny quickie question ‘cause we’re out of time. Email, video in email, a friend of mine has been doing, he’s a big email marketer. He’s got a huge list. It is his business, and he started putting in just a frame, like an image of the first frame of a video and putting that image into his emails and when you click on it it takes you to his webpage with that video. And his click throughs have gone through the roof. Partly ‘cause he’s super handsome, and…

Grant Crowell: Oh I can’t wait to meet this guy.

Susan Bratton: And partly because I think it jus works really well. What do you know about best practices for getting people to click on video content through email marketing?

Grant Crowell: Okay, well the good news is I actually have written about video and email marketing at another site that I’m hired to write for. It’s called Video Commerce Consortium at vide-commerce.org. And recently I’ve written an article called Trusted Video In Email Marketing, and I interview a vendor that puts out technology solutions, which is where we hope to see things as the next step of where people who want to receive video, who are on certain internet service providers who verify the video, you can have the video play as an option because a lot of times that video is certainly not going to show up. People don’t normally want to get that, which is why you don’t see that. Images in your email used judicially are a great way to do email marketing, and that image – now granted, it just looks like a video. It might have the play button in there, but it’s conducive for people to click on where it opens up a browser window that plays the actual video. There are technologies out there that can basically implement an animated giff, which is frames from your original video, and granted, it’s a low frame rate and have that play, but it doesn’t have the audio. With HTML 5 coming out we’re going to be able to do a lot more with having embedded video in an email play. I’ve seen the technology, it’s a lot of fun. As long as there are solutions that say “I want to have video play”, “I don’t want to have video play”, “I want to have it from trusted providers play”, very, very handy and I always say as a tip for people if you do have videos to share do that image, you know. Showing a person is a great way to get people to click on it and have a play button. Don’t make it too much detail. Showing one person talking or showcase the product that you have to offer or if the personality is the product, that’s a great way to include that image in there. Don’t do it every single time. Be judicially. But again, get feedback from your own audience on is this something they’d like to have. But what your guys is doing, handsome as he sounds, I think it probably a very good idea.

Susan Bratton: I do too.

Grant Crowell: I’m saying that as a straight guy everybody. I want to clarify that.

Susan Bratton: Grant, this has been super helpful. I’ve got a lot of links to get from you that I’ll put on your DishyMix page so everyone can find all of the great resources that you have provided for us today. It’s such a massive subject. I’m really appreciative that you took the time to do a two part series with me as well. I want to thank you for that.

Grant Crowell: Thanks for having me. It has been informationally pleasurable. That’s not even a phrase, but coined it. I’m going to celebrate with a large jug of wine after this.

Susan Bratton: Maybe you could just get yourself SEO optimized for that term too. It sounds like you love doing that.

Grant Crowell: Yeah, although people might think I’m a little bit weird.

Susan Bratton: They already do. But that’s good.

Grant Crowell: Just a little. Thank you Susan. It really has been my pleasure. I’m glad you gave me the opportunity to talk with the audience about these subjects.

Susan Bratton: Absolutely. Grant Crowell. You can follow him at @grantcrowell.com. That’s g-r-a-n-t c-r-o-w-e-l-l. He’s the Senior Analyst for Reel SEO, reelseo.com. You can find him at the Video Commerce Consortium at video-commerce.org. He’s the founder of Grantastic Designs. He has a new book coming out called A Legal Guide To Online Video For Business. And pretty much, you know, he’s the videologist. If you want to know something about video now you know who to follow. You can thank me. And I thank you for tuning in to this two part series of DishyMix. I’m your host, Susan Bratton, and I hope you have an awesome day. Enjoy! Take care. See you next week. Bye-bye.