THE VALUE OF VIDEO OF YOUR ONLINE BUSINESS



THE VALUE OF VIDEO 

OF YOUR ONLINE BUSINESS 



 Videos are good for your online business whether you post them on 

your Web site to boost your e-commerce performance, or upload them to 

YouTube  for search-engine benefi t, or in the hopes they ’ ll become 

a viral success story. 


• Online jeweler Ice.com found that visitors who chose to view product 

videos were 400 percent more likely to buy than those who did not. Ice.

com also credits video with decreasing returns by 25 percent. 10


• With proper optimization, video increases the chance of a front-page 

Google result by 53 times. 11


• Among the benefi ts of online video, says eMarketer senior analyst Jef-

frey Grau, are “lower numbers of abandoned shopping carts, reduced 

return rates, and higher sales.” 12

 But of all the potential benefi ts of online video, the brass ring is “going 

viral.” When a video goes viral, it becomes exponentially more popular 

thanks to the amplifi ed word-of-mouth power of online social networks. 

 The favorite example is those Blendtec blenders. The “Will it Blend?” 

YouTube spots generated a 650 percent increase in traffi c to the Blendtec 

Web site, around 10 million page views and coverage on the Today Show

and the Tonight Show . Not to mention a signifi cant jump in sales. 

 “When George approached me about actually fi lming extreme blending 

challenges and putting video clips out on the Web, I thought it would be 

fun, but I never imagined that it would take off like it did. In fact, when 

George said we were going to post videos on YouTube, I didn ’ t even know 

what YouTube was,” admits Blendtec president Tom Dickson. “‘Will it 

Blend?’ was not designed as a sales campaign—it was designed to be a 

branding campaign. The fi rst six videos we produced and posted cost us 

about $50, and now they have been viewed by millions. This campaign put 

Blendtec on the map in just a few weeks. 



While the Blendtec story is often repeated, many new viral sensations 

are unfolding every month. A snapshot of some of the popular viral videos 

of 2010 reveals that most of them are big brands ’ big-budget television 

ads—but there ’ s always a smaller brand or sleeper hit emerging: 


• Lego World Cup—a stop-motion depiction of the United States versus 

England soccer match, starring Lego fi gures 


• Adidas Originals ad—remaking the old Star Wars cantina scene 


• A leaked iPhone 4 ad 


• Samsung business-card throwing 


• Heineken “Men with Talent” 


• Greenpeace public-service spot 

 Who knows what will be the next Blendtec-style phenomenon? But one 

thing is for sure: it can ’ t be you if you ’ re not uploading anything. 


YOUR COMPANY BLOG 



 A great primer for anyone planning a company blog is the book Naked 

Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with 

Customers by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. If nothing else, your blog is 

an unparalleled means for expressing your company ’ s perspective in your 

unique company voice. 

 “The most valuable and powerful tool a business has is its voice,” says 

Ben Cohen, the iconic founder of Ben & Jerry ’ s ice cream and a lifetime 

proponent of socially responsible business. 

 Authoring a company blog may be the most time-consuming single 

piece of the social-media program outlined in this chapter. Yes, fi lming and 

editing YouTube videos can take a big investment of time, and in some 

cases outside resources. And yes, posting and direct-messaging to Twitter 

every few minutes, as the top twitterati do, can add up to a ton of hours. 

But writing frequent, high-quality blog posts that make a difference—and 

that have the potential to spread—is a big job. 

 Scoble and Israel point out that in comparison to traditional corporate 

communications platforms—public relations campaigns and advertising, 

for instance—blogs are positively cheap, easy, and quick. 

 Authors, when asked how long a book or a chapter should be, often 

answer “as long as a piece of string.” And so it is with blog posts—there is 

no correct answer as to the ideal length.



The best traditional blogs still require relatively long-form posts—al-

though readers reward the best, most thoughtful, and most original posts 

by Digging and spreading the word. Glenn Allsopp, a viral marketing 

blogger in South Africa, analyzed average post lengths of the most popular 

blogs (as measured by Technorati) across eight industries, and saw a great 

deal of variation, with posts on celebrity gossip blogs or sites dedicated to 

tech gadgets or political news opting for lots of shorter posts—from about 

180 to 465 words a post, but with a frequency of several posts a day. 15

 In industries valuing depth over immediacy, expect to spend more time 

researching and writing, and plan to write longer, more signifi cant posts. 

In Allsopp ’ s analysis, blogs about investing, marketing, and self-improve-

ment averaged about 1,200 to 1,500 words per post. But, Allsopp notes, 

these blogs typically see a posting rate of just one to seven posts a week. 

 That said, attention spans are getting ever shorter. The trends we ’ re seeing 

on offl ine and online media alike, for shorter-form media, will likely continue, 

accelerated by the success of microblogging platforms like Twitter. However, 

there is no substitute for quality—whether blog posts get shorter or not. 

 Allsopp also performed an interesting analysis of the most popular blog 

posts across several industries (as measured by external links), and there 

he found a number of common themes. Admittedly, his analysis revealed 

less about what makes a great blog post than what attracts external links. 

Some of the impact here may be that blog headlines that match common 

search phrases (like “best places to live” or “hot growth stocks for 2010” 

or “how to write a cover letter”) tend to perform well in search-engine 

results, so are therefore seen by more people, so are therefore linked to by 

more people. 

 Not every post you issue can be a “top 10” or a “beginner ’ s guide.” That 

said, here are some tips for blog topics and headlines: 


• Tips 


• How to 


• Contests or giveaways 


• Comparisons 


THIS IS YOUR COMPANY BLOG ON STEROIDS 



 Blogs as a phenomenon were certainly overhyped a few years back. 

Douglas Quenqua wrote in the New York Times that according to a 2008 

survey, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the Times tracks. 

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