Integrated Branding Blog | Movéo

Hosting videos on your Site vs. YouTube

Many marketers are already aware of the benefit of using video in B2B marketing. But once you’ve decided on this strategy, you still have to decide where you’d like to host the videos - your own Web site or YouTube. There are pros and cons to each, which I explain below.

The benefits of hosting videos on your site are that the user will be spending time on your domain and that links to the video will empower your domain and not YouTube.com. When a user is on your site, you have the added benefit of promoting your brand. YouTube does allow you to customize your channel, but control is limited.

Some companies may not have the time, bandwidth or resources, however, to implement videos on their site. There is a level of programming involved and you will have to embed some type of video player. If the technical issues are too much of an obstacle, you might strongly consider the YouTube route.

Creating a YouTube Channel and uploading videos is very simple and can be accomplished in a matter of minutes. You can also optimize your videos by giving them appropriate titles and tagging each one with related keywords.

It’s important to remember that YouTube is currently the second biggest search engine in the U.S. as far as volume of searches. Using YouTube allows your videos to be found by users who are searching within YouTube.com, as well as those who are using Google or Bing.

3 social media marketing tools that track your brand

As a company, it's important to know what others are saying about your brand. Thankfully, there are tools to help us keep track of what is being said and who is saying it. Here are three tools to help discover these online conversations:

socialmention
This site allows you to create alerts, just like Google Alerts. You'll receive e-mails of the latest mentions of your company on blogs, bookmarks, comments, images, events, news, videos, audio and Q&A.

TweetDeck
Download TweetDeck and you can keep track and organize conversation on Twitter and Facebook that involve your brand. You can also save searches and see who is replying to your Tweets. Best of all, it's all in one window that you can customize.

Keotag
Search for tags that mention your brand (or any keyword). It's simple to use - just type in the keyword you'd like to search and then click on the engine you'd like to search through. There are a number of engines available including Technorati, del.icio.us, MSN, Digg, Reddit, Yahoo! and YouTube.

Know of any others? Feel free to mention them in the comments.

What’s everyone Tweeting about?

If you don’t believe Twitter has any marketing value, get this. You can use Twitter as a research tool even if you don’t have a Twitter page. Would you like an example? I thought so.

Let’s take one of our friends - Stericycle. This company offers an array of product recall services. If they want to know what the Twitter community is tweeting about in regards to the keyword ‘recalls,’ they can go to search.twitter.com and find out. See for yourself: recall-related Tweets.

The search results mentioned above show all the Tweets that mention the word ‘recalls.’ Savvy companies have used this to see who’s talking about their brand and counter it with positive PR messaging. Companies with a Twitter account can reply directly to the user and try to resolve issues, thank them for being a patron, or whatever makes sense. There are endless creative ways to use Twitter. I suggest you start by searching to see what the community has to say about your company. This is similar to Google Alerts, which we’ve mentioned in a previous post, but it only involves people on Twitter.

How have you used Twitter for your company?

Microsoft and Google get in the health game

Technology giants Google and Microsoft have entered into the online healthcare biz with the launches of Microsoft HealthVault and Google Health. Both platforms allow anyone to create a free account, which they can update with personal medical information and family health history. Secured settings allow the user to keep their personal information public or private, depending on their preferences.

Aside from importing medical records, HealthVault and Google Health let users search for doctors and other health services that might be of interest. Digital devices, such as blood pressure monitors, that monitor your health and upload it to your physician are also in the works. This cuts time and money from routine office visits, hopefully making healthcare more efficient and affordable.

Microsoft’s HealthVault, which is currently in beta, has much more of a professional feel. Google is using their traditional simple layout with bubbly icons and lots of white space. Trustworthiness and credibility go a long way in the health care industry, even in design, and right now it looks like Google isn’t quite as far along in the development stage.

Here are a few resources on how some clinics are already using HealthVault:
Healthcare IT News
Life as a Healthcare CIO blog

Is it time you joined in?

To learn more about our healthcare marketing services, visit Moveo.com.

The future of search results is now

In 2008, there has been much talk about Google's plans to customize their search results. Many speculated major changes to come in 2009, but the end of 2008 has already provided us with some interesting tweaks. If you've performed a search in Google lately, you may have noticed some new icons housed next to each listing. The future of customized Google search results is here.

Google calls it SearchWiki and it's for users with a Google account.

Here's how the newly customized search results look:

Notice the icons located to the right of the top and bottom lines of each organic listing. The up arrow allows you to boost the listing to the #1 spot. The "X" lets you delete a listing that you find irrelevant, or simply don't want it in your results. The final icon lets you comment on the listing. Be careful what you say because your account name will be attached to your comment.

Here's a look at the rejuvenated results after I voted a Gifts.com listing (on page 2) to the top:

As you can see, the listing is now atop the results on page 1. I can now vote it back down if I so choose. Next, let's take a look at making comments on a particular listing. Here's a before and after view:

So what relationship does this have with branding? Branding is now more important than ever when it comes to searching. The voting only effects how you personally see results. The comments, however, will make a big impact on how everyone views Google search results now.

We're already well aware of the influence that comments and reviews have on a site or product. Now, users can view comments on a site before they even get there. This will no doubt have some influence on which listing a user decides to indulge in.

Jeff Swanson

The evolution of choosing a doctor

As the Internet evolves it takes many industries along for the ride. One such industry is healthcare. Way back in the old days, more popularly known as the ‘90’s, healthcare customers would rely on word-of-mouth references and telephone books to find a family doctor. But oh how the times have changed.

Nowadays, the Internet has molded us into a research-intense society. We can go online and scour the Web to help find qualified doctors. Thanks to user-generated content, some sites even allow us to categorize potential physicians not only by proximity, but by ratings and reviews.

Because of this migration to the Web, it’s critical that healthcare companies and physicians are visible online. The Internet is the new phone book, but more dynamic. Healthcare doctors and companies can host a blog, publish videos, educate their clients, etc. There's a whole new world of Internet healthcare marketing. Sites like WebMD.com have physician directories complete with profiles and contact information. It's important for physicians to be included in these major directories, so they don't miss out on potential customers.

Jeff Swanson, Organic Search Specialist

Google Goes Political

From day one of the 2008 political primaries the use of the Internet has had a huge effect on the results and communication of the candidates message. With Barack Obama using leading the web in search, and John McCain leading in Paid Search it is no wonder that Google is using the political season as yet another way to test some new products in Google Labs.

“In Quotes” compares the candidates views on issues side by side. The idea here is to let the searcher know who said what, and how the candidates differ side by side. The applications of this feature beyond politics aren’t part of the test, but I am sure many B2B buyers would love to use this feature to compare possible competing vendors.

“GAudi” or Google Audio Indexing begins the real connection between Google and YouTube as the search giant tries it’s hand at audio indexing. Anyone who has tried any of the image or video searches by any search engine knows they are typically unreliable. If Google can get it right with YouTube, perhaps users could expect an improvement in non-text based search technology.

PC commercial made on Mac...

Something about hearing that just made me think about it, does it really matter?  I have to be honest, I would consider myself neither a PC guy or a Mac guy. I made the decision to just use both. When I first bought a computer I bought a PC, because I didn’t have the need in my eyes for what the Mac is really best at: being creative. Many times did I go to try to edit video on my PC only to get frustrated with the bad rendering when I was done. Long did I dream of the day I would have a Mac to really express myself on. Now that I have one to use, I find myself bringing my PC to the office so I can actually use Excel to it’s fullest without the spinning wheel of color I often see on the Mac.

The point is that although, as seen in the commercial, PC’s dominate much of the computing landscape there are still some things best done on a Mac.  Apple really has differentiated themselves and carefully chosen the hill upon which they stand. Whenever I begin to design the strategy for a new paid search marketing campaign the first question I ask is what sets the client apart from the herd, what does their brand signify, how are they aligned. Without understanding how search marketing fits into the media mix and how it aligns with the brand image a campaign can be optimized for 8 hours a day and still not produce the same results as a properly integrated paid search marketing campaign.

Google Chrome – Why is Google in the Browser Business

With MSN still loosing search market share, and the failed Yahoo bid, you would think that Google would have written them off as competition and figured the software giant would, well…          …stick to software. It seems like Google has other plans than to quietly back away from possible confrontation with Microsoft. The new Google open source browser has been released as a beta: Google Chrome.

I run Chrome on my PC that I use to handle the large spreadsheets I work with. My experience so far has been a generally positive one. It seems to run smoothly, crashing less than Firefox, my up-till-now default browser. I have to admit, I haven’t used Internet Explorer for years. The only problem I have had with Chrome so far is the time it takes with certain graphics, like the graphs in AdWords reports. I would have thought Google would have made sure that Chrome ran all its interfaces smoothly, but I guess they don’t plan to worry about a feature that isn’t used, since the graph can only be saved through a screen shot.

From everything I have taken in on the Tweetisphere it looks like this is Google’s way of shaking up the browser market, by solving several problems that have led to tons of crashes. But its just a beta, and with Google’s never ending betas it will be interesting to see when or if Chrome gets polished up and out of the beta phase.

Can Google NBC Alliance Shed New Light on TV Viewers?

Google began a private beta of Google TV Ads last summer, and released it to the public in May.  However, for many agencies and advertisers tracking held them back from trying the distribution service. By adding tracking through Analytics to Google TV Ads in June the Internet Info-product marketers jumped in. I’m sure you saw more than one commercial from a crazy fox selling you the latest Internet get-rich-quick-scheme. But seeing as the system itself and offering have both been in the development stage traditional advertisers have shied away from Google TV Ads.

At the beginning of September Google and NBC announced a partnership involving several of NBC’s cable networks and Google’s TV Ads Platform. On the surface this looks lke Google just trying to offer broader TV choices to advertisers, and NBC looking to pick up falling ad revenue.

Really what this is all about is data, accountability, and Google trying to develop the same level of real time information for traditional media outlets as it currently has with the AdWords Platform. One of the first steps in their partnership is to work with the service provider Dish Network to more precisely measure viewer activity through tracking with the subscriber’s set top receiver.

Also in the works, is to work toward local targeting of ads through this network as well. Google and NBC intend to work together to increase the information advertisers can receive about viewers, increasing the advertiser’s and agency’s ability to optimize advertising campaigns.