When you are trying to find out information about a prospect or customer, you are most likely going to “Google it.” Well you can also search Twitter, however, with Twitter you are not going to find the company’s website, you are going to find out what others are saying about that company. Also, if the company has a Twitter account of their own, you will find out what the company’s most recent announcements are.

Millions of people are searching Twitter, so if you are not posting information about your company on this medium, you are reducing your opportunities to be found.

Check out our video series explaining what Twitter is and demonstrating how to use it:

• Twitter Overview
  

  How To Video About Using Twitter

  This video tutorial shows you Twitter.com and introduces the basic functionality of Twitter. Interestingly enough, the value you will derive from Twitter, the searching for others and posting your own messages, will most likely not happen on Twitter.com.

  There are a number of other applications you can use to search and make posts to Twitter. In the video below you will be shown how to use TweetDeck, a popular and valuable product to implement your Twitter searches.

• The Value of Twitter Search – Tweetdeck
  The real value of Twitter is the search. Millions of people are searching Twitter, which means it can be a great way for you to create opportunities to be found, and also a great way to find out a lot of information about others.

  By entering your prospects and customers names into a search on TweetDeck, you can stay up to date on what others are saying about your prospects and customers, and also any new events your prospects and customers are announcing.

  This can be very valuable as a sales tool because it can give you ammo for conversations, as well as excuses to reach out to your prospects and customers.

Click here to view the video series.

By joining and participating in groups relevant to your target market, and answering questions relevant to your industry, you can immediately position yourself as an expert in your space. Furthermore, you will also get direct access to these other professionals as prospects!

We have put together a series of videos to show you how to:

1. Join a Group in LinkedIn
   

   Videos on how to use LinkedIn Groups and Answers

   Participating in Groups on LinkedIn is a great way to gain access to a larger network of professionals and, in doing so, creating more prospecting opportunities.

   You are allowed to join 50 groups on LinkedIn and should absolutely take advantage of the ability to join all 50. If you don’t, you are reducing the opportunities for awareness, exposure, and business.

2. Create a Group in LinkedIn
   If there is not already a group for your target industry, or even your company, you can create your own! Owning a group allows you to moderate the content and create excuses for contacting group members.

   Note, people will leave groups if all they receive is advertising, so be sure to provide primarily valuable information to your group members, in addition to a little information about your company from time to time.

3. Create a Sub-Group in LinkedIn
   Sub Groups on LinkedIn are a great way to increase the engagement and communication between existing group members.

   Ideas for Sub Groups include sub groups for events you are holding, different products your company offers, or different industries your company services.

4. Get started with LinkedIn Answers
   LinkedIn Answers is a simple yet powerful way to stay up to date and what professionals in your target market are talking about, as well as a great way for you to position yourself as an expert in your space as a source of information.

   LinkedIn Answers are basically questions that other professionals are asking the LinkedIn network, categorized by topic. If someone is asking a question that is relevant to your line of work, this is a wonderful opportunity to connect with a prospect!

Click here to view the video page for how to use Groups and Answers on LinkedIn.

The LOTS of video content that YouTube displays

YouTube has its strengths but also its limitations. By definition of being a sharing platform, YouTube is designed to share LOTS of video content. What does this mean for you? It means that while your video is playing on YouTube, YouTube is actively trying to distract the viewer from watching your video, and click on another video.

From a marketing perspective, this limits the value of YouTube to creating awareness (largely via SEO). The most important aspect of this limitation is knowing about it – make sure the goal of the videos you put on YouTube are designed to generate awareness, not sell products.

There are other ways to motivate the user to take action and purchase. The best way is to host the video yourself (or through another platform like Vipe), so when you embed videos on your webpage, they do not re-direct the viewer.

Another option is to pay for a promotion campaign on YouTube (Adwords for YouTube search results) AND then to pay for call-to-action overlays in your video that you pay for on a CPC basis. The downside here is that you can ONLY have call-to-action overlays that direct a viewer away from YouTube if you are ALSO paying for a promotion – so you end up paying twice. Once for each time someone clicks on your video in a search and again when someone clicks on the call-to-action. Though there are other solutions designed for using video to take action from the ground up, this is probably not a bad environment to test in – similar to starting with SEM to test key words for SEO.

Video is proven to be one of the most effective forms of online communication, the key is understand what options you have, define a strategy, and get started creating videos for marketing.

Here is a link to Grant’s interview of Mark.

Participating in LinkedIn by regularly updating your status, recommending others, becoming active in groups, and answering questions, your can dramatically increase your exposure, creating additional opportunities for business.

We have put together a series of videos for you to learn

1. How to create your profile.
   The first steps to leveraging LinkedIn for your business is creating your own professional profile. This tutorial video walks you through the first steps of how to get your profile started.

   Make sure to fully complete your profile! A complete profile brings with it increased Google indexing as well as increased awareness on the LinkedIn network of over 75 million professionals as of the time of this article.

2. How to mass connect to your database
   As soon as you have created a profile on LinkedIn, your number one goal is to connect with as many people as possible. This video shows you how to connect with your entire database on LinkedIn. LinkedIn even shows you if a contact is already on LinkedIn.

   If you have a contact who is already on LinkedIn, and you are not connected with them, you are doing yourself a disservice because it means that other people are connected with them!

3. How to integrate your blog into your LinkedIn profile.
   One goal when using LinkedIn is to generate business. A great way to do that is to incorporate your company’s blog onto your LinkedIn profile to create another opportunity for the viewers of your profile learn what your company does and also view the newest updates.

   If you have a company blog, you should do everything you can to generate as much traffic to the blog as possible. Why spend time writing a blog if nobody reads it?

Click here to view the video page about how to get started with LinkedIn

What did we do before video? We had a cute subject line. We had pre-calls made to the client/prospect asking them to “look out” for our important-email. We visited offices with the promise of a follow-up email to relay any facts or info the prospect wanted in writing. This seemed all nice and neat, however; it never really got the attention we thought our product or service deserved. Sometimes they responded to our follow up calls or emails, sometimes they did not.

Now, if you send an email with the promise of a “Personal Video Message from ME!” you will get results. Competing with yesterday’s marketing strategies and methods grows hazardous as world class competitors vigorously challenge each other. Never before have the latest and best marketing and sales practices been more essential in conquering new markets and defending hard-won gains.

Interest in video usage is growing, according to Multichannel Merchant’s recent Outlook 2010 survey. Of the 594 respondents who said they sell via catalogs and/or Websites, 46% said they are using rich media to include video on their sites. What’s more, 37.4% said they are using video to help boost their rankings in the search engines.

Use of video is set to increase this year: The Outlook study indicates that 42.3% of merchants will incorporate videos into their Websites in 2010.

With the popularity of video on the web now, it makes sense to cater to the audience that is viewing these videos. Even the older generation can’t seem to escape the “here and now” of video. Trying several different approaches to get the attention of a prospect or a customer by using video will make you stand out from the ordinary emails that fill their inbox everyday. The power of video in marketing is undeniable. See you on the web!

“I don’t know about you, but I work on a computer or PDA all day long and I really get tired of reading and reading until my eyes feel like they are frying and ready for a crow to pick my eyeballs out for lunch. And then presto feels like overnight magic and the internet bandwidth and web 2.0 come to save my eyes and brain at one time. Yes there is a tech god out there.

Now during my daily quest on the grid I am greeted by nice video boxes with an irresistible arrow to click and all the info I need comes pouring into my brain in 2 minutes or less.

So what has motivated all these video marketers?  It seems Forrester Research has uncovered some answers very recently.

• Video increases the time spent on a site (no kidding!)   65% view videos 10% read the text – Pass the Visine
• There is a 12% buy rate with video and only a 1% rate with text – eBay better wake up!
• Videos with social media share tools get 20% more traffic – Maybe I can sell my house now?

So to all the video marketers on the grid, please keep it coming, you make the day a lot smoother.”

On the other side of the coin, businesses have found significant increases in click through rates and video has been proven to be the most effective way to motivate potential buyers to take action.

Viewers prefer video and companies see increased sales from using video marketing in their communications; however there still exists a hesitation by many to create videos.

Why? There is a widely accepted misunderstanding that the only two forms of video are (1) the inexpensive, homemade, and unprofessional videos and (2) the expensive, professionally produced, out-of-your-budget-range videos. Most companies are hesitant to associate their brand with a YouTube quality video, however, most are also unwilling to invest a seemingly inordinate about of money to have a video produced.

What if there was a middle ground? Find below three examples of videos and their associated costs.

Option 1 (Total cost of creation $39): A company overview video. Technology today allows you to type in a few text phrases, upload a few pictures, upload some short videos, and the output is a very professionally produced video that includes transitions and background music. Vipe recently added a video just like this to our homepage using a technology created by Animoto.com. Total cost? $39. What’s better is that with our account we can create unlimited videos, make unlimited revisions, and even download the file so we don’t have to pay for another month’s use if we don’t want to create any more videos. We also used Camtasia to make the video snippets in our overview video, and considering they offer a 30 day free trial, using it won’t affect the total cost. Should I want to continue with both Animoto and Camtasia the total investment for unlimited use is $39/month and $299, respectively. Furthermore, Camtasia is great for recording product demos and “how to” support and training videos.

Option 2 (Total cost of creation $145). An introductory “talking head” video adding personalization to my own communications with prospects and customers. Click here to see an example. With a FlipVideo and small tripod we were able to record this video. What’s better is that we can make unlimited videos like this once we have the camera and tripod, and furthermore, the videos can also be customer testimonials, messages from other’s in our organization, or if we were a hotel or physical location, we could record the property, sample setups, local amenities, etc.

Option 3 (Total cost of creation $595). A professionally produced video inclusive of a branded introduction, integrated photos / screen shots, music and professionally edited FlipVideo footage. Click here to see a sample. This service, and others related to video production are offered by Pixability, noting that as you add additional services (like an onsite crew), you will also begin to increase the price.

Incorporating video marketing worthy of representing your brand into your strategy can be done for the cost of a client lunch. Most every organization that we have experience with in taking the first step has seen almost immediate benefit – as is suggested by the statistics presented at the beginning of this article.

As quoted by Gordon Gekko in the now classic Wall Street movie, “The most valuable commodity I know of is information.” All of the above solutions are reasonably priced ways to take the first step in experiencing how video marketing can help you increase traffic to your website, leads, and sales. If you didn’t already know about them, here’s to sharing!

“If you asked me if video marketing worked two years ago I wouldn’t know the answer off the top of my head. Now that I’ve used video in my sales for over a year, I say, ‘Heck Yeah!’  I credit my General Manager for having the foresight to try something new when things were going well. (If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it) When things started to go south in the hospitality industry, we were miles ahead of everyone else in this regard and remain that way today.

My three star Hotel consistently ranks in the 1, 2 or 3 spot for hotels in my competitive set. And this is against four star hotels. When I saw how the videos I used were responded to, I felt such a sense of power in my normally un-powerful role of trying to get someone to decide on my facility, my staff, my menu’s, my complimentary offerings etc…that I became a more relaxed salesperson. I was sure that I was putting my best foot forward to potential guests who might not be able to come to my property for a tour because my Hotel was right there on the video; nothing to guess about, if you will.

Does Video Marketing work? I grew up as part of thee TV generation. Yes, THEE TV Gen! The sixties were like a hurricane of TV shows that were bombarding our households every day. I know, I know, it’s nothing compared to what is out there today, but boy did it seem like a lot back then. Once in a while it seems like there are “57 channels and nothin’ on” , but not often. Everything we “saw”, we wanted, or we “experienced” or “we felt” strongly about.

I don’t think anything has changed. We are more motivated by video than any other medium. It’s in our blood. So no matter what you’re marketing, if you have a video attached to it, the chances of a sale increase. Recently, there was a company that discovered from survey results that customers were 40% more likely to buy their products online if there was a video they could watch… even if they did not watch the video! Crazy, right?

Starting to use video was a bold step to take, but it helped portray everything we were. Honest, Comfortable, Clean, Different, Welcoming, Happy, Sincere; these are things you can’t express in words alone. 74% of respondents said “After interacting with companies or brands via new media, I generally have a more positive impression of the company or brand”. (Consumers Demand Brand Interaction, October 2009) People see videos and decide, I like you or I like what I’m seeing. The reasons people buy are universal; trust, comfort, satisfaction.

Video Marketing is here to stay if you ask me and I’m glad I started young. I joined Vipe because I saw the power behind the idea. I use Vipe because I see the power behind the idea at work almost every day. Hello out there, Video Marketing Works.

Bruce P.”

Some surprising answers came from Dr. Fogg including quotes like “Video has become one of the most effective ways to motivate people towards certain behaviors.” and “…the biggest challenge I’m seeing, when I work with brands or large organizations, is that they’re afraid to dive in.”

Read the entire article to learn more about how nimble companies are succeeding because they are trying video, whereas large organizations holding back because they want video to be “perfect” are losing out.

Click here to learn more, below is an abstract for the webinar.

Note this webinar is for