TomBritt.com Online Marketing Blog

We finally got our first Internet-delivered television show up on GeistTV.com last week. Using a new Canon HDV video camera, Adobe Premiere Elements, and Jumpcut to host and produce the final show, I finally got the prototype show online last week.

The learning curve has been in figuring out whether to edit raw clips via Jumpcut or pre-edit them in Elements and upload them as finished shows and use Jumpcut just for hosting. What I figured out (after many experiments) is it is best to create short clips, under 2:00 minutes each, and then create a movie in Jumpcut from the clips. Just like YouTube, Jumpcut has a 100 MB maximum file size so posting a 12:00-15:00 minute video will suffer quite a bit in quality. Posting (10) 2:00 minute clips and putting them together in Jumpcut is the “answer.” Besides, the video quality in Jumpcut is far superior to YouTube.

Now, we’ve been posting the short clips to YouTube and a local video portal IndyTube.tv. This has been pretty effective for us to gain eyeballs and traffic to the mother ship: GeistTV.com.

What we plan to do next is start soliciting neighbors around Geist to submit their video clips to Jumpcut and join our online group. We can then take their clips and add them to our movies, a cool feature of Jumpcut that makes it really unique.

Oh, and if you’re worried about Jumpcut over YouTube, remember that Jumpcut is owned by Yahoo! who also owns flickr. I put a photo slide show to music and posted it on Jumpcut in about 5 minutes yesterday, something you can’t do on YouTube.

Some Indiana-based bloggers are organizing the first-ever Blog Indiana Conference on August 16th & 17th at IUPUI in downtown Indianapolis. I’m going to speak on a subject or two, not sure what exactly yet, but I’m game. Blogging has matured quite a bit in the last 10 years, from “online diaries” to “business applications.” We need to enlighten the midwest that blogs aren’t just for weirdos anymore. For $49, this is a steal for two days. Just hanging around the lobby and reading name tags is worth $49. Hope you will all join me!

The best web stats software on the market today is Google Analytics. Why? Because it’s good, doesn’t reside on your server, doesn’t require a licensing agreement, and it’s free!

That’s right, free.

And to help you get started with Google Analytics, they have posted several instructional videos on YouTube.com to help you understand conversions, the role of conversions on non-ecommerce sites, bounce-rates, advanced techniques, and much more.

View entire playlist!

The new study showing the value of video ads on quality content sites, finding that consumers are more likely to act on ads they see on media sites, versus portals or user-generated content (UGC) sites, according to Online Publisher’s Association. Over one-third of consumers on magazine (38%), newspaper (37%), and online-only news (35%) sites say they have searched for more information after watching a video ad, while about one-quarter did so after watching an ad on a portal (27%) or UGC (24%) site. About one-quarter of consumers on magazine (29%) and online-only news (26%) sites went into a store to check out a product after viewing a video ad, while only 17% on portal sites and 14% on UGC sites did so. About one-in-five consumers on local broadcast TV (21%), national broadcast TV (19%) and cable TV (19%) sites requested more information after viewing a video ad, while only 16% on portal and 14% on UGC sites did so.


Overall, 80% of all video viewers have watched a video ad online, and 52% have taken some sort of action, whether it’s checking out a website (31%), searching for more info (22%), going into a store (15%), or making a purchase (16%). The importance of environment was reinforced by concept testing video ads. The study found that if a consumer has a positive attitude toward an advertised brand, and likes the video content that the ad appeared within, brand consideration jumps 61%. If the consumer’s initial attitude toward the brand is neutral or even negative, brand consideration still rises 21% if they like the adjacent video content.

This is a subject that is near and dear to my heart: community journalism. I seek out websites, blogs, and business models all the time to get ideas on how to make my GeistBlogs.com Network of weblogs better. One I’ve been watching for quite awhile is iCommunity.tv. These guys have it goin’ on!

While I believe their model is a bit too broad, they have the right idea: allow Joe Citizen to post local news about their town or community and allow them to contribute to their local “channel” as they have it defined. Users post their news clips from YouTube.com hosted content, add a description and title, and then plot the video on an interactive Google Map.  Google allows just about anyone to link to their maps and provides a free API to help you do it. But no one that I’ve seen has married this mapping technology to local video content and built an aggregation portal around it like iCommunity.tv.

While iCommunity.tv is still in beta, the idea is probably just waiting on the technology and users to catch up with it. It quite possibly be the CNN of the Internet someday with everyone in their local communities posting local news clips to iCommunity.tv and any other local niche portal. As YouTubers start plotting their mapping coordinates on the YouTube Google Map, iCommunity.tv will get some help in aggregating video content from their API master. Let’s just hope that Google keeps this platform open and doesn’t charge aggregators like iCommunity.tv a license fee. They should make enough money on the business ads they are selling through the maps to keep it free for a long time.

The sun shines a little brighter today.

Today I relaunched my local portal website www.atFishers.com on the new multi-user blog platform WordPress Mu. After over 8 months of tinkering, testing, loading and unloading, and tweaking….I’ve finally launched the future of what I think will be many online communities.

For those of you who have attended my workshops or classes on Internet marketing, you know that I always recommend BlogSpot.com (owned by Google) to newbie bloggers. Why? Because it is easy, much easier to set up and work in than any other blog platform.

However, my follow-up comment to this endorsement is always “when you get ready, you’ll want to move to WordPress.org.” Why? Because it is awesome!

WordPress is an open source blog platform with a legion of dedicated developers creating all types of extra add-ons (or widgets) to give your blog some awesome functionality.  If you don’t have a hosting provider (which if you don’t know what that is, you probably don’t have one) they will host your weblog for you for free on WordPress.com. Every free hosting service comes with a catch, except this one. The only downside of having WordPress.com host your blog is that you can’t put outside code, banner ads, or AdSense ads on your blog.

I stumbled across WordPress.com late last year while doing some research for my book in progress. I then graduated on to WordPress.org, the open source development community for WordPress where you can download the software for free and they will even help you install it (at no charge by the way). I started hosting a few WordPress blogs, including this one, and then started learning the php code underneath WordPress. Believe me, I’m no programmer. Just four years ago I was figuring out FrontPage which is essentially the Microsoft Word of web design.

But then, on a cold January morning earlier this year, while looking for yet another cool plug-in for my TomBritt.com blog, I found the multi-user version of WordPress: WordPress Mu. Being a local portal person with now a few months of WordPress experience under my belt, I downloaded and installed this multi-user blog system on my host and just fell in love with it.

After 8 months, I’ve finally moved just about every local website that I had built in FrontPage over to this new blog network I’m calling the Geist Blogs Network.  The benefits are huge:

• Two-step self-service process to create a blog within the network
• Themed templates gives each user the ability to customize their blog to be unique
• Shared traffic within the blog network
• Updates are easy: “if you can use MS Word, you can post to your blog.”
• One search for entire blog network

And the list goes on.  I encourage you to check out the Geist Blogs Network. I’ll be launching a similar online community for authors within the month. Stay tuned!

Newspapers are doing more and more online, but they are losing ground to other online news sources, social networks, and narrower niche websites. According to statistics gathered by Alexa.com (owned by Amazon.com), the largest newspaper websites have all been declining in online rank since January 2006. (see 5-year chart below)

Their page view rank is on the decline as well, noted in this graph below:

A recent study conducted by the Newspaper Audience Databank in Canada sheds some light on this ongoing problem for newspapers. It shows that boomers are still in love with their newspapers, 56% of 40+ year-olds read newspapers each day with 78% reading each week. On the weekend, boomers on average spend 105 minutes with the paper while those under 40 spend on average 67 minutes.

“Their readership habits have changed little over the past 20 years despite intense media fragmentation and technological innovation resulting in a ‘media everywhere’ marketplace,” the study found.

Which brings me to my point: people adapt their preferred method of consuming news at an early age and stick with it. As the boomers age and they become a smaller percentage of the population, newspapers will shrivel up on the dying vine.

We’ve been seeing a decline in newspaper distribution for the last five years and I’ve blogged about this phenomenon several times. The “Internet Generation” is not excited about a newspaper website offering journalist blogs, talk back features, or online extras. Their boomer base isn’t excited about it either. As a matter of fact, no one is excited about their online strategy which is reflected in their traffic decline over the last 18 months.

The general public is going online to get their news, not from traditional newspaper sources but from bloggers and citizen journalists. For the record, YouTube.com is now ranked 4th on Alexa.com right behind 1. Yahoo! 2. MSN.com 3. Google.

In my previous life (dot com days), I used to fly all over the world and talk on the topic of convergence. My thesis was simple: eventually all data, video, phone calls, audio, video would be delivered via an Internet protocol (IP) based platform. I always talked about this convergence from the device-side of things; television, handheld devices, set top boxes. Now that the dot com bubble has poppped and broadband adoption is now over 65% in the United States, convergence is happening right before our eyes in the media industry.

With this in mind, I’d like to propose that the ‘big bang’ of convergence has been YouTube.com. Yes, this free online video hosting service purchased by Google last year is democratizing the last of the media frontiers: television.

Think of what desktop publishing did to the book industry. I was working at a typesetting company back in the late 1980’s when they bought their first Apple computer. Within three years, Weimer Typesetting was purchased by a local printer in Indianapolis for about $3.1 million and a few years later, the name was basically worthless. Desktop publishing lowered the barrier for average Joes to design, layout, and publish their own print publications. Fifteen years later, print on demand took this industry to the next level of democratization by allowing people to print one copy of their books at a time. Publishers were no longer the gatekeepers to the books that people bought. Bookstores were no longer the destination for book sales, Amazon.com took buyers online with a broader selection of books.

Second, look at what the Internet did to the radio industry. Remember back in 1995 when Real Networks introduced the Real Audio Player and Broadcast.com (later acquired by Yahoo!) took most radio stations online? People were now able to listen to their favorite broadcast radio shows from all over the world on their PCs. Fast forward to today, now that 67% of America is dialed in with broadband and Apple has sold over 100 million iPods, people are coming out of the woodwork producing podcasts (or Internet radio shows). People like the ability to listen to what they want, when they want. The radio industry has been democratized as well.

Lastly, look at the television industry. Traditionally, it takes a lot of money and an FCC license to produce and ‘publish’ a television show. Local broadcast stations and cable networks have been giving up ground to satellite television for years. Again, people like more channels, more choice, and thanks to Tivo and new set top boxes watch it when they want. But up until YouTube.com, average Joe had no way to easily and effectively distribute video. Today, YouTube.com allows anyone to create video content, push it online, and host it for the world to search and see. This my friends is the last frontier that needed to be conquered before true convergence happens. Network television no longer is the gatekeeper of video content, and televisions are no longer the ‘last 10 feet’ of convergence: iPods, cell phones, and hand held devices are the ‘last 3 feet’ of convergence.

So what does this all mean? It means that people like me can provide a multi-media, multi-platform source of news and entertainment with nothing more than a laptop, video camera, and Internet connectivity. And guess what? That’s exactly what I’m doing.

With atGeist.com, we’re providing:

• A monthly print publication that is mailed to 13,000 Geist Reservoir residents
• A twice weekly podcast radio show at GeistRadio.com
• Video segments for many of our feature articles

We can provide the full spectrum of media in a local market, thanks in large part to YouTube.com. Video was the last frontier to be conquered, now it is up to the devices and transparent software to streamline the delivery and consumption of all medias. The lock that newspapers, book publishers, radio stations, and television stations have had on media delivery has been obliterated by the Internet.

Okay, it was only a matter of time, but I finally have broken the “radio” publishing barrier by starting a local podcast show called the Geist Radio Show. My neighbor and I get together on our back patio on Friday afternoons and record a podcast for local Geist residents. So far, the response has been very positive (except for our guests that sometimes get teased a bit).

As reported previously, Google is now selling radio ads in local markets. I logged into my AdWords account and a big “Audio Ads” tab was staring at me this morning so I took it for a spin.

Much like SpotRunner.com, Google Audio Ads allows you to select the radio markets you want to advertise in by city, state, station formats, and audience type. You can select the times of day you wish your ads to run, days of the week preferences, and set your budget by the week. To help you get your :30 second spots created, they have developed an ad creative marketplace that you can search for audio production companies to help you create your spots complete with samples of their work.

Taking an idea from Ingenio.com, they also offer free call reporting service where they assign you a toll free or local phone number that rings to any number you wish and tracks the responses. How cool is that? Even if you already have a toll free number, it’s a good (and free) way to track each campaign separately and monitor all the responses in your Google AdWords account.

Hats off to Google for taking a very difficult ad buying process and putting it online and giving it trackability. I’m testing a campaign in Las Vegas for our upcoming WriteStuff Writers Boot Camp in June. I’ll let you know how it goes.