When Kate, our fearless AustinSEM leader, asked me if I’d be willing to write a blog about the Video Marketing Expo (VMX) May 13, my first thought was, “I’ve never written a blog and I’m too busy.” But then it occurred to me, why am I attending such events if I’m not going to jump in and do what I learned. So, here I am writing my first blog entry! And then, I thought, “Well, if I’m going to a video expo, I should do a video.” So I interviewed the event organizer, Chris Justice of Sparksight, on opportunities in video. Chris was great and Kate has helped me put up the blog entry, as well as the video. So far, so good!

Editors note: We decided to do the recap as one post and the video as another. The video will be published tomorrow in Carrie’s followup.

VMX Video Marketing
The expo opened with Ingrid Venderveldt who gave encouragement with saying “Yes, it is worth finishing, it’s not stupid!” The overarching theme of this show seemed to be that businesses needed to not be afraid of video, but embrace it.

Brigette Dale and Lan and Vu Bui talked about the future of entertainment and TV. They said the most important things are that videos should teach you something and, ideally, end with a smile. They suggested www.Freevlog.org and www.thebuibrothers.com as having tons of stuff on how to get going. They all made the point that what your audience really wants is to see you are a person.

Next I attended Track 2 with Troy Lanier and DadLabs on the essentials for producing online video. One nugget that jumped out was www.tubemogul.com allows you to put your video out to 15 plus social sites.

Then we went on to learn about online video marketing strategies with Jim Warren from Infomercial.com and Giovanni Gallucci with The Agency Blog.

Jim’s 3 steps for successful video marketing:

1. Call to action
2. Offer
3. Hook
   • Exclusive web offer;
   • Limited time offer or TV offer;
   • Lack of availability to purchase elsewhere;
   • Credibility of spokesperson.

Giovanni says Google owns YouTube and therefore it is very valuable to your overall marketing presence to optimize your videos.

1. Title in description in YouTube should be 100-300 words
2. 5 keywords per 100
3. Put keyword either before or after the link in video description;
4. Google loves Flicker, so do stills of your video and put them up.

Next up was producing and syndicating online video from the Bui Brothers. Being a super neophyte regarding internet and video, I had no idea how video even got onto websites. Now I know they get there by living on a host site and then being embedded onto a website. Some of these sites are free–if your content is non-commercial–and some are kind of lax even if the video could be considered commercial.

Their favorite was blip.tv, but they agreed that for low quality video, the product isn’t that great. Blip does let you encode information about your own company. Vimeo.com was 2nd favorite and better with lower quality video, but more picky about commercial content. The brothers had experienced being cut off without notice on one of their ads. They mentioned that having YouTube host your video on their website gives them a lot of rights that you may not feel comfortable with. You can always have it hosted somewhere else and just put it on YouTube. For a tutorial on getting a video shot and up, go to http://thebuibrothers.com/store/.

Brian Rutledge from GetPageOne says the nice thing about video is the search engines might pick it up if it’s optimized. Video transcribing (putting video text onto the page) can help with rankings. He suggested maybe putting a little of transcript on the page and then putting “more” leading to the rest of the transcription. His favorite metric tool is tubemogul.com. He said seomoz.com has a lot of useful information.

Hank Jones talked about copywriting, legal compliance, and rules of ownership. He suggested to

1. Always cover “what-ifs” in contract;
2. Deconstruct definitions in contracts;
3. Cover industry and technology “processes” with samples, exclusion;
4. Register copyrights early, often, and right;
5. Learn from other copyright groups.

We finished up the day with Brian Brushwood with Scam School giving a fascinating presentation about branding. He recommended a book entitled “Origin of Brands” by Al and Laura Ries. How to win:

1. Be first;
2. If can’t be first, be first in category;
3. Be first in the mind;
4. Be 2nd, but be as opposite of everything first is as you can.

Brian of the wild hair used the techniques to successfully become “the magician of the internet.”

Awards followed with a great reception of Japanese food. Wow, the food was great all day!

Several sessions and interviews from the day are available at VMX2009, including the session by Chris Justice about  live streaming and webcasting that I wasn’t able to attend. I also interview Chris about his thoughts on the opportunities and future trends in video on a separate, upcoming post.

Carrie Vanston, Technology Futures, Inc., cvanston at tfi.com