VideoRetailer.org - Exploring the Intersection of Video and e-Commerce.

Trends for 2010. Video-based geolocalization: yes. Mobile video commerce: not yet.

Reading through European and North American blogs about digital marketing these days, one gets a rough idea where marketing budgets and efforts will go to next year. Most experts share the opinion that two areas will see a huge growth: 1. mobile marketing, pushed by the rapid adaptation of smartphones (iPhone, Blackberry and cell phones that run on Android, including Google’s Nexus One) especially in Europe and 2. geolocalization.

(For more info on 2010 digital marketing trends I recommend reading “Where Digital Marketing Is Heading in 2010 (Part 1)” published at Advertising Age).

So what does that mean for video marketing and video commerce?

I think that in general mobile commerce is still in a premature phase and it’s too early still to speak about “mobile video marketing” (the use of video content in mobile marketing). Just think about watching a video on your cell phone… While Apple (57 million iPhones have been sold worldwide) and Google (Android) have made sure that YouTube videos can be viewed on their devices, reproducing a video on a Blackberry is still quite a painful if not impossible user experience. In general, it will take more technical effort and time until e-marketers provide relevant web content for mobile users (at least that’s what I predict for the European market), let alone video integration for mobile navigation or mobile video commerce applications.

Having said that, let’s look on the possibilities of video and geolocalization. Actually, it makes a lot of sense to combine content mapping or geolocalization -one of the killer applications on the web- and video content.

Look at Trip TV, “The Hotel Video Guide”, a site that sells hotel rooms around the world. For me it is one of the best e-commerce sites when it comes to integrating video-based geolocalization. The idea is really simple: optimize the user experience by providing the necessary information for holiday travelers.  Users can browse the site using a Google Maps interface that includes videos of listed hotels.

The video player has all the state-of-the-art features necessary to guarantee a great user experience: in video thumbnails to go from chapter to chapter, a more info button on the hotel, a photo gallery and related video (similar hotels) button, sharing options and a “see on map” option.

Click on “Rooms” and you will get short videos of everything the hotel offers.

You got the idea: mash up video content and maps to optimize user experience. The online travel industry shows the way. I wonder why so few retailers are using this simple combination to stand out in map-based search engine marketing. Something to think about for 2010!

Video Commerce Summit: Emerging uses of video in ecommerce

Moderator: Faramarz Farhoodi, Motosport.com

Faramarz remarks:
Strategically analyze the objective of your video program
- Driving traffic to your site (Google Network, Affiliate sites, SEO?)
- Increasing conversion
- Increase average order value
- Increasing page views
- Length of video quite important: under 1 minute, even 30 seconds to avoid distractions - Importance of testing: measure and test conversion
- Misplaced content can hurt conversion

Impact of video on site performance - working with onsite production. Professional resource
- How to videos (how to change tires, change exhaust)

Alison Jeske, drugstore.com
- Affiliate channel is emerging as an important channel to leverage video
- Embedding videos on affiliate site with integrated product merchandising & cross-sell
- Affiliates also commenting on some videos, helping contribute to overall SEO
- Affiliate educating site searchers on how to buy products by clicking on link overlays in videos
- Example of an affiliate gone wild with video: http://www.spreety.com/Fun-Beauty-Infomercials.aspx
- drugstore.com launched first video email campaign in April 2009
- Early results of video in email are promising, but still too early to tell
- Continuing to refine placement for video in email

What’s next?
- Going to continue blowing out video over social media channels e.g. integrating video into Facebook lifestream
- Critically important is bringing video to where the customers are

Goodmail Systems: (Gal Chanoch, VP Product Management)

- Goodmail partnered with AOL, AT&T, BT, Comcast, Cox, Time Warner, Road Runner, Telus, Verizon, Yahoo
- Demonstrated video playing in AOL fat client (including full motion and sound)
- CertifiedVideo enables true video in email, no increase in load times or file sizes
- Goodmail AUP forbids auto-play with audio in email, but does enable auto-play without audio

Certona Meyar Sheik

- Seeing personalized video as emerging trend, dynamically serving most relevant video on site pages, and serving different versions of video
- Sees opportunity for behavior-driven merchandising and cross-sell within video
- As the volume of videos continues to increase, important decisions will need to be made regarding whether to continue showing relevant videos, or to drive someone more directly to product pages via product thumbs and other product metadata

The Video Commerce Summit is Here!

I am headed to the first video commerce summit, in Seattle tomorrow June 2nd. This is going to be an exciting event, I will be opening the day with a brief intro then closing with remarks.

Also we will try to capture these sessions on tape. I will likely be blogging the event, if the premises allow WiFi. Here is the agenda for the day (Tuesday):

8:20 Summit Opening Remarks

8:20-9:15 Opening Keynote “Video Commerce: A New Paradigm in Online Shopping”
Justin Foster, Founder, Video Commerce Consortium & Co-Founder, Liveclicker

9:25-10:25 Interactive Panel “From Start to Profit: Three Video Commerce Strategies Revealed”
Jimmy Healey, Sr. Product Manager, OnlineShoes.com
Peter Cobb, Co-Founder & SVP Marketing, eBags.com
Craig Bokesch, Online Marketing Manager, Altrec.com
Moderator: Raj Gajwani, Founder/CEO, Silverdock

10:40-11:40 Featured Speaker “Developing a Winning Video Content Strategy”
Jason Lohr-Johnson, Video Art Director, REI

11:50-12:50 Interactive Panel “No Video? No Problem! Control Costs with Production & Content Acquisition Strategies”
Alison Jeske, Director Product Management, drugstore.com
John Weaver, In-House Video Producer, FansEdge.com
Wes Pomeroy, Director of E-Commerce, RIVR Media Interactive
Moderator: Jed Alpert, VP Marketing, WebCollage

1:30-2:30 Afternoon Keynote “Using Video as the Fuel in Your Social Media Strategy”
Jimmy Healey, Sr. Product Manager, OnlineShoes.com

2:40-3:40 Featured Speaker “Video SEO: Smoke and Mirrors or Real Results?”
Mark Robertson, Online Video Expert & Founder, ReelSEO.com

3:50-4:50 Interactive Panel
“Emerging Uses of Video in E-Commerce”
Jordan Blum, CEO, BeautyChoice.com
Gal Chanoch, VP Product Management, Goodmail Systems
Jimmy Healey, Product Manager, OnlineShoes.com
Moderator: Faramarz Farhoodi, CIO & VP E-Commerce, MotoSport.com

4:50-5:00 Summit Closing Remarks
Xavier Casanova, Founder/CEO, Liveclicker and Blogger, VideoRetailer.org

Panda launches an open source video platform

UK-based New Bamboo is launching Panda, the first open source video platform that’s running solely on Amazon Web Services.

Earlier this week Ruby-experts New Bamboo announced the launch of Panda, which was featured on TechCrunch. Now this is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, this new video platform is open source and therefore free. Looking at the documentation, they implemented a basic REST API, for uploading and integrating content onto existing sites. Second, the software has been developped to run on Amazon Web Services, and in particular S3, EC2 and SimpleDB. Most video services providers I know use Amazon S3 for storing their video content, but this is the first time I hear the actual video encoding process been handled on the EC2 service. That is impressive because it elimates any upfront hardware investments to get going with video on your site.

I anticipate this new service to see some nice traction in the lower tier of the market, for content publishers and maybe e-commerce sites. In effect, Panda covers the market segment between YouTube-video hosting, and Brightcove on the high-end. Time will tell if this new platform will succeed. Like any open source project that wants to succeed, Panda has to consistently deliver feature improvements and bug fixes to be viable. Then monetize somehow these efforts with premium support services for the enterprise.

The difficult balance between quality and speed in video commerce

Did you ever notice YouTube offers the option to view some of the videos in high-quality? Have you ever experienced Hulu.com? If so, you are aware of the huge gap in quality between an ordinary video, and a high definition video.

On paper, I’d argue that the word “high definition” is implied when we talk about video commerce. Savvy marketers invest a lot of time and resources making sure their products and offerings are always well presented - and video as a medium is no exception to that rule. So yes, ideally, video in the context of ecommerce has to be high-def. The problem is that quality comes at a huge cost in the video world. Why? For starters, video requires a player (in general an SWF file, of the silverlight player) that typically is in the 30-60KB range. But that’s of course not the biggest issue.

The issue is the size of the video file. High quality video is a 10-12MB per minute proposition, a little less if you start reducing the size of the player and using advanced codecs such as h264. At that bit rate, not every user connection can follow. If if the user’s connection is good enough, you may see some undesirable side effects such as losing your IM connection or your email. And let’s not even talk about what would happen if you were on a modem connection.Here are some tips to keep things in check, in the context of video commerce.

1. Users prefer high-quality/small videos to low-quality/large videos. That’s why it’s best to keep it to 320×240 for instance. The other benefit of smaller players is that they’re easier to fit into existing product templates.

2. For Flash video, use h264 whenever possible. The h264 is fantastic for quality and not too bandwidth hungry. Do not encode your FLVs at a high bitrate using Sorensen for instance. Keep Sorensen for the low-def, and offer the h264 high-def option.

3. Be careful with h264 and other more advanced codecs, as they are not supported by all Flash player versions. If possible, implement a mechanism in your player that detects the codec support and serve the appropriate video dynamically.

4. Make sure your SWF or more generally your video player are as small as possible and cacheable.

5. Use a content delivery network for speeding up the delivery of your videos. Example: Amazon S3 or Akamai.

6. Use streaming as a way to buffer the content, but only trigger streaming when the user has chosen to play the video. Don’t have every user download a video on a product page that they haven’t chosen to view! And finally

7. Test and validate the user experience from your connection at home. Testing from a T1 connection at work isn’t reflective of what the general population actually experiences.

ShopFlick Wants to Be the Next Online QVC

ShopFlick, the LA-based company that just raised $7MM in venture funding, is arguably an interesting approach to video commerce. Positioned as the video store for indie products, ShopFlick offers an end-to-end video commerce solution to independent and small commerce vendors, and more specifically, independent artists. More established commerce sites can also promote their items on ShopFlick, but the checkout is done outside of the site in a model that is very similar to a PriceGrabber or Shopzilla.

From the user experience’s standpoint, there are a few interesting details worth pointing out. The site has that blend of commerce and educational content, that’s just perfect to persuade the potential buyer to take the next step. Each of the stores for example has a feature video where the artist gives sort of an elevator pitch for the brand or just tells a story. On the same pages, you may also find links to product videos which are more sales-oriented, and naturally these pages all have the price of the product, a big obvious buy button and the usual YouTube-ish options to share, comment and embed the video elsewhere.

The checkout itself is fairly simple, an overlay on top of the current page with the traditional payment options. We didn’t go as far as actually buying on the site, but overall we were impressed by the ease of use and the overall clean design.

Whether this site is successful or not remains to be seen - it’s a fairly unique blend of ideas which have worked well for others:

1. Compelling video content, well presented and well connected to call-to-actions.

2. Great search engine visibility: this has been key to the success of comparison engines in the past, and knowing how video-hungry PageRank is, we can expect this site to rank fairly high.

3. Community-enabled: extremely important for building the brand and generating a conversation around the products and the site itself

4. Hybrid business model: they make it easy for independent artists to upload their content, and profit from a direct commission on the sales, PLUS they allow large retailers to publish their video catalog there too under an affiliate model

One of the challenges ShopFlick will have to face is the find its market position between traditional commerce sites, which inevitably are all moving to video, and the established commerce shopping engines (Buzzillions, ShopZilla, etc), which are doing amazingly well in the segment.

You Can Be The Expert

Many of the marketers I talk to on a regular basis view video as an opportunity to position themselves as experts in their category. At a time when price competition is biting off margins, it’s important to find ways to differentiate, and video provides the perfect medium for conveying a message since it’s uniquely engaging and persuasive.

Unlike pictures or even audio files, video creates a unique connection between the anchor and the viewer. How you look is almost as important as what you say and what you sell. All of us have had positive and negative experiences buying product in the real world. The most memorable ones almost always involve a sales person we did or didn’t like. Why would this be different in the online world? Since video now enables that connection between buyers and sellers, it’s logical to think some of the basic rules of “offline salesmanship” apply to the internet.

People buy from credible experts. Experts need to be credible, engaging and they should persuade the user to buy the product they are featuring. Of all the qualities I have seen behind the camera, I came up with a short list –

1. Credible experts need to be “real experts”

Few people can act, and for most product managers and merchandizers, shooting videos for the site is not a full-time occupation. My experience working with Jimmy Healey from OnlineShoes.com has taught me the importance of being a real expert when pitching a product. He’s credible as an athlete, he projects confidence and sounds very passionate about running shoes. In other words, a self-proclamed yet credible expert in his category.

2. Credible experts talk plain English

Doctors are known for adapting their communication style and content with each patient. Likewise, video retailers need to think about the masses of people of all skills who will listen and watch — and therefore, adopt a soft and easy tone when talking. Using simple words and simple concepts make experts credible because they are able articulate better than anyone the key characteristics and benefits of what they’re selling.

3. Credible experts focus on the benefits

It’s easy to get lost in the technical specifications of a product, and while it may be necessary to outline these out for specific product categories, this isn’t exactly what video is about. Video is about establishing a human dialog between an expert, and a prospective buyer. A credible expert, someone who has lots of experience using the product he’s selling, will quickly skip the tech talk to get to the tangible benefits of what he’s selling “If you’re an overpronator, this shoe will reduce the risk of knee injury for you…”.

4. Credible experts are impartial, even to their own site

This one is quite obvious, but important nevertheless. Experts should to push specific products or brands in order to maintain the trust with their audiences.

Do you have more tips or ideas? Feel free to leave a comment below and share your thoughts with the rest.

8 great commerce video production tips

Holding the camera’s the easy part! Here are some tips to speed up the editing process and increase your video production productivity.

1. Buy a good camera

There are dozens of good cameras available on the market to create your videos. One thing to keep in mind if the fact that videos on your site will typically be 320×240 pixels, which do not require high-definition. However, we recommend buying good camera (HD typically) because they will give you more editing options. Also, try to get a camera with a hard-drive, as opposed to tapes.

2. Use a microphone

Sound is an important part of your videos. You need to use a mike at all times when recording your clips. Wireless or wired mikes typically run under $100. It’s an excellent investment.

3. Prepare what you’re going to say

It’s good to be spontaneous but your imagination and creativity will likely wear off after you have assembled a few videos for your site. Prepare your points ahead of time for each video, and try to be concise when delivering your message.

4. Limit to number of products or points per video

Your viewers have limited attachment span and in general, it’s best to limit sequences to 1 or 2 minutes when filming for eCommerce applications.

5. Starting and stopping the camera

If you are filming product video clips, start filming your anchor a few seconds before she starts talking, then stop a few seconds after she’s done. This will give you some additional editing flexibility down the road.

6. Single-sequence clips work well

When presenting a product you may decide to cut your video clip in two sequences (general frame then zoomed-in), sometimes even more. A highly effective approach that’s been successfully implemented with our clients is to shoot single-sequence clips instead. These are generally shorter, more focused - and it also greatly increases the number of videos you will be able to create a day.

7. Use noise reduction

Even with a good mike you will still need to do some noise reduction on your clips while editing. Adobe Premiere has an excellent Noise Cancelation feature that works perfectly for clearing out all the background noise.

8. Take lots of notes while filming

Another great productivity idea! Write down some basic information about any clip sequence you are filming. Simple notes such as “Keep”, “Delete”, “Not sure if this will work on the site” will save your editors tons of time since in a typical production day you’ll create hundreds of small clips.

Will the iPhone play a role in eCommerce Video

In just a few weeks now, Apple will release their new 3G iPhone to the masses. Here is Silicon Valley, people are rumbling about it. I met two friends this week end who were delaying their phone replacements by a month of two to get an iPhone this time.

The iPhone is an important piece of the puzzle in the nascent eCommerce Video space. In case you haven’t heard already, there are a number of mobile startups who have pre-announced iPhone applications capable of streaming video content from their phones. Qik is one of them, but there are others. And that opens up a world of possibilities. Let’s imagine that:

(1) Site chat applications evolve to accept video streams from a Webcam, or a phone. This would enable retailers to engage in a more powerful and engaging experience with their customers.

(2) Brick and Mortar stores with “people on the ground” can connect live with buyers, show them products, answer their questions right from their desks or shops.

(3) Customer support staffs can ask their clients to show them exactly what their problem is while talking to them on the phone.

Most of these examples are futuristic, but if the bandwidth connection is good, if it is to use these video applications from an iPhone, and if the user experience is positive and profitable, it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine this will soon happen. At least for some retail segments to start.

Omniture Adds Video Tracking to Its Analytics Suite

With their new version of SiteCatalyst 14, Omniture is the first Web Analytics vendor to offer comprehensive video statistics. According their press release, they now are able to track basic video stats for Flash, Windows Media, Quicktime and the RealPlayer.

In the past, Omniture clients could track video by adding Omniture tags inside the Flash player, and configuring a set of custom reports. What’s new about this announcement is the fact that video reports are now available in the Omniture Reporting Interface. Also new are support for Windows Media, Quicktime and RealPlayer, though I expect tags to be harder to deploy for the three video players.

For video retailers using Omniture, this new feature is a good thing. However, stats will only be collected when the video is played on the actual retail site, not outside.

Via: Techcrunch (see article)