Let’s say you have a website and you post regularly to a blog. At some point someone (not affiliated with your company) randomly posts a comment on one of your blog posts mentioning another company or linking to a video about that company on YouTube. Then that company mentioned sees the comment and isn’t happy about it. Rather than engaging in a conversation in the comments to defend their brand position or asking that the comment be removed; they have the power to shut down your ENTIRE domain. Sound like censorship? It is.

The Protect-IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) are bills which would give corporations and government the ability to censor websites on the net. Both of these bills had, at their heart, good intentions. However both bills are so horribly written with vague definitions of piracy that basically ANY website including any form of user-generated content could be at risk of being shutdown. Think of Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. and the implications these bills could have on the way these websites fundamentally operate if passed into law. All of these websites rely heavily on user generated content. SOPA /PIPA would completely alter the way Americans would be allowed to use the Internet. Key word in that last sentence is “allowed”.

It also presents a nightmare for web hosting companies which will be forced to police all of the domains that are hosted by them. Let’s say you own a boutique baby clothing store and you had a post about how babies do the cutest things on your website blog and someone posted a link of their baby dancing to a top 40 song. If that top 40 song’s recording company were to claim that this content were piracy, your web hosting company would have to shut down your ENTIRE domain as soon as the complaint was received. There would be no pre-shutdown notification email and no friendly ‘please remove this from your site’. The next day you’d wake up and like flicking off a light switch – your entire website would be gone.

Companies such as DreamHost where the Adelie Studios website and blog are hosted, have over 1.2 million domains that are hosted by them. If this layer of enforcement were required because of the liability they’d be forced to take on, you can all but say goodbye to affordable web hosting. DreamHost has their own response denouncing the bill and the negative effects it would have in their blog post “Don’t drop the soap, drop SOPA!”

As a small business producing niche animated content and marketing animations for the web, both of these bills are incredibly frightening to us. Fight for the Future produced a great little animation (which we are always fans of people using animation) to explain and illustrate the way these bills could potentially censor the internet. Check out their animation below.

SOPA comes up for a vote on Tuesday, January 24th. To find more about the SOPA & PIPA bills yourself and to see what actions you can take, visit: http://americancensorship.org/

Maybe you have heard the term “video snacking” in regards to consuming online video content or maybe this is a new one on you. It has nothing to do with wolfing down mini Reese’s peanut butter cups by the handful; not that there’s anything wrong with that. But it may be more similar to this than you may think.

Snackable content on the web refers to how people browse and search for information. Usually it’s somewhat casual poking in to read something, watching a quick animation, reading product reviews, etc. When you market online you don’t have people’s attention for very long. In a blog post I wrote about online video viewing habits - 10% of your audience clicks away after only 10 seconds and more than half click away after a minute.

Think about that for a second.

More than half of your audience leaves after one minute. This is why it is critical to make sure you keep your video content short. Here’s where the snacking comes in.

If you try to cram everything you do into one video it’s going to get longer and less focused. That’s how you loose viewers online. You are better off creating shorter, more focused videos because the end user is more likely to consume more of your content that way. That’s because most video viewers don’t specifically go looking for video – they come across it while browsing a web site and are curious. So they click to watch. If it’s less than a minute, there’s very little time commitment needed. Video snacking feeds that curiosity and keeps people engaged on your site for longer periods of time.

As an example – let’s say you make software. Your lead video should be a very short and focused video of what problem your software solves. Then there should be a call to action either in that video or around it to watch a short video about how the software works. From there you can keep linking through calls to action to short 10-30 second videos throughout your site of customer testimonials, specific functions that the software does to make the user’s life simpler, etc.

You should also sprinkle these video clips throughout your website. Have a technical specs page? Include a few videos showing some in-depth features or “How to” style tutorial animations. Have some case studies? Include video testimonials from some of those customers. Snackable video content on your website allows the consumer to feed their inquisitive nature while at the same time passively pulling them closer to a purchasing decision. One video clip at a time.

To bring those Reese’s peanut butter cups back into the analogy; it’s the difference between a Reese’s King Size and a bag of Reese’s Miniature Cups. If you leave a stack of Reese’s King Size with four full peanut butter cups per package in your lobby area, the casual passer by may think it was left there for someone else or they may possibly pick one up. If they do, they may just eat one or two of those peanut butter cups but by the time they get to that third or fourth full peanut butter cup, unless they are a teenage boy with a cast iron stomach, they’re probably feeling sick and full of regret.

Then try putting a bowl of tiny Reese’s Miniature Cups in the lobby. They were “created” to be a browsing snack. People will grab one without even thinking about it. They will grab a couple for their friends. Before you know it the whole bag will be devoured and people will be looking for more every time they walk by.

June 24, 2011 — HubSpot, the leading inbound marketing platform and Adelie Studios, an industry leader in online marketing animated video production, were honored to be the recipients of two Telly Awards for outstanding achievement for their original short online videos. The winning videos, from the Captain Inbound Animated Series were selected among thousands of entries for their entertainment and originality.

“It’s not every day you get to work on a series of animated shorts starring super heroes and villains,” said Eric Guerin of Adelie Studios. “It was great to work with HubSpot creating Captain Inbound because they live and breathe strategic content marketing like these videos every day. Winning two Telly Awards for the project was really icing on the cake.”

“Rather than bombard people with cold calls and spammy emails, you should attract them to your company using inbound marketing by creating interesting content and optimizing that content for search, social and mobile channels,” said Mike Volpe, Chief Marketing Officer at HubSpot.  “HubSpot is a pioneer in inbound marketing, and the Captain Inbound videos are an example of the type of marketing which companies should be doing a lot more.”

Founded in 1978, the Telly Awards is the premier award honoring outstanding local, regional and cable TV commercials and programs, the finest video and film productions, and online film and video. The Telly Awards annually showcases the best work of the most respected advertising agencies, production companies, television stations, cable operators, interactive agencies, and corporate video departments in the world.

This year, the Telly Awards received over 13,000 entries from all 50 states and countries around the world. Silver and bronze medals are awarded based on creativity and outstanding achievement in a specific category.

About HubSpot

HubSpot, Inc. offers an all-in-one marketing software platform for small and medium sized businesses. Over 4,500 companies in 31 countries use HubSpot software to increase the number of visitors to their website and convert more of those visitors to leads and customers. Applications in the software platform include website management, blogging, search engine optimization, lead management, marketing analytics, email marketing, landing pages, and social media monitoring. HubSpot is also the developer of the popular website analysis tool, WebsiteGrader.com, which has over 3 million users. HubSpot, Inc. was founded in 2006 and is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Find them at http://www.HubSpot.com.

About Adelie Studios

Adelie Studios specializes in creating animated marketing videos and tutorial animations to promote your marketing message online in an engaging and entertaining format. Adelie Studios producer Eric Guerin has previously won three Telly Awards: one in 2010 for JCSI and two in 2009 for Waste Management and Open Pages. See more animated videos and tutorial animations they have created at http://www.adeliestudios.com.

RELATED LINKS

Captain Inbound Episode 1 on YouTube

Captain Inbound Episode 2 on YouTube

HubSpot, creators of an inbound marketing software that helps businesses get found on the internet, hosted a webinar titled “Beginner’s Guide to Video Marketing”. Although we’ve been involved in online video and animation since 2004, I always like to see what new statistics, tools, tips, etc. I can share with my customers to help them better utilize the animations we create for them. In this post, I put together the “Cliffs Notes” version of the webinar with a few tips and statistics I thought were the most interesting to share with you. If you are interested in listening to the webinar in its entirety, you do so and download the slides from HubSpot’s On Demand Archive of the Beginner’s Guide to Video Marketing.

The first speaker was Maggie Georgieva, an Inbound Marketing Manager at HubSpot. She shared some interesting insights into how HubSpot utilizes video in their own marketing efforts including case studies for sales empowerment, webinars and events for lead generation. They also build brand awareness through podcasts (like their weekly marketing video podcast HubSpot TV) and entertaining videos (such as the Captain Inbound Animation Series we worked on for HubSpot).

She also shared how video screenshots have performed far better than static images or text links in email marketing. She didn’t share any exact findings but here’s some statistics we compiled about using videos in your email marketing campaigns.

Next up Yelena Kadeykina, the Marketing Director of Pixability, shared a few interesting statistics and suggestions largely around video discovery. She stated that 30-40% of video views are the results of search queries and another 30% are the result of social sharing on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc. Think about that. That means that roughly 75% of online video views can be attributed to a combination of proper tagging and SEO optimizing your video and having a social strategy for your video content.

Jay Wilder, the Director of Product Marketing at myBrainshark spoke next about sharing / promoting videos and the importance of placement.

Jay had some great points and did a fantastic overview of how to use and distribute video on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn. The real amazing statistics he presented were regarding mobile and QR codes. According to Nielsen, mobile video viewership soared 40% in 2011 and the smartphone market grew to a 50% market share. He also illustrated how QR codes “connect the online and offline world” through their ability to show you a product in action. I personally believe that combining QR codes with your mobile video strategy will truly start catapulting video marketing to new heights in the next few years. Particularly for people selling products to consumers. Imagine rather than hemming and hawing in a store over Product A or Product B, if Product B has a QR code taking the buyer to an interactive video experience right there on their phone to answer any questions they may have about it…which product are they more likely to buy? That’s where things are going…the industry leaders are already there.

Last up was Jim Kukral who has worked with companies like Fedex and Progressive Auto Insurance understand how find success on the Web. He kept his presentation fairly simple and focused on how to measure video.

One of his points I personally enjoyed was when he talked about how videos on landing pages convert better than traditional text & images. It’s important to remember that people don’t consume content offline the same way that they do online and that is what makes video so effective as a messaging tool.

All in all the presentation had a ton of great content for people new to video marketing as well as some tidbits for someone like myself who has been doing this for a while. One of my favorite quotes from the event was from Jim and it sums up my thoughts on why video is critical to the success of every business marketing online:

“When faced with a choice between a video or a bunch of text – they’re going to choose the video. Recognizing this and building a strategy around it is the type of thing that changes a 1 million dollar company into a 10 million dollar company.”

Adélie Studios, a provider of animated marketing videos and tutorial animations, has received the 2010 All Star Award from Constant Contact®, Inc., the trusted marketing advisor to more than 400,000 small organizations worldwide. Adélie Studios is one of Constant Contact’s 2010 top business partners and most prolific user of its tools, whether within Constant Contact’s email marketing, event marketing, social media marketing or survey products – or a combination of all four.

“We’re pleased to be recognized by Constant Contact for helping our customers achieve higher click through rates through integrating video into our customers email marketing strategy,” said Eric Guerin, owner of Adélie Studios. “Our customers utilizing email marketing with video were able to garner a response rate that was on average 10x higher than direct mail and nearly double their click through rate when video content was included. Constant Contact’s services played a big part in helping our customers achieve those engagement goals.”

Constant Contact looked at criteria including the following when selecting this year’s All Stars:

• Frequency of campaigns, events and surveys
• Open, bounce and click through rates
• Usage of social features
• Mailing list sign up tools
• Use of reporting tools

“We work hard to listen to our customers, and we use that feedback to create products and services designed to help them better engage with their customers and prospects,” said Gail Goodman, chairman, president and CEO of Constant Contact. “The Constant Contact All Star Awards are our way of recognizing our customers that have successfully used Constant Contact to market their companies. We have some of the most committed, passionate customers out there and we’re proud we can be a part of their continued success.”