The Google +1 button is part of the new initiative they have to tighten integration between YouTube and Google+. They’ve even got a whole page that talks about it here. As far as the claims of the Google +1 button being on YouTube, I was unable to replicate it yet. I used Opera, Firefox and yes, even Chrome, with two different Google/YouTube accounts, both of which have Google+ profiles and I still couldn’t replicate it. I even logged out while in Chrome and still couldn’t trigger the +1 button. So if they are testing this, it’s very limited, perhaps based on certain YouTube user levels or geographic location. Odd, because my main Google account is in a slew of their beta programs and I couldn’t dig it up.

Source: ©2008-2011 ReelSEO.com Online Video Guide

So how to create effective, engaging clickable video? Read on…

1. Begin with the End in Mind

Okay, so this allusion to a notable self-help book gives me away as a self-professed lifehacker. But this statement holds true in this case as well – there is really no good way to utilize clickable video unless you set out to create one. Repurposing existing content is extremely hard to do, but if anyone knows of good examples, please send them my way.

There should be a strategy behind the clickable content. You have to get into the mindset of web developers who have to consider the usability behind the frameworks they build.

• Why should the viewers click here?
• What information do you want to convey with the clickable content?
• What actions do you want them to take?

And when you release your video, remember to let viewers know it’s clickable, preferably right away once it starts playing. In the video above you’ll see an opening bumper letting viewers know they can interact with it. We also made sure that the narration included direct calls to the viewer to click on the elements which were most important to our piece.

2. View the Technology as a Character

This is the biggest tip I can give on the writing side and it works on several levels. Primarily, just as you would put time and care into crafting a character for a narrative piece, you have to do the same for your clickable content. Just as you would write a character with a backstory – a set of assumptions that will guide his/her behavior – you want viewers to have a consistent set of assumptions for how they interact with your clickable content. For our video, we established that that the majority of the clickable objects would be animations.

This statement holds true for shooting. You have to plan your clickable elements in each shot as if they were a person. Do you keep them in frame long enough that they are recognizable? You want them to be easy to click, so ideally they’re not moving around too quickly in the frame. I can’t stress enough the importance of previz here. We storyboarded every shot of the piece that involved clickable elements (also a best practice for any sort of motion graphics).

3. Use a Dig-Down Approach with Your Clickable Content

There’s an easy trap with clickable video of simply restating the same content in both your video and clickable pieces. Another common pitfall is to simply hit the same call-to-action over and over. While there is value in repetition of message and being straightforward with your call-to-action, you should try to create a more subtle interplay between video and clickable content. Give viewers credit. If their first few clicks are a disappointment, they won’t continue to do so.

Try using a dig-down approach where the clickable content provides more details on the higher level narration. This additional content should be useful or provide other value to the viewer. This will make your primary, sales message memorable and increase pass along value.

We aimed to deliver actual tips that viewers could take away and use on their business listings. And then we followed that up with an opportunity to dig down further by entering an email address to receive a whitepaper.

4. Open Your Mind

It’s pretty amazing what all you can do with the technology. You can pull up additional video content and live social media streams within a video. It integrates directly with ecommerce applications. Viewers can register for contests or subscribe to your blog. All without leaving the frame, which is huge for viewer retention.

Soon, this technology will be moving to mobile (wireWAX already works on Android and should be coming soon to those non-Flash mobile devices everyone is raving about). Imagine the possibilities there. What if you could develop a way to the technology with augmented reality on mobile phones, skinning clickability on top of the real world?

The coolest applications of it have yet to be developed.

5. Make it Fun

While the main goal of our piece is to promote our newly written local search whitepaper, we’ve also woven in some purely “fun” elements of video (click on the bank scene character’s search boxes for example). Clickable video is still a novel technology for most viewers and has built in pass-along value.

This is something we realized later in the game with our video. If I were to go back and rewrite, I certainly would integrate more playful elements, especially early on in the piece.

©2008-2011 ReelSEO.com Online Video Guide

Video Discovery – Search Up, Facebook Down

The report devotes a lot of time to how videos are being discovered and where the online video traffic is coming from, whether through search, social media properties like Twitter, and so on.

The good news for those of you who still care about Video SEO: video discovery by search is up, with Google seeing a 3.7% increase in referral traffic quarter to quarter.

Facebook, on the other hand, had its first quarter of actually decreasing in referral traffic:

It’s interesting that Facebook referrals dropped a bit in the second quarter, but not enough information to draw sweeping conclusions. Does this mean Facebook is no longer a good place to market your videos? Of course it doesn’t mean that. But it could be the beginning of a trend, and definitely something to keep an eye on.

In the meantime, search remains the single biggest way to connect prospective viewers with your videos, as has almost always been the case. Despite the rise (and impressive performance) of social video and other innovative video marketing strategies, search is still the key. And I bet a great many video marketers have started skipping some of the old classic Video SEO steps.

By Mark Robertson, Publisher ReelSEO.com – based on an interview at the 2011 Video Commerce Summit, August 2011

In my presentation at the summit I intend to take a look at -

• How video marketing is becoming more of a holistic Internet marketing strategy (rather than just something relegated to video SEO) and what research is supporting this.
• I’ll go through some examples specifically in the eCommerce realm of companies that I feel are doing a great job with regard to SEO, which is still going to be an important component of my presentation, and is still something that we very much believe in.
• Then, I’ll show some case studies of those who’ve done well with video in social media. I’ll probably also present a couple of case studies of how not to do things, and hopefully a case study (if I can find one), of someone who’s done a great job with video in both search and social; and I’d like to be able to show the difference and impact for that.
• Beyond that, what I’d really like to get across is more strategic thinking about video marketing. I’d certainly provide a few tactics here and there to teach the audience (and our own audience at ReelSEO) that video marketing is not going away, and that it’s not just one component like SEO; it requires strategy and forethought, both up front and during. That strategy and forethought, in some ways, can differ when you’re talking about the eCommerce vertical. Hopefully, we’ll be able to pass on our teachings that we at ReelSEO have gained over the past year, and turn that into some actionable measures for the audience. But also, we want to get them to think more holistically about video, as part of an overall business strategy.

Special Tips For E-Commerce & Retail Video

What do you find to be some special considerations in the retail business for doing video (in eCommerce)?

I had a conversation with someone on that recently, whom I’m speaking with on another conference panel. He brought up a very interesting point that I think isn’t communicated as well as it should be. I think the going notion is that, “If I have a thousand videos, it’s important that I get all one thousand of those videos in the search results.” I think in some cases that’s true, but I really think it’s more important to ask as many questions as you can in such a strategy.

For example, in eCommerce, we know that in Google Universal search, if someone is doing a transactional search (say for example, Nike hightop shoes), more than likely they’re not interested in seeing a video for that product. More often than not, when you’re doing a transactional keyword search, you won’t be presented with videos. And that being the case, I think it’s more important for eCommerce retailers to look at things like: What keywords people are searching for? What drives the most traffic? When those keyword searches are done, how often to video results tend to surface?

I think specifically, with regard to Google Web and Universal Search, it may not be the right strategy to get every video within the search engine, because oftentimes that could change, slightly, rankings for Web search. I think it’s important to think through that, and I don’t think everyone is right now. I think the going notion is, let’s get all of our videos in the search index, and let’s focus on product videos. At the same time, we know that informational type searches, “how-to” type search queries, do surface with video quite often. It may be in an eCommerce website’s benefit to actually do a different sort of video strategy altogether. Depending on the metrics, it’s still very beneficial for them to be doing product videos, but it may also be important for them to be doing helpful videos.

For example, Crutchfield Electronics has a great video library on how they can help people with purchase decisions. It’s helpful to their community. If someone were to be going online and searching for something related to something like, say, installing an automotive accessory or any A/V accessory, they could stumble upon a Crutchfield video and be taken to their site; and in turn end up becoming a more engaged, longer-term customer.

Overall, to answer your question, the oversight I see with eCommerce companies is that I don’t see a lot of strategic forethought with video marketing, and I don’t necessarily see a lot of follow-up, either. In fact, I see a lot of eCommerce clients I’ve worked with where they’re not necessarily interested in having a solid plan for what results they should expect, and how to properly measure them. That should really change if you’re going to get any serious momentum.

What do you think have been some notable advances in online video retail and video eCommerce since last year (2010)?

Overall and ongoing, I’d point to several things…

• Video sitemaps are not a fixed target. With Google and Bing’s index of videos – the way that they validate videos within your sitemap is an ongoing target. It’s changing all the time; and even Google will tell you that.
• We continue to see constant change within video search.
• YouTube has launched a ton of new products just this past year alone. They’ve focused quite a bit on quality video content and web-series type content. I think there is more of a focus in the past year, or brining to light more so, the desire, at the very least on the part of Google and YouTube, to bring about much higher, long-form quality content to their website.
• I do see a movement towards higher-quality video (especially in consumer electronics). That is true for the eCommerce industry and businesses in general. If you look at the way that general businesses are doing video, I think that many of them are starting to realize that maybe a webcam isn’t necessarily the best video for their business, and maybe they need to find something higher quality.
• Social in video will continue to take off. We’ve seen surprisingly very little movement in terms of Facebook enhancing their video product, but we have seen an increase in social products to video, and we’ve seen a big push by companies and websites to make sure that they’re socially enabling their videos.

Optimized video presentations posted and promoted online add a powerful new thrust to acquiring exposure on the most important place to be found online by far, the organic links on Google.

It’s a simple value proposition really to justify getting into the exploding world of online video presentations.  Since high-ranking organic links on Google are known to be highly valuable owing to their prime visibility to people whose intent on Google is to proactively research services or products as part of their purchase process, then having as many links as you can show up at that critical juncture makes perfect sense.

A web page can give you one link.  A video presentation can give you another, and another, and maybe even another for the exact same keyword phrase.

The more organic links you occupy on Google, the more customer exposure you have during their research and purchase process . . . and the less your competitors do.

You’ll notice I keep referring to video presentations as opposed to just saying videos, which in the YouTube era of ‘user generated content’ usually equates to someone talking on camera.  Video presentations can make use of still photos, moving graphical text, simple animation, plus an announcer voice-over reading a tightly-written script.  Watch television commercials closely and you will see how many of them are made in this manner.

The point is that a number of low-cost video presentations can be made to target one or a number of different keyword phrases a business wants to pursue.  And you can just keep on making more and more video presentations over time for the same or different keywords.

Businesses can really do well in terms of gaining Google exposure by having video presentations that don’t just ‘tell the story’ of the business one time and one time only.  (That’s all you get with a video from Internet Yellow Pages directories and the video production companies that make these one-off videos . . . there is no real video search engine optimization service being provided.)

A more sophisticated strategy is to continually make inexpensive video presentations aimed at any number of ‘long tail’ keyword inquiries that are relevant to the type of service you perform or products you sell.

For example, a house painting company could make a one-off video presentation about being quality interior and exterior house painters that someone searching on Google for the category-level keyword phrase ‘painters Smithville’ might come across in the organic links.  But the painting company could do another video presentation that focuses on a specialty of theirs such as ‘exterior stucco restoration’ or ‘kitchen cabinet refinishing’.  Or a video presentation on how they choose different types of paints, or how they consult with you on which colors to choose for your painting project.

They could even do multiple video presentations featuring happy customers talking on camera or citing testimonials from these customers using written quotes on-screen, all of which could be keyword-optimized to be in pursuit of the single category-level keyword phrase ‘painters Smithville’.   Or each testimonials video could be aimed at another keyword phrase such as ‘kitchen cabinet painting specialists.’

Optimized video presentations targeted at a range of relevant keyword phrases provide a killer strategy for local businesses in particular.  It’s totally do-able for a local business to go for the grand slam of local visibility on Google by generating organic links through video presentations posted online, through their web site of course, through their blog and also by appearing in the Google Maps ’7- Box’ that can come up for keyword phrases entered which include a city or town name at the front or back of the phrase.

Plus you can put your video presentations on your web site itself, on your blog, on your Facebook page, in customer emails, in your Google Maps listing and more.

Point being that the Google organic links is where you want to be visible when your prospective customers are in research and purchase mode, and using keyword-optimized video presentations along with keyword-optimized web and blog pages is a powerful and permanent way to end up in the organic link cross-hairs multiple times.