Did you know that YouTube is actually the second most popular search engine, behind its parent company Google? Additionally, YouTube makes SEO child’s play, by allowing you to embed videos with tags and associations that help it appear in more relevant searches. By taking advantage of embedding, you can get two bites at the cherry by having your video show up both on YouTube and your own website in a blended search. While not technically a search engine, it is also important not to discount the importance of Facebook and other social media. A video reference from a friend carries far more weight than results from a search engine, especially in terms of new content discovery. If you are using video on your website, ensure that your video platform has easy to use buttons for social media sharing – Facebook, twitter, digg, everything that you can. It is a small, easy to overlook function, but can net you easy hits with little effort. Stay tuned for more on this topic in the coming days

Earlier this year, Hunting With Pixels caught up with Shay David from Kaltura on the New York leg of our epic interviewing spree. Kaltura are a leading open-source video platform, helping business and educational clients deliver top quality video solutions. In this video, Shay shares some examples of good practice around user-generated content, giving advice on how business can balance openness and brand safety. In order to best implement consumer feedback and engagement, online video providers need to understand that there are multiple stakeholders in the conversation. Businesses want to be promoted without having consumers degrading their brand, and consumers want to feel engaged and that they are listened to. In terms of moderating any user-feedback section, Shay suggests that any moderation should be as transparent as possible, to allow users and business to see the rules, and to build up trust between the groups. To that end, there are several levels of moderation that are generally found to strike an appropriate balance. It is possible for user-content to be entirely moderated by the business. So for example they can preview user content and feedback before it being released to the wilds of the web. At the other extreme, it could be entirely self-moderated by users, by having a ‘report’ button or other method for consumers to police the conversation. It is also possible to have a more hands off approach, in the form of set rules or pre-moderation, for example swear filters. This has the added benefit of transparency, as the user knows before making a post exactly what will and won’t be accepted. Finally, Shay encourages brands to open up the level of engagement over time, once trust has been established and the brand feels comfortable. A feedback forum might have users who become a trusted source, who can perform the role of moderator from outside of the brand. Above all, it is important that customers feel as though they are legitimately engaging with the brand and with other customers. Customer engagement can be a powerful tool in the marketer’s arsenal, but it must be genuine. http://www.vimeo.com/25699044

When you run a business, the primary goal of all of your online content is to create a connection to your target audience. The problem is that without marketing efforts to bring eyeballs to your page, the greatest content in the world will go to waste. This is where the world of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) comes in. A solid SEO strategy will see you rank higher on the major search engines, bringing in more viewers with whom to connect. Using video on your website is a great way to improve the SEO performance of your website. Most modern search engines now use a display format called “blended search”, whereby a query will bring back videos, images, news stories, maps, and other types of results alongside their standard search results An engaging video thumbnail is far more likely to draw clicks than a block of equivalent text. And it may surprise you to learn that it is actually about 50% easier to reach that coveted first page ranking as a video than with text alone On top of the SEO advantages, using online video is also a more effective way to engage with your audience once they have been drawn to your website. It offers a personal, visually stimulating, and altogether more human experience than text alone (a subject of many of our other articles and blog posts). This is important to remember, as SEO professionals can sometimes focus too much on getting click-throughs, and forget all about providing worthwhile content once the viewer has landed! Stay tuned for more on this in the coming days

We recently had the opportunity to sit down with Steve Rubel, executive VP for Global Strategy and Insights with Edelman. Edelman is a global public relations firm, well known for being on the forefront of technological change. Click here for more info on Steve and Edelman. In these opening clips from our interview with Steve, he talks about what PR is, and how technological change has impacted upon the PR industry, and media as a whole. In a nutshell, Public Relations is about using communications to build a relationship with a target group that is important to your business. That target group is not necessarily consumers; it may be fellow businesspeople, it may be legislators. Once that relationship is in place, it becomes advantageous not just to the business, but also to the target group. In the last five years, however, the PR industry has had to adjust to the great changes in communications technology that have come about. Steve talks about a “dispersion of authority”, where the power to shape the media conversation has moved away from a few big players, to many smaller ones. The net effect of this dispersion is that we now have four different spheres of media, three of which exist on the internet. – The ‘traditional’ media, as Steve phrases it, encompasses the old guard such as newspapers, radio, television etc. These are typically passive mediums, in that the audience does not generally interact. – Using a traditional business model in a totally online space, the “tradigital” media is a bridge between old and new. Tradigital media provides a lower entry level to the media industry, and has led to a proliferation of independent media. – A relatively new phenomenon, social media, such as twitter, facebook and YouTube, allows literally anybody to have their thoughts and opinions broadcast to the entire world – Finally, there is Owned Content, which is typically corporate websites and the like, where every business can act as a media company for the purposes of promoting themselves. The challenge now for PR companies is to navigate this new paradigm of communication, where the target group can finally join in the conversation. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bc550-IMUyE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_07Jua5dHiY

We recently partnered with Michael Giannik from Group Security on an animation project. Michael asked us to help communicate how his Lone Worker Solution works: potential clients of Group Security had a hard time understanding the concept of the product and the practical application. The issue is that some concepts are hard to convey through written content, because most of us are visual learners. A clever combination of video, written content and graphics will cater for the various learning styles, so your clients get a better idea of what your product can do for them. At Hunting With Pixels we’re big fans of simple, clean animation because it’s a powerful tool to create an instant overview of a concept. Simple illustrations and colours create visual anchors for viewers and help to provide an overview of a complex step by step product or service. Here is how we used animation to clarify what this product does. http://vimeo.com/29127362