The Only Yard For The Internet Junkie

Archive for July, 2011

71 Percent Of Online Adults Use Video-Sharing Sites

July 27th, 2011 |

Author: JYDC Admin

Article Source: The Only Yard For The Internet Junkie

Us Americans may not enjoy the same blazing-fast broadband speeds as our South Korean friends, but that doesn’t stop us from getting our YouTube on. The majority of us may not even need bigger pipes, if a new report by Pew Research Center is true: according to the group, a whopping 71 percent of online American adults make use of video-sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo. That’s a lot of “Cookie Monster Sings Chocolate Rain.”

The numbers stay largely the same regardless of sex, income or geographic location: a female in NYC is just as likely as a male in Kansas to check out the latest Lady Gaga vid online. In fact, the biggest differentiator in video-sharing usage seems to be age; the older you get, the less likely you are to be on YouTube. Ninety-two percent of people under the age of 30 frequent the sites, as do 80 percent of people between 30 and 50. That number drops to 54 percent, or just over half, of people aged 50 to 64. And if you’re over 64? Fuggedaboutit. Only one in three senior citizens get their video kicks online.

One key difference between urban and rural watchers is their frequency of video-sharing use. A third of urban and suburban correspondents told Pew that they’d visited a video-sharing site “yesterday.” That number dropped to only 14 percent for rural netizens.

The 71 percent usage rate is a major jump in five years. In 2006, only 33 percent of Americans utilized the services of YouTube and their ilk. You can check out the full report online, but be warned; there’s a ton of numbers and graphs.

Image credit: interactiveinsightsgroup.com

Getting Stuff Done by Video

July 27th, 2011 |

Author: JYDC Admin

Article Source: The Only Yard For The Internet Junkie

Posted by PhilNottingham

Hi SEOmozzers! I’m Phil Nottingham and I’ve recently joined Distilled as an in-house pirate. This is my first SEOmoz post and I look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments!

The Conundrum

Creating detailed and actionable client reports has become a vitally important skill for any agency SEO to hone. Often we’ll spend 20-30 hours composing a veritable treat of a read for our clients, a hand crafted sluice for a torrent of brilliant ideas, delegations, and requests that will certainly lead to a better performance in the SERPs once put into practice… but, as we’re all painfully aware, sending over these floods of text and screenshots often fails to get stuff done. It seems that often these reports get stuck in the quagmire of uncompleted items lurking at the bottom of our clients inboxes for weeks; to end up competing with a perpetual inundation of other requests, constantly clamouring for attention and requiring immediate action. And it’s no surprise that these reports often fail to make the impact we have in mind for them.

Consider a typical reading list for a web marketing type on a Monday morning. It’s probably going to look something like this:

Emails
Blog feeds
Google Reader – News & Articles.
Twitter
Facebook

If you’re anything like me, this list is going to feature well in excess of a hundred items, the vast majority of which you will only skim read and deal with quickly. As technology thunders on, accelerating global connectivity and productivity on an exponential scale, this brevity and superficiality of attention span is likely only to expand; threatening the practical viability of our beautifully crafted and detailed client reports.

How Can We Communicate Detailed Concepts and Suggestions to our Clients More Effectively?

The obvious answer is to do more phone-calls, lunches, video-conferences and direct face to face communication with the client so you can explain things and answer questions when you have their full attention available. However, most clients are typically busy and over-loaded people like us, sometimes based in different time-zones, making this approach rarely feasible.

At Distilled, client reports were taken to the shearers a while back. It’s now company-wide policy to send out succinct, simple, bare-bones reports a maximum of 3-4 pages long, which focus purely on the actionable and achievable aspects of all the findings from our 20-30 hours of research.

But just recently, we’ve also started trying out a more creative method of communicating complicated tasks and ideas to our clients and colleagues – demonstrating our thoughts and suggestions through recorded video.

Without going into too much detail, below is an eloquent summary of our findings so far from my colleague Tom Anthony:

Written reports – 20-30 pages = very little shit gets done

Distilled reports – 3-4 pages of actions = lots of shit gets done

Video report – video(s) + 1 page summary w/checklist = masses of shit gets completely annihilated

Why Go To The Effort?

There are some unique benefits of using video to communicate with clients as a supplement to email and telephone calls….

1. It’s different and fun

Video doesn’t feel like as much of a chore to plough through as emails or reports and this helps it to stick out from the remaining mass of inbox clutter and generate interest.

2. It’s a great teaching environment

If you’re client is not particularly SEO savvy, video is an efficient and easy way to practically explain some of the basic principles driving the ranking factors.

3. Clients can’t skim read a video

You cannot skip through a video as innocuously as you can skim through an email or document; it requires conscious effort to avoid.

4. It’s easy and quick to make

If you become practiced and efficient at making videos, it can be an extremely fast process and take less time than composing a long email.

5. You can demonstrate complicated technical issues as if explaining them in person

It can be easier to explain complicated design and technical considerations with screencasts and diagrams, rather than through extensive writing and annotated screenshots. Problems with UI and design are often better looked at than talked about.

6. It can be edited

As with an email, but unlike a phone-call or video conferencing; a video allows you time to consider your response and suggestions before sending it.

7. It lives on after it’s been created

Unlike a phone-call or VC, videos can be watched back by multiple people at their leisure. This can be a great way to help clients and as can keep the video for future reference, as well as showing it quickly to colleagues.

8. It can be rapport building

Videos can also be a fantastic tool for building rapport with your client. If they happen to live a long way away and are on different time zones, so you’ve never met, allowing them to see your face and hear your voice on a regular basis is a great way of building trust and mutual understanding. You can also convey emotion through video where you would struggle in formalised written word.

9. It’s not Rocket Science

While is fantastic to have a top-of-the-range camera and microphone to work with, you can still create relatively high quality videos with modest resources.

This…

Was recorded and uploaded using this…

Common Pitfalls When Making Videos

Although videos can be an incredibly useful resource when integrated into a holistic approach to communication, it is incredibly easy to undo the potential benefits videos offer…

1. Thinking Video Can Work for Everything

I’m not suggesting here that video is an all an out solution for all communication, but rather that it works when included in a holistic approach encompassing email, phone-calls and traditional reports. Video is particularly valuable when you don’t have the opportunity to meet with your client and explain things to them in the flesh, such as with International SEO, but it doesn’t replace traditional methods of communication.

2. Lack of Clarity

The best thing about email and reports is that they can be edited down to succinct actions points, which cut out the prognostication and deliberation populating everyday phone-calls and conversations. To make effective instructional and informational videos – always stick to the point at hand and avoid meandering tangents. Videos are only valuable in as much as they maintain an audience’s interest.

3. Inability to hone in on specific points

If you’re going to end up putting your video on YouTube, then an interactive transcript can be used to allow your client to skip to relevant points within the video. If not, then creating a contents list with corresponding time-codes for your video can be a great aid for efficient viewing.

4. Low Quality

Having good picture quality and clear audio is essential when producing a video. Especially when discussing complicated technical processes, there cannot be any compromise on this. Ensure you record all content at high resolution and avoid microphone interference.

5. Difficult to work out actionable tips

Clients aren’t going to want to watch through your videos multiple times and transcribe the point you make in order to ascertain appropriate action points. Whenever you send a video, ensure it comes complete with a list of jobs to be undertaken, which you’re client can study while watching your presentation. This will focus their mind to the practical essentials of what you are trying to say and ensure stuff gets done.

How to Convert a Written Report into a Video Report

Decide the form appropriate form the different parts of your report should take – which bits are best shown through a screencast and which bits would work best with a whiteboard Friday style talking head presentation?
Convert your report into a script, removing any descriptive passages which can be displayed visually – If it makes sense within the context of your report; write a script for multiple videos covering a single subject on each one. Six 5-minute long videos are easier to digest than one 30-minute video.
Practice speaking through your script in time with your screencast a couple of times before recording, ensuring you cut out any “umms” or “likes” opting for pauses any time you are unsure what to say.
When recording, always talk slightly slower than you would in everyday conversation, as the nuances of corporeal expression are inevitably lost through the cables of a microphone — Speak at the speed where it just starts to feel uncomfortably slow. In most cases, when you listen back to your recording, you’ll be surprised how slow it doesn’t feel.
For any talking head passages of your recording, always look straight into the lens of the camera.
After recording, trim out any sections which lag or feel unnecessary to make the overall points.
Add zooms, markers and annotations where necessary.
Export your content to video and upload to a cloud hosting service if necessary.
Creative an executive summary of the key points in text and create a contents checklist for your client to use to navigate to relevant points in the video(s).

Examples:

Last week Rand published a blog titled The Best Kept Secret in the SEOmoz Toolset, which explains how to access the new SERPs analysis tool. I’ve taken the process he explained through text and diagrams and put together a tutorial video which works towards the same purpose. Using Rand’s post as a script, this video took roughly 10 minutes to make using Camtasia for Mac.

Do you find it easier to watch through the video or read through the post? Please let me know your thoughts!

If anyone would like to see further practical demonstrations of turning a written report into a movie, then i invite you to email me over your content (phil.nottingham@distilled.net) and i will use the above formula to convert it into a video and share it in the comments section.

If you’re interested to know more about the practical process for making awesome videos, please check out a post I created a the Distilled blog last month – Creating Awesome Videos for SEO.

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Internet Explorer 9’s New Malware Blocking Features Leave Competition in the Dust

July 18th, 2011 |

Author: JYDC Admin

Article Source: The Only Yard For The Internet Junkie

IE9 If like most Maximum PC readers you’re the first person friends and family call when looking for tech advice, you might want to think twice before suggesting they move away from Internet Explorer. According to a recent report from NSS Labs, Internet Explorer 9’s dual-pronged approach to blocking malicious URLs wasn’t just slightly better than the rest; it’s pretty much night and day.

According to the study Internet Explorer 9 blocked 92 percent of all malware using its URL-based filters, and 100 percent with its application filtering. Internet Explorer 8 took second place by blocking 90 percent, while Chrome, Safari 5, and Firefox 4 all tied for third with a dismal 13 percent success rate. Google, Apple, and Mozilla’s three way tie can be explained by their joint use of Google’s Safe Browsing system, while Opera was the only major browser to score lower on the test.

Opera currently uses a URL blocking service maintained by anti-virus maker AVG, and using this list they only managed to block 5 percent of the study’s tested sites. Internet Explorer 9’s application reputation feature is a great way to help less savvy users spot potentially malicious files, however even it isn’t without a few quirks. False positives, even among Microsoft’s own add-in’s have been known to occur, but better safe than sorry.

It’s worth noting that the study doesn’t take every malware prevention factor into consideration such as Chrome’s sandboxing feature, but it does highlight Microsoft’s continued commitment to improving the security of Internet Explorer. With Chrome and Firefox duking it out in the rapid release war for consumers, Microsoft’s improved security image among businesses could well cement IE’s foothold in the corporate world for decades to come.

The Only Yard For The Internet Junkie

Archive for July, 2011

71 Percent Of Online Adults Use Video-Sharing Sites

Similar Posts:

Getting Stuff Done by Video

The Conundrum

How Can We Communicate Detailed Concepts and Suggestions to our Clients More Effectively?

Why Go To The Effort?

Common Pitfalls When Making Videos

How to Convert a Written Report into a Video Report

Examples:

Similar Posts:

Internet Explorer 9’s New Malware Blocking Features Leave Competition in the Dust

Similar Posts: