Just ran into Anupam Gupta, CEO of Mixpo. I had caught a demo of Mixpo earlier today and was fairly impressed with what they have created. Basically Mixpo is a simple online video creation tool for SMBs, or more precisely for companies that sell to SMBs. Mixpo has set up several reseller relationships that are starting to sell their service. Every day it seems like there is another SMB video player (it’s starting to remind me of the IYP space),…
Just sat down at the Kelsey Conference with Darren Waddell of Merchant Circle and Andy Klein of Spotzer to discuss their recent announcement that they will be offering free online videos to SMBs on MerchantCircle.com. Basically the way the system works is that you go to your profile page and by agreeing to get a video, Spotzer will instantly create a pre-made video for your business category and add your data (e.g., business name, phone number, etc.) to the video.…
According to Frank Jules of AT&T at the Kelsey Conference. Pretty impressive. Frank has walked us through a number of digital initiatives that AT&T is attacking and it’s pretty impressive. There’s nothing here that has a wow factor and they are doing everything you would expect them to do (e.g. call tracking, TV on demand YP, ad supported 411, mobile, etc.), but the fact that they are doing all of it is wow factor enough. “Search, Discover, Transact” is their…
The WSJ writes today about the emergence on online video advertising for small businesses. According to the article some advertisers are seeing great performance. This bodes well for the growing legion of SMB video ad sellers. Here are a few that you might want to check out: AdReel Jivox JiffySpots Mixpo SpotMixer TurnHere One of the things that caught my eye in the article was how the “try it for free” incentive was key to attracting the business profiled in…
Use your keywords in your business name Create a separate page on your website for your video and use a description with your keywords If you have a video and listing on a search results page you get 3.3 times the attention that you get from an ad or a single organic search result. The more Web citations (your business name appearing in text on various pages) you have the more likely you are to rank higher Look at the…
Integration of video and pictures in search results is the most interesting thing about local search. It’s going to take a lot of education to get SMBs to do video. A lot of SMBs don’t understand what it means to give their data to a search engine. I have heard a lot of restaurants complain about getting a lot of calls from local search start-ups trying to make sure that information is accurate. I think we need a central portal…
Coming into this one late unfortunately. Mixpo is provides an easy way to create web videos for marketing. Mixpo provides a dashboard to help measure the effectiveness of the video. You can click on a video from a campaign to get impressions, views and conversions for specific time periods. You can see a map that shows where the views are coming from. They show you where in the video the interactions are happening, e.g. when did someone click on the…
TurnHere has already made a name for itself in the industry as the purveyors of online video for small businesses. Something must be in the air because I just got pinged by Steve Espinosa about Buzzspot.net a new service that provides affordable TV advertising to small and medium-sized businesses. Buzzspot is basically a reseller of Google TV, a Spotrunner-like service that allows you to make media buys on local TV via the Web. Over the past month I have been…
Greg Sterling recently posted his 2008 predictions for local search and I thought it only right that I take on the 2008 predictions for local search engine optimization, particularly because Greg’s post never even mentioned the subject. So here goes: (updated 12/29/08 to see how I did)
If video SEO is in the NY Times you know it’s gone mainstream. Yesterday the Times ran a piece on how a dentist in Pennsylvania has posted a video about root canal on YouTube to explain the procedure to his patients. Since he posted the video, he has signed up 42 patients via his website. Before the video he had only attracted 26 patients via the site.