Picture courtesy of http://www.chrisbrogan.com

Chris Brogen, internet marketer and co-author of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling book “Trust Agents”, recently wrote a post stating that while visiting a website he observed “video on the page is the most visually motivating thing the site offers.”

He points out that video in of itself is a call-to-action, which is true: when you embed a video on a page you are essentially saying “click me.”

Your video can be any number of things: a commercial for your product, testimonials from your clients, tips on how your product will make your customers lives easier. No matter what it is, a video can help you convert potential customers into paying ones.

Chris adds one final piece of advice in his post which I think is important: “If you’re not already doing video for your site, I strongly recommend it. It doesn’t have to be amazing. It might still draw our attention if it’s just plain useful.”

Do you have a video on your website? Send me an email and lets talk about how we can make a video for you and your company. For more tips on how to improve your conversion rate check out these 10 tips by Added Bytes.

Now, more than ever, it’s important to make video and YouTube part of your PR strategy. Why? YouTube is serving 1 billion videos per day and it is the second largest search engine in the world. If these two reasons don’t give you cause for a video, here’s 3 more from PR Web’s webinar “Using Video and Multimedia in Online News Releases.”

• Video is the most effective content for a social media release, according to a a survey by Marketing Sherpa. The benefits are the timely indexing of media and “link juice” from YouTube.
• Online video drives business. A survey by the Kelsey Group found that 55% of people who watched a video took action.
• It is easier to explain complex concepts with a video. If a picture is worth a 1000 words then a video is worth a million.

Send me an email and lets talk about how we can make a video for you and your company. For more information on why you should have a video in your press release check out the Slideshare presentation from PR Web below!

CNW Group is Canada’s number one resource for time-critical news and information.

I made this video for CNW and their new same-day web video service. It’s a great service; they go to your event or business, shoot and edit a video for you on location, upload it to all the popular video sharing sites and send it out on their newswire and Twitter feeds.

Reel SEO has a great article called “5 Ways Small Business Can Take Advantage of YouTube” written by Morgan Brown, the director of marketing for TurnHere. Morgan has some good tips on making videos for YouTube. Some of them are obvious like “pay attention to production value” and “give the viewers a follow-up action”, but one of his points isn’t quite so obvious and quite often overlooked – create content that meets a need.

By making a video that answers a question your customers may be searching for is a great way to hook them and get them interested in your product. Here’s an example from my own life: I’m getting ready to redo the floor in my family room. My wife wants a laminate floor and neither one of us have any idea how to install it. So what did we do? We went on YouTube and searched “how to lay laminate flooring”.

The video above is from Lowe’s and was one of the first videos to come up in our search. It’s a great piece of branded content that answers a common question asked by their clientele. I would never have searched for “Lowe’s” on YouTube and to be honest before watching this video I wasn’t really familiar with the company (they are American and have only recently opened stores in Canada). When I think about home building supplies I think Home Depot or Rona, but because of their video I now know them, went to their website, found out they just opened up a store near me and will probably go there when it comes time for us to do our floor — all because they had a video that answered my question.

Think about how this could work for you and your company. What problems do you solve for your customers? Send me an email and let’s talk about how we can work together to help you reach your audience through video.

The Climate Shop is a web based solution that makes it easy for you to track your energy usage and rewards you for reducing the amount of energy you use.

I was contracted by The Climate Shop to produce a video for them to coincide with the launch of their website and service. As soon as I saw their site I knew what I wanted to do: the beautiful design was just asking to come to life.

The complexity of the service made this one of the harder projects I’ve worked on. We spent a lot of time getting the script and storyboard right. For me, this is an important step. Sure the animating takes a lot of time, but working from an agreed upon storyboard and script makes the process a lot easier: everyone knows what is going to be said and has an idea of what the end product is going to look like, which means fewer changes in the end.

Inniskillin is a Canadian winery located in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. It has played an important pioneering role in the modern Canadian wine industry.

I was commissioned on behalf of Inniskillin to create a series of video blogs for their Facebook fan page to coincide with the release of their 2007 Reserve Cabernet Franc. The videos feature winemaker Bruce Nicholson who did a great job of explaining the winemaking process, storage tips, and the history of Inniskillin.

Videos such as these are a great way for companies to communicate their brand. It’s a way to put your product in front of consumers without selling to them. I really like how these videos were made specifically for their Facebook fan page. Facebook is a great place for building a community around your brand.

TextWise creates the semantic Digital DNA of documents, revealing the fundamental meaning of text.
This video was a challenge. TextWise is a pretty complicated API that we had to explain in the simplest terms possible.

Michael O’Connor Clarke from Thornley Fallis headed this project and he brought some really great ideas to the table. After many rewrites we decided that an infomercial was the best format to delver the information.

At first we were going to do a Billy Mays style video, but decided instead to make it more retro. I shot it using a VHS camcorder, that’s how it got its look and for the call to action I recreated the info-graphic from an old Ginzu knife commercial.

In the end think we did a really good job of explaining something really complex in an entertaining way.

Danone and Activia sponsored the Campaign for Inside Health – a network of savvy mom’s working together to live a healthy lifestyle.

I could really identify with this project. My wife and son are big Activia eaters so I had a strong sense of the brand going in.

When Sean Moffitt from Agent Wildfire originally approached me with this project he had several different concepts – all of them good. Together we determined what would work best for their audience and decided on an animated video.

I had done several animated videos before this that used typography. For The Campaign for Inside Health I wanted to do something different. The video uses a lot of imagery which I chose specifically for the audience and I think it really helped to convey the message.

CTVglobemedia is one of Canada’s largest private media companies.

From March 2007 to August 2009 I worked for CTVglobemedia as a Digital Media Producer creating original online video content for programs such as So You Think You Can Dance Canada, Canadian Idol, Canada’s Next Top Model, and eTalk.

In addition to creating original content for CTV programs I also produced content for events such as the Olympics and Toronto Fashion Week. As well as developed an original online series for Space.

From November 2007  to October 2009 MTV Canada commissioned me to produce a series of videoblogs for inclusion in their flagship talkshow “MTV Live.”

I was given a topic by the shows producers and asked to write a rant taking the opposing view of the shows guests. Topics ranged from religion to transportation and I was encouraged to really push the envelope.

I had a good run. My videos received  positive reviews from the MTV audience and did quite well on YouTube. When the format of the show changed my segment was cut.