Online Video Best Practice Guide

Steffan Aquarone

Overview

The Online Video Best Practice Guide, extensively re-written and updated for January 2014, is aimed at a wide range of marketers and content owners at all levels, who are using video as a strategic tool for marketing and sales.

The 61-page guide covers all you need to know about what’s happening in online video, including best practice tips, platforms and techniques. The report is full of real, practical examples, case studies and interviews to help you with online video strategy and tactics.  

About this report 

Econsultancy’s Online Video Best Practice Guide enables marketing managers, content owners and digital marketers at all levels to understand the opportunities and challenges presented by the world of online video content.

This year’s Online Video Best Practice Guide has been extensively re-written to reflect the significant changes in the online video market since the last edition of this report. It covers four pillars of successful online video strategy in detail with advice, tools and technology tips from across the industry. These pillars are understanding audiences, creating content, managing distribution and measuring and attribution success.

The 61-page guide also covers three strategic strands that address the business case for online video in more detail, showcasing best practice and highlighting opportunities for organisations. These strategies are online video for off-site engagement, online video for on-site optimisation and online video for business improvement, occupying Sections 6-8 respectively.

About the author

This report is written by leading online video strategy expert, Steffan Aquarone. As well as a public speaker at various conferences and events, Steff is also Strategy Director at Buto, a web-based online video platform. 

As an entrepreneur, Steff works on technology start-ups as well as with big brands ranging from RBS to UCAS, helping them to develop elements of their online video and digital strategies. He leads Econsultancy’s Online Video Strategies training course and writes regularly on the future of video on the web.

Contributing authors

Contributers to the report include: 

  • Courtney Freedman-Thompson, Digital Editor, Waitrose
  • Chris Gorell Barnes, Founder and CEO of Adjust Your Set
  • Lee Kemp, Managing Director at Vermillion Films
  • Stuart Maister, Managing Director, BroadView Communications
  • Jeremy Stinton, Strategy Director, Buto
  • Steffen Tiedemann Christensen, Co-founder and CTO at 23
  • Nick Timon, Chief Strategy Officer, Adjust Your Set
  • Sarah Wood, COO at Unruly Media

Table of contents

  1. Introduction
  2. About Econsultancy
    1. About the author
    2. Foreword
    3. How this guide is structured
  3. The Story So Far
    1. The “Dark Ages”
    2. Mass adoption and the rise of the viral star
    3. New business models
    4. New players
    5. What has changed?
  4. The Business Case
    1. Content-led marketing
    2. Setting expectations
    3. Putting together the right team
    4. Integration into digital marketing strategy
    5. Key ingredients for success
    6. Common pitfalls
  5. Online Video Strategy
    1. Four strategic pillars
      1. Understanding audiences
      2. Creating content
      3. Managing distribution
      4. Measuring and attributing success
    2. What are you actually trying to achieve?
      1. Online video strategy setting tool
    3. Budget
    4. External commissioning
      1. Top tips for picking the perfect partner:
    5. Technology
      1. HTML5 and video formats
      2. Mobile
      3. Video security
      4. RTMP
      5. DRM
      6. IP / domain restriction
  6. Strategy 1: online video for off-site engagement
    1. Distribution channels
      1. Seeding
      2. YouTube
      3. Video advertising
      4. Vine, Instagram Video and Twitter Cards
    2. Video SEO
    3. Measurement
  7. Strategy 2: online video for on-site optimisation
    1. Hosting and content management
      1. Content management
      2. Publishing, hosting and playback
      3. Choosing a video platform
    2. Retention marketing
    3. Interactive technology
      1. In-player adverts
      2. Clickable video
    4. Measurement and continuous improvement
      1. Gathering data
      2. A/B and multivariate testing (MVT)
      3. Improving performance
      4. Informing other marketing channels
  8. Strategy 3: online video for business improvement
    1. Key principles
    2. Training
    3. Internal communications
    4. Measurement
  9. Legislation
    1. Accessibility controls
    2. Other benefits of compliance
  10. The Future of Online Video
  11. Glossary
  12. Appendices
    1. Industry Experts’ Biographies
      1. Courtney Freedman-Thompson, Digital Editor, Waitrose
      2. Chris Gorell Barnes, Founder and CEO, Adjust Your Set
      3. Lee Kemp, Managing Director at Vermillion Films
      4. Stuart Maister, MD, BroadView
      5. Jeremy Stinton, Strategy Director, Buto
      6. Steffen Tiedemann Christensen, Co-Founder, 23
      7. Nick Timon, Chief Strategy Officer, Adjust Your Set
      8. Sarah Wood, COO, Unruly Media
    2. Further and continued reading
      1. Other Sites
      2. Viral Video Chart

 Download a copy of the report to learn more.

A free sample is available for those who want more detail about what is in the report.

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What your website can learn from Google’s Rap Genius ban

Christopher Ratcliff

I covered the Rap Genius website briefly in my 13 amazing interweb things post from a few months ago, in which I highlighted its hip-hop lyric cruncher. This however is just a small corner of its now slightly less burgeoning empire.

The site itself publishes lyrics to rap songs, and using crowd-sourced annotations, adds notes that expand on references within the lyrics themselves. Great for those of us who don’t know the meaning of such terms as ‘whip’, ‘trill’ or ‘what’s crackin?’*

How did Rap Genius break Google’s rules?

Growth hacking. 

In a contrite blog post on Rap Genius’s own site, the engineering team goes into great detail how they manipulated the system and quickly drew the attention of Google through some fairly debauched (their own word) SEO malpractice.

  • Rap Genius appended lists of popular song links to guest blogs that were unrelated to the content of the post.
  • It offered to promote any blog who linked to Rap Genius in any post, regardless of the relevancy of content.

John Marbach received just such a proposal on 22 December 2013, which he describes on his own blog in great detail, but for your consideration I’ll post the contents of the email that drew Google’s attention, as sent by Mahbod Moghadam of Rap Genius.

Using the potentially huge amounts of search traffic generated by the new Justin Bieber album, Rap Genius were hoping to direct searchers towards its own site. What business Rap Genius has in publishing Justin Bieber lyrics anyway should be discussed elsewhere, but by building these powerful hyperlinks across multiple sites and blogs, this would artificially raise Rap Genius up through the rankings.

You can possibly sympathise with Rap Genius’s desperation when you uncover the fact that 80% of its traffic comes from only 20% of its lyrics. As Marbach agrees, the fast pace of the music industry dictates that 2013’s most popular drivers like Daft Punk’s ‘Get Lucky’ will certainly fade in popularity in 2014, if they haven’t already. However the above email shows a blatant and shameless manipulation of the system.

The fallout

Google caught them, fast, and on Christmas morning gave Rap Genius a severe penalty the like of which only the very worst children on the naughty list receive. A 10 day Google ban. “Take away my PSP, take away my new BMX, anything, but please, please don’t take me off of Google!” I’d imagine Rap Genius was pleading, while on its knees, to the Ghost of Christmas Search Listings.

Even using the search term ‘rap genius’, the website didn’t appear in the Google SERPs until page six.

Everything seems to be back to normal now. Rap Genius has worked hard to remove all of its unnatural links from around the internet, using Google’s own four-step approach:

  1. Download a list of links to your site from Webmaster Tools.
  2. Check this list for any links that violate our guidelines on linking.
  3. For any links that violate our guidelines, contact the webmaster of that site and ask that they either remove the links or prevent them from passing PageRank, such as by adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute.
  4. Use the Disavow links tool in Webmaster Tools to disavow any links you were unable to get removed.

As of today (7 January 2014) this is how Rap Genius appears on Google using certain popular search terms:

‘Jay Z lyrics’

Rap Genius appears as the sixth result, if counting news items.

‘Get Lucky lyrics’

Rap Genius is the fourth result.

‘Ice Cube Today Was a Good Day lyrics’

Rap Genius is the third result. So really this whole mess didn’t take too long to correct itself. Perhaps it’s down to the speed of Google’s web crawlers, or perhaps Google did its own manual fix.

I understand that Rap Genius’s 10 day ban was nothing more than a ‘slap on the wrists’, and obviously the attention it has drawn to the site will probably end up driving far more traffic to the site in 2014 then any amount of organic search listings or unnatural link-building ever would. However I feel it’s important to highlight this as an example of how we should all avoid artificial link-building and how quickly Google deals with such transgressions.

*’car’, ‘a portmanteau of true and real’ and ‘hello how do you do?’

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Guides

The Account Manager’s Guide to Effective Communication & Client Retention

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I’ve worked for, and learned from, several remarkable agencies in my career. Great account managers stand out in any agency environment, no matter the industry. They are able to build relationships with clients quickly, establishing trust out the gate. They may provide the same results as other account managers, but they communicate the value of […]

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