We have been experimenting with online video since last year in our Yamaha Rhino project, with very good results. So I was not surprised to see a Forrester Research blog post saying that an online video is 50 times more likely than a text page to appear on Google’s first page. A big part of that is simply the huge disparity in the number of text pages and the number of videos. Now that Google is including videos in its “blended search results,” a well-optimized video has a much better shot at a first-page ranking than a text page. Forrester’s research meshes with our own experience. Although we have many more text pages dealing with the Yamaha Rhino recall, a Google search for “Yamaha Rhino recall” on July 2, 2009, placed our two Rhino videos in the top 4 search results. Message to consumer lawyers, include online video in your marketing plan.
Yamaha Rhino recall Google search results 7-2-09
In an earlier post I recommended the book Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe. Okay, the full title of the book is Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business. I mentioned in my post that I was experimenting with crowdsourcing a banner and logo for a new website, www.consumernews.com, at crowdSpring.com. Our projects there are finally over, and I was very pleased with the result. We set an award (a financial amount we were willing to pay) and then different designers from all over the world submitted entries.
If you like, you can ask your friends, colleagues and relatives to go vote on the one(s) they like best. We asked a bunch of family members and friends to express opinions, and were sometimes very surprised. The end product was something I would never have visualized, and if I had bid it out to one company, I would have been stuck with one product. I came away very pleased with the design, and had a lot of fun doing it. Give it a try when you need a graphics or web designer. I’ve used (and still on occasion use) Elance to get designers and others for temporary projects, but Crowdsourcing is more fun and, I believe, leads to a better product.
Tagged as:
Crowdsourcing,
crowdSPRING.com
