Video Stat of the Week: Video Marketing Usage Increases Rapidly in 2012

According to a new report released by Social Media Examiner last month, YouTube and video marketing top all other social media for investments this year.

Why Online Video?

There are several reasons why online video's popularity has increased:

1. Access to audiences is much easier, esp. via YouTube
2. Online video creation has come down in cost, although professional creation is still very important
3. Video helps improve SEO rankings and searchability of marketeers' content

Given these facts there is no reason why you should not utilize online video as part of your Marketing mix.

Easily present your Powerpoint presentation on an iPad

Moving your Powerpoint presentation to an iPad is not an easy feat, since Microsoft never released a Powerpoint viewer for the iPad. But Slideshark has - and it's surprisingly useful.

Upload your presentation to your iPad

Uploading your presentation is very straight-forward:

1. Create an account on Slideshark.
2. Upload your presentation.
3. If you have not done so yet, download the free iPad app from the AppStore.
4. Log into the iPad app and download the presentation from the Slideshark's website.

That's it - you are ready to present.

Presenting from your iPad

On your iPad, use AirPlay or Apple's HDMI adapter to connect to your screen and present directly from your iPad. Even better, Slideshark supports a special presentation mode where your audience sees your presentation, but you see the slides, your notes, the prior and next slides. There's also a timer that allows you to keep track of the elapsed presentation time.

All of this works straight out of the box - we did not have to fiddle with fonts, colors, images or animations. Everything was preserved.

What's not supported

There are a number of Powerpoint features that are not supported:

• We could not play back any embedded videos.
• slide transitions did not work, either.
• According to Slideshark, advanced animations might not work fully either. Neither will hyperlinks or any 3rd-party components.

Verdict

Slideshark has instantly become our favorite Powerpoint presentation tool on the iPad. If we need video, we use Keynote. We don't miss the lack of transition support - less is often more when it comes to presenting. And everything else Slideshark handled well.

Highly recommended!

Powerpoint in Motion

Click on the image above to download the sample PowerPoint presentation.

Many people have seen presentations that incorporate animations. But if it has been a while since you explored Microsoft PowerPoint’s animation capabilities — either because you think they are too complicated or because you have experienced a less-than-professional animated presentation — take another look. Professional, well-executed animations can bring a presentation to life and keep viewers’ attention.

Easy as 1, 2, 3

PowerPoint provides built-in animation capabilities. Some visual effects are easy to implement:

• Entrances and exits of graphic elements and bullets
• Changes in size, color or rotation of text or objects
• Movement of elements You can hide items to focus viewer attention precisely where and when you need it. In short, animation allows you greater control over your information.

Advanced animations

Suppose you want to explain to your audience what is involved to get a new version of a product launched, including all the various tasks that your company, its suppliers and third parties have to perform. It’s not trivial to explain this succinctly, so that your audience will be able to follow along.

Rather than creating pages of pages of text bullets, an animation might be a much better way to tell the story. Just take a look at the image sequence above. Do you want to see the full animation in PowerPoint? Simply download the presentation from our website.

Of course, quality graphics and text are the basis of a well-animated presentation. Professional content development is the first step and can take the pressure off internal resources.

At Digital Dazzle, our experts can create and package powerful presentations that will inspire audiences to take action! Contact Digital Dazzle for a no-cost consultation and to learn how our talented presentation specialists consistently deliver excellent corporate presentations, cost-effectively and on tight deadlines. Call us at 415.937.1791.

Why to use Video for Social Media Marketing

The Social Media Examiner recently conducted a survey of over 3,800 marketers with the goal of understanding how they are using social media to grow and promote their businesses. The information derived from the survey was summarized in the Examiner’s 2012 Social Media Marketing Report.

Here are two of the report’s primary findings:

• Marketers still place high value on social media: A significant 83% of marketers indicate that social media is important for their business.

• Video marketing holds the top spot for future plans: A significant 76% of marketers plan on increasing their use of Youtube and video marketing, making it the top area marketers will invest in for 2012.

Based on these findings, here are tips to help you effectively include videos in your social marketing campaign and keep up with your marketing peers:

1. Increase your 2012 budget for videos.
2. Add links to videos in your social media communications. These links should lead to an appealing landing page, where the video is embedded.
3. People want to access social media wherever they are. So, make sure your videos can be viewed on any device (desktop, notebook, mobile device) without losing production quality. This also means they should be optimized for small screens.
4. To draw customers from Youtube to your site, embed a link and a call to action in your video.
5. Add a sharing function to your video so that prospects can pass it along to colleagues and other decision makers via social media and other channels.

The experts at Digital Dazzle are very familiar with optimizing video for social media. If you would like help, contact us by email or at 415.937.1791.

Video Stat of the Week: Video Viewership

Mark Hosbein, a vice president with Nielsen, recently presented a series of video-focused stats and observations in a meeting with marketers from the greater Los Angeles area.

To nobody's surprise, video viewership has increased over the last years and will certainly continue to do so this year as well. The surprising statistic was the rapid increase in mobile video viewing, by more than 200% in the last 3 years. Corresponding with that number was a decrease in desktop viewership.

This has implications for video marketeers:

• Serve up your video as HTML5 video, not Flash.
• Make sure that your web design allows for viewing of videos on small screens.
• Optimize for small screens - use lightbox overlays that support different sizes for your videos based on the device that a video is viewed on.
• Similarly, ensure that your video content doesn't break down when the video is viewed at Half Size.
• Embed analytics that differentiate between mobile and desktop/notebook viewing.

If you follow these guidelines, you can be assured that your intended audience will be able to watch your videos, not matter what devices they are on.