Season's Greetings!

Season's Greetings from all of us at Digital Dazzle

 

One of the superb joys of this season is the opportunity to say
THANK YOU
to great people like you and to send you our best wishes.

May you have a beautiful holiday wrapped in warmth, touched in wonder and filled with joy.

May the new year bring you continued success and prosperity.

We look forward to sharing some exiting new offerings in 2012!

 

With Warm Regards and Lots of Good Cheer

The Digital Dazzle Team

What's So Great About Video?

Generating new leads to bring in business or gain investor support is a top priority for every organization. More companies are turning to video as a powerful lead generator that packs a high return on investment (ROI).

Video has many advantages over more traditional media — but only when it’s used properly. How can you ensure that your video efforts will have the results you want?

What’s so great about video?
One of video’s biggest advantages is its wide reach:

• Visible Measures, an online media research firm, reports that audiences watch online video advertisements up to 600 million times per quarter.

• A recent Web Video Marketing Council (WVMC) Intelligence Report shows that more than 75 percent of business executives regularly watch online video — 17 percent of them watch daily. This figure has quadrupled in only four years.

Beyond getting your message in front of viewers, video has a growing ability to get it in front of potential customers:

• A recent study by research firm Ipsos Mendelsohn shows that affluent Americans (i.e., those who earn more than $100,000/year) are the heaviest users of digital media.
  
  
• Of all digital advertising, video advertisements had the highest chance of prompting action in this group — twice as many video ad watchers purchased an item, compared to web banner or static online ad viewers.

Keep in mind that Google can scan captions. To pump up your search-engine rankings, add captions or a transcript to videos that you post online. (Incidentally, Google owns YouTube, which accounts for about 25 percent of Google search results.)

Video can boost a company’s exposure even further by increasing its search-engine ranking. Forrester Research blogger Nate Elliott says that in recent years, “optimizing video content to take advantage of blended search is by far the easiest way to get a first-page organic ranking on Google.”

Big-league players such as Zappos and Amazon, which regularly use videos to draw in customers, would probably agree.

Reel in leads with video marketing
Just what turns a video into a lead-generating powerhouse? Several factors help business videos succeed.

• Interaction: Get viewers to act. Provide a registration form, a call-to-action button or one-click sharing, or combine video and text to increase branding.

To take full advantage of video’s wealth of distribution options, be sure to give each video a unique URL. Also make certain that your videos support multiple formats and bit rates, as well as automatic detection of the receiving device type, Web browser and connection speed.

• Distribution: One of the great things about video is its flexibility. One clip can be pushed to consumers via many methods: on your website or social media pages, in marketing emails, onscreen at a conference booth, on video sharing sites such as YouTube, and more. A video is also an effective tool in all types of presentations, whether to clients, investors, prospects or partners. Follow the tips in our blog for more ways to maximize your video’s reach.

• Empowerment: Videos can be integrated into a company’s customer relationship management (CRM) solution such as Salesforce. As a result, companies can accelerate the sales cycle by giving their sales teams the ability to speed delivery, measurement and follow-up — increasing the likelihood of successful communication with potential customers.

A single video can provide all these benefits in one package that can easily be forwarded, linked and replayed, without additional costs or concerns about size or storage. And videos can provide a powerful personal element that static text and links cannot, offering potential customers a view of your company’s “corporate personality” and the people behind it. 

Any company can produce a video — but not many companies have the expertise to execute a truly valuable, successful one. Your best bet for on-time delivery and success is to work with an expert organization. Contact us to learn how our experts can transform your message into a high-value video that gets leads! Call us at 415.937.1791.

When should you upgrade your software?

Over the weekend, a friend asked me what I think about MacOSX Lion (he knows we are a Mac-only shop). My answer surprised him: We have not even begun to evaluate it.

I took the opportunity to run him through our upgrade policy, which can be depicted nicely as an infographic:

 

Essentially, our Macs fall into three categories:

• Production Critical Systems, where we do all the heavy lifting for our clients. If these systems don't work, we not only face missed milestones, but probably some very serious time rebuilding the machines. Thus, we are most carefully when upgrading these.
• Production Systems, for tasks such as writing, emailing or billing. While essential, we can easily switch these tasks to other hardware, with only minor (or no) impact on milestones.
• Test Systems, which is hardware that is not in daily use and can therefore be used to test before we deploy in our production environment.

In an environment like this, OS upgrades are the hardest to pull off. During a brief stint in the data center world, I learned that you should never upgrade the OS of critical systems until at least 6 months after the upgrade was released. Similarly, we don't even touch a new OS until the first maintenance release and don't put it in production until the second maintenance release. In other words, let others find and worry about bugs.

In the case of OSX 10.7 Lion, we felt that the first maintenance release was so small, that we would wait for the second maintenance release before starting to test. Also, we aren't in dire need for any of the new features, so if in doubt, we'd rather sit it out a bit longer than jump in too early.

That's why we have not even begun testing Lion.

 

Sequentia Environics featured in Gartner's Digital Marketing Service Providers report

 

One of our customers, Sequentia Environics, were distinguished in Gartner’s Competitive Landscape: Digital Marketing Service Providers report. Joining the ranks of McKinsey & Co. and Accenture, they are the only firm noted for social community development to support activities such as advocacy marketing, content marketing, crowdsourcing, consulting and measurement.

Congratulations to well-deserved recognition!

Screenflow 3 released

Screenflow from Telestream is our favorite editor for Corporate Demo Versions. They just released version 3 of the software and were kind enough to include the following quote by us in their press release.
"ScreenFlow 3 provides huge productivity improvements for us," said Veit Irtenkauf, CEO and co-founder of Digital Dazzle, LLC. "In the past, we had to use third-party tools to highlight specific regions of the screen, blur sensitive information and draw freehand video annotations. With ScreenFlow 3, we can now do these directly inside the video editor, which speeds up our video editing workflow and allows us to turn around customer change-requests more quickly. ScreenFlow remains our editor-of-choice for our corporate video services."

YouTube and Vimeo Video Compression Guidelines

Many of our customers want to host the videos we created for them on video hosting platforms under their own account.  The most popular hosting platforms remain YouTube and Vimeo.
After a client selects a hosting platform, we then optimize the compression settings for that platform. For clients who wish to optimize the compression settings themselves, we offer guidance as to which settings are best for the hosting platform they wish to use.
Most platforms post their recommended video and audio settings.  For example, visit YouTube or Vimeo to access the YouTube guidelines or the Vimeo guidelines for best compression settings.
And if you have special compression needs, just ask us - we can help you with any of these.

Image courtesy of stock.xchng user sibaudio

Press Release: Digital Dazzle Sponsors LiNC 2011

 

 

 

MILL VALLEY, Calif., May 16, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Digital Dazzle just announced their Select-level sponsorship of this week's LiNC 2011, Lithium's annual user conference.  Digital Dazzle is Lithium's vendor of choice for partner marketing videos and collateral.  As such, many of their corporate videos and brochures will be featured at the conference.

Digital Dazzle's Partner Enablement Videos solve the main obstacle to forming productive partnerships.  70% of all partnerships fail to drive revenue because partners are not willing to invest in a partnership until a pipeline of leads is built.  Yet, traditionally a pipeline can't be built without a significant investment.  Digital Dazzle videos alleviate this Catch 22 and enable a company to:

• Bring partner integration solutions to life before they exist;
• Vividly demonstrate key differentiators and benefits of partner solutions at a reasonable cost; and
• Begin preselling joint offerings in just 15 days.

 

A case in point is Lithium's use of Digital Dazzle's demo videos in their partner program. Henry Bruckstein, Director of Alliances at Lithium, reported, "Their unique ability to understand the business benefits of the project, translate that into a script and then design amazing looking mock ups has allowed us to accelerate our partner program to the tune of 5 new launches in a single quarter."

In today's fast moving, competitive, and complex business environment, savvy companies are using promotional demo videos to accelerate business development and shorten the sales cycle in order to drive revenue and gain market share.

About Digital Dazzle

Digital Dazzle, a boutique marketing agency, helps clientele achieve and maintain industry leadership through state-of-the-art corporate demos and videos, PowerPoint presentations, marketing collateral, web design and partner marketing consulting services. Working with such market leaders as Wipro, Cognizant, Alcatel-Lucent-Genesys, Lithium, Vovici and Teletech, our compelling storytelling delivers the quickest path to building strong brand connections that influence analysts, partners, customers and buying behavior. Founded in 2008 by Veit Irtenkauf and Sharon Rushton, Digital Dazzle is a privately held LLC with headquarters in Mill Valley, California.

 

For the complete press release, please see PRNewsWire

11 Ways to Leverage Your Corporate Video and Maximize ROI

Are you fully leveraging your corporate video?

Oftentimes, the pressure of an upcoming event (i.e. a sales presentation to a potential "major" customer) pushes a company to get off the fence and finally create that video they had been thinking about for ages. Yet, after the event passes, they let the video grow stale. If this has happened at your company, then you did not come close to realizing your video's ROI potential.

A professionally produced, compelling and concise video can become your least expensive, most effective lead generation and sales tool, when leveraged across multiple platforms and within various campaigns. This is especially true because a well-crafted video hastens audience engagement and understanding for superior influence.

Here are 11 ways to leverage your video and maximize ROI:

1. Place your video on your website's home page or product's page.
2. Give every salesperson and reseller access to the video (via DVDs, downloads from your website or from video services like Vimeo).
3. Include a link to your video in your marketing emails.
4. Present your video at trade shows or conferences. Show it on a large screen and put it on a constant loop so that attendees can easily view it and be attracted to your booth.
5. Upload your video to a service such as YouTube or Vimeo, make a company page and place your video on it. This will make it easy for others to embed your video on blogs, online communities or wherever your product or service is being talked about.
6. Post your video on your Linkedin page and other networking sites.
7. Place share links within your video for viewers to share the video with their contacts on Facebook, Twitter, or Yahoo.
8. Make the video available internally (i.e. via downloads from your website) and keep all your employees on the same page through consistent and concise messaging.
9. Present your video to analysts, investors and partners.
10. Reference your video in press releases to gain more media exposure.
11. Include a link to your video or embed it directly in your webinar invite emails to increase webinar registrations.

Are you ready to get started on a new corporate video or other marketing project? Schedule a call with Digital Dazzle and, based upon your parameters, our experts will craft an exceptional experience that will educate, influence decisions, and incite action.

 

Announcement: Consolidating Feeds

Dear Readers,

We're consolidating multiple feeds over the next few weeks, so if you get this message more than once, please stay on the Digital Dazzle feed and feel free to unsubscribe from the other feed(s).

Thank you for your understanding

Veit

Two of our customers are now partnering with each other

 

 

 

 

Two of Digital Dazzle's Customers, Sequentia Environics and CloudSquads, announced a new partnership today. Congratulations!

"Sequentia Environics and CloudSquads today announced a strategic partnership to deliver comprehensive, end-to-end community programs, enabling the world’s largest brands to integrate social content from branded communities like those powered by Lithium Technologies, Facebook, and Twitter into their existing businesses."

Rapid Presentation Design for Lithium/SAP

 

 

 

 

 

Digital Dazzle completes Rapid Presentation Design mockups depicting interaction between Lithium online communities and SAP software. The mockups will enhance Lithium’s presentation to SAP by helping SAP to better visualize and understand Lithium’s vision. Lithium is the premier producer of Social Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to Fortune 500 enterprises and SAP is the market and technology leader in business management software.

Learn more about our Rapid Presentation Design service offering

Welcome to the Digital Dazzle Blog

Welcome to Digital Dazzle's Blog!

We are excited to report that today is the beginning of the Digital Dazzle Blog!  It will keep you up-to-date on the latest happenings at Digital Dazzle and give useful insights about the world of Marketing.

Some of the topics we will cover are:

- News about Digital Dazzle

- Impact of visual Marketing (i.e., demos, videos & visualization) on your business

- Marketing trends

- Tips and Tools of the Trade

 

So check back often, or better yet, why don't you subscribe?