Topic - Online Video & usability
Video Heatmaps, A Breakthrough for Sales Teams?
Web video marketing, sales, and collaboration application Wistia today announced they have the first-ever heatmap tracking feature available specifically for online video engagement and tracking. Wistia’s CEO Chris Savage says the new feature is designed for visual analysis of individual viewing of video content by offering a colored display of the viewer’s interaction with web videos, and help sales and marketing teams quickly capture leads. (Watch a short video and demo of Wistia’s video heatmap in action.)
Virtual Spokespersons and Video Spokesmodels
Video spokesmodels are appearing more frequently on websites. Are they an innovative marketing tool that more businesses should have? Or, do they violate usability best practices and ignore permission-based marketing standards, and turn off audiences. Or maybe, it is both, and still successful? ReelSEO’s Grant Crowell interviews Rich Rogers, President of LiveClip, Inc. and VideoSpokesModel.com, to learn about about the benefits for web businesses to have a video spokesmodel, what businesses are best suited to having a VSM, the advantages of working with a professional service like theirs, and how Video SEO enters into the mix.
SEO and Video Top Retailer’s Priorities for 2009
According to Internet Retailer’s latest monthly survey, online merchants are making search engine optimization and video their top web site design priorities for 2009. The survey also reports that “usability testing can also help retailers do a better job of deploying video” to which ReelSEO’s Grant Crowell makes his suggestions for e-retailers to improve the website video usability experience for shoppers.
Usability Standards for Web Video (Where the hell are they??)
Most companies producing online video content aren’t giving enough consideration to the end user’s experience with the video they’re watching. Despite the huge business growth of online video, not a single major usability organization or video solutions provider has put out any publicly available ‘best practices’ information on the web video experience for the end user!
Listen to my podcast on web video usability.
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SES Search Usability Panel’s Recommendations for Video SEO
ReelSEO’s Contributing Reporter Erika Blackwell continues her coverage of the Search Engine Strategies Chicago 2008 conference, and asks the Usability and SEO Panel – What usability tip do they recommend to clients when it comes to featuring video on their website? The panel’s reply: Include transcriptions and captions; plus include a “click here to read [keyword title]” SEO-friendly link of both the video and audio-only file.
YouTube Geo-targeting Local Video – Good New Feature, Still “Buggy”
It was back in June when YouTube started testing geo video search – integrating Google Maps with YouTube videos tagged with a physical location. Up to now it was only evident as either an advanced search feature, or as a standard keyword search. Now, typing in a location-based search may turn up related, location-based videos on the bottom of the same page. However our testing shows that this can be a buggy feature, as YouTube is more apt to recognize and properly map major cities than smaller ones.
Online Video Usability – Importance of Player Control
One thing that is seldom posted about (as far as I can tell) is the issue of usability standards for online video platforms and online video players.
