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Is it time to reconsider hosting on youtube?

Hubze, an internet marketing company had its account suspended recently, apparently without warning. The company, which relied heavily on youtube for marketing and instructional products, had all 250 of its videos removed as a result. Hubze's David Foster has a number of theories speculating on why his company was banned, ranging from the fact that they were an e-marketing firm to their use of youtube in some titles. But the bottom line is that his company has lost hours worth of work and thousands of viewers overnight.

While your company may not be at risk for a shutdown now or in the near future, this story is a telling example of the direction public video is headed in. Is it really worth investing the time and effort to build a viewership when the plug can be pulled at any time?

Youtube is more than a video host, it's a community. Perhaps they do have the right to keep commercial interests out of sight. But for those looking to use video to expand their interest, maybe it's time to reconsider whether access to the audience is worth the lack of control.

For internet marketing businesses, it may be too much to risk. While companies that advertise through video as much, a firm like Hubze is losing a significant portion of its online reach through the loss of its channel. Had they used a private host for their videos, they would not have been subject to the untimely ban.

Creating the Perfect Storm Part II: What should this stuff be doing, anyways?

In our first part of the series, we outlined the three basic relationships affected by the introduction of new technology to a sales force, and went over some of the potential benefits and drawbacks. While there is much to gain from the introduction of new technology, we also discovered that new technology was not without its drawbacks. The question remained: how can technology augment current sales practices without causing harm?

According to research by Dr. Michael Ahearne of the University of Indiana and Dr. Adam Rapp of the University of Connecticut, the greatest risk stems from the potential of disintermediation. Disintermediation is the process of the salesperson being removed from the customer's purchase decision. Sometimes this is also referred to as a channel conflict.

To outline what technologies may create such a process, technologies were split into five categories, placed on a continuum.

Technologies range on a continuum of salesperson oriented to customer oriented, and separated by the level of exclusivity between the two. In the middle are the salesman-customer shared technologies, which include communications technologies as outlined in the paper.

Salesperson exclusive and centric technologies allow for the increased effectiveness and efficiency of the salesperson. As we mentioned in the previous article, a well informed salesperson is an effective one, and the automatic tracking of data saves time, making him more effective. Salesman-customer shared technologies are an area of mutual benefit, allowing for increased customization on the part of the customer and the potential of up-selling for the salesman.

The potential for disintermediation comes into play with customer centric and exclusive technologies. Allowing customers to search for information on their own may allow them to make a purchase decision without the help of a salesperson. Depending on the size of a company, this may be a good thing, as a limited sales staff can save time by not having to deal with many inquiries. However, the potential for adding information to sway a purchase decision is lost when information is accessed without the salesperson's knowledge, as it is in a customer exclusive technology

But what about products that defy these categories? Through tracking, it is possible that customer-exclusive technologies can become salesperson-oriented technologies. Interfaces that can provide the customer with information can be used just as easily by salespeople to track user activity. In some instances, this can generate a huge amount of information about the customer that can be used by the salesperson to make a more targeted approach. With the rise of tracking technology, the customer-exclusive technology may become a thing of the past.

How does one filter through the volume of customer information? Find out next week and remember to add us to your RSS!

Source: Ahearne, Michael; Rapp, Adam. Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, Spring2010, Vol. 30 Issue 2, p111-120, 10

Creating the Perfect Storm Part I: The Executive Viewpoint

What are the current opinions on sales technology among top executives in the field today? In order to integrate sales technology, it is always good to model after success.

A recent study by Dr. Linda Ferrell of the University of Wyoming and Dr. Tracey Gonzalez-Padron of Michigan State University, sought to establish some of the underlying opinions facing sales technology today among executives in the fields of health, beauty, household products and wellness. Interviews were conducted in a semi-structured manner and the results were analyzed to create a framework of how technology affected their organizations and the leading perspectives.

It is important to distinguish between the effects that a technology can have on a firm's sales efforts from the perspective of different relationships in the firm to consumer chain. A product that can help maintain the relationship between sales people and customers, for example, could have a negative effect on the relationship between the salespeople and the organization itself.

The Sales - Consumer Relationship

The use of technology to maintain relationships between sales and customers is by far the most positive. Customer Relationships Systems have become more affordable than ever and have reached a very wide spread. However, the full use of CRM and other technologies has been hampered in some cases. The effectiveness of a technology's introduction has been found to relate inversely with how established senior members of the sales force are. That is, senior members try to resist incorporating technology more.

The ability to augment the customer with the salesperson is key; not the replacement. Making information easier to access is difficult for even the most stubborn sales member to turn down, but the replacement of procedures by automated processes may exacerbate a difference in opinions.

Customers have also benefited from the incorporation of sales technologies. An informed customer saves the salesperson a lot of time and makes the process more efficient. The most advanced content delivery systems allow tracking to see which particular content items customers have viewed, bringing the amount of additional education down to a thin margin for the salesperson.

The Firm-Sales Relationship

The use of technology within the firm has made the salesperson's job much easier as well. Training and education has been made easier with the use of technology. The use of video for internal communication has reduced the dependence on complex and sometimes difficult to understand print material. Internal communications are also made much easier with new technology, making coordination for order fulfillment much less of a hassle for sales people.

The Firm-Customer Relationship

The relationship between the firm and the customer brings with it distinctive trade offs that counteract the positives of the other two relationships. One of the underlying principles that was encountered in many of the interviews was the idea that the sales technologies strengthened a firm's relationship with the customer at the expense of the sales team. On a related note, this weakens the sales force's relationship with the company. One of the examples provided was the integration of company wide CRM. While this seems to be the obvious play from an efficiency perspective, it represents a 'cutting out' of the salesman's important relationship building capabilities that mediate the relationship between the company and the customer. A balance must be struck instead of relentlessly upgrading technology.

Take Aways

The effects of integrating a new technology into the sales procedure of a firm are overwhelmingly positive. The negative aspects need not be seen as a trade off, however. How does a firm decide what role technology should play within the new sales practice? Check in next week for the answer.

Source: Ferrell, Linda, Tracy L. Gonzalez-Padron, and O.C. Ferrell. "An Assessment of the Use of Technology in the Direct Selling Industry." Journal of Personal Sales and Selling 30.2 (2010): 157-65. Print.

Technology and Lead Generation: Creating the Perfect Storm

With the continuous development taking place in recent years, new technology is being implemented almost universally in businesses across every industry. With new products coming out from all directions, the question has evolved from whether to integrate new technology but HOW to integrate new technology, in a way that complements existing business processes without hampering them.

Nowhere is this truer than in sales. A practice that has been historically governed by face to face relations for hundreds of years, sales is more sensitive to the introduction of technology, which may even cause a backlash in productivity, as we will see. The purpose of this series is to explore some of the top academic literature in the field of sales research in order to isolate how to integrate technology as effectively as possible with your sales practices. Instead of letting the forces of technology pull your sales apart, we seek to create ‘the perfect storm’ of lead generation, qualification and response to supercharge your sales efforts.

We’ll take a look at a different perspective every week, so be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed to stay tuned.

Part 1: The Executive Viewpoint
Part 2 (Coming soon)
Part 3 (Coming soon)
Part 4 (Coming soon)
Part 5 (Coming soon)
Part 6 (Coming soon)

Video Marketing versus TV Advertising by the numbers

A recent study by Yume has been able to put viewer attention into tangible figures. Using a battery of testing methods including eye tracking software, facial analysis and biometric recording devices, Yume was able to capture data on how people react to advertising on television versus online video from a number of different angles.

The results were interesting:

• Viewers universally pay more attention to online video. Online video advertising captured full attention for 55.2% of run time versus 36.9% for TV ads.
• Viewers are increasingly 'tuned out' when watching television. The presence of DVR recorders has made it increasingly easy to avoid ads altogether.
• Online video created brand recall almost 2X higher than TV advertisement, at 50% versus 28%
• Due to regularly scheduled intervals of ad blocks, TV advertisement is more easily disrupted. 'Systemic disruption' of irregularly scheduled online ads prevents conditioned avoidance of regularly scheduled ads, with no increase in consumer backlash as indicated by discomfort ratings
• With TV and online viewing, the main screen is not the only screen. Environments for testing represented real-life scenarios; subjects were free to distract themselves within the testing room.

Key Takeaways:

If you've studied marketing and gotten your marketing degree within the last few years, then you probably already know that the age of television advertising is coming to a close, and the rate at which viewers ignore advertisements is only growing. Return on investment for television advertising is becoming even smaller, as rates for commercial slots remain sky high.

Video marketing is only growing, as we often say. While this study was primarily focused on natural pop up ads encountered in internet browsing, the figures for video brochure engagement rates are even more impressive. Consider the average viewing time of 1.3 minutes for flimp video brochures over hundreds of campaigns documented in the past few years.

Capturing user attention is no longer a matter of putting your product on the highest billboard and waiting for the customers to flock in. Targeted engagement is key, and the numbers will back that up.

Source

How the Human Mind Processes the 'Information Jungle'

Do people need help navigating making sense of the information they encounter on a day to day basis? David McCandless, an award winning designer featured in publications such as Wired and The Guardian believes so, and shared some of his ideas in his recent TED talk.

A journalist by trade, McCandless expounds on the idea that most people exist in a state of information overload. Even hard data and figures are not free from blame, as without context they can create very different impressions on the user. As a designer, McCandless makes it his job to connect data in meaningful ways to inform the user as much as possible with the least amount of effort.

The diagram above is an infographic by McCandless representing the effective "bandwidth" of various sensory channels in the brain, based on research by Danish physicist Tor Norretanders . It's easy to see that sight is by and large the fastest component of information processing. To effectively present information visually is to reach one's target as fast as possible

What does this mean for your business?

For marketing and sales, the more one can integrate into visual channels, the faster and more accurately a message can be delivered. Text has a very limited capacity for processing, reading speed is limited to an average of 200 words per minute. In an age where new information is being introduced from all angles, making your information the easiest to process can make the difference between whether your core message is transmitted or not.

With video, the rate at which information can be process is expanded exponentially. Static images can be scanned over and forgotten, but engaging video content not only draws attention but directs the flow of visual information in a structured manner. To control how your information is presented is to be able to communicate your value proposition more effectively with potential customers, which at the end of the day is what effective marketing is all about.