Video Content Management System

Cantaloupe's Backlight video management platform was designed to help marketers publish, distribute and measure the success of their videos across the web. It's continuing to evolve and will soon become an even more powerful solution for our clients. Enough with the fluffy salesy talk, though.

As your Video Success Manager, it's my responsibility to ensure you are getting the most out of your videos and the tools at your disposal. I wanted to touch on one often underutilized feature of Backlight: the ads.

Video ads are more than just a place for your advertisement to display. They are truly calls-to-action that you can place in your video player as you wish. Use ads to underscore a point, drive viewers to take a specific action ("Register for our webinar!") or lead them to additional information ("Learn more about our solution!").

This empowers you - the marketer and online video content manager - to create, update and place these calls-to-action when and where you want without having to make edits to the video itself - the message, placement, duration and destination webpage are completely within your control.

Below is a sample video. At the 5-second mark, you'll notice an ad pop up and hang out for 10 seconds, then fade away. Clicking on the ad pauses the video and directs the viewer to Cantaloupe.tv's 'Request a Demo' form. (Feel free to request a Backlight demo while you're there.)

As an added bonus, Backlight's analytics tracking allows you to report on how many viewers engaged with each ad. 

You have powerful tools and information at your fingertips - are you taking advantage? If you need help using any of the Backlight features or would simply like a demo to see what all the chatter is about, drop me a note or give me a call at 317.594.9999!

Marketpath's Content Management System and Video Management Software from Cantaloupe.tv provide users a more engaging experience.


Content management solution provider Marketpath, Inc. has just announced the addition of VideoHere to its SaaS web content management solution. This integration offers Marketpath users the ability to seamlessly utilize video in their web pages therefore providing highly relevant and engaging content. VideoHere allows users to point-and-click to upload, customize, embed, and track videos in their web pages. It is licensed from Cantaloupe.TV, LLC, an online video solutions company that provides an end-to-end solution for marketing with online video.

Directly from their Marketpath account, customers can easily manage a video library, add video to web pages, and track video metrics. Users can upload MP4, MOV, FLV, MPEG, WMV, and AVI videos to an online video library. Further, impressions, clicks, views, drop-offs, view times, and viral sharing can be measured so that marketers know how their videos perform.

“Adding video to web pages provides website visitors a more engaging experience and allows marketers to better meet their goals,” says Matt Zentz, CEO of Marketpath. “Studies show that 65% of viewers watch online video to completion, while less than 10% read a text-only site in its entirety. Keeping visitors glued to their content helps companies better deliver a message to their intended target.  VideoHere is a powerful tool to help ensure that our client’s audiences engage more deeply and longer on their websites.  And with Marketpath’s VideoHere integration, it is now just as easy to add video to your website as it has always been to add images and image galleries to landing pages.” 

Other added advantages of VideoHere are that an online marketer is able to enhance SEO efforts and also increase their social media footprint. VideoHere includes an out of the box tool that tags videos for search engines, and the video player includes features which allow the viewer to easily share videos with their network and post to social media outlets.

“Videos are delivered to viewers via well known and respected Content Delivery Networks, ensuring the best viewing experience possible,” says Stacy Billanti, Cantaloupe’s President. “Marketpath customers will now have an advantage over their competition by being able to effectively and easily use video in their websites. Further, they will have access to a video hosting library that is reliable and scalable to support large spikes in web traffic.” 

When establishing web video into your online marketing strategy,  it is vital to purpose video content on your home page.  But how do you properly compare the video analytics of the video content on your homepage to the web analytics of the homepage in and of itself?

A few of our clients were confused by this very topic.  One company was concerned that the videos were not being watched.  Their web analytics showed around 500 unique visits to their homepage everyday.  But their Backlight video analytics showed that only 20 of those visitors were actually clicking on the video to watch it.

To the naked eye, it certainly seemed like prospects were not interested in the video they had purposed on their site.  But, when we dug a little deeper and looked a little closer, the truth was revealed.

Come to find out, an estimated 300 of those 500 unique visitors were existing clientele who were coming back to their site to purchase more products and services from them.  Why would they watch your "about us" video if they already know who you are?

Then we discovered that about 150 of the remaining 200 unique visitors were agencies coming to the homepage to log in to their reseller account page.  Once again, if they are selling your products and services, why would they watch your "about us" video?

So, that leaves us with 50 unique visitors that are probably first time prospects.  And 20 out of 50 isn't too shabby.  Furthermore, according to their Backlight video analytics, the video completion rate was a whopping 93%.  So, not only were most watching the video, most were watching the entire video to the end.

So, carefully compare your web analytics to your video analytics.  You may be pleasantly surprised.

To learn more about Cantaloupe's video content management system, Backlight, email me at bevans@cantaloupe.tv

Cantaloupe.TV today launched its new breakthrough video platform, VideoHere(TM) to web application providers at the Marketing Sherpa Email Marketing Summit. VideoHere is a turnkey online video management system that providers can embed in any web application, uses no APIs, and requires no IT investment.

"VideoHere gives the end user their own online video management platform all within the web application they already use," says Stacy Billanti, President of Cantaloupe.TV, "and this is all done using scalable and reliable cloud-based technology." This product is particularly relevant for marketing applications including email marketing software providers, blogging software providers, and website content management systems, as their customers are demanding the ability to use video in their marketing communications to create more compelling online content. Further, web marketing application companies need to focus on their own platform development, and they don't have the expertise, time, nor development resources to effectively build and maintain online video capabilities.

VideoHere allows end users to point and click to upload, customize, embed video and play buttons, and track video viewership. Email service provider Net Atlantic, Inc. has just announced the addition of VideoHere to their suite of email marketing solutions. This integration offers Net Atlantic email marketing users the ability to seamlessly utilize video in their email campaigns. "Adding video to email campaigns will improve lead quality and increase conversions for our customers," says Bill Reich, President of Net Atlantic. "Studies show that video email campaigns increase click-through rates by 2 to 3 times, shortening the sales cycle and increasing revenues." "As video becomes pervasive across online channels, web application providers will need to offer video management capabilities seamlessly to customers," shares Stacy Billanti. "VideoHere offers a powerful extension to their existing suite of services, provides them with a competitive advantage, as well as allows them to generate incremental value from this new offering."

The Cantaloupe video team specializes in producing authentic web video stories for one-to-one marketing. Cantaloupe also provides online video management platforms, Backlight(TM) and VideoHere(TM), which are easy-to-use and powerful tools allowing marketers to integrate video into email marketing, websites, blogs, and social media.

Learn more about VideoHere

With video becoming a highly sought after internet currency, the questions around video and email are becoming more prevelant. How do I do it? What are best practices? Can I embed the video into my email directly?

Can you do it? Yes. Would I suggest it? No.

How would you even embed video in email?

HTML5 has added a <video> tag that allows advanced browsers to automatically recognize and play a video file without the use of a custom Flash, Quicktime, or WMV player resource. While there are some browsers that already support HTML5, email clients are another story!

Because email clients often use the HTML engines of browsers to render HTML emails there is an assumption that this video tag will allow you to embed your video directly into your emails allowing the enduser to view your video there. Think again! A study conducted by CampaignMonitor shows the real story.

In the image below you can take a look at the different email clients and which (1) actually allowed the different types of video files to be rendered:


I'm pretty sure that the number of red (X's) tells you right away to stay away from embedding video directly into email!

So how do you email your videos out?

There are three approaches to this that we have taken here at Cantaloupe. You can either embed a link to your video, a thumbnail from the video with a link included on the image, or an animated .gif that mimics the look of video in your email. With these methods the enduser would click on the image or link and would be directed back to your website where you have embedded your video.

There are multiple advantages to this approach. One, when the enduser is taken back to your website they are being surrounded by your brand and other call-to-actions. I realize that most email campaigns are heavily branded, but the amount of messaging and call-to-actions that can be included in an email do not equal that of your website.

Secondly, by bringing the enduser back to your website to view the video in your video content management system you are able to track the time of view and other interactions that the user may take on the video. If you are letting the user view the video directly in the email you would lose this tracking.

If you are not currently getting tracking on your video content find out how you can start using Cantaloupe's Backlight video management system.

What's the future?

I would say that in the next few years the ability to embed video directly into email will become more advanced, and once the email clients begin to allow this content to be rendered, there will quickly be solutions that allow you to track video within emails. Until then, your best bet is to use images and links.

At Cantaloupe.tv we feel that sharing is something that you learn at an early age. We also know that sharing is one of the easiest ways to get your message in front of hundreds of prospective clients in today's interwebs. To test this, we deployed some Cantaloupers to 'road trip it' to Friendship, IN. In the two part online video series below you will see just how amazing sharing can become when you actually try surviving from it. Honestly, Friendship Rd. leading to Friendship, IN isn't something we could actually write a script for...

With Cantaloupe's online video management system, Backlight,  we make sharing your online video content as much fun as it is to travel to Friendship, IN. I almost forgot, we make it easy for you to share those videos with your social media channels too...starting with email -- http://www.cantaloupe.tv/exacttarget/integration

A recent study by TubeMogul shows that a large protion of online video views are being driven by blogs. TubeMogul is a service that allows you to upload your online videos and then distribute them to over two dozen video sharing sites such as YouTube, Yahoo, and Google with a single click. As much as email marketing and social media may seem to be the best distribution channels to share your videos for viral marketing, this study is begging to differ.

The key to this study is that you still need a video content management system that can allow you to output your videos into the necessary formats, allowing you to upload your videos to a solution such as TubeMogul.

With Cantaloupe's Backlight Saas video system you are able to download your online videos directly to your local machine in the necessary formats to not only upload them to a solution like TubeMogul, but other social media sites as well.

Many of the video content management systems available right now will provide upload conversion, but do not allow for download conversion. Because you are sometimes faced with the fact that your videos were produced by a second party this becomes and extreme monetary value for your company.

Once you are able to output your videos in the necessary video format you can then not only embed your videos into your blog, but you give others the opportunity to embed your videos into their blogs from not only Backlight but multiple video sharing sites.

The more accessible your videos are the more people are going to embed them causing a higher rate of engagement. For more information about Cantaloupe's Backlight video content management system click here.

Looking for a complete blogging software solution for your business? Check out Compendium Blogware for all your business blogging needs.

I have been recently introduced to a website that is taking the college campus tour to a whole new level. YOUniversityTV has brought the college campus tour to online video. With campus tours in all 50 states, universities and colleges are being given the chance to engage with more potential student prospects than ever.

This is the beauty of online video production and online video content management systems, like Cantaloupe's Backlight, becoming easier to use and more affordable.

With the economy in a slump, traveling to tour a college that is 6 states aways is probably out of the question for many soon-to-be college students. With the use of a little internet video marketing and a video content management system YOUniveristyTV is taking the travel out of the equation and bringing the campus tour into the comfort of your home. They have even taken it one step further and are now letting user generated videos to be uploaded to the website, meaning that they are getting free and relevant content that they are then able to distribute.

If you are wondering how your company or organization can utilize online video to help you engage a broader audience contact Cantaloupe or sign up for our Eloupe webinar - Engaging Your Audience the Cantaloupe Way.

You have video and you have social media channels. How in the world are you going to use it and measure it? Let's talk about the three current big social media channels Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

Facebook

When using Facebook for your organization there are two different ways that you can handle video. You have to first either setup a Facebook Page or Group. Pages seem to be a better solution for companies because you are often times having longer conversations with your end user and Pages are setup for this. You can learn more about Pages vs. Groups here.

With your Facebook page you can either load the video directly to your page or share a link to your video with your fans. We'll get to how you can monetize the video with a link a little later.

This decision is usually made by looking at whether you want the people on Facebook leaving Facebook and going to your web page with your video or if you are comfortable with your branding on Facebook and allow them to watch it right there. In the example below Cantaloupe has decided to use Facebook as another channel aside from mass email and their website so they post their videos directly to their Facebook page. This allows fans and colleagues to share your video with others very easily. The example that we are going to show here is the laughter yoga video that Cantaloupe produced and you can see how Facebook returns information for video plays on your Facebook page.

 
In the example to the right you are looking at Video Views inside of Facebook's Insights. The first spike on the left was the interaction with the video the day that it was posted. There was a drop off in the next few days so what we did was go into our Facebook page and share the video with all of our fans directly, therefore not relying on them to see the video post in their news feed. This sends each person that is a fan of Cantaloupe a direct message to their Facebook inbox allowing them to watch the video. Over the next two days you can see the spike in video plays that this created for this video. With only about 50 fans on the Cantaloupe Facebook page you can see that there were double that amount of video views. This tells us that the video was shared to others outside of the Cantaloupe fan base which in turn means the video was exposed to folks that we were not having any type of conversation with. We like to upload our videos directly to our Facebook page because you can then see the interaction that is being made with the video just on Facebook.

The other way to share your videos with those on Facebook would be to post a link to your video directing the end user to the page that your video sits on. The best way for sharing video links on Facebook is to use link tracking software such as bit.ly. Bit.ly takes your existing link, shrinks it into a smaller URL, and then returns data around the number of clicks and where those clicks came from. One downfall here can be that if an end user clicks to the video and then copies the URL from the page they are on to share the video with a friend you are not going to be able to tell that the friends video view came form this campaign or post.

Become a Fan of Cantaloupe on Facebook.

Twitter

We all tweet, tweet now.

You have 140 characters and it has to be text. How in the world can you share your videos with your Twitter followers and be able to monetize it? Here's how.

You have your video placed on your website, so all you need to do is grab the direct URL to the video and shorten it with bit.ly. Once you have the shortened link all that is left to do is tweet your message with the link included. Below is an example of how you can measure the number of clicks on that link.

This graph is showing the number of clicks on a video link that was sent out via Twitter by Cantaloupe. The bar to the left is showing the number of clicks on the video link the first time that it was sent out. At the time Cantaloupe was pretty new to Twitter so 10 clicks was acceptable. As time went by and Cantaloupe started to gain more followers we decided that it might be a good idea to send the same link out again. The result is the taller bar to the right. Because there were new followers the number of views doubled from the previous post.

Ok, so they clicked the links but did they watch the video? The way to measure this is to log into your video content management system and check the number of views your video has prior to posting your link to Twitter and then checking those numbers a few times after posting the link. By comparing the change in video views and the number of clicks in bit.ly you can then begin to measure your success. The one good thing about Twitter is that most of the time the interaction is going to be immediate so the comparison between the clicks and video views becomes less of an assumption.

Follow Cantaloupe on Twitter @cantaloupe_tv.

YouTube

You have your video on your website, why would you need to post it to YouTube?

Simple. Numbers.

There are millions of video views on YouTube each month and when using a video content management system like Cantaloupe's Backlight, posting your video to YouTube can be done easily. By posting your video to YouTube you are giving access to millions of people that may have never even knew you existed. So, if they are on YouTube searching for a solution and your video comes up the conversation starts there. By setting up a YouTube channel you can store your videos in an orderly fashion as well as brand the channel with your companies branding and website URL allowing users to quickly engage with you.

The example for this again is the laughter yoga video that Cantaloupe produced. After getting the video up on our website and sent via mass email we posted the video to our YouTube channel. We were able to create some buzz among the laughter yoga world and even had a few laughter yoga websites embed or link directly to our video. The video helps them show what it is they do and allows us to get in front of new prospects.

In this image you can see that Cantaloupe has generated 210 views on this video from their YouTube video channel. You can also see the different websites that are linking to your video.

So, people are watching my video on YouTube but I want to know if we are getting conversions to our website from this. To solve this you would just need to use your website analytics and look at the referring sites to your website. You should be able to filter them down to the number of referrals there are from YouTube that you can then use for conversion rates.

Subscribe to Cantaloupe's YouTube Channel.

So we've covered the three current, big social media channels and how you can monetize your video content through these channels. I'm sure that there are more channels to come and there will be different ways to monetize your video through these channels, but for now why not get started with these?

Exposure leads to prospects that can in turn become customers. Internet video marketing is advancing quickly and the sooner that you can get your foot in the door and start building an online presence with your videos, the farther ahead you will be of your competition.

Learn more about how Backlight can help make your social media video monetization easier.

Follow Cantaloupe through Social Media:

We launched Backlight 2.0, Cantaloupe's new online video platform, about three weeks ago. Since then we've been busily helping clients adopt the new software and roll out their web video strategies. Here are a few examples of Backlight being used by our earliest adopters.

Forum Credit Union
Fishers, IN
Forum is using the single video embed to promote their Save It Up challenge. (Click through the picture to see the actual implementation)



ANGELLearning
Indianapolis, IN
Angel is using Backlight's playlist layout and has embedded it directly in their website. Note their use of the online video ad management to direct people to register for their upcoming conference (At the 2:20 mark)



BlueLock
Indianapolis, IN
Bluelock uses the full page layout to create a video microsite for all their online video content. They're also using a single video embed and have chosen to resize the video player to fit their homepage design, thus taking full advantage of their entire video content management system.

There has been a lot of talk about Obama finally bringing the age of digital communications to the White House, whether it's the hoopla around his Blackberry, questions about who has access to his email address, or the addition of streaming video to his weekly public addresses.

It doesn't seem any of that is going to change; however, what is going to change is White House's video hosting service, video management system, and online video player.

According to this report, the White House will no longer be using YouTube for online video hosting. Instead, they've opted to go with a generic video player using Akamai as the content delivery network.

Why the switch? It seems no one knows for sure, but the prevailing speculation is that the White House was unhappy with YouTube's privacy policy, which left tracking cookies on viewers computers, even if they never played the video.

Here is Obama's weekly address in the new online video player (You need to click through. Their new video player doesn't embed well)

Reel SEO is a blog site that provides the most insightful, interesting, and useful information out there about video search engine optimization. Recently, they decided to make it easy to find all of their most popular posts on Video SEO tips and techniques.

One of these posts lists the top video search sites. I thought it'd be helpful to spread this information to all my readers. You can see the full list here, but below is a list of the top video search sites by Alexa rank:

1. Yahoo Video
2. Google Video
3. Windows Live Video
4. MSN Video
5. AOL Video

Do you need a video management system that makes it easy to push your video to all these search sites? Then check out Backlight 2.0, a platform for managing all of your online video content.

 We've just finished the first cut of a video that gives an overview of our new online video management system, Backlight 2.0. In this video we poke fun at Cantaloupe's President Stacy Billanti, who thought it would be funny during her confessional interview to fake like she was picking her nose. (crude humor isn't really my thing, ha). She specifically said "Don't use this or you're fired."

Well we used it anyway and she wants us to cut it out, but it's such a great ending to our latest online marketing video that I'm putting up a small fight.

To build my case, I'm embedding a video shown at Bill Gates' retirement party. You'll see that throughout the video he makes fun of himself, and it comes off quite well.

A couple web video production takeaways...

• Unscripted would have been better. They obviously decided to script some of this. I think it's bearable, but I also think they easily could have captured the comments they needed without scripting and it would have been a lot better.
• Repurposing this digital video works here. I'm pretty sure this video wasn't produced specifically for the web. I think it was originally shown in a big room with a lot of people. It works for the web for a number of reasons but a couple are 1) It's not a commercial. It's entertaining so people watch it. 2) If a video is shot in high enough quality for off-internet, that means it's usually high enough quality for the internet.
• Authenticity and vulnerability make for great content. Bill isn't afraid to make fun of himself, which is refreshing. 

In case you missed it, Cantaloupe sent another installment of its Cantaseries Video Magazine earlier this week. (Cantaseries is our ongoing web video marketing series where we feature an interesting, heartfelt, inspiring or just otherwise entertaining story. We use it to keep in touch with clients and other Cantaloupe fans.) 

This latest web video story was called "Laughter Yoga." I won't waste any time telling what that is, because the video itself is worth a million...laughs?. 

I have to say, it's a behemoth at over 7 minutes. Sounds crazy considering how often we preach shorter content for the internet, but more of the results on that in another post.

Basically, I wanted to share with you something else cool we saw yesterday. We sent "Laughter Yoga" out through our latest release of our online video management system Backlight 2.0.

One feature we've been very focused on is video search engine optimization. Our goal is for our clients to know that when they upload a video and embed it using our system, that they're taking advantage of the best practices in Video SEO.

Yesterday, we saw a small part of that in action with Laughter Yoga. It's a small confirmation, but if you go to Google's video search and type in "Cantaloupe Yoga" you get the following result: 



We're probably not going to convert a lot of people with the search term "Cantaloupe Yoga" but it's a start. Another cool thing is that our ads, or calls to actions" if you well, stay within the video (check out the 0:56 mark and the 5:35 mark) so if people find us there we can direct them what to do next.

This is all very exciting for us here at Cantaloupe. We're looking forward to bringing this online marketing practice to all current and future clients.