The Internet has come a long way since the days of chirping modems and painfully slow download speeds. The modern web is a multimedia marvel filled with audio, video, and interactive content. One of the most exciting trends is the explosive growth of online video. Billions of videos are watched everyday, and the technology to make high quality video content is accessible to anyone.

Since not everyone has the talent of Spielberg, or the budget of Pixar, here are some tips I’ve picked up while doing video projects for ArcStone:

1) Keep It Short & Sweet

Even if your video is well made and compelling viewers can only handle so much at a time. The sweet spot seams to be two minutes or less. Audience attention starts to wain after one minute, and sharply decrease after two. Keep the pacing quick and your script concise to help viewers make it to the end, and have enough attention left to visit your other videos or website.

YouTube has some great tools for measuring your videos effectiveness and audience attention.

2) Make It Your Own

Adding your company’s unique style and branding to your videos will help viewers make a connection between your video content and overall web presence. Also, take advantage of the customizing options many video sharing sites have. YouTube, for instance, offers a custom channel page that can help you brand and promote your videos.

With some tweaking you can make your YouTube page look much like your website.

3) Say Hello & Goodbye

Including intro and exit screens help frame up the video, and will benefit your marketing efforts if you include your logo, website address, phone numbers and other information. Having consistent intro screens will also create continuity between your videos.

4) Capture Every Detail

Now that HD (high definition) video technology has come down in price it’s worth filming, editing, and saving all your content in HD format. Many of the most popular video sharing sites are also making HD their preferred format. HD or not, upload the highest quality version of your video to sites like YouTube, as they will handle scaling down the quality for users with slower connections.

If you can produce videos in HD, viewers will enjoy more lifelike images and crisp, easily readable text.

5) Do Your Homework & Planning

Before embarking on your first video production check and see what else is out there. It should be easy to find a wealth of videos pertaining to your industry. Notice what you like and dislike about them, which ones keep your attention, and how well the audience has responded.

Usually the most costly aspect of producing video content is the actual shooting itself. You can minimize this cost, and end up with a better product, if you do the proper planning. Make sure the talent is well prepared, the location ready, and the shoot well thought out.

6) Have Some Fun

Online video is a great way to show your company’s personality, culture, and unique way of doing business. The most successful videos not only communicate key marketing messages, they also have a little fun doing it.

If you would like more information about how ArcStone can help you produce high quality web video check out our video production services page. To see some of our work visit ArcStone’s YouTube Channel.

I’ve been thinking about writing a post on Google Caffeine since Google announced their search engine upgrade back in August (and then again in November). Yes, there was a little hype – Matt Cutts, (a software engineer at Google – can you say nerd celebrity?) said it would be rolling out in early January 2010. This was big news in the SEO world. There was a lot of buzz and speculation. Mostly, SEOs were anxious about how this new upgrade would change the way we search.

Why was it such big news for SEO? Easy – Google Caffeine was going to revolutionize search by adding a live search component. Basically live search allows up to the minute announcements from Social Media sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, and news feeds. Interesting.

I started seeing live search results a few weeks ago. My first reaction was lukewarm as I was afraid that the organic search results would be diluted by a bunch of useless tweets. In fact, several industry experts speculated that adding the live search results would change the way people search.

How did they think it would change search? Consider this – A typical Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP) may contain all of these elements – sponsored listings, organic links, GoogleBase links, video links, news links and now social media links. That’s a pretty big page with lots of stuff on it!

What does this mean? Slowly, pages two and three may become more significant in search results. People will get used to clicking on “next results.” They will search deeper – similar to the way they search through images.

Fast Forward 3 Weeks

I noticed this when i was working on one of my new search engine optimization accounts – ICE-Qube.com. They make these fantastic emergency preparedness kits.

I was searching for “emergency survival kits” and this nice little image, description and link showed up from “My Social Circle” on the 1st page of Google. “My Social Circle” has the potential to turn search marketing upside down. Basically it could mean the more connected, the wider your social circle grows, the more we utilize social media – in this case Twitter – the more likely it is that we will be in Google’s 1st page of results. Wow, this is incredibly powerful stuff!!

ArcStone client Ice-Qube.com on 1st page of Google search.

If you weren’t on the social media bandwagon before, it’s time to rethink your strategy.

Incidentally, here comes my pitch – if you need help setting up a social media strategy, feel free to contact me. Yes, that’s a shameless plug.

I’ve been noticing a trend for larger projects that have been coming to us lately. A surprising number of long term clients as well as new customers want to formally partner and work together to build web applications. I’ve had several conversations turn to creating a joint venture LLC or a cooperative agreement early on. We regularly get 3-4 of these a year but in the last 6 months, I’ve had at least 8 joint venture opportunities of one kind or another pass my desk.

What does this kind of arrangement do?

For our clients a joint venture can:

1. Reduce financial risk by lowering up front development costs – ArcStone bears a proportionate amount of the expense.
2. Give the project a jump start – sometimes we can we inject proprietary software into the partnership.
3. Eliminate the need for our clients to hire any initial, dedicated technical employees.

Joint ventures benefit ArcStone by:

1. Providing an additional revenue stream and an avenue for discovering new consulting opportunities.
2. Enables us to harvest some of the potential upside as the application becomes more successful.
3. Allows us to exercise our entrepreneurial muscles (which is a ton of fun) – having started three other online spin-offs, AssociationsOnline, HOAWeb, and Wonderfile – we love the start-up!

Is this a sign of the times – are other web developers seeing this trend?