Paul Chaney’s [Other] Blog

Social media gained ground as a tool for marketing and business communications in 2009, and 2010 should prove to be no less significant. What will evolve is a leaner and meaner version of the medium from a business perspective, one that has proved its return on investment value.

Maturation of social media for business should take place on three fronts: aggregation of content, further integration with the mobile Web and, most important, improved analytics.

• Building better filters. Because we are inundated with a fire hose of information daily, the need for content filtering will become paramount. In fact, job descriptions will be written around this topic and, as with measurement, software tools will be built to ensure that we only see the content we need.

• Going mobile. Thanks to the iPhone, BlackBerry and, now, Android, the mobile Web will be the third area to gain acceptance in 2010. The real-time, always-on evolution of the Web requires that we stay connected to our communities of practice, and the only way that can be accomplished is through the use of mobile technology.

• Measuring our work. The mystique around measuring social media's effects will evaporate thanks to better software, as well as a keener understanding of how social media supports business objectives and a better grasp of which metrics a business should track.

  The notion that social media is difficult to measure will give way to greater clarity, leading more CEOs and other leaders to readily adopt the technology. No longer will it be considered a "curiosity," but be seen as an aligned channel designed to integrate with other, more traditional, forms of marketing. The end result will be that, as you indicate, more money will be shifted to online and, specifically, social media. 

2010 promises a bright future for social-media endorsement, adoption and engagement. Problems we began wrestling with in 2009 will be more fully addressed in this coming year. The question of "why should we use it" will give way to "how can we use it more effectively."

-- Paul Chaney, Internet marketing director for Bizzuka, author of "The Digital Handshake" and member of the SmartBrief on Social Media Advisory Board

My end of the year analysis of social media trends in 2010 for SmartBrief on Social Media.

Our accounting manager Babette went above and above by creating pumpkin bread mixes (along with the pumpkin too) for each member of the Bizzuka staff! Now, that's embodying true Bizzuka spirit!

Not only the way you speak—but the way you write and act. More than geography, accents now represent a choice of attitude.

Let's define an accent as the way someone speaks (writes, acts) that's different from the way I do it. So, if I'm from Liverpool and you're from Texas, you have an accent, I don't.

Seth Godin shares a phenomenal post on "accents." I was with him right up until the end when he closed with "Y'all come back soon, y'hear."

I mean, come on Seth. People in Boston don't have accents? Mid-westerners don't? How about New Yorkers. Apparently, you've never been to Brooklyn.

Picking on us Southern folk is easy...and a cheap shot. We're not all Larry the Cable Guy you know!

So how can you optimize your online videos? The agencies and search engines I've talked to offer a number of different tips:

• Insert keywords into your video filenames.
• Host your videos on YouTube, and embed those YouTube videos into your own site. Google says its algorithms consider how many times a video is viewed, and any views embedded videos receive on your own site get added to the 'views' tally on YouTube. (And yes, nearly every video we saw Google blend into its results came from YouTube.)
• Optimize your YouTube videos by writing keywords into your videos' titles, descriptions, and tags.
• Embed videos into relevant text pages on your site. The context provided by the text on those pages (which is hopefully already optimized for search as well) will help the search engines figure out what your videos are about.
• Also create a video library on your site, so Google knows where to find your video content. (Google Video Sitemaps can help with this too.) Write keyword-rich annotations for each video in the library.

Good pointers on how to optimize online video for search.