New technology can provide ample opportunities to improve our marketing and branding. Just as often though, it seems to spawn new threats. Deepfakes – faked videos made by machine learning algorithms – can now convincely imitate real people, from CEOs to politicians to celebrities. The software takes real videos and uses them to create convincing fakes, allowing any individual to record a video using someone else’s face and voice.

Not all Deepfakes are as harmless as putting Nicolas Cage’s face onto others’ faces

Where did Deepfakes come from?

Deepfakes were originally found outside of mainstream websites, and people on these sites used it to insert ex-girlfriends and celebrities into pornography. Already, there are clear implications here for how this could damage someone’s reputation. 

While some internet users used it for more harmless purposes, such as inserting the face of Nicolas Cage into movies and news clips, comedian and filmmaker Jordan Peele (director of critically acclaimed horror film Get Out) teamed up with Buzzfeed to demonstrate just how dangerous videos like these could be.

The resulting video below supposedly shows Obama mocking Trump, but in reality, Obama’s face and voice were superimposed onto footage of Peele for a convincing fake. Watch below, but bear in mind it contains some foul language:

What do Deepfakes mean for everyone else?

Deepfakes may pose a major threat to public figures in general, and more so than fake news or Photoshopped images have in the past. Because the videos appear so realistic, it’s difficult to spot fakes – a problem which grows worse by the day as the technology develops. This means more people will believe the videos are real.

Worse still, the prevalence of fake videos could undermine public trust about every source of information, because we could never tell what is real anymore.

While Deepfakes take some technical skill at the time of this writing, they are getting easier to make by the day, as demonstrated by an increasing number of apps used to create them. Normal people will soon have the ability to convincingly fake someone’s face and voice in video. 

That means managers, public speakers, and employees of controversial companies. It means anyone who makes decisions that might make someone unhappy in the process. Anyone who once said the wrong thing to the wrong person. Even anyone who has ever been romantically involved with another person.

If you find yourself in a situation where someone else doesn’t like how events played out, people who don’t like your choices now have the ability to create a new reality using doctored video.

What are people doing about Deepfakes? And what can you do? 

Currently, The Department of Defense is developing tools to combat the threat of Deepfakes. Additionally, tech companies like YouTube, Reddit and Facebook have banned Deepfakes from their platforms, and claim to be working to protect their community members. However, none have offered concrete explanations for what they plan to do to this effect.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much to do directly to defend yourself against Deepfakes, aside from making the extra effort to consider those around you whose lives are affected by your decisions. New technologies will slowly roll out to work against Deepfakes, but for now, any public figure should be mindful and vigilant about the types of attacks this technology allows.

Deepfakes also create a tricky situation regarding public presence. On one hand, the more your videos exist online of your face, the easier time someone could have building a realistic recreation. However, this does not mean we should all hide from the web – just the opposite, in fact. If we build a strong online presence where we consistently establish our personality and values in our videos, we can more easily discredit attacks made by those who wish to fraudulently tarnish our reputations.

If you wish to learn more about using video to build your brand online, contact Media272 here.

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By Drew Estes, August 2018

For other popular posts by Media272 blogger Drew Estes see below:​​​​​​

• - Expert Tips to Improve SEO with Video

• - Is it Legal to Use Paid or Fake Testimonial Videos?

• - 5 Video Marketing Tips to Attract More Customers Than Ever

• - How To Keep Customers Away from Your Business

Originally posted (and best read) here, on the Media272 blog

Marketers and managers have thrown around buzzwords like “SEO” for years, often with little understanding of what they mean, much less how they work. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is one of the key pillars of online marketing. To put it simply, it is the process of getting more traffic from unpaid sources – most notably search engines like Google. 

A website well-optimized for search is more likely to appear in the front page of search results, and thus more easily found by customers. On the most fundamental level, the best way to optimize your website is to offer quality content to visitors. This means content that offers value in the form of information or entertainment, such as blogs, images, and videos.

Lately, video in particular has proven itself as a major SEO booster. With that in mind, this article will show how you can use videos to increase the organic (i.e. unpaid) traffic to your website.

Learning the technical specifics of SEO takes time you probably don’t have, but fortunately you can improve

1. Add Titles, Captions, and Metadata

Whether it’s a product or a service, sometimes you need to explain what you offer. If your company has a more complex buying process, you can put your customers’ minds at ease by walking them through it. Or, if your product has a learning curve, create some short and simple videos explaining how to use it best. 

If you’re like Media272, you might have a service that requires some explanation. Videos like this can help clarify what you offer.

There are other aspects of inserting video into your web pages that you should know about though:

• TITLE: the main factor determining whether your video appears in search results. Also, a good title will help viewers decide if they want to watch the video or not, so it could increase your video play rate. More views means more time spent on your page, which means higher ranking by search engines.
• DESCRIPTION: On YouTube, description is interchangeable with caption, but on your website, it’s a bit different. What you type in your video description will display in text in search engine results. It also helps search engines find and display your video when people search for related terms online, or keywords.
• TAGS: Related words and terms that connect to your content in some way. These are factored into search results, but not given as much weight
• TRANSCRIPTS: In certain places, it can help to add a typed version of everything said in the video. This ensures relevant content is more likely to be picked up by search engines, and it provides an alternative to people who are either hearing impaired or for one reason or another are unable to play the video with volume.

Because Google is essentially a database of text, the more text you can attach to your video, the better. Just make sure that the text is quality content, rather than spam or excessive keywords! As a rule of thumb, any new text you add should clarify or otherwise add value to the existing content.

2. Set Clear and Relevant Thumbnails

To be clear, Google will not rank you higher because of the content in your thumbnail. However, thumbnails are indirectly helpful with SEO because they significantly affect the number clicks your video receives. A clear thumbnail relevant to your topic will attract more clicks, especially if it grabs a viewer’s attention.

More clicks = more views = more engagement with your site = better SEO

Make sure your thumbnail is eye catching and suggestive of the content within. A good thumbnail is one that leaves viewers wanting to know what else is in the video. Further, a watermark or logo on your thumbnail also shows a level of professionalism, so potential viewers know they will find quality content. On YouTube in particular, a good thumbnail will significantly increase views. 

Similar to thumbnails, you can add a poster image (as seen above), which is the image that appears when you look at a video on a page before pressing play (as opposed to seeing a random scene or a black rectangle). This is a chance to add an image that’s interesting, intriguing, or if nothing else, relevant.

3. Upload to Multiple Platforms 

You might already understand how self-hosting your videos is better for SEO than simply embedding a YouTube video. A video on your landing page will help increase conversions and increase visitor engagement with your site.

However, this misses the bigger picture. By uploading your video to a variety of platforms, you increase your odds that potential customers will see it and become more familiar with your company. Additionally, each place you upload your video is one more location from which to link to your website, thus increasing traffic from a wider variety of places (another SEO booster).

When using different platforms, be sure to change your descriptions slightly on each. No need to completely rewrite them, but having diverse text descriptions will increase the chances that your video will be found on any given platform, while preventing a drop in search rankings due to duplicate content.

Sidenote: If you’re fairly internet savvy you might already know this, but never use flash for your videos. Among other reasons, search engines don’t even recognize it anymore.

4. Pay attention to Mobile Optimization

Most SEO articles will bash you over the head with the importance of mobile optimization, but will fail to mention this isn’t the same for everyone. As a whole, mobile video viewing surpassed desktop viewing years ago, so if you’re selling B2C, you should absolutely put in the time to make sure your videos are mobile friendly. 

That said, the majority of businesses still view videos more on desktop computers, which means if you sell B2B, you don’t need to panic as much about prioritizing desktop views for your content. 

Overall, it will still be in your best interest to optimize your website and its content for mobile as time goes on, so don’t wait too long. Mobile traffic still makes up a sizeable portion of B2B traffic, and providing a seamless experience for mobile users will help your SEO efforts.

Platforms like YouTube and Vimeo are automatically set up for this, but a video player on your website? Not necessarily. There are many tips and tricks for doing this well: for more technical information on how to keep your videos optimized for the web, check out this guide by Google.

5. Understand the Power of Links

A 2015 rendering of the internet (courtesy of the Opte Project), mapped to show how interconnected it is, and how central a small minority of sites are to the internet at large

The internet functions similarly to any other human network, where each website is like a person. If a person is well-connected and provides value to their connections, they become a central figure in the broader network. CEOs, politicians, and celebrities are some of the more extreme examples of this.

So if a handful of CEOs and celebrities all endorse a certain other individual, people who trust these central figures are much more likely to follow suit. Likewise, if the Apple website provides a link to some obscure personal site, this provides strong validation for the small website, so both apple.com’s visitors and search engines will take it more seriously.

To greatly oversimplify this, search engines like Google look at these networks and try to determine which are the most relevant sites to the most people. That way when you search for information, the web pages in your results are ordered not just by how relevant they are to your search terms, but by how central they are within the internet as a whole. 

For instance, if you search a person’s name, you will probably find their LinkedIn or Facebook profile long before you find their personal website, because these social networks are drastically more central within the internet.

To sum this up, if you provide valuable information or services on your site, more people will link to your site. When more people link to your site, more people know about you, and more search engines will show you near the top of their results. The more popular the website that links to you, the better. Whether you receive these links from social media sites, or from individuals within influential businesses, your webpage — and therefore your business — stands to benefit.

6. Take Advantage of Specialization

 As video production specialists, Media272 produces professional videos for companies like 3M

Odds are, the value you offer as a business doesn’t come from the video itself, and it doesn’t come from your superior understanding of SEO. That’s why you hire others to do these things. 

Which is a better use of your time: paying your own employees to do a task they aren’t experts in (rather than using the strengths you hired them for), or letting them do what they do best while you hire an outside company who does this work professionally?

Companies like Media272 can create professional videos for your business, and if you don’t feel you can invest the time to become an SEO expert, video distribution services like Traffic Geyser can help.

With today’s technology, it may be tempting to create videos yourself. However, using a video production company ensures you have quality content (which is better for SEO), and that you can spend that extra time doing what you do best.

Conclusion

While some SEO tips stay more or less consistent, search engines are constantly evolving. This may make the task of optimization sound daunting, but in reality it can work to your benefit. That’s because the purpose of search engines is to match searchers with the most relevant content possible. So if you provide quality content and valuable services, all things being equal you will gradually increase organic traffic.

Essentially, to overcome the quickly evolving and often confusing changes in SEO, we must ignore common trends like stuffing in a bunch of keywords or irrelevant tags just to try and game search engines. Instead, focus on making your content valuable (or at least entertaining) to customers, so they always want more of it. If you offer something to customers and provide an enjoyable or beneficial experience, Google search will reward that.

In a sentence: provide valuable content meant for humans rather than machines, and you will perform better in the long run than those who don’t.

If you want to learn more about getting started with video to kickstart your marketing efforts, contact Media272 today!

Other popular posts by Drew Estes at Media272:

• Is it Legal to Use Paid or Fake Testimonial Videos?
• 5 Video Marketing Tips to Attract More Customers Than Ever
• How To Keep Customers Away from Your Business

If you aren’t familiar with video testimonials, you may be wondering – what’s the point? Why concern yourself with legality if you have no plan to use them? Let’s consider for a moment why testimonials are useful: obviously, when comparing two companies with a similar product, we want to choose the best. So it follows that the product with great reviews from a range of sources is going to inspire more confidence than one without. But just how powerful are these reviews?

According to marketing expert Neil Patel, over 70% of customers look at reviews before purchasing a product. Another survey found 9 out of 10 people were influenced by positive reviews in their buying process!

Patel explains that “sincere and high-quality testimonials not only help to overcome the doubts of skeptics about your product, they even go a long way toward changing the minds of prospects who aren’t sure about the legitimacy of your product.”

This is due in part to a psychological principle known as social proof, where we look to others when we’re uncertain about a decision. If the group seems to love something, we will probably give it a chance. 

Testimonials are made even stronger when put into video form. An online review is great, but we’re naturally more inclined to trust (and be persuaded by) someone when we can see their face and hear them speak.

Great, so I should start filming video testimonials today, right? 

Well, not so fast. While it’s easy to create testimonial videos yourself, this isn’t always the best route. Sure, filming your own testimonials with customers might save you money in the short term, but it could cost you big down the road for at least two key reasons.

First, filming your own testimonials means you’re probably sacrificing on video quality. A video with proper lighting, editing, and some friendly coaching of customers by an experienced professional is much more powerful and persuasive than a DIY approach.

More importantly, you might be overlooking legal issues without realizing it. The consequences of breaking the law in your marketing and advertising can be incredibly expensive. Are you confident your videos are legal? What’s allowed? 

Worry not, Media272 is here to help. Let’s break down some common areas of confusion:

Are fake testimonials legal? 

You might see an advertisement and wonder whether you could just pay an actor or a friend to step in front of the camera and talk about how much they love your product. To avoid confusion, let’s spell this out as clearly as possible:

Fake testimonials are illegal.

This includes hiring actors, but also includes having employees pose as customers. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) states that fake testimonials are illegal under Section 5 of the FTC Act (15 U.S.C. 45). According to the FTC:

“When consumers see or hear an advertisement, whether it’s on the Internet, radio or television, or anywhere else, federal law says that ad must be truthful, not misleading.”

Hopefully you would steer clear of this anyway, as lying to your customers is unethical to begin with, even if it were technically allowed. Perhaps you’ve considered other sides of this, so let’s look a little closer.

Is it ever okay to have company employees provide testimonials? 

Yes, actually. If you have an employee who is also a customer, they can legally give a testimonial about the products or services they’ve received. That being said, Media272 believes that the strongest testimonials should come from unaffiliated customers. This makes the testimonial less biased, and therefore makes the video more trustworthy.

The main reason testimonials are so powerful is that they build trust with future customers. So why shoot yourself in the foot by undermining that trust from the very beginning?

So are paid testimonials legal?

You don’t want to lie to potential customers, but you still need to find previous customers willing to give a testimonial on camera. In a busy world, this can be harder than it sounds. So are you allowed to pay them for their time on camera?

So technically, yes, you can use paid testimonials. But you have to make it clear to those you’re marketing to.

According to attorney Aaron Kelly, false advertising in the U.S. is not just about the content within a given ad: “regulations also consider missing information and how omitted material can lead to consumer deception.”

Basically, if there’s a connection between the endorser and the marketer of the product that could affect how people judge the endorsement, you should share this information. Think of it this way: if someone is paid to provide a statement about something, they may be biased, and customers have the right to know this. Therefore, you want to be as transparent as possible.

To be transparent, you need to disclose that while these are actual customers, they have been compensated for their time. At Media272, we include the following statement at the end of the video testimonials we shoot for customers to address this:

“The people shown in this video are actual customers of [our customer]. Their statements are actual experiences they’ve had with [our customer]. They received compensation for their time to record this video.”

By including this statement we follow FTC guidelines while including genuine customer statements that influence prospective customers.

Is there a better way to get video testimonials from customers?

While you could pay your previous customers to take time out of their day and record testimonials, sometimes this can feel a little strange. If you’re lucky, they might appreciate your business so much that they do it for free, but you can’t always be so fortunate.

You want to give them something for their time, but in a way that builds upon your existing relationship. This is where Media272 can help. With our Win-Win Video package, we arrange a video shoot for the customers of your choice, and record their testimonials. These videos are then edited by professional videographers to give you the highest quality content possible.

But here’s the part your clients will love: while we’re on site filming these testimonials for you, we create a package of video marketing materials for the clients as well. Everybody wins!

Check out this video explanation of Win-Win Videos for more info. Or, to learn more about introducing video to your marketing strategy, click here.

Drew Estes, July 2018

Want to read more? Check out these other posts by Drew Estes, content strategist at Media272:

• 5 Video Marketing Tips to Attract More Customers Than Ever
• 6 Easy Ways to Drive Sales with Video
• Are You Ignoring a Huge Advantage Over Your Competitors?

Growing a business can be challenging and fun, but sometimes it has an unfortunate side effect: more customers. With customers come revenue, and as a business you obviously want to avoid both of these things. Lucky for you, we’re here to help. Here are some warnings about the types of strategies that are known to attract customers so you know what to avoid.

1. Stay Away From Google Adwords

Some of the most qualified leads come from Google searches, which makes it a powerful inbound marketing tool. For every $1 spent on Google AdWords, the average business generates $2 in revenue. Because of this, you’ll want to avoid Google at all costs. Take Google Adwords for example: at some point, potential customers will search for solutions to their problems on Google. If your company can solve their problem and you pay for Adwords, you run the risk that these people will find you at the top of their search results. Even worse, Adwords provides you with analytics on who clicks, which could tempt you to use this information to draw in even more customers.

2. Ignore Social Media 

Any marketer worth their salt knows that not every social media platform is going to be useful for their business, and trying to tackle all of them is a waste of precious resources. But how do you know which ones to drop? If you’re not sure, you should just abandon all of them. After all, what’s a social media presence good for, aside from staying top of mind with your customers, building relationships with these customers, understanding their needs, answering their questions, engaging with a wider audience, or improving your overall SEO and thus driving more organic traffic to your website? Clearly, social media platforms run too high a risk of bringing in new customers. Ditch them while you can.

3. Forget About Video 

After watching a video about a product, 64% of users are more likely to buy that product online. Companies who use video enjoy 41% more web traffic from search than those who don’t use video. It creates more email conversions and builds trust with customers. But who wants any of that? Further, how do you avoid accidentally using video effectively? Here are some video styles that are proven to work with customers. Avoid them at all costs. Sure, companies like Media272 can produce professional marketing videos for a wide range of needs and budgets, but do you really want more customers? I didn’t think so.

4. Don’t Start a Blog

You might think it’s safe to start a blog for your business. After all, most people prefer videos these days, so no one will bother to read it, right? Not exactly. A well-written, regularly updated blog does a number of things:

• It gives search engines like Google a better sense of your website and its content, making it easier for people to find you. 86% of consumers use the internet to find a local business, so a blog only helps them.
• A post with quality content means people will find value in your site, which gives them a better sense of how trustworthy your business is, and whether you know what you’re doing.
• Worst of all though, when people spend longer on your site, whether reading articles, watching videos, or clicking through pages, this data improves your ranking in Google searches. This means more qualified customers will find you organically.

That makes three strikes: blogs are out.

Conclusion

No business wants customers, so hopefully these tips will help keep people away from your company. Just remember: avoid Adwords, snub social media, vilify video, and ban blogs. As a bonus tip, you should practice terrible customer service, and don’t show any flexibility when new clients come. That way, they can tell their friends to stay away from you, saving you the time and effort it would take to scare them off!

Looking for more information? Being forced to use video and don’t know what will work? Media272 can help, but unfortunately this means more customers for you. If, for some reason, this is what you want, be sure to use the advice from the above mentioned 5 Video Marketing Tips to Attract More Customers Than Ever for the best results.

 GET STARTED WITH VIDEO TODAY!              

Brian Pasch and Jon Nigbor talk about some discoveries Jon's company Media272 has seen during the past 10 years of their shooting videos on-location nationwide. http://cbtnews.com/shows/auto-marketing-now/

What have you and your store tried and seen change over time?