Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Daphne Kwon, CEO of Expo TV (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Is this user-generated content used by the brand itself?

Daphne Kwon: Yes.

SM: So a brand puts these videos on their Facebook page. Talk to me more about video SEO.

DK: What is happening now in video SEO is when you are looking for brand or product information – you are typing something in YouTube – you generally have to wade through a tremendous amount of nonsense. If you type in “Dell computers,” you get a bunch of nonsense about a car running over a Dell, or a cat and a Dell computer. It is very difficult for a product researcher to get a helpful and informative video about the product. Our clients want us to generate that helpful and informative video and put that up on YouTube.

When people are searching for “squirmy baby diapers,” “hair counseling styles” or a very specific mobile phone like the “VX-93000,” they want specific keywords that they can win on that. What we do, which is very different from other videos, is that we are able to create a “buy now” button on each of these videos. These videos are very informational and demonstrative videos – separate from the professional videos. As we have seen, those move a completely different set of people. The people who are moved to purchase from watching a professional video and the ones who are moved from watching a user-generated video are two separate audiences. Obviously, the user-generating audience is growing. They are looking for more authentic and credential messaging from people who are not the manufacturer. They work together, but the audiences they reach are very different. That is the realization of the brands, which is that their messages are losing or not reaching a greater and greater audience, which they need to have other content for. As video is becoming a tremendous bandwidth hog where people search more and more for video, they need to have those marketing pieces to answer those people who are absolutely unmoved by professional video.

SM: How is video SEO different from regular SEO?

DK: There are two things. Google is prioritizing video. There are various analysis showing that if you create a video, this video is 56 times more likely to get on the first search engine result page than a text piece of content. Google is looking for video that has some level of credibility to show in search results, because they know that people are specifically searching for video content. On Google that is an SEO point, meaning you can rank higher with a video than with a text piece. Google is drowning in text pieces. As I mentioned,  YouTube is the second biggest search engine, and that is only in video.

That is extraordinarily important when thinking about what format people are going to be digesting their content in in the future. There is another Cisco study that shows that by 2015, ninety percent of bandwidth is going to be hogged by video consumption. The current lack of video consumption is not driven by people who don’t want to watch things, it is driven by “that is all the bandwidth we have.” But as bandwidth opens up and the distribution of video becomes more ubiquitous, that is where people will turn. That is the marketing trend both toward video as well as moving audiences with professional how-to videos and buttressing them with authentic and persuasive consumer videos. The videos we put up are graded with the exact same persuasiveness score as TV commercials are prior to being approved for distribution. Our videos are often even more persuasive than TV commercials in terms of the elements they have in them.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Daphne Kwon, CEO of Expo TV
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