As a video search marketing professional and legal analyst of new media, I’ve put together this introductory guide for marketers on understanding the most important legal issues with video in search marketing, the serious consequences of not following the law; and tips for how to protect your own video assets and your business.

Biggest Legal Issues Today With Online Video

I recently covered some of these issues with attorney Daliah Saper, of SaperLaw.com in the video below, and I’ve highlighted some of the key points in our discussion below..

Click here to view the embedded video.

• Copyright infringement – the unauthorized use of a video, or any content featured in a video, under copyright by someone else. This includes the right to reproduce or perform the copyrighted work, or make derivative works.
• Trademark infringement – using a trademarked name or other brand’s identity in your video, which causes consumer confusion and can cause damage to the owner’s trademark.
• Right of publicity – also called “personality rights;” this is the right to control how your image is used for any purpose. (I.e., to keep one’s image and likeness from being commercially exploited without permission or contractual compensation.) In a video recording, this can apply not only to other people, but private locations and facilities featured in a video. This is one of the reasons why search-marketing conferences have strict video recording policies for all attendees.
• Right of privacy – basically, the right to be left alone and not have one’s personality represented publicly without permission. In a video recording, this would apply to an individual person’s rights to not be video recorded for commercial or non-newsworthy use, and to not take that person’s name
• Defamation – making malicious statements in your public video against someone else that are knowingly false, or with a callous and reckless disregard for the facts; and which can be shown to cause damage or likely create a negative image. Defamation in video commonly happens in two situations:
  • A company or individual will either shoot a video with defamatory content about another company or professional individual
  • A business or individual will create a user-generated content space that allows others to submit defamatory video content about another business or individual, and not respond in a timely and appropriate manner to removal/complaint notices.

Serious consequences for not following the law:

• Injunctions – you videos may be removed from your video sharing site (like YouTube), or even from your own website if your ISP or Web Host has received a DMCA takedown notice. If the situation is considered egregious enough by your video host, they may suspend or cancel your account altogether.
• Civil lawsuit – you could be sued for financial penalties, both compensatory and punitive (in the case of any infringements of registered trademark or copyrights). Your clients or partners could also hold you liable for failing to get the necessary clearances in advance of doing the work.
• Loss of reputation and business – you may lose the trust of clients and prospects if you have a record of violating legal guidelines and lawsuits to deal with.

What Legal Tips Should Video Marketers Know?

I’ve put together what I consider to be the 5 most important tips that everyone should take as necessary precautions to protect theirs’ and their clients’ video assets, and be successful in their video marketing activities.

1.  Check for and get permissions

There can be a lot of intellectual property issues and personal rights involved with any video you produce and publish, and market for commercial or promotional purposes. These can include:

• Other people’s own copyrighted footage – e.g., video, audio recordings, or graphics – you wish to insert in your video.
• Talent featured in the video -  either paid or non-paid.
• Locations in your video -  If you’re shooting at an event, you may also have to get permissions from the facility holding the event, as well as the event promoters.
• Usage – How you feature any of these people or things in your video directly relates to the types of permissions you need. Even if you have permission to record something or someone, you may only be allowed to do so for personal use, not for public use. Or, you may be allowed to publish a video for informational purposes, but not for commercial purposes. (I.e., such as implying an endorsement of your business or to sell something.)
• Content – Are you portraying anyone in an unfavorable light? Better make sure you got your facts straight, and you’re not intentionally trying to misrepresent yourself or others.

The first thing you should always do when using any footage or content in your video that is not your own, is check for who owns it.

Look for original sources, and do searches online for the trademark name or copyright registration. That’s the best way to track down the owners and find out about what you may or may not have permission to use, and what licenses you may need to arrange and purchase for such use.

The best way to get permissions is to have a written release waiver. The New Media Rights website provides a legal guide to getting video releases, and the use of audio and video recordings. Finding release waivers templates online is a very basic form of legal insurance.

However, For those who are serious about protecting their video assets and themselves, I strongly recommend consulting with an attorney to review or create your video release waiver form. (See below, “Know When To Consult With An Attorney.”)

If you can’t get a written waiver, your next step is getting an email with expressed permission. (However you will have the challenge of being very specific in your request and using the proper legally binding language for your permitted use.)

If you can’t get an email, at least get a recorded verbal release from the person you’re video recording, or whoever has the authority to grant a video recording of wherever you are shooting.

Here’s the best and simplest advice I can give on permissions. If you’re not sure if you have permission to use someone else’s video, or use something in your video, then the safest thing do to is not use it!

2.  Understand “Fair Use”

Video publishers and marketers who haven’t received expressed permissions (such as in writing or otherwise recorded) definitely need to understand what is fair use – I.e., when you have protection under the law to copy someone’s copyrighted material.

Fair use protections with a video are much stronger when that video is considered “newsworthy,” versus publishing a video primarily for commercial purposes (or even selling that video).

3.  Follow online legal resources

The good news is there’s a lot of information on the Internet with legal tips for online video marketing, and it doesn’t have to cost you a cent. Review in advance any website guidelines for submitting video content, (especially copyright and trademark guidelines), and for filing claims and counter-claims on copyright or trademark infringement.

I strongly recommend checking out YouTube’s Copyright Overview section, YouTube’s Trademark Complaint Form, YouTube’s Abuse & Safety Center, YouTube’s Community Guidelines, YouTube’s legal inquiries page and legal resources page. Also be familiar with DMCA takedown notices, both for knowing how to file in case of a legal dispute, such as a claim or counter-claim.

And I would be amiss to not include my own legal resources with online video: ReelSEO’s Online Video and the Law column; and my YouTube Channel, Legal Video Guys, which covers legal issues with online video marketing.

4.  Know when to consult with an attorney

If you haven’t done so at least once already, talk with an attorney who specializes in intellectual property, Internet law, and entertainment law. (Ideally, one who not only follows the online video space and has consulted with clients on web video campaigns, but participates in web video marketing as well.)

If you’re doing a big campaign involving video, consider budgeting for consulting with an attorney to have your project plans reviewed. This way, you can be advised on what permissions you may or may not need to get, and what precautions you may need to take, before you start shooting, and then publishing. At the very least, you should have a much better awareness of what the risks are and how to prepare accordingly

5.  Have legally binding contracts

Make sure that your written contracts with clients, vendors, and other 3^rd parties has clear language that absolves you from liability from any unauthorized and restricted video content which they may provide you with, and you are expected to work with, or create on their behalf.

For example, I had this case one time with a client who assured me that they received permission from their headquarters office do a video shoot for their website and YouTube channel, only to have the entire shoot and marketing budget go to waste after all the work was completed, because of a cease-and-desist notice when HQ decided to not allow the content for saying it was in conflict with their brand guidelines – something that was the client’s responsibility to provide all along.

With declarations about Video SEO like those in Where 2 Get It’s recent press release announcing it as “one of the fastest-growing Internet search trends,” it’s easy to see why more companies are now promoting and augmenting their own marketing solutions with this same term. However, I often find this wider use generates increased misunderstanding—and sometimes lack of appreciation—of what Video SEO really involves. As a professional in the Video SEO space, and before that in the SEO space for many years, I can attest that Video SEO is just not the same thing as SEO, and despite what some companies may be implying, simply inserting video inside an page or site that’s optimized for the search engines just doesn’t qualify as a “Video SEO” solution. A professional search optimizer who works with video will tell you that Video SEO has some very clear distinctions from traditional, text-based SEO. As someone who’s built web sites with video and optimized video for the search engines for a number of clients, here is how I’ve come to define the fundamentals Video SEO:

• Creation of unique video content
• A strategy of implementing related keywords and content inside and around the video
• Direct act of submission or indexing by the web search engines, or video sharing sites indexed by the
• web search engines, or even social media and networking sites accepting video and are indexed by the search engines

(Or, you offer a video program directly on your site allowing your clients or users to do this.)

Using some techniques, while separate from the actual video, are certainly good strategies for Video SEO:

• Individual, separate web pages dedicated to just the video content itself (these can also include a transcript of the video content)
• A video site map (links of all your pages
• A video section on your site (subdomain or folder) with inbound links to other video
• “Video” listed in your navigation scheme and site’s main link structure

Some things are not Video SEO but may have an indirect impact on search engine visibility include:

• Sharing features in the video (embed video, copy link, send to a friend, etc.)
• Ratings and comments

It is also important to understand the difference between a video solutions provider and a video SEO specialist.

The video solutions provider—hosting, content planning and production, publishing, exporting, distribution, submission, monetization, etc—is the catalyst. They can provide the tools or access to the solution; they do not implement the actual SEO work (video content appearing in search results) without external assistance.

The Video SEO specialist provides such assistance. They have the ability to actually implement any of these tools so the actual video content shows a direct improvement in a client’s search engine results—and more importantly, leading to higher conversions.

I had the opportunity to interview Manish Patel, CEO of Where 2 Get It, and ask him questions about his company’s example “Video SEO solutions” page Where 2 Get It featured in their press release—a single Office Depot storefront. Amish explained to me that Where 2 Get It incorporated its new video content feature as part of its Search Locator program, already touted as successful SEO local search solution for national, regional, even local brands. But does their new offering of video qualify as a Video SEO solution?

The answer: Yes, but only in their partnership program with Mixpo, which does provide video-specific landing page creation (separate from the Where 2 Get It page), submission to the search engines and video sharing sites, performance tracking, and multivariate testing. That being said, Where 2 Get It could have offered a much better example than the one featured in their press release. Some of the viewing on the video example don’t actually work (such as HD format), and a number of the standard video sharing and call-to-action features that Mixpo provides weren’t available, either.

Turns out that Manish agrees with my distinction. “The Office Depot example definitely falls more on the side of using video to supplement an existing SEO entity (the Office Depot local page). This example does not fully exploit or demonstrate Video SEO,” he said.

Glen Pingul, Marketing Director for Mixpo, confirmed that all of the features normally described in their video publishing platform are available to those participating in Where 2 Get It’s Search Locator program. So that would just mean that the press release example was not the best indicator of the features that could be offered to customers.

Its good to hear from the CEO of Where 2 Get It that they actually now do “get it”—meaning of course, the difference between Video SEO and SEO. While its an honest mistake, they should still replace their poor example with something that really showcases more of the actual Video SEO benefits they’re promoting, and hopefully other companies with similar Video SEO partnership will get better about doing that as well. Otherwise it will lead to the type of confusion that even CEOs will be at a loss to explain, and industry analysts like myself to do a double-take.

Grant Crowell is the Owner of Grantastic Designs and Senior Media Analyst for ReelSEO.com. His upcoming white paper, Video SEO: The Solution for the Newspaper Industry, is scheduled for publication in October 2008.

To summarize, Mixpo is a turnkey video marketing solution geared specifically for SMBs (small-to-medium businesses), which combines a self-service platform including hosting, an interactive video player, and online editing that allows clients to simply and quickly repurpose their video.

One of the notable SEO benefits: Multiple videos can be developed from a single original client video, allowing for an easier assembly of video content applied for both search optimization and video advertising.

“This is an exciting time for online video advertising. More advertising dollars and marketing budgets are moving towards video. Big brands and big advertisers jumped into video first. Now there are millions of small brands and advertisers that are just starting to get exposed to online video,” says Anupam.

He explains that SMBs are in an ideal position to take advantage of video marketing and video SEO. “Video is a powerful mechanism for communicating what your business is all about,” says Anupam. “Video drives more qualified leads and conversions, all in a way that is measurable and where we can show accountability. Measurability and accountability is what made search marketing successful, and that’s what SMBs and SMB advertisers need to be all about to succeed.”

Adding to the benefits of video are interactivity technologies for direct customer engagement. In the top-right hand corner of each Mixpo video is an icon, which allows the viewer to choose from a series of calls-to-action any time during video play.

“We’re already seeing a lot of interest from the SMB industry. Video is in the early stages where we’re going to see a lot of ramp in even just the next number of months to come,” says Anupam.

He explains that Mixpo has two constituents: The actual advertiser (client) who wants to be more effective in their online marketing, and the aggregator, who already has a relationship with these customers. Mixpo refers to “aggregators” as interactive agencies, directories, publishers, etc.

“What we hear from agencies – including firms involved in search marketing and SEO – is that they need more effective tools and capabilities to serve their clients in a better way, and show them how they can drive measurable results,” says Anupam. “What we hear from advertisers, is what they’ve been traditionally doing online hasn’t necessarily worked, or they can’t really measure the effectiveness of all of their marketing programs.”

Both of these constituents do understand search as a measurement tool, “and really love the ability where they can measure things on their own” says Anupam. “Everything Mixpo provides is backed by a very solid measurement platform,” which allows for optimization of both performance and visibility online.

As for Mixpo’s business model, it’s rather simple: cost-effective opportunities for SMB advertisers, and sharing advertising revenue with their aggregator partners, whatever their sharing model may be. “Their success is our success,” says Anupam.

As for a sneak preview into his presentation, Anupam shared with me that people attending his session can expect to learn about Mixpo’s recent partnership activities and how they will benefit search marketers involved, or looking to get involved, in the local video space. He also mentioned that their own solution is a good complement to fellow video speaker TurnHere, which concentrates more on the creative agency side of video production compared to Mixpo’s focus on their self-service platform. Mixpo does offer their own creative agency services, but Anupam looks at TurnHere as a technology and marketing ally for the emerging local video space, and not really a competitor.

Grant Crowell is the CEO of Grantastic Designs, a web design and search solutions provider specializing in new media strategies for B2B and B2C companies.

Grant: So what was the motivation for your company to devise this report?

Eric: This study is definitely a first attempt by DoubleClick Performics at getting a better shot at understanding the needs—the demands and supply, if you will—as well as the tools available online for people to find news video. What we gathered , more than anything, is information that will help us take a deeper dive the next time around.

This study essentially covered some basic points: What video consumption is currently taking place online and how does it break down by demographic? What is the news search demand?

We didn’t just say video. We were simply looking at the demand in search for news. Then we kind of brought those two things together-video news and search. And then when people stumbled upon news video that was integrated within search results-be it Google, CNN, Yahoo, MSN, etc. -were they likely to click on it? Were they consuming it? And lastly, what were the tools that they favored to find this news video?

We decided to go pretty broad and shallow with our research, as opposed to focused and deep. But I think that sets us up in a pretty good situation-not just for DoubleClick Performics, but for others out there in the online space to dig deeper into these issues.

From your study, we have some summaries that are already well understood: Such as video is in high demand and has high engagement levels. What would really jump out in your findings that a marketing audience should really pay attention to?

What jumped out to me was that search engines are doing a pretty poor job of helping people find news, especially timely video news content. Our report showed that only one third of people were listed as “very satisfied” with the news-related results they got back. Those are pretty weak numbers. If Google had a one third success rate on searches, we’d all be looking for other search engines. I think there’s a gap right now between the demand and desire to find news video and search engines’ ability to bring back quality results.

And why do you think that is?

Part of that is the lack of good integrated video search results. We’re seeing YouTube as the primary publisher that is featured within Google, and even in Yahoo!. There’s not good diversity there; we don’t get more listings from quality news video providers like CNN, CBS, BBC, and everyone else. It just doesn’t provide enough quality offerings. I think to some degree, we’re seeing some people saying that they wouldn’t mind if they had more video news results in their universal searches. So I think it’s a combination with Google trying to find the right balance between text search results and video search results; and I think there just needs to be more diversification of the results from publishers.

So now that we understand how video is displayed within Google’s universal results, it seems that there’s no rhyme or reason as to when video results will appear for a news-related search, including whether or not a displayed video icon or embedded video will appear in a single result. Again, since your report would confirm that news content is highly regarded in search results and has high engagement levels with consumers, let me ask you: do you believe news video is being taken advantage of by online marketers, or not?

I don’t think news video is being marketed anywhere near the extent that it could be. True, online video can be difficult and unpredictable. Its not like in SEO where, if you do a set of best practices, and your site is considered “worthy” to be included because you followed those best practices, then the chances of being in the top of the listings-the top couple of pages-is quite high. The SEOs can help relevant clients get listed. But with video, it’s a lot trickier; it seems a lot more random at times. To some degree, we’re frustrated by that, but concurrently it’s also a really opportunistic time. We can say that its tough today, but we can still figure this out. So the more we can get a head start from everybody else, then when the engines do get to a point where they’re better at selecting these videos and listing them, we’re going to be in pretty good shape. So my advice to SEOs is this: take advantage of video and this special kind of imperfection.

The further one explores the video space; you realize how many marketing niches there can be. Your approach with your company’s report on news video and search was to “cast a large net and getting the shallow fish,” so to speak. You didn’t appear to further segment the information by well distinguished news segments. Some examples that come to mind are newspaper publishers or television stations, or doing geotargeting from the hyper-local to the regional news services. That being said, do you think that the information in your report can be used as a starting point across the board for all different types of news video, or do you think it will require further analysis?

I think the information in this report is both a starting point and an opportunity for further analysis. We’re not trying to accomplish everything in one survey. I think what DoubleClick Performics set out to accomplish was to gather some high-level data. It’s surprising the large degree of video consumption that’s taking place. Even though video engagement tends to skew towards the younger demographic and female demographic, our survey has shown it to really permeate across all age groups. I was surprised to see high-consumption of news video by older groups. We made some kind of high-level points in the report; but to your own point, a deeper dive in some of these other areas would very much be welcomed.

Now let’s shift the focus from the consumers to the news publisher. Traditional publishers who have been hit hard with decreased circulation, subscribers, and ad revenue are employing new online content resources, especially with producing news video in-house. My question is, do you have any inclination on how well these traditional news publishers are doing with marketing their video news content online, including with video SEO? From what I’ve seen, most news publishers seem to stick with keeping their own content on their own internal network. They appear rather hesitant to participating in an outside distribution model and don’t appear to be too keen about optimizing their video content for the search engines. They might have a YouTube channel for such distribution, but that’s about it—no SEO around their video and no real social networking plan. They appear to also have issues with putting their video content on popular video sites, where they can’t control what content appears next to their own video. On top of my first question, would it be a fair assessment to say that the news publishers, who could be considered in a prime position to benefit from the Video SEO opportunity you mention, are not pursuing it for reasons including that they would have to relinquish some control over how that video is featured?

That’s obviously a business decision for the news publishers, and there are a lot of good reasons why they would want to keep complete control over their content. However, I think there’s another side to that argument. By getting that video out there and getting more visibility on that content, they’re going to pull a lot more people into their sites, get them more engaged, and acquire more registered users. There are a lot of things traditional news publishers could gain from letting their video content be displayed outside of their internal network. But at the end of the day, it’s up to experienced marketing folks like you to work with clients to help them look at both sides of the issue and make a good business decision one way or the other.

I will say that when I advise clients, I encourage them to at least get out there and put their toe in the water. You don’t have to put every single piece of video content out on YouTube; you don’t even have to build a YouTube channel. But what you can at least do is experiment with certain news stories, showcase some video and get some good metrics around it, see what data comes back, and go from there.

Grant Crowell is the CEO of Grantastic Designs, a web design and search solutions provider specializing in new media strategies for B2B and B2C companies.

Recently I interviewed Michael Folkers, Group Product Manager for Adobe Acrobat, to discuss more of Acrobat 9′s video features and the new advantages for SEOs with the latest software release:

Video SEO benefit – simpler production

Most SEO specialists are not highly skilled in video post-production, including taking uncompressed video files (typically from a client or 3rd party media producer) and encoding them to the Web or popular social media platform specs. With Acrobat 9, video files can now be inserted directly into the PDF and viewed by anyone who has the free Acrobat Reader 9 plug-in installed on their system. What that means for SEOs is they no longer have to understand special video conversion requirements and encoding to multiple file formats. With Acrobat 9, even Microsoft Powerpoint files and Word files with video can be turned into animated, optimizable PDFs.

“The design guidelines for how we approached this were to make the barrier for entry very, very low,” said Folkers. “By that, I mean the ‘average knowledge worker’ should be able to assemble a PDF with video very easily. The average knowledge worker should be able to drag-and-drop a video clip, trim it, and assign other quality settings to it very, very easily for distribution downstream. We have plugging this authoring capability inside common workflows today. So, I think the ability to propagate and distribute this content was made a lot easier with this release of Acrobat.”

SEO benefit – social media optimization

Acrobat 9 also allows for embedded video to include comment tags from multiple viewers. While Acrobat’s product managers confided with me that they weren’t aware if Acrobat’s comment tags had ever shown themselves indexable by the search engines, comment tags are a valuable social media asset (just check out the new comment annotations with YouTube). Providing for comment tags can increase the potential for backlinks, which translates to the better SEO of the PDF file.

SEO benefit – a strong compliment to your existing video SEO strategy

Granted, Acrobat 9′s software features are not meant to eliminate any of the current strategies that video search optimizers are currently doing. However, they can provide a highly complementary means of having indexable PDF text content around all of your video files, and may even be used as an acceptable duplicate of your existing content without incurring any search engine spam penalties.

I further pressed Folkers on what new advantages their Acrobat 9 could offer search optimizers who were looking to include video in their SEO campaign.

“To the degree that you’re making this more approachable to the person that’s interested in search marketing, the answer I believe is, to the degree that the PDF is being discovered, once people reach it, it’s going to be a whole lot more impactful than almost any other communications media that they can come up with,” he said. “The reason for that is that not only does it include video, but it also includes all of the other elements into a cohesive, branded method for delivering information that’s really quite engaging. Finding video in YouTube or other Web 2.0 environments – I can’t believe it could be any more compelling than what you could accomplish with a PDF that you deliver.”

Before you buy yourself a copy, be aware that the Acrobat Pro Extended version is the one with the full range of video features. The “Pro” version is the highest level for the Mac, and has less video platform capabilities. The “Standard” version has no video features.

One overall limitation: the video experience with Acrobat 9 is not backwards-compatible. This means that those people still using earlier versions of Acrobat Reader will just see an image in place of the video.

My recommendation: get a 30-day trial copy of either the Pro Extended (Windows) or Pro (Mac) program and test it out. Don’t use in it place of any other video SEO or video marketing activities, but do test out its indexability in the search engines and linkability in the social media space. That said, Acrobat 9 qualifies as a good complement to your video SEO strategy, which you can really start launching by the end of summer 2008.

Grant Crowell is the CEO of Grantastic Designs, a web design and search solutions provider specializing in new media strategies for B2B and B2C companies.

Recently I conducted an exclusive interview with Stephen Baker, Chief Revenue Officer for EveryZing. Months ago I had the opportunity to preview a beta of their program on the Boston.com website, and Baker informed me since they’ve signed new major clients such as Reuters, Dow Jones, Intercom Radio, MarketWatch, and Tivo—all of them to launch later this year with their own EveryZing video program.

What is EveryZing?

The short history—EveryZing origins came out of a company called BBN Technologies, a government R&D shop that’s been around since 1948. One of their earliest IP families they started developing was creating a next generation speech text platform, which was being solely used for government purposes before becoming a commercial product—first through their earlier company incantation of Podzinger, and now its updated name, EveryZing.

While a well-known video search engine, blinkx, has touted its own speech recognition model for its indexed video content, EveryZing takes this technology several steps further. EveryZing’s own proprietary speech-to-text technology automatically classifies spoken-word multimedia content into meaningful topics and keywords, which visually appear to the user as actual, clickable, and navigation-friendly text.

“It all starts at Speech Text transcriptions since the internet is very much a text based environment, whether it’s searching for content, advertising, targeting, you really need to have a text version when you are using any sort of input for that,” says Baker. “So what we have focused on is building what we call a media merchandising platform, which is actually a search publisher’s solution that can make all audio and video content searchable, indexable by the major search engines via the text transcripts. We can also use that to improve the recall and precision kind of matrix on site search applications. We can also use the text to target advertising, kind of for agnostic to add that work around platforms.”

A B2B video search solution

A visit to the EveryZing site and searching its media results will bring a user experience far more robust than the consumer-grade YouTube platforms. Here you will find time-coded and fully linkable transcripts, graphic indicators of key points in a video (which are also accentuated with a keyword search), and a video player with social bookmarking and sharing capabilities that has also been well-tested by usability best practices. Simple enough for video newbies to use, and just the right amount of features for advanced video explorers.

“EveryZing is all around search and multimedia, and us publishing user and client content,” says Baker. “Our business plan is two-fold: One, driving better user experience, making it easier to navigate and integrate video into the site content itself. And second, doing it in a manner that makes it SEO-friendly.”

EveryZing’s infrastructure and program features

Baker explains that EveryZing maintains its entire program on several hundred servers. This content doesn’t typically host the multimedia content itself, but it is “where content is processed to create the text transcripts, where we do all the metadata extraction from those text transcripts.”

The program has two components—a service-based model and a hosted-based model. Participating in the EveryZing program starts off with up to 500 hours of content processing and a million page views.

On a hosted basis, EveryZing will take a customer’s web design templates—including search results and media landing pages—and build their content delivery system around them. Baker explained the work scenario with their beta customer, Boston.com. “Boston.com gave us their ad tags, they gave us their analytics tags, they seeded a URL name to us; plus they were involved in the entire design of the graphic templates themselves. Even their usability and UI (user interface) teams get involved in the process.

“That way, they get a overall low-cost, quick-time to market approach, that still gives them all the benefits of A) the traffic coming from their website, and B) them having all the analytics tags so they can see engagement and traffic growth. Lastly, all their ad tags are dropped in, their video player is dropped in. We basically become an extension of their web development team,” says Baker.

Baker is also proud of the openness of the program to their customers. “Everything is made available through EveryZing’s web services’ API to our customers,” says Baker. “Our customers can directly access that API every time they need the metadata, and incorporate it and formate it into their own web templates. We find more often, however, that our customers want us to design and host the templates, which makes sense since we’ve already spent a tremendous amount of work designing them to be very crawler-friendly and SEO-friendly.”

Let’s talk pricing

While EveryZing is not yet ready publicly disclose its pricing model, many companies with an abundance of quality, targeted multimedia content who are serious about engaging in a video SEO strategy (and heavy with targeted video content) may find it very reasonable cost-wise, and an especially high performance value compared to comparative SEO marking strategies for similar or larger budgets.

Baker explains that there are two components to Everzing’s pricing model: First is a monthly term license/fee, which includes a certain # of page views, a certain # of hours of content processing. “It’s similar to a CPM-based model with a fixed cost element to it, and that fixed cost is meant to cover our content processing cost of keeping our infrastructure up and running.” Baker also mentions that along with being a startup company comes some sales flexibility. “We has a few customers they do a revenue-sharing program with. Being a startup company, we’re flexible and open to that.”

While this will likely be outside the range of most independent media publishers, it’s certainly an option targeted to media conglomerates, including publishers with aggregated media content targeting a small region. A good client example Baker gives is a small media conglomerate with multiple local newspaper properties. “Because they’re pooling together all the video traffic across all of their newspapers, the economics work out extremely well for them.”

“Whether it’s national to hyper-local to global focus, the companies that we’re catering to right now consist largely of media conglomerates and larger media companies… on a direct sales model.”

Baker explains his company’s goal is to be recognized as the most search-friendly, user-oriented B2B multimedia search solutions provider for media publishers on the market. If their new product launches proves successful, that’s something which many also have many search marketers flocking to.

Grant Crowell is the CEO of Grantastic Designs, a web design and search solutions provider specializing in new media strategies for B2B and B2C companies.

Superpages.com has already done a nationwide rollout of its video advertising products to help their advertisers reach local shoppers online, and YellowPages.com has rolled out their own video ad program in 28 states, nearing completion for the rest. Yet while the IYPs may be best suited for taking the lead in the local video space, many questions have been raised about IYP video advertising. Are the videos findable? Are they search-friendly and conversion-friendly? Do they bring in more traffic, leads, sales, customers? Or should there be less emphasis on search criteria over branding and social/viral marketing strategies?

The situation right now is that even after a good number of months into local video promotion, the IYPs do not appear to have executed a strategy to make their video content findable in their own on-site search results, and much less the mainstream web search engine results or specialty video search engines like YouTube. Considering that the video production quality is certainly of professional standards, it is a huge missed opportunity that the IYPs have not done anything with the organic search space.

Over the past few weeks, I interviewed the customers participating in the IYPs’ video advertising programs and learned about their experiences, and found the results a mixed bag (which, in fairness, is expected with any new marketing technology). But of the customers I interviewed who expressed positive results, very few attributed those results to an increase in their search traffic. This was peculiar, since the IYPs say they give better placement in their directory listings to advertisers who feature video.

What appeared to be a much more telling factor in a local advertiser’s success with the program was if they took the initiative to promote the video on their own.

Keith Larsen, Property Manager for Abington Woods Luxury Apartments in Massachusetts and YP.com video profile advertiser, received more leads from featuring his video (which YellowPages.com produced for him) in the online classified advertising space Craigslist. Michael Baez, Chief Manager of the IT/computer repair company Lucky Gorilla, says that although after one month into the program he hasn’t yet gotten enough leads from the YellowPages.com site to cover the cost, he has been getting more business from “going viral”—sending the video to his friends who put it up on their MySpace and Facebook pages. “The viral marketing and social marketing I’ve done more than pays for the video itself,” says Baez.

Is that to say that local video is more suited to social/viral/word-of-mouth marketing than organic search? Not at all. The problem is, the IYPs still haven’t leveraged the organic search space and leave their customers to handle their own social marketing activities. Those customers who rely solely on their IYP are more likely to find themselves with less than stellar results. A fair number of customers I talked to even said they were discontinuing or had already discontinued the program—and that was from the client list provided to me by the IYPs themselves!

When I had the opportunity to talk with one of my IYP contacts at a recent search engine marketing conference, I asked why there was no push to get all of their quality video content out into the organic search space. Her response was that they didn’t yet have enough video inventory. That answer demonstrated a lack of understanding about how video search optimization works. You don’t need thousands—or even hundreds—of videos to build a video SEO program. Even a single video can generate sizable traffic, including targeted customer traffic. The fact that these IYPs have at least dozens, if not hundreds, of videos they are promoting in national press releases but not doing anything organically with, is a huge missed opportunity for the IYPs and their customers.

For IYPs to jumpstart interest in the local video space, they need to make their own video content fully indexable and optimized for web search results. The first place they should start is with their own site, and here are some recommendations:

On-site optimization. Since the web-based search engines still rely primarily on text for optimizing video content, IYPs should build a separate video directory and site map. Every time a new video ad is produced, it could dynamically be added to the site map and directory, along with a title, description, and tags. This strategy covers the search engines who spider the web for video content, such as Google.

Video RSS feeds. The IYPs can start off with a single Video RSS (aka Media RSS, or MRSS) feed for all of their video content. When it reaches critical mass, they should start specialty video feeds for the categories more popular with video advertisers. This strategy covers the search engines which accept RSS feeds into their databases, such as Yahoo and AOL.

Automated distribution. IYPs should include a basic video SEO submission program as part of every video ad package—especially since every popular video place you can submit to today is still free. Programs such as tubemogul offer a single point for deploying uploads to the top video sharing sites, including YouTube.

On-site search results. The IYPs need to implement at least a basic means of being able to find business listings that feature video content on their own site. Right now, if you added the word “video” in your search query for a business on the IYP sites, you will be no more likely to turn up results with video content in them. By including “video” as an indexable tag for advertisers with video ads, that would greatly improve the quality of their own search results, and with minimal effort.

Online marketing videos. Simply doing in-house SEO won’t be enough for the IYPs to truly take advantage of the local video search space. And the reality is, they can’t count on their sales groups to train their customers on how to market their video content online. By producing their own training videos on SEO and social/viral marketing, they can directly educate their customers and empower them on how to distribute and promote video content to the web search engines and popular social media sites for local establishments, such as Facebook and Craigslist. Considering that customers have full redistribution rights to their video, teaching them how they can best serve as their own sales force is a win-win situation.

It is ironic that the best opportunity for some IYP customers is not how their videos are currently being promoted by the IYPs, but how those customers take the initiative to promote their own videos themselves. The IYPs still have a wide open opportunity to truly capitalize on the local video market—they can start by learning from the experiences of their own customers.

Grant Crowell is CEO and Creative Director of Grantastic Designs. The Video Search column appears on Thursdays at Search Engine Land.

Huge market, huge confusion, huge challenges—that could summarize discussion on the Meet the Local Search Engines panel, consisting of some of the major players in local search—including major search engines’ local search properties, an exclusively local search engine, the largest Internet Yellow Pages (IYP), and a search marketer in the local space.

Session moderator, Greg Sterling, Founding Principal of Sterling Market Intelligence, started off the dialogue with his one word summary on why local search is really important. “Money.” Even with the increased ad, business and consumers spends online, Greg explained that online money is a tiny sliver of what’s being spent offline. All the transactions are happening in the real world, and the real world is the last mile of search.”

Justin Sanger, Founder and President of the SEM firm LocalLaunch, concurred with this stat: “In local search, the majority of activity (93%) takes place offline.”

Yet for all the local consumer interest, business are barely taking advantage of the online local space. So, what’s right and wrong with local today? What’s holding the market back?

Sterling gave his 3 reasons local businesses are not spending online to the degree of market opportunity: budget, lack of time and personnel, and confusion.

One disagreement brewed over whether a lack of content is prevalent online today. “There’s not enough business content online.” said Sanger. “Businesses aren’t putting it on, and we need more content for the experience to get better. User generated content is going to be key to the process.”

Other panelists disagreed, including Matthew Berk, Lead Search Architect for the online ad solutions provider, Marchex. “There’s plenty of local content. The question is how to make best use of it. For example, do you really want to go through all 120 reviews of a restaurant? There’ have to be better tools to help us make decisions, rather than just a volume metric.”

All of the panelists agreed that the growth of the local space will depend on better merchant education. Part of this problem could be attributed to the lack of maturity of the local online space. “There’s a lot of different places to advertise in local, and without the consolidation, it leads to a lot of confusion.” said Greg.

Heath Clarke, Chairman and CEO of the search engine Local.com, explained that a portion of the responsibility falls on the merchants, themselves. “I believe the failure rate of small businesses is 80% in 5 years. The reality is that a lot of these small businesses don’t even know how to advertise, period. They’re not very good at it. It’s going to be challenging to get the message out with this more advanced form of advertising, no matter how good it is or simple it is. Part of the challenge is we have to educate businesses how to be better at marketing their own businesses, not just at what we do.”

Frazier Miller, Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Local, defended the search engines and IYPs in their ongoing efforts to educate merchants. “At Yahoo, we work closely with our partners, because one of the key things in the space with reaching out to merchants is how to educate them, millions and million of merchants. The traditional IYPs have made lots of progress thinking of their channel in terms of how to best educate their merchants with how to advertise online (education), at the same time they’re conflicted with their own properties they’re purchasing. We need to clarify and offer more educational packages that are broad-based and objective as possible and across multiple areas (SEM, direct mail, etc.), not just one property in a direct channel.”

Another contentious issue was Sanger’s predication that the IYPs will diminish and fall by the wayside to the major search engines in the local space.

Matt Crowley, CMO of YellowPages.com, argued that the IYP market and returns are steadily growing. “We’ve only started building relationships with advertisers, and we’ve seen the average revenues per click increase in the last 24 months. That’s a strong indication that the businesses we’ve partnered with are investing more, it all points to stronger ROI.”

Grant Crowell is CEO and Creative Director of Grantastic Designs. The Locals Only column appears on Mondays at Search Engine Land.

One interesting aspect of the research this year focused on the challenges to bringing search in-house. If you’re thinking about bringing your search engine marketing in-house, how hard is it? The report features answers from 247 marketers who did just that in the past 24 months, a subset of the 3,053 search marketers who took our August survey.

We asked marketers who stopped outsourcing what successes (or failures) they’ve seen since. The process was more involved than many thought, and they told us how long it took before they were truly up and running, as well as what problems popped up along the way.

We also looked at why it’s so hard to find good search employees and how staffing ranks against other SEM concerns, why these jobs are so mobile, and salary ranges in various parts of the country.

The allure to bring SEM in-house is growing stronger for many marketers, although the number of organizations getting outside help actually increased over the past 12 months. However, it’s becoming more common to use outsourced assistance as part, not all, of the overall SEM effort.

The debate to stop outsourcing your SEM and bring it in-house is a complex one, with pros and cons on both sides.

More than a quarter of marketers we talked to were dissatisfied with their agencies’ performances, while 40% expressed ambiguous feelings. Still, others said they were very happy with their agencies and saw this as a potential waste of time and money. For those who decide to make the move, they’ll find filling SEM-related positions, especially SEO specialists, to be one of the biggest challenges: almost a third of our respondents say it is “very difficult” to attract these employees.

We asked search marketers whose organizations had brought SEM in-house in the past two years about their motivations for doing so. Nearly half thought they would achieve better results from the move. Interestingly, of the 125 organizations in that camp, so many were still ‘in process’ that we were unable to get a good read on their success in optimizing SEM. However, in several post-survey interviews we learned that the reviews were mixed, with a general sense that the decision was a good one but that the move was more involved than expected.

We asked organizations who had made the recent move from outsourcing to in-house SEM to estimate the time it took to implement the change. The median and average aren’t too far apart (three months vs. four months, 11 days), so there’s a good reason to think that the reality is in that range. The fastest moving companies manage to get started within a month, but they’re in the minority and the move for some was to make contractors full-time employees, which is naturally less painful than the alternatives.

We also found that for more than half the organizations we polled, filling SEM-related roles was more difficult than filling other ones in marketing. Of these, SEO specialists were the most challenging, with almost a third of organizations reporting that it was ‘very difficult’ to attract them.

What about training in-house? Someone with media experience might get brought up to speed in between one and three months. Successful agencies have made in-house training a priority. One smart agency president has established a network of stay-at-home moms to do account management—they don’t get stolen by competing agencies and working from home is the most powerful fringe benefit going.

Although the desire to bring SEM in-house is strong, the number of organizations getting help from outside actually increased over the past 12 months. However, it’s becoming more common to use outsourced help as part, not all, of the overall SEM effort. So, while the share of companies using a consultant, agency, or Web design firm for assistance appears to have grown, their role in SEM hasn’t necessarily grown with it.

For those with large SEM budgets, the use of SEM agency assistance is naturally more common than for smaller spenders. The difference is most pronounced in paid search, where more than half of the big spenders use full-service search agencies.

Copies of the 2007 Search Marketing Benchmark Guide are available at the Sherpa Store.

Stefan Tornquist is Research Director of MarketingSherpa Inc.