Category: The Edge of Innovation

From the Cutting Room Floor: Working with Video

July 11, 2017 / Hannah / 0 Comments

Today on the Edge of Innovation, we are talking with Brian Gravel about Media Technology and working with video.

Introduction

From the Cutting Room Floor: Working with Video

Paul: So early on we talked about you were in your studio and in your video practice really, you shoot everything in 4k. Are you doing drone shots in 4K as well?

Brian: Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Paul: Wow. So let’s just talk about that for some of our more geek listeners. You get 4K video. What do you record in? Is it MP4?

Brian: Yeah, yeah. We usually use MP4 format.

Paul: H.264?

Brian: Yeah. That’s the codec but the MP4 file size is—, usually it’s in the sweet spot of you have that quality but the file size itself is not really massive.

Paul: So you’re shooting at the compressed.

Brian: Yeah.

Paul: You, you don’t have the raw.

Brian: Right. We’re not getting that.

Paul: Yeah, because that’s crazy. It’s a lot of space. I mean, what is it? 2 gigs a second or something like that? It’s ridiculous.

Brian: I saw Canon just came out with a DSLR, the Mark V or VII.

Paul: Yeah…

Brian: I don’t know what version it’s on.

Paul: Yeah, the Mark IV, I think it’s called. Yeah.

Brian: And that’s shooting basically uncompressed 4K, and I think we figured it was like 10 minutes of footage was like 100 gigs of storage.

Paul: Wow.

Brian: Which is crazy.

Paul: I mean, it’s a lot of space. So you’re having it in-camera compressed.

Brian: Yeah. Correct. So we already have like a pretty digestible, usable format coming out of that.

Paul: So you take that and what do you do with it? It’s on an SD card or is it…?

Brian: Yep. It shoots the micro SD card.

Paul: Okay. So you got that. You bring it back to your shop and you plug that into a computer, and you copy those files to it. You’re backing it up, I imagine. You’re putting it online, or what are you doing? Just keeping it local in a sand or something?

Brian: Yeah. We have our own internal processes for storage and backing up. And yeah, for the most part, we’re just getting the footage off the drone, digesting it. A lot of clients are taking it raw, just need footage or pictures to use what they want to use of that. And then other times, we’re editing pieces together for them.

Paul: And what do you guys use for editing?

Brian: We use a range of tools. I’ve gone through the whole Avid, Final Cut, Adobe stack. And for me, it’s less about the tool and more about what people are comfortable on. So as we’ve grown as a company, we’ve evolved with those tools and we’re primarily in the Adobe product line.

Paul: It’s a broad suite where, you know, when you have Photoshop…

Brian: When they switched to Creative Cloud, you’re getting all the tools for a monthly cost, it made sense to use them because they really try to create a synergy between the products at that point. Whereas before, you were buying kind of the products piecemeal, which I think works out better when you have a whole array of tools vs. I have my editing tool for this, my color correction tool for this.

Paul: Right. Exactly. So I’m trying to paint a picture for our people at home. Alright. They go out and buy a drone, so now I’ve got to get Adobe Creative Cloud. Okay. I mean, it’s what? $60 a month. So it’s not terrible. But I’ve got to learn Premiere now, Adobe Premiere to edit.

Brian: Yeah. It’s the same thing. You know, there’s different ways to get around it. You can go buy a $400 drone from BestBuy and have something like iMovie and edit on.

Paul: Okay. So that’s fair.

Brian: Yeah. I mean, you can definitely do things. If you’re a budding professional or starting a business or something along those lines, there’s definitely ways you can get in at a low cost and work your tail off too.

Paul: I want to put this together. I’m just trying to give people a window into the process. We’re, not going to teach them how to do it. So, I edit it. I want to put some text in, things like that. Now, it’s never as easy as it seems. It seems, so you just put the text it. But now what do you guys do for that? Is that after effects or…?

Brian: Yeah. We’re using that Adobe product suite. So yeah, we use a ton of tools out of that. It’s really up to our editors. We have three fantastic editors on staff. So I leave it up to them as far as what they would do. If I was to go in and dust off my video production skills and get back into editing a project, I would be caught in a completely different league than our, our lead editor. So it really depends on the comfort level of what you’re using the tools for.

Paul: Right. So now, you bring up a good point. I mean, editing has two aspects. One is cutting it up but actually deciding where those cuts are for what you want the end user to experience. And so you have different people. How variant is that? You know, if you had three editors, are you going to get three different stories? In different subtle…?

Brian: You definitely could. Yeah. For sure. I look at our team as each person has their own kind of strength, and depending on the project is how we divvy up who’s doing what.

Paul: Sure. So you select the right person for the right task.

Brian: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah. Cool. So if you had one that was more of let’s say a school project. You know, you’re doing a university or something, you’d choose one of your editors over maybe a corporate project.

Brian: It’s even within projects.

Paul: Really?

Brian: Yeah. You lay out the rough cut, and the other person will finish the color correction and the titling and all that stuff. And while one person may be working aftereffects, creating templates for the assets, and the other person may be implementing them.

Paul: Yeah, and as you’re listening to this, don’t let what Brian said go by too quickly. The color correction. That’s probably one of the most under, or unknown, aspects for a normal consumer. You take a picture inside and you take a picture outside and then you come back and take it a different day. The color of the scene changes dramatically in all of those. And somebody has to make those all look good together. And that’s a lot of work.

Brian: It is. It’s very time consuming. We get budgets and projects that range quite dramatically. So, you know, I would say that’s probably one of the first things to go on a on smaller budget project, just because the general nature of time to put together even like a rough cut and eventually a final product is very time consuming. And then when you’re short on how much time you can actually put into the project because of the budget, you have to look at ways like, “Okay. You know, what can we do here to get the project done at what the customer can afford, essentially?”

Paul: Right. Now were you ever involved in film or tape editing?

Brian: Yes.

Paul: So we’ve seen a dramatic reduction in the amount of work it is to do that. So hopefully, you know, as things go on, it will be easier and easier.

Brian: Yeah, it’s definitely happening with tools and things like that. But, you know, there’s just so many…video is a very hard final product to convey to a person who’s never done anything with video or photos before because you’re so used to seeing it in media, TV, online.

Paul: And we’re very sophisticated consumers because we see good production.

Brian: Yeah. A lot of lead-ins are like, okay, we’ll shoot it in 4K video. Well, I can shoot 4K video on my iPhone.

Paul: That’s right. Exactly.

Brian: And you can. But it’s a whole different process once you start putting together a story. And it takes time to do that. And that’s where I think people see these final products, and if they’ve never edited a video before, they don’t understand a lot of times how much time goes into that product. So that’s one of the challenges of my aspect of doing sales and business development is to kind of convey, what a person could do at different levels of budget. It’s like, well I’m comfortable in this budget area. Well here’s some examples of different things you could do with this. So you’re like, let’s get creative with what you want to do and how could we tone it back a little bit so that we get that effect but don’t have hundreds and hundreds of hours into it.

Paul: So let, let me ask you. You sort of touched on something there, that there’s probably multiple aspects but there’s two aspects. There’s the technical —getting the pictures, getting the video, editing it, all that kind of stuff, color grading it. But then there’s the story. And which one do you think is more important? How do they mix? Is it 50/50? Is it 10…?

Brian: Yeah. I don’t know if there’s like a percentage balance. I mean, both are equally important. It’s kind of like you could shoot beautiful video, but if you have crappy sound, it could ruin a project. I think the technical aspect is: if you have people who are good technically capturing video and audio, then editing becomes a lot easier. You can dedicate more time to the story. Versus, if you are spending a lot of time in editing, cleaning up what, what should have, could have, been better onsite when you were doing production.
So the story part is important because you could have the greatest footage in the world. If you don’t have somebody who can tell the storyline and explain… You know, we ran into this with, a lot of profile pieces that we were doing a few years back. And we were shooting hours of footage and trying to reduce it to a five-minute snapshot of a company’s 100-year history and rolling it in a package with two other videos that were doing the same thing. How do you successfully recognize someone’s accolades and tell a company’s story of their innovation and their 100-year history in a 5-minute piece, you know?

Paul: The story becomes critical.

Brian: Yeah. So, you know, it depends on the project. And then we run into that too with customer testimonials. Like grabbing those parts that really encapsulate and excite people versus somebody just getting on camera and saying, “Well, I really like this company because…”

Paul: Right. Right. Right. So, you had also touched on something there. Sound. It seems like people are willing to sacrifice video quality — I mean, they consume YouTube. They do all these different things, and they sort of give it a pass. I mean, obviously, if you can have a high-quality image, it’s great to see that. But people aren’t going to stop watching something just because it’s not a high quality. But if the sound is bad, I’ve seen people won’t even engage. So, what’s with that? I mean, how do you talk about that at all? Is that true? Do you find that?

Brian: Yeah. I’ve found that because of things like the iPhone and us being a very camera-centric world, that getting quality video is not as difficult as getting quality sound and knowing how to get quality sound.

Paul: Yeah, that’s an art. I mean, it seems like, “Well, no, just put a microphone in front of somebody.” But it’s just not that.

Brian: No, it’s not at all. Especially when you go out and shooting on location. The studio is pretty simple if you have decent gear and it’s quiet, you’re going to get good sound. You go out and shoot in the city with traffic going by or even just doing an interview outside and a plane going overhead, you don’t realize… That’s where I think you can see the big difference between, if you watch something on TV versus something someone shot homegrown.

Paul: Well it was interesting. We had a video crew here, I think, in January. They were doing something on the Craigslist killer because one of the companies I was with, we helped catch him with the technology.

Brian: Oh, no kidding.

Paul: Yeah. And but what they did is they brought in two high-end Cannon cameras. They were dual. They had the interviewer-interviewee, and we’re in the middle of it, and they had me wired, a lapel mic, and I think the other person had a lapel mic, and they had a sound for the room, and in the middle of it, he said, “Wait.”
I’m like, what?
The water cooler went on.

Brian: Or the AC or something.

Paul: Yeah. And he said, because he says he didn’t care that it was there, but he didn’t want the change. It’s almost like color grading, you know. It’s like, imagine, if you will, in the middle of a shot, you turned on fluorescent lights. The color just changed dramatically, so it’s going to be disturbing to the viewer. But sound, you know, is something that people, I’ve found, just are not tolerant of bad sound because they can’t deal with it. There’s no way to fix it. With an image or a video, I can sort of imagine what it is. And so that’s interesting.

So sound is critical. So do you guys have… Are your editors doing sound as well or do you have different people for sound?

Brian: Yeah. Again, I’m fortunate. I have a lot of talented people in our group. And, they know what a good quality production is, and they know how to get that production value. And we’ve invested in equipment that helps it a lot.

Paul: Yeah. So you’ve got the best advantage. But it’s really taking… I think the critical thing you’re bringing out here is that the person sitting in the seat is what makes good or bad content really sing. You can only do so much with the content. And the person there making it all work together is critical.

Brian: Yeah. And from a business perspective, knowing what, what medium you’re playing to… I mean, most of our stuff is going online. And most of our clients have a finite budget of what they want to spend or can spend. So getting the best quality for that medium, for that project budget, I think, is a tricky thing to refine. You know, going back to your photography days, you know, you could put tons of time into editing photos, but at some point you need to say—

Paul: Print it.

Brian: Exactly. And I think for anyone in the creative space, there’s a perfectionist in them all. And finding the balance of time and how to do things quickly but efficiently, and with high production quality. We’ve gone in and nailed that down. And that’s why I think we’ve been successful.

Paul: Excellent. Now is there anything else you want to talk about, that we haven’t covered? Any areas you want to touch on?

Brian: I’m happy to talk about anything you want, really. I think we did cover a lot about the different pieces, of how we got into drones and, you know, came into this thinking, talking primarily about drones, but what I’ve enjoyed about this conversation is that you can see how the drone piece fits into the whole scope of what we’re doing, but it’s a lot—

Paul: It’s evolutionary.

Brian: Yeah. But there’s a lot of other components that go into creating the products that we’re putting out, one. And two, like, the reason why we’ve engaged in drone stuff is really at the epicenter of our company — technology. It’s a media. It’s all those things wrapped into one. That’s why the space for us is very exciting.

Paul: Yeah. Very cool. And I think that as we — I think we touched on earlier — if you’re using stock photos on your website, don’t do it. Stop. Go take them down. It’d be better to have a blank space, and nowadays, we need to have video. Gotta have good video.

Brian: Agreed. And to that point, we’ve been through an exercise with clients lately where because of the designs of websites now, the photo — or photos, I should say — and video are changing the whole look and feel of it. And we had this interesting project recently where we were tweaking all these style elements, fonts, and this, and colors, and, and really, like we changed a couple of different photos, and all of a sudden, it made sense. And then, then it became, alright, well, you know, the photos are driving the page, so, like this is kind of like the type of photo that you need to fit in. You can switch your photos up whenever you want, but, you know, certain ones are going to work with the other elements of the page a lot better then. And I think that’s a big… It’s not like something that’s just come about. This has been happening for years, but it’s one of those things that it’s changing the course of how you’re designing sites is that imagery is almost becoming… You almost need to put that first and then build around it versus the opposite way, which I think was kind of the way it was being done, which is you built the shell and you pop some photos in. And the photos helped it along but yeah, it’s very different now.

Paul: Yeah. I agree. You have the creative director of a magazine or even a video shoot, and they’re thinking of holistically how it works. And that’s magic in a lot of ways. And I think because of the ability now for just the average person to produce a website, they aren’t used to having to take all those things into account. And then they don’t know why. Why does mine not look as good as theirs? Well, because they’re taking in all these subtleties into account. And I think you’re absolutely spot on. And I think the same thing’s happening with video, but I think people are a lot more tolerate with video than they are with photos. Because a bad photo, just sitting there, not moving is a bad photo, and it just yells that at the top of its lungs. But a video, you know, boy, you get a connection with that person, and, it’d be nice to have it high quality, but even if it’s not, it’s better than not having it.

Brian: Yeah. Even in video, like video use as assets in sites versus just a click play video, you know. Like how it’s presented, how it’s formatted, and how it renders on a phone or a browser. We have people, believe it or not, who are still on things like Internet Explorer 9 or 8. And you…

Paul: They should have their internet taken away.

Brian: Amen to that. I should say the same thing, but you know, the whole experience changes if you can’t… If that video is not loading, and it’s your whole background to your page, yeah, it looks cool on that Mac that the 17 year old has on running Chrome or Safari, but to someone who’s making a decision about whether or not to engage your services or not, and is on an older browser or something that it’s not playing, they’re like why is this big black screen?

Paul: Reflects badly.

Brian: Yeah. It’s always part art, part function. Right?

Paul: Yeah. Absolutely. So anything else you want to cover? Any particular topics?

Brian: No. Thank you very much for having me.

Paul: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

Brian: Any time you want to geek out, I’m happy to have a conversation.

Paul: It is a lot of fun. It is a lot of fun, and we’re also open. If you come up with something you want to talk about, we’ll put it out and talk about it and we tend to be a little eclectic, you know, and not just when we’re talking about this part of business or whatever. We love technology and it just sounds like just like you guys do. It’s a great time to be alive. I mean, 30 years ago… Well, let’s say 50 years ago, you couldn’t do all these things. You know, you had to be in a dark room. You had to do all these different things. You couldn’t even buy a video camera, you know. So, it’s a wonderful time to be alive.

Brian: Yeah. And I’ve been fortunate enough over my lifetime and my career to really go through these unique set of stages with technology. You know, I filmed on VHS tapes and eventually mini DV and then I was like, why are we recapturing DV tape when we could shoot the SD card? And so from a video standpoint, I’ve seen, even my freshman year of college, which I don’t want to date myself, but back in early 2000s, the cameras alone, like what you could do, with shooting on little Canon Elura that were shooting standard definition, and now, even like six years, seven years later, people are shooting high def video on their phones.

Paul: I know. It’s amazing. Isn’t it?

Brian: Crazy.

Paul: You couldn’t have predicted it. I just like wow. Just the storage needs of YouTube. It’s just incredible.

Brian: I remember we built this site. It was called Boston Nocturnal. It was a nightlife site, and the whole premise was we’d deliver a weekly video about bars and nightclubs and events going on in Boston. This was 2005, ’06 timeframe. So YouTube was just coming along, and we made a very conscious decision at the time that we did not want to put our videos on YouTube. We wanted to embed them in flash player on the site because it was more professional.

And I think about a decision like that at the time, not knowing, you know, where YouTube would go. And it’s eventual acquisition by Google and things like that is to, how different your mindset goes in just a short amount of time. And now if a client asks how we’re going to put it on our site, I’m like, “You’re going to put it on YouTube, and you’re going to embed it on your site because you’re getting more bang for your buck as far as getting it found and sharing it and so on.” So yeah. You’re right. It’s a neat time to be in technology and the creative space. And I’m just amazed by young people coming out of school and even, you know, stories of like 11-year-olds who are hacking and things.

Paul: No barrier. They’ve never seen a world where they didn’t have these tools.

Brian: Or even my two-and-a-half-year-old who, you know, consistently asks me for “his” iPad. I said…

Paul: Well, he has it right.

Brian: Yeah. It was like, okay. And he wants to watch his videos, and he can go through YouTube kids. And that’s just, to me, amazing. And I think the people who embrace technology and realize that it’s not everything but it is the way of the world, you know, those are the people who will end up having that good balance.

Paul: That’s right. I agree. Well, we’re here with Brian Gravel, and he’s with GraVoc in Peabody, Massachusetts. He’s the vice president of creative technology. And we’ve had a great talk. I think this will end up being a couple of different podcasts. So if you’re hearing this, go back and listen to the other episodes as well. So, Brian, thank you for coming. Really appreciate it.

Brian: Thank you for having me, Paul.

Paul: Absolutely. Thank you.

Also published on Medium.

Why you should be afraid and take action about Ransomware

June 29, 2017 / Daniel / 0 Comments

In today’s special edition, we are breaking our normal schedule to inform you about recent ransomware attacks known as WannaCry and Petya, and what you can do to protect yourself. Please listen and be informed. The worst is, unfortunately, probably yet to come. Don’t get caught…

The Amazing New World of Drones

June 27, 2017 / Hannah / 0 Comments

Today on the Edge of Innovation, we are talking with Brian Gravel about The Amazing New World of Drones.

Media Technology with Brian Gravel

June 13, 2017 / Hannah / 0 Comments

Today on the Edge of Innovation, we are talking with Brian Gravel about Media Technology.

Ed Alexander – Website Content Development and Segmentation

May 30, 2017 / Hannah / 0 Comments

Today on the Edge of Innovation, we are talking with Ed Alexander, founder of Fan Foundry, about developing your Website Content as well as content segmentation and publishing.

Introduction

Paul: Hello, and welcome to the Edge of Innovation. I’m Paul Parisi, your host, and today I have Ed Alexander, founder of Fan Foundry.

Ed: How are you doing? Nice to be here.

Paul: Great to have you.

Content Development and Cross Pollination

Paul: So now, we moved into the area of content development and what it is and the cross-linking and things like that. What are the other steps? Those are certainly not simple. But is it really those two steps? Make sure you have good content and then make sure you cross-pollinate that. Is there something else?

Ed: I think that making sure that whatever structurally you do with SEO on any given page of content is congruent, it resonates with the actual content on the page so that people don’t get false positives, get led someplace they don’t deserve to be or look for something and find something else that’s less relevant or not always as satisfying. That’s a mutually supported proposition.

But we know you hear and anybody can read Google’s and Alphabet, their parent company’s, intention was never to build an ad network. When Sergey Brin and Larry Page first founded Google, one of their first statements was, “No, we’re not trying to build an ad empire, although that’s going to be a byproduct, and it will help fund our operations. What we really want to build is an artificial intelligence machine.” In the year 2000 when Google was founded, the words in their mission statement were, “Don’t be evil but we’re going to build an artificial intelligence machine.” What does that mean? They meant something different then than it does now, but they’re eyes were on the prize.

So we’re now living in the world of natural language processing, artificial intelligence, where computing power enables computers and machines to interpret our podcast, for example, turn it into an article, for gosh sakes, pass it by an editorial filter, and one final pair of eyeballs later, you’ve got a printed article that transcribes our podcast. This is the world we live in today. If that’s feasible, then think again about the value of the content. You can only be so manipulative about your content before it begins to deteriorate in terms of the value it’s giving to the customer. Start first about delivering value to your customer, to your buyer, to the family or the other people who are constituents to the buying decision.

I’ll give you an example. My yacht charter client realizes a lot of people who take yacht charters are families. They’re bringing the kids along. It’s a legacy. It’s a, you know, it’s a bucket-list opportunity. Never had a webpage before devoted to kids. Why is yachting cool for kids? Well, you’ve got to be reminded about that and when you think about it, if a family travels to a hotel, the first people to complain are the kids because the Wi-Fi is not good. You know, when they’re coming back again, no matter how lavish the treatment might be, there’s no Wi-Fi. This is going to miserable for everyone. Let’s fix the Wi-Fi.

So guess what? Hotels now know they have to have the best Wi-Fi coverage and the best cellular coverage. They have to have repeaters everywhere. And that becomes the competitive differentiation. Your customer is not just the buyer. It’s everybody in the buyer’s entourage. Have content for them.

Paul: So…

Ed: So if you’re the doula, you want to have content not just for the mom but for the father.

Paul: That’s true. That’s a great idea.

Ed: But for the family.

Paul: Yeah. What’s a doula? You know, because somebody tangential to the, to this is not going to understand what that is.

“I Drink Your Milkshake.” How Synonymous Bridge Words Seed Markets.

Ed: That’s right. And analogy for it, that’s not exactly accurate but people think of it often in the same sentence, is midwife.

Paul: Right. Yeah, so would you suggest that a doula do deliberate content things to get the searching from midwives?

Ed: Sure. Why not?

Paul: How would you go about that? So, I mean, you’re not a midwife. And I honestly don’t know the difference.

Ed: Me either. Let’s assume they’re so different that you really can’t say one is the other. I guess you would say one good piece of content to put in your website is, “We’re a doula. We’re not a midwife. How do we differ?” Explain that.

Paul: What if they are similar?

Ed: It might still require some explanation. There’s enough nuance there that a person making the decision would like to know the difference.

Paul: So probably, if I went up to this doula and said, “What’d the difference between you and a midwife?” That’s a great blog post.

Ed: Exactly right. Think about the questions the customer would be asking.

Paul: Ask the answer, the obvious questions.

Ed: Yeah. As they say in the law business, never ask a question to which you don’t already know the answer. And blog accordingly.

Paul: So now, do you just do this once? Set it and forget it?

Frequency of Blog Post Publication with a Yacht Example.

Ed: I’m frankly, the last, the worst offender of my own pontification about how frequently and how regularly to schedule your content publishing. Frankly, blog articles appear on my site approximately whenever I feel like it. And that’s my schedule, and I stick to it. But in the case of a paying customer, by all means, we make sure they have the appetite, the infrastructure, and can carry on the job of routine, regular publishing of content.

Paul: What is, what is that routine?

Ed: The cadence has to do with the appetite of the viewer. If you have a restaurant and you want to publish weekly specials, you better publish something every week. If you are a charter business, and you’re taking, you’re dealing all over the world, then you have segmented content based on regions of the world, at least once a week.

Paul: So, okay. That’s a great concept to talk about — segmented. So is it different pages on their website, the segmentation?

Ed: Great question. In this particular case, the client’s name, if you don’t mind me mentioning it—
Paul: Yeah, Please.

Ed: Her name is Carol Kent. Carol Kent Yacht Charters has been in business for 30 some odd years. And in her case, since she… Since one of the conditions, one of the trappings, if you will, of a yacht charter experience is that you’re typically working with an executive chef, a good chef, which is no small feat to be able to run a five-star [inaudible 00:34:07] rated kitchen out of a galley of a, of a ship at sea. Think about the planning, you know, the design, and all the features that go into turning out a sumptuous experience for your client.

Paul: A lot of frozen food you got to order. Huh?

Ed: The frankly, it can’t be frozen. It has to be refrigerated. So all the shopping, all the provisioning, all that has to be really, thoroughly carefully planned. That’s quite a ballet to pull off. And it gets done. It gets done. So now, imagine pulling that off. Imagine being that yacht chef. You probably have all kinds of stories. She interviews top-yacht chefs and blogs about them on her top-yacht chefs blog. And she has owed the url topyachtchefs.com, and she points it at that particular site, the blog posts about top-yacht chefs. But she still only has one website, carolkentyachtcharters.com, or carolkent.com.

So you can segment your audiences based on their interests.

Paul: Now, does she have duplicate content? Does she have that blog post on Carol Kent and on yacht chefs?

Ed: It’s actually only in one place. The url points at the same page. It’s promoted differently, but it all looks to the same piece of content.

Paul: So is the idea that, on Carol Kent or… On the yacht chef’s site she says, “Hey, there’s a great new blog post over at CarolKent.com. Go and visit that. Here’s the link.

Ed: It’s a little more transparent than that. It just talks about top yacht chefs, period. It happens to be at Carol Kent’s yacht charters business. But she doesn’t say that the blog post is on Carol Kent’s yacht charters site. It’s on the top yacht chef’s blog. It’s all that the yacht chef cares to know about or the epicurean enthusiasts needs to know about. It may be irrelevant whether it ever occurs on her chef. The point is, it’s great culinary technique, it’s being executed in extreme circumstances.

Paul: So on Carol’s website, does she point back to the yacht chef? Say, hey, there’s a new review over there?

Ed: Yes.

Inbound Links and How They Help

Paul: Okay. Because I’m thinking, if this doula wanted to do this, would she say “Let me give you the best hospitals to birth in Massachusetts.” Starts a new website, .com or something like that and does reviews of that. And she would be the person doing the writing. She would refer back to her site. But on her site, would she say something about this site or not?

Ed: I can’t imagine why not. Rather than that, it would make a lot more sense and be a little less confusing to have one page of content, but have it be referred to from a number of different conduits, your referral sources, your landing pages, your links, your posts.

Paul: Okay. So the idea isn’t necessarily to start another website, it’s to get more inbound links.

Ed: Exactly. Right. What it does is it enriches the value of your main business site by having other content channels link to your relevant content.

A Microwave Example: Have Interesting Events and Content.

Paul: So on the microwave idea, I just made the better, best microwave in the world, you know. And it’s really great. Would I go and… Obviously, I’d try to get Consumer Reports to cover it and all the different consumer magazines. But I might want to go to who knows what, Appliance daily, and get them to cover it. Is that what I want to do? Or do I want to say, “Let’s do a comparison of that on my own?”
Ed: Yeah, let’s do a bake off on the expression. Right? Or a nuke off, and talk about the different kinds of microwaves and what the results are. Maybe do some actual technical challenges, replicate them, and then blog about them.

Paul: And blog about them on that, on the company’s website.

Ed: Absolutely. Or ask people who, ask a top yacht chef who uses that microwave to blog about why they like that microwave better. Maybe it’s less, you know, tippy at sea. Maybe there’s something electromechanically about the microwave that makes it superior, and you can taste it.

Paul: So let me ask you, with the, with the doula. Would it be reasonable for the doula to say to a mom, “Would you be willing to do a blog post on your experience?”

Ed: Satisfied customer.

Paul: And would that go of the doula’s site or would it go on her, the, the mom’s blogging site?
Ed: Why not both? Or why not just link to the mom’s site if the mom is looking for attention as well, for whatever the righteous reason might be. Maybe that mom has got a home-based business but talks about parenting and raising kids and so forth. Likewise, Stephanie Arnold who I mentioned earlier, the AFE survivor, does exactly that. There are plenty of great stories to be told — frankly some tragic ones as well that are deserving of attention because they point out the need for more research and funding toward AFE, solving the issue. She’s happy to link to people whose stories deserve to be told. She doesn’t have to re-tell them, and she doesn’t have to acquire the traffic. That’s not the point. The point is the stories need to be told.

So you really look at the, frankly, the altruistic, best outcome scenario and say, “How does, how do more people benefit from this?”

Let’s bring it back to your microwave manufacturer. Dynamite microwave oven. Is it that the chrome is shinier? What is it? Why is a superior microwave? Have people tell the story about what they learned. Maybe the microwave oven saved my life. I should tell the world, “That microwave oven saved my life.”

Paul: It’s a bulletproof microwave.

Ed: Exactly. Right. Bulletproof microwave. That’s right. Yeah. It even missed Obama’s head.

Paul: Well the cameras. This one doesn’t have any cameras in it, so…

Ed: Oh, it’s one of those. Yeah.

How Do You Measure Content Marketing?

Paul: So we’ve talked about some really innovative ideas here of how to actually think through SEO and your pages, your whole marketing, really, in the way your posture out in the world as it’s represented on the internet. How do you measure this stuff?

Ed: That’s a great question. The most low common denominator, which is available to anybody with a website is Google Analytics. You can look at the extent to which a blog post sends traffic to your website or if that page on your website caused the person to bounce, if you’ll pardon the expression, and instead leave your site to go read the real factual story about the person who is the subject of the story. If your intention is to help that person benefit as well, then the bounce from your page to another page is a benefit you intended, and that’s a successful result.

So when we think about these websites as being acquisition targets, I think of them as more as being conduits for learning. If my intention is to help that rising tide lifts all boats and help other people in this lives, then it’s okay to me that someone left my site to go someplace else. I was directing them there Paul: Right. So you helped them find the answer.

Ed: Exactly right. When someone, as a habit, for example, on my own blog on the Fan Foundry blog, I typically include a link or two to either foundational or supplemental or supportive articles, content that either was the basis or the reason for my writing or it was additional reading if the person wanted to look into it more. Since I, you know, none of us wants to be discovered for the frauds that we are. I always, I always like to refer to other people who think like me because in that echo chamber, we seem to support each other’s theories. So why not link to further reading if a person is curious about the subject? I do that. And so to the extent that person clicks that link in the bottom of a blog article, I know I’ve found a reader who is really enthusiastic about the subject. Guess what happens? I get more blog subscribers because people go to my blog article to find the jumping off point to get everything else.

Paul: Interesting. So now how does Twitter, Facebook, all that stuff go into here? Because it sounds like a way to announce something is really what Twitter and Facebook are. Or is that a destination in itself?

Ed: Yeah, well we’ve heard quite often that Twitter is really turning into the headlines, the up-to-the-minute headlines. And that’s sort of a byproduct of where people seem to find the most value, which broadcasting or announcing or, if you will, pardon the expression, bull horning, your content. If you use Twitter for both that purpose and its original intended purpose which was to support chat among people who are like-minded at a point in time.

Case in point, today, I just came to this meeting with you, Paul, from a North Shore Technology Council event where part of the digital ventriloquism I do for them on a pro bono basis is I’ll go to an event — in this case it was a sustainability forum — to take a photographs with the presenters and the host and a few other dignitaries, luminaries, funnel those photos over to my Twitter account that I manage for the North Shore Technology Council, @NSTechCouncil. NS Tech Council. And then initiate the tweet/chat process. Now, my job is done. I could leave and other people in the room are carrying on the conversation. I had to jump over here to meet with you, so it’s almost like touching a match to the tinder and letting it burn away based on however people want to carry it forward.
Likewise, social channels to me, can be extremely effective for helping pollinate your message but also support like-minded messages. I have an equal number of people I follow as follow me. Frankly, Twitter actually has limits. You can’t just do nothing but follow other people and not acquire any followers of your own. After a certain point in time, you trip over a wire. Then Twitter says, “Sorry, you can’t follow anybody else until you’ve acquired some followers,” or word that to effect. If you’ve ever seen that message, you know you’re doing a lot more following, and you’re not contributing content. Where’s the balance in that conversation? They’re there to enforce chat, conversation, and the idea exchange.

Wrapping It Up

Paul: Discussion, hopefully. Alright. So, we’re talking with Ed Alexander. Are you the founder of Fan Foundry? What’s your title?

Ed: Chief digital ventriloquist. Yes.

Paul: Chief digital ventriloquist. Well, we’re going to cover that in our next podcast. This digital ventriloquist guy and kind of thing. So we won’t get into that too much. But anyway, we’re today talking with Ed Alexander.

Well, it’s been a fascinating discussion about SEO and understanding, really, marketing in the web world. We’re going to be talking with him over several podcasts and I think you’ll find some very interesting things. So, Ed, I want to thank you for being here for this first podcast.

Ed: It’s been fun, Paul. I’m looking forward to what comes next. Thanks for having me.

Also published on Medium.