Next Friday June 4th, Video Guy and myself will be joining a number of other businesses at the first [Start To Sell Online](http://starttosellonline.co.uk/) seminar in Reading, Berkshire. The event is aimed at introducing traditional businesses to the world of selling online or for those who are already online but want to expand their operations.
vzaar are down on the agenda to talk about rich media and in particular how video can hep you sell online. Best to stick to what we know eh?!
What I really like is that after a 10 minutes Dragons Den style pitch, we get to meet each of the local businesses attending in what has been billed as a speed dating meets round table discussions. Should be interesting.
Other speakers include eBay, Royal Mail and Lloyds Banking Group and the whole event has been put together by the good man Chris Dawson of [Tamebay](http://www.tamebay.com/) fame and his cohort John Pemberton of [Give Me Designer Clothes](http://stores.shop.ebay.co.uk/A-Designer-Clothes-Shop__W0QQ_armrsZ1).
If you fancy coming along or would like to know more you can see [details here](http://starttosellonline.co.uk/)
Archive for May 2009
I just wanted to write to let you know how pleased we are with the vzaar video player here at CoolComputerBags.com. Our site sells fashionable laptop bags, and it’s important for our customers to really see how the bag functions, and how it looks on a model. It’s our best way of approximating the in-store experience one would have touching and opening a bag. We spent a good bit of money getting high quality video shot of our bestselling products, but with the YouTube embedded player used previously, the video quality was too grainy to really help shoppers see the bags. We didn’t get the lift in conversion rates from the video we were hoping for while using YouTube.
I’ve been shopping around online for a solution to our video player needs, signing up for trial accounts with many of your competitors. Your player was by far the most professional in appearance, and your video quality could not be beat by anyone. Even the higher priced providers couldn’t offer clearer video quality, and those with similar price points fell far short.
Starting out at just $10/month, we have an unbranded video player that looks like we did it ourselves. I appreciate your pricing tiers, so we can only pay for what we need. Though, since embedding the new player for just 4 days, it’s getting so many views already I can tell we’ll be upgrading soon! Still, the value for our dollar is great.
I’m looking forward to having a month of using vzaar under our belt, so we can rerun the conversion rate reports. I expect to see an impact on conversion rates this time, with the higher quality video.
One last thing – your customer service has been impressive. I didn’t expect to get a phone call to follow up on our new account, particularly from a company across the ocean. That’s not something you get from a lot of businesses, and has already made me feel even more loyal to your brand. I’ve already recommended you to other colleagues with similar needs for hosting commercial video.
You may have seen this site recently [on how to use twitter for marketing and PR](http://www.howtousetwitterformarketingandpr.com/).
At vzaar we have been finding Twitter rather useful for marketing and some minor PR. Jamie (‘business guy’ on the blog), takes a bit of time each day to respond to people looking for video solutions and communicate with them. Sometimes this is one way, but it can also become the opening to a conversation which is the best way to find new users. Conversation, not broadcasting.
I’ve also noticed a lot more people following our [@vzaar twitter feed](http://twitter.com/vzaar) in the sales space (i.e. online selling of something). What I find interesting is the average follower count of these people is normally in the 1K-10K range.
I find this curious. On my personal feed I tend to block most (not all) followers like this. I don’t want someone following me to boost my follow count, or because they expect me to follow them back. I want people following me who either actually know me, or want to follow me because they find me interesting. I would say I have probably an 80% hit rate of genuine followers out of my 250ish followers. On our work account I would say this hit rate is probably more like 20% out of the 200ish followers we have there.
But then in fairness, we follow 206 people, and we don’t read the stream of people we follow. We read the search stream and we follow our own personal streams, but we don’t follow the stream of who we follow, as we’re all just too busy, so we’re equally as bad.
I would love to reduce our work twitter stream to people we actually follow and read, but we all follow them on our personal accounts anyway. I think Twitter is splitting into two groups. Those who use them for personal conversations, and those who use them for work and/or to amass followers.
I think there is much more value in real links than the empty links you get when it’s a game and the winner is how many followers you get.
The coffee shop and restaurant above our office, just started a twitter feed. [@thepantrylondon](http://twitter.com/thepantrylondon) only has 14 followers. But all of those followers are valuable as they are all people who live or work nearby. I would rather have 14 valued followers than 10000 empty ones.
They don’t have to be the most followed coffee shop in the world. What they need is people who might by coffee from them, to have an interaction with them when they are not in the shop.
That’s how you use Twitter for PR and marketing.
Updated Help – Encoding & Embedding Guides Added
Ever wondered what dimension we encode our videos at or just how on earth do I add my video to my eBay listings via Turbo Lister? Well ponder no more as I’m pleased to say that we have spruced up the vzaar Help pages and added two new sections on **Encoding** and **Embedding Guides**.
The guides might prove particularly useful if you are new to both vzaar and the concept of adding video to your eBay listings or blog page. We have guides that cover the following tools and services:
**eBay Tools**
- [eBay's Sell Your Item Form](http://vzaar.com/help/faq_embedding_questions/#ebay_syi)
- [eBay's Turbo Lister](http://vzaar.com/help/faq_embedding_questions/#turbolister)
- [eBay's Blackthorne](http://vzaar.com/help/faq_embedding_questions/#blackthorne)
- [eBay's File Exchange](http://vzaar.com/help/faq_embedding_questions/#file_exchange)
- [Auctiva](http://vzaar.com/help/faq_embedding_questions/#auctiva)
- [ChannelAdvisor](http://vzaar.com/help/faq_embedding_questions/#channeladvisor)
- [Seller Source Book](http://vzaar.com/help/faq_embedding_questions/#seller_source_book)
- [Spoonfeeder](http://vzaar.com/help/faq_embedding_questions/#spoonfeeder)
**Blogging Tools**
- [Blogger.com](http://vzaar.com/help/faq_embedding_questions/#blogger)
- [MoveableType.org](http://vzaar.com/help/faq_embedding_questions/#moveabletype)
- [Typepad.com](http://vzaar.com/help/faq_embedding_questions/#typepad)
- [Wordpress.org](http://vzaar.com/help/faq_embedding_questions/#wordpress)
All our help pages can be viewed in our [Help Section](http://vzaar.com/help)
Stephen Parker, Founder of Smart-Questions.com
I was looking for a video site to stream a few videos to our book publishing website. I found vzaar. The website looked simple / friendly / inviting and the player is elegant. Uploading videos was simple and so was embedding them. Perfect.
- 11 young entrepreneurs on the power of video marketing: http://t.co/OR66WfYK via @B2Community 1 day ago
- Learn how @DrNajeeb has built a million dollar e-learning business with vzaar: http://t.co/aZpd7Xgo 5 days ago
- Is it the weekend yet? Kill some time until it is by taking our customer survey : https://t.co/pftRRr3D 5 days ago
- More updates...
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