Last week I had the great fortune to moderate an all-star panel of video commerce pros at the StreamingMedia West conference in San Jose. StreamingMedia is a show that draws online video innovators, technologists, and a large contingency from the media and advertising industries. Dan Rayburn, industry guru, organizer of the show and EVP of StreamingMedia.com shared last night that the video commerce session was among the top 3 ranked sessions of the entire show. So first and foremost, congrats to the panelists: Jason Arend of PFI, Mike Sullivan of Hot Topic/Shockhound/Torrid, Gerry Johnson of HSN, and Rico Nasol of Zappos for making the panel happen!
Over the next few days, I’ll be sharing PPTs from the panelists as well as video interviews here on video-commerce.org. Below is Rico’s presentation. Along with his presentation, I’d like to share a few highlight takeaways:
- Zappos has 6 video studios currently, will have 10 video studios in 2010, and is aiming to create 50,000 product videos by the close of 2010. I’m unaware of any other retailer outside of the video production companies (HSN, ShopNBC, QVC etc) with greater ambitions. Clearly Zappos thinks video is the future of online retail and is putting their money where their mouth is.
- Big value of video for Zappos is SEO - they do transcripts and follow other video SEO best practices
- Consistent increase in conversion rate - “significant increase”
- The only way to do video is self-production - “better control, conveys the brand better, offers the ability to differentiate through video rather than use cookie-cutter manufacturer video content”
- Work with automated video production company TalkMarket to speed development of video
- Interactive video is a big push - use of overlays, thumbnails, etc. Results still TBD
- Rolling video out to product pages, landing pages. Specialized sites (ZapposInsights.com, Zappos.TV) are secondary in focus. Product detail page very important
- Jury on video syndication is still out. Syndication has to be done “intelligently” so videos drive traffic to product detail pages rather than cannibalize results of product pages in Google results.
Enjoy:
November 24th, 2009 at 11:22 pm
Look forward to hearing more. Especially about “Big value of video for Zappos is SEO - they do transcripts and follow other video SEO best practices”.
Best, Mark
November 30th, 2009 at 3:52 am
50.000 Clips in der Pipeline: Zappos Video-Strategie in Zahlen…
Kaum eine Meldung auf twive! hat in den vergangenen Tagen wohl für soviel Furore sorgen können, wie der Schulterschluss von Zappos und Overlay.tv. Und während sich der Schuh-Händler bereits mit Nachdruck für das Widget-Web rüstet, liefert Justin Foster…
December 3rd, 2009 at 6:36 pm
Thanks for sharing Justin, and looking forward to the PPT from the other panelists!
December 16th, 2009 at 10:05 pm
@mark - Here’s some other good material re: video+SEO: http://www.reelseo.com/seo-best-practices/ and a posting we did on this topic a while back: http://video-commerce.org/2009/08/video-seo-the-reel-story-on-getting-your-online-video-discovered/
@twive - thanks for the pingback!
@Jeff - sorry for the delay in getting the next one up. We have two more to go. Lots of good content coming up, much thanks for your patience!