EyeView's Blog

New Video Marketing Quiz Lands With A Bang

We’re really excited to launch the newest Video Marketing Quiz with all new questions.

Following the success of the last quiz, we wanted to top ourselves and present some of the data generated by the tests we run in the most engaging way we could imagine.

Since the last quiz we have seen the format picked up and imitated by Omniture/Adobe, which just makes us think that we created an exciting product.

To mark this launch we are giving away hundred of dollars in Amazon vouchers to the people who take the quiz and the Tweet their results.

Every hour for the first eight hours after the launch today at 10 am ET, five lucky tweeters will be selected and sent $20 to spend any way they wish.

It doesn’t get more exciting that that!

Enjoy the quiz and get tweeting!

Imitation Is The Sincerest Form Of Flattery

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. What they mean is, when someone pays attention to you and respects what you do enough to reproduce one of your original ideas or activities you should be flattered. And we usually are.

Last July, before the release of his New York Times bestseller, Trust Agents, I approached Chris Brogan with an idea for a Twitter giveaway. I proposed that we give away 50 copies of his book on the day of its launch to the first 50 people who tweeted about a brand awareness campaign we were running. The campaign centered on our Video Marketing Quiz which is a fun interactive game that tests your knowledge of video as an effective marketing tool.

We were overwhelmed with the results. As soon as Chris tweeted about the giveaway, everything went nuts with thousands of people taking the quiz and tweeting about it afterwards. It was such a simple idea, yet it worked so well for us and we were tremendously grateful to Chris for his support and proud to be part of the launch for Trust Agents.

We knew it was a successful idea when Chris ran with it and instigated the exact same promotion with his pals at LinkedIn less than a month later. I’m sure it’s not the last time we will see Twitter used in this way.

This week our Video Marketing Quiz saw another form of imitation as Omniture, the web analytics company that was recently bought by Adobe, released an interactive game that tests your knowledge of banner ads as an effective marketing tool. If you disregard the background, the awkward fonts and the clumsy interface that never quite clicks on what you want to click, it’s eerily similar to our own Video Marketing Quiz. All of which goes to prove a few things:

• If something works for someone else, you might be able to make it work for you
• If you want to know who’s listening, check who’s copying
• Great ideas belong to the world (but it’s always nice to know you had them first!)

            

          EyeView's Video Marketing Quiz                                        Omniture's Pick The Winner Quiz

Twitter Excels At B2B Marketing

Yesterday we launched our new Video Marketing Quiz. The idea was for us to find an engaging way to present the data we have captured from real traffic on real sites. Once we settled on the format our designers worked overtime putting together the Flash elements and creating a neat user experience that was informative without being preachy. I think they did a great job, but you can decide for yourself when you take the quiz.

The next part of the puzzle was how to get people to find out about and take the quiz. We were never looking to explode, just to build some awareness which would translate into extra traffic. We wanted to tap into the online community of marketers who could see the value of the quiz and introduce them to EyeView without trying to sell them anything.

At the same time we wanted to put into practice some of the things we have learned from reading and participating in marketing blogs and discussions over the past few months. First of all we wanted it to be Free. I devoured Chris Anderson’s book when it came out and while I don’t believe he suggested anything radical, I think he captured the essence of something important regardless of what Malcolm Gladwell says.

Second of all, we wanted to try out our new interpretation of doing business as a B2B company. Instead of a business negotiating with other businesses, we want to be individuals in a business talking to individuals at other companies. This sense of building and maintaining trust is something we have gleaned from our contacts in social media and specifically from the Titan of Trust, Chris Brogan.

In honor of our launch on the same day as Chris launched the book he wrote with Julien Smith, we chose to run a modest promotion on the book’s Facebook fanpage.

 

We thought it would be a nice idea to try to give away 50 copies of the book to anyone who completed the quiz and tweeted their score on Twitter. Things were ticking over nicely until this happened:

 

That’s when it all went crazy. I want to present some of the statistics we have gathered from the first 24 hours since the Video Marketing Quiz went public. The viral impact of several points in a network choosing to microblog our link on Twitter at around the same time meant that in the first 8 hours alone, over 3,000 people came and took the quiz. We have connected with marketers all over the world who want to know more about effective video for businesses. I sent copies of Trust Agents across the world to places as far flung as Canada, England, Brazil, India, Malaysia and Kentucky. There is truly a global marketplace for good writing and smart marketing.

So far it’s been a heck of a day. I’ll let you know when it eases up.

Video Marketing Quiz 2009

One of the benefits of working for a company that is committed to testing is that we never have to fall back on guesswork. When EyeView releases data about the impact video has on conversion, you can be sure that the data comes from real sites using real traffic. We don’t deal with suppositions, simulations or uncertainties. Instead, EyeView has a scientific approach to conversion optimization where every element is tested to prove its worth and every assumption examined to establish its authenticity.

The Video Marketing Quiz (VMQ), which you can find here, is the culmination of several weeks’ work to find an engaging way to present some of the data we have collected to the community of marketers. The quiz will test your instincts and help you understand effective use of video for businesses.

How do we distribute content in 2009?

Once we were sure the quiz could provide value, we looked for the medium that was best placed for sharing that value with the marketing community. Much has been written over the past few months about Twitter and its value for businesses. For the most part that value has been ascribed to consumer-facing (B2C) businesses like Zappos.com or Comcast who are leveraging Twitter to maintain relationships with their customers and establish their reputations as companies that care. On the surface our company is a classic business-facing (B2B) business, but we are discovering that the old B2B models aren’t as relevant anymore. B2B relationships aren’t about businesses communicating with other businesses, they are about individuals within a business talking with individuals working somewhere else. Twitter is the perfect tool for humanizing relationships, not just with consumers but with business partners, colleagues and peers.

We are launching this year’s VMQ using Twitter as our main communications medium backed up by Facebook and LinkedIn. We believe that a friend spreading the word to other friends is the most effective way to reach a broad group of people. As more people take the quiz and share the experience with their trusted network, we hope reach a wider audience and share our experience and add value to the community that provides value to us very day.

So, enjoy the quiz, share the quiz and thank you for everything that you share with us.

You can find us on Twitter here.