Expertise on Tap | Email & Video Marketing...made easy

Met Police admits victims' email address sharing error - how to avoid it happening to you

This article on BBC News caught my eye today. Scotland Yard has admitted inadvertently sharing the email addresses of more than 1,000 victims of crime with other victims. A Met spokesman said "In total 1,136 emails were sent out in seven batches of between 119 and 198 recipients but because the addresses were put in the wrong box they were visible to the other recipients in the batch." What seems apparent from this quote is that the Met was using its in-house email client (for example Outlook or similar) to mass e-mail people and instead of putting the email addresses in the "bcc" blind copy box, it placed the emails in the "cc" box instead meaning all recipients could see each others' addresses. The Information Commissioner's Office comments "We will be making enquiries into the circumstances of the alleged breach of the Data Protection Act before deciding what action, if any, needs to be taken." The maximum penalty is £500,000 for "the most serious cases".  Ouch! Mistakes like this are remarakbly simple to avoid and it's astonishing the Met were not better informed on how to send mass emails of this nature. How to avoid this happening to you. The simple solution is never to use your email program to send out newsletters or similar to large numbers of people. Instead use an email service provider such as Campaign Monitor. It doesn't cost much and it will help you avoid serious data breaches. Alternatively, just outsource your e-newsletter production to Expertise on Tap and we'll ensure you stay within the law.

How to measure audience retention for your videos using YouTube analytics

Big news from YouTube! They've recently introduced a massive improvement to their video analytics. This brings some powerful benefits if your business has videos on YouTube. You can now monitor how long people watched your videos for. It's all very well saying your video got 800 views but what if those viewers stopped watching part way through thus missing out on your key message? Now you can play the video and view a graph showing exactly which proportion of the audience were watching at any given time. See the example below. How to view your audience retention 1 Go to www.youtube.com/analytics and logon to your account. 2 Click "audience retention" on the left hand side bar. 3 Then choose your video beneath where it says "content". 4 Choose your date range. 5 Play the video and the red vertical bar will move. Note: This will only work for videos with more than a few hundred views. Top 3 tips on how to use this to your advantage: • Anyalyse where the drop off occured. What specific content caused people to tune out? • Was your video too long? Could you have got your key messages across in a shorter video? • Use the results to work out what you could do differently next time you produce a video. Here is an example of the audience retention measure. As you play the video in your YouTube account the vertical bar moves across.

YouTube Analytics: Find out how people 'discovered' your videos

Big news from YouTube! They've recently introduced a massive improvement to their video analytics. This brings some powerful benefits if your business has videos on YouTube. YouTube now has a new ‘discovery’ measure which shows you the different in which people found your video. This measure could prove useful for future videos in terms of where you decide to embed it. For example on your own site, on other people's sites, web forums and such like.  See the example below.... You can access this information by clicking the small icon next to your views count which looks like this >>> And you can set these statistics to be public or private.

HOW TO remove YouTube branding from videos embedded on your website

Until recently, one of the downsides of embedding YouTube videos on your website was the YouTube logo in the lower right hand corner of the screen >> There's now a way of removing this by adding a small snippet of code to the existing embed code. The following instructions assume you already know how to add YouTube embed code to your website. 1 Find the video on YouTube. 2 Click on "Share" just beneath the video player. 3 Then click on "Embed"   4 Scroll down and untick "Show suggested videos when the video finishes". I recommend this to avoid competitors' videos playing when your video has ended. 5 Select your required video size.   6 Grab the resulting embed code. 7 Add &modestbranding=1 immediately after where it shows ?rel=0.   So, this: <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/e8BORfMv5Pc?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>   Would change to: <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/e8BORfMv5Pc ?rel=0 &modestbranding=1" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> If you get stuck please call me for some free of charge help.

Three more tips for better email newsletters

1. WHY not to send your newsletter on the same day that you write it. I guarantee if you write your newsletter today and review it tomorrow that you will change something! Reviewing your content the following day enables you to look at it with fresh and more objective eyes. This provides an opportunity to: 1 Proof read your content.     2 Test your content. Are all your images displaying and links working?     3 Abridge your content. Is it too long? Are you using short sentences and paragraphs? Have you got plenty of white space?     4 Assess your content for relevance. It's easy to get wrapped up in your own world so stand back, review your content and ask: - Why is this relevant to my subscribers?   - How does it add value? 2. WHY you should include a subscribe link in your e-newsletter. This is where you might say "Why do I need one? They're already subscribed aren't they?". Not necessarily. If someone has received a forwarded copy or read the newsletter on Twitter or Facebook, including a prominent subscribe link will enable them to do just that! 3. WHY you should avoid a big logo at the top of your e-newsletter I often receive e-newsletters with a large logo in the masthead. Sometimes these are 200 pixels high or larger.  If you're wondering how big 200px is, it's this big... LOOK AT MY FANTASTIC NEW LOGO I'VE SPENT LOTS OF MONEY ON IT THAT'S WHY IT'S THIS BIG I REALLY WANT YOU TO NOTICE IT The problem with using a logo this size is when your subscriber is viewing your newsletter in their preview pane it pushes the content down the page.   They need to see some of the content to make a decision on whether to open. Therefore it's far better to have a smaller, more discreet logo in the masthead.

Expertise on Tap on location at Edgbaston Test Match

Expertise on Tap has just completed a corporate event video shoot at Egbaston for Birmingham based Gala Hospitality. The event took place at the England v India Test Match on 12th August 2011 and featured a Q&A session with cricketing legends Nasser Hussain and David Lloyd.

Alan George of Gala Hospitality comments “This is the second video Expertise on Tap (EOT) has produced for us and we’re delighted with the result. We have used several videographers before and they haven’t come near to EOT’s quality. Their attention to detail and their eye to get a variety of different aspects of our events, really show the atmosphere and help to sell next year’s event. We will definitely be using them in the future.”

Our latest round up of e-newsletter tips

Here's our latest round up of tips for better e-newsletters. This list is based on e-newsletters I've received recently. 1. Use a real "from" address not a "no reply" address. Always use an address which can receive replies. This is imperative as some subscribers may have comments or queries 2. Keep your introduction brief. If your introduction is too long this means your relevant and  important content is buried too far down the page. Introductions can work well and add a personal touch to the email. But do keep them brief. A couple of lines at the most. 3. Include your company name in the "From" section I received an email this week with only the person's name in the "From" section. It was not clear which company the email was from so I deleted it. So, unless you're so well known that your name alone will suffice, always include the company name. 4. Don't include attachments I received an e-newsletter recently promoting an event with three lengthy attachments. Subscribers won't bother to wade through too much information. Never send attachments, they can trigger spam filters. If you need to include further information link to a pdf or a blog post. Keep the extra information concise. 5. Don't use your email program and send to "undisclosed-recipients" This just looks amateur and depressingly I receive several examples of these every week! Using your email program will almost certainly result in compatibility issues. Eg. it might look fine in Outlook but not in Hotmail. Use an email service provider to send your newsletter, for example Mailchimp. Or better still outsource it to us!

How to increase click throughs for your e-newsletter using video

If you try and embed a video into your e-newsletter it won't work properly in most email programs. The email is also likely to get blocked by anti virus ssoftware. Technology is changing and this may become possible in future but for now a work round is necessary. Here's a simple technique which I use with great results in clients' newsletters. Simply pause the video and take a screen grab then add a play button onto the image. Use this image in your newsletter so that it looks like a video screen. You'll get far more clicks than just using a text link saying "Click here to watch video".

^ Examples of video ^ screen grabs used for my client The Stuart Holmes Hair & Beauty Spa

Why email marketing is not dead. It's just changing

Email marketing is dead! That's what various web articles in the past year would have you believe.  They argue that the growth of social networking will eventually mean people abandon email and start communicating using tools like Facebook messaging and Twitter. Presumably brevity will become the norm as we all attempt to converse in 140 characters or less (!). What I, and others in the email marketing industry are saying is email is not dead. It's just changing. Discover how it's changing and read my 5 point plan on how to adapt your own email newsletter.

How to link to a specific time in a YouTube video

It's a common dilemma. You're watching a funny pets video and you want to send a link to your friend about the bit where the skateboarding dog comes on. Usually it goes something like "Check out this amazing dog, LOL! It comes on around 2 minutes in". Now you can send an exact link of a specific time in any YouTube video. Just right click on the video at the relevant time and then left click on "Copy video URL at current time".  The link is then on your clipboard for you to copy into an email, a Tweet, a Facebook post or whatever.

The resulting link will look something like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Je8nn-RzYZk&feature=player_detailpage#t=28s