Immersive360 Blog

Whether you are a large or small business you can always benefit from creating a YouTube Video account to promote your business.

Everyone probably knows YouTube is a video-sharing website where anyone - including businesses - can upload videos for others to view. Having an account in YouTube offering easy accesible video content is always useful, especially in a time when the use of video on the internet has increased vertically. In Alexa ranking of the most polular sites globally, Youtube is in 3rd position just behind Yahoo and Google so you can see the kind of exposure it gets.

Some people may say using YouTube doesn’t add to a professional profile for a company. We would disagree with this. Although YouTube videos don’t have the greatest quality, if you are concerned about this you can always use your YouTube account to host “preview videos” and host better quality full versions on your own website. The point about YouTube is exposure!

On the issue of quality we recommend the following:

• Start with the best possible quality, so don’t over compress your video when putting it together. Ideally use as little compression as possible at this stage and start with the original codec your video was captured with.Use H.264, it is a high quality compression codec. You want YouTube’s compressor to work with the best quality possible. The bitrate we recommend you try is 2000kbps — we will go into this more later.
• Resize your video to 320×240 this will match YouTube’s native resolution when you encode. The idea is you want YouTube to do as little as possible to your video . This removes one step for YouTube and will also speed up the time it takes for your video to be accessible online. This is also where the bit rate comes back in. 320×240 video running at 2000kbps is almost lossless in quality. H.264 is designed to look good at much lower bit rates. By oversampling your video to 320×240 and using such a high bitrate you will get very good results.
• Deinterlace your video when you encode. As it is yet another thing YouTube will do for you if you don’t.
• If you shot your video in widescreen use letterboxing to make it fit 320×240’s or 4×3 aspect ratio. YouTube only has support for one aspect ratio, if you upload wide video it will be squished.
• If you are posting a long video that is over 100MB (which is the YouTube limit) when using the 2000kbps h.264 codec, adjust the bitrate until you get something that is as close to 100MB as possible.

Here is a sample of YouTube Video Created using this method -

YouTube is a free hosting site. It is an ideal place to organize and keep your videos and from there you can link to your video’s on YouTube or even embed them into other web-pages directly including your website and Blog. YouTube automatically provide the code to embed your video into a web-page and it’s as easy as ‘cut & paste’. Also others can link to you videos, further increasing your exposure.

So what kind of videos can you use in your YouTube account that would be of benefit. Basically anything that helps you promote your business, TV presentations or interviews, workshops or seminar speeches, client testimonials, product showcases and reviews, instructional video or ‘hands on’ video demonstrations, footage from trade shows and conference events, ‘in progress’ videos for long term projects, a ‘walk-around’ of your new factory installation of property development, time-lapse video to show long processes quickly. The list is endless, you would be amazed what people are interested in.

Through careful use of your YouTube account and advertising it by participating in video responses, comments or groups related to your business you can draw people’s attention to your website and increase traffic, but the key to all this is to have created videos that people will be interested to watch. Also remember you will have 2 audiences on YouTube, your existing clients where you can inform them with samples of videos about the work you have done so far and everyone else, any one of whom may just be your next customer.

The internet is s gateway to a global audience. Use it widely and wisely too to promote your business and get the most out of it. This post is on our Blog page . Visit our Immersive360 YouTube account with samples of our projects and videos.

Proposed by ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites) and approved by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) World Heritage Day was established in 1983. With a new theme every year; 2008 is Religious Heritage and Sacred Places. Virtual Tour technology is a fantastic way of experiencing heritage locations that you are not able to visit in person. With this in mind we are making a Virtual Tour of one of the worlds greatest religious and cultural monuments, the Athens Acropolis!

All you need to do is have Google Earth 4.2 (or later) installed on your computer and then download and open the kml file available HERE and from our main website www.immersive360.com from the 18th of April onwards. A link to the panorama tour will be installed in your Places palette. Click on the link under Temporary Places and you will automatically be taken to the first panorama. To exit the panorama click on Exit Photo (top right) or click on one of the icons you can see for other locations in the tour.

The kml file once downloaded is auto updating and we will be adding new locations in the near future including more locations in Greece, including the 2004 Athens Olympic event sites.

Once you have exited the panorama you can see it as a sphere. We have positioned them above ground level so they don’t interfere with the 3D models.

Download the KML file here

The following is a short video to show how it works -

Interesting Links:

www.acropolis360.com

UNESCO Heritage Events Calendar

List of World Heritage sites in Europe

World Heritage Interactive Map

THE BENEFITS

It is no exaggeration to describe e-marketing as a revolution for the marketing industry. For the first time, it gives businesses of any size access to the mass market at an affordable price and, unlike TV or print advertising, it allows truly personalized marketing. Specific benefits of e-marketing include:

GLOBAL REACH
If you build a website you can reach anyone, anywhere in the world, provided they have internet access. This allows you to tap new markets and compete globally with only a small investment. This can be particularly useful for niche providers, companies whose products can be posted easily, or businesses who are looking to expand geographically but cannot afford to invest in new offices or businesses.

LOWER COST
A properly planned and effectively targeted e-marketing campaign can reach the right customers at a much lower cost than traditional marketing methods. You can build a website for as little as a few hundred pounds or send e-mail for a fraction of a penny.

TRACKABLE, MEASURABLE RESULTS
Marketing by e-mail or banner advertising makes it easier to establish how effective your campaign has been. If someone clicks on a banner advert, or a link in an e-mail or on a website, you can see how they arrived at your website. This detailed information about customers’ responses to your advertising allows you to assess the effectiveness of different campaigns.

24-HOUR MARKETING
With a website your customers can find out about your products even if your office is closed.

SHORTER LEAD TIMES
If you have a website or an e-mail template, you can react to events much more quickly - giving your marketing a much more contemporary feel. If one of your products is in the news or something important happens in your industry, you can capitalise on it without having to print or post anything.

A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
With a well-designed website, you can show yourself to be as professional and credible as your larger competitors.

PERSONALISATION
If your customer database is linked to your website, then whenever someone visits the site, you can greet them with targeted offers. The more they buy from you, the more you can refine your customer profile and market effectively to them. A great example of this is Amazon’s website which suggests products based on your and other people’s previous purchases.

ONE-TO-ONE MARKETING
E-marketing lets you reach people who want to know about your products and services instantly - you don’t have to wait until they come home from work and switch on the TV or open their mail. People have a different, more personal relationship with most new technologies. For example, many people take mobile phones and PDAs wherever they go, and a surprising number feel lost without their e-mail. Combine this with the personalized aspect of e-marketing, and you can create very powerful and targeted campaigns.

MORE INTERESTING CAMPAIGNS
E-marketing lets you create interactive campaigns using music, graphics and videos. You could send your customers a game or a quiz - whatever you think will interest them. One of the great successes of e-marketing has been film companies letting people download trailers for forthcoming movies. Other small companies have picked up this idea - a radio controlled car company sends customers designs or photos of new products in development while clothing
companies send out sneak previews of the new season’s range.

BETTER CONVERSION RATE
If you have got a website, then your customers are only ever a few clicks away from completing a purchase. Unlike other media which require people to get up and make a phone call, post a letter or go to a shop, e-marketing is seamless. The change from reading an e-mail to buying on a website is negligible - no special effort is required, meaning that your call to action can be much more direct. Together, all of these aspects of e-marketing add up to one thing:
more sales.

As taken from “The Department of Trade and Industry“

In the Immersive360 Blog we are going to post our latest news on e-marketing VR products as well as useful tips and information on e-marketing

We are glad to publish our blog today. A few words about Immersive360 below: Immersive360 Ltd are the marketing leaders in Visual Interactive content for e-marketing.

…We work with marketing managers and directors of Premium Brand Companies

…Who have a problem missing out on valuable sales by not making maximum use of the Internet to market their product

… What we do is maximize the exposure the exposure of our clients products by providing a powerful and cost effective visual marketing and sales tool

…So their customers understand the benefits of their product more clearly which means our clients gain advantage over their competitors and increase sales and profile.