While few things excite me more than a great pair of shoes, I have to say that this year’s Shop.org Annual Summit in Dallas, TX has me pretty fired up! Nothing is better than being around new eCommerce technologies and in the company of the most esteemed online retailers in the IR 500.
This year Invodo will be exhibiting at booth 218 where you can stop by for a free shot and see examples of eCommerce video in action. It is always exciting to see retailers’ reactions when they realize Invodo eCommerce video not only increases conversion rates, but also drives traffic from video SEO enablement and reduces product returns.
eCommerce video is the next big thing in online retailing and I like nothing more than to show off Invodo’s amazing production capabilities, eCommerce focused video platform and player, and our ability to distribute videos to social media sites.
Go ahead and add Invodo, booth 218, to your EXPO Plan here and don’t forget to read, “Getting the Most out of Your Shop.org Summit” to get tips from our CEO, Craig Wax.
See you at Shop.org!
Leading children’s furnishings and accessories retailer to highlight key products and features with the power of video
August 31, 2010
AUSTIN, Texas – Invodo®, the only full-service eCommerce video partner for online retailers, announced today that The Land of Nod, a sister store to Crate & Barrel, has selected Invodo as its eCommerce video partner. Invodo will create, implement and deliver online product video on the The Land of Nod retail site (www.landofnod.com), which specializes in high quality furniture and accessories for kid’s rooms.
“Customers are increasingly turning to video to learn more about products on the web,” said Michelle Kohanzo, Marketing Director at The Land of Nod. “We chose to partner with Invodo for our eCommerce video initiatives based on the company’s leading online video platform, high video quality and proven ability to further influence consumers at the point of purchase.”
Invodo, a full service eCommerce video solution provider, creates high-quality content at scale and develops leading technology to implement and deliver online product video on retail sites and other points of consumer influence. The Land of Nod will leverage video created by Invodo’s production team and implemented via the Invodo eCommerce video platform. The videos drive sales and reduce returns by highlighting key features of merchandise and aiding the consumer buying decision process.
“Both the Land of Nod website and the products sold there have earned a reputation as innovative and high-quality,” said Craig Wax, CEO of Invodo. “In choosing to work with Invodo, The Land of Nod can be confident that high standard will be maintained as we work together to create and implement video that will help inform customers and increase conversion rates.”
Linked is an example of one of the videos and the video library that have been produced and implemented on the Land of Nod site as a result of the partnership with Invodo.
About Invodo
Invodo helps online retailers sell more through the power of video. A full-service eCommerce video solution, Invodo creates high-quality product video at scale and develops retail-focused technology to influence consumers where it matters most. Invodo videos increase sales conversion rates, reduce returns and drive site traffic for customers, including Internet 500 retailers and major brands.
About The Land of Nod
The Land of Nod is part of the Crate and Barrel family of brands that also includes CB2. The Land of Nod was founded in 1996 by Scott Eirinberg and Jaime Cohen and is headquartered in Northbrook, IL.
Contact:
Jen Cadmus
jcadmus
invodo
com
512-934-8350
I was asked to write a blog on why I decided to join Invodo.
First, a disclaimer: This is my first blog post. Yes, I am a blog newcomer. I asked for guidance on what I should write and the answer was that I should be heartfelt and authentic. That sounded pretty simple to me, as that is how I live my life. So, without further disclaimer, here goes…
Before I tell you why I decided to join Invodo, let me start by telling you what is not the reason. Some people jump jobs because they are running from something – perhaps an environment that they don’t like, a boss they don’t like, a declining business, or something similar. That is not the case with me. I was very happy and proud of my team. They were like family to me. Wayport had been through the trials of Job and had emerged as a powerhouse – the largest provider of managed Wi-Fi hotspots in the US. We were also doing challenging and interesting things and business is booming, connections on our infrastructure were growing at 4x/year. Those kind of challenging things excite me, and it was a difficult decision to leave. Even though things changed with the AT&T acquisition, I wasn’t actively looking to make a jump to another company.
So, why Invodo? My wife asked why I would leave a stable job with a great team, great compensation and benefits to join a startup. She’s my toughest critic, so I am well practiced at answering this question. There are several reasons:
1) Opportunity. When we started at Wayport over 10 years ago, hardly anyone knew what a Wi-Fi hotspot was, but I thought that over the next decade Wi-Fi would become huge. It did, and Wayport became the largest provider of managed hotspots even though it had many larger competitors to begin with. When I look out over the next decade, I believe that video will be huge in e-commerce. I expect that just about every site will have video. Invodo is unique in this space as we do full service.
2) Team. When I met the Invodo team, it reminded me of my early days at Wayport and Pavilion. We had world-class teams at those companies and I see the same thing at Invodo. They are talented, energetic, fun, and entrepreneurs at heart. They are full of the fire, desire, and vision from which great companies are built. The investor group is the same as the group that funded Wayport, and they have a knack for picking winners.
3) Impact. I liked AT&T, but there wasn’t much I could do personally to move the mother ship in one direction or another. In a small company, my efforts are often live-or-die decisions: We do the right things and make it big, or we do the wrong things and we fold. I thrive on sense of responsibility and the rewards that come with it. When I look back over Pavilion and Wayport, I was instrumental in helping create companies that provided jobs for nearly 1,000 people (around 200 at Pavilion and nearly 800 at AWS). I would like to do that kind of thing again – building world-class teams is what I love to do.
4) Technology platform. Invodo’s technology platform is just at the beginning of what it can become, but it already has all of the right pieces. I expect that we will be adding unique IP to this in the future that will make Invodo the most sought-after provider in this space.
5) Money. Ok. I am coin-operated. The most important reason that I came to Invodo is to get stock options and make them worth a pile of money. That opportunity did not exist at AT&T. It also can’t be done without reasons 1-4, and I found a place where we can make the company very valuable. That is good for everyone, me, the employees and their families, and the investor group.
Stay tuned. I think this will be an extremely fun and profitable ride.
– Jim Keeler
AT&T’s Jim Keeler joins Invodo as VP of Engineering & Operations, University of Texas Professor Jim Fredrickson Joins Advisory Board
August 25, 2010
AUSTIN, Texas –Invodo®, the only full-service eCommerce video partner for online retailers, today announced that Jim Keeler has joined the Company as the Vice President of Engineering and Operations. In this role, Dr. Keeler will be responsible for leading the Invodo development team and maintaining Invodo’s position as the leading eCommerce content technology platform in the industry. In addition, Jim Fredrickson, well known University of Texas Professor and business consultant, joins the Invodo Advisory Board.
Dr. Keeler spent the last 10 years at AT&T/Wayport (AT&T acquired Wayport in November 2008 for $275 million) in a variety of roles including CTO and VP of Engineering where he led the technology team to enable AT&T Wi-Fi Services through explosive growth to become the largest Wi-Fi hotspot provider in the US. Prior to Wayport, he was the CTO, VP of R&D, and co-founder at Pavilion Technologies. Keeler holds a Ph.D in Physics from UCSD and was a Post-doctoral fellow at Stanford prior to moving to Texas to join MCC where he became Sr. Member of the Technical Staff. Dr. Keeler has over 30 patents, and several academic and industry awards.
“It’s exciting to join a company that’s making big strides and generating momentum in the market,” said Keeler. “Just as I saw during my time with Wayport, I am eager to build the technology team and platform for explosive growth and success at Invodo in the years ahead.”
Invodo’s Advisory Board augments the in-house talent and resources by providing insight and input on strategic issues that are relevant to specific areas of expertise for each member. Dr. Fredrickson has extensive consulting and executive development experience with clients such as Advanced Micro Devices, BMC Software, IBM, Deloitte & Touche, FedEx Kinko’s and Luminex. He is also Chairman of the Management Department and the Tom E. Nelson, Jr. Regents Professor of Business at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin where he also serves as the School’s first Director of Teaching Development.
“Invodo brings real value to the retail industry, and the growth they’ve experienced validates their business model,” said Fredrickson. “I am eager to lend my insight and experience to help them lead the market.”
“We’re consistently adding more large retail companies to our roster, joining current customers like Verizon Wireless, Toys R Us, Golfsmith and Lenovo,” noted Craig Wax, Invodo CEO. “We’ve chosen to bring the Jims on board because they bring the experience and skills we need to accelerate our growth.”
About Invodo
Invodo helps online retailers sell more through the power of video. A full-service eCommerce video solution, Invodo creates high-quality product video at scale and develops retail-focused technology to influence consumers where it matters most. Invodo videos increase sales conversion rates, reduce returns and drive site traffic for customers, including Internet 500 retailers and major brands.
Contact:
Jen Cadmus
jcadmusinvodocom
512-934-8350
In almost any area of business you can benefit from going back to basics. Nowhere is that more true than in merchandising video online for success. The impact of video for retailers on SEO, conversion and returns is well documented. It stands to reason that video delivers the most benefit when it’s merchandised where it will be viewed. But that’s often forgotten as retailers get involved in the complexities of choosing production options, optimizing for conversion, and mastering the intricacies of video SEO.
So let’s take a moment to look at what we know about merchandising video on product pages to increase view-through rate (VTR):
There’s a lot more actionable information in our merchandising whitepaper, Watch This! If you want to ensure that your videos are merchandised optimally, download it to use as a reference tool in planning your pages. There’s plenty of information in it to help with planning other video program elements, too – and to calculate the financial impact in order to get the project approved.
Once you’ve done as much as you can with the basics, there’s a lot more you can do. If you’re constrained in your video placement, consider tools like Invodo Smart Merchandising to get your videos viewed. Think about going beyond the product page, too. Place videos on category pages to help consumers shop or use video in email campaigns for a 2-3x improvement to click-through rates. Given the appetite online shoppers clearly have for video, the possibilities are limited only by your imagination and your video provider’s creativity and capabilities.
First things first, though. Are you making the most of video merchandising basics? If not, what stands in the way? Let me know in the comments.
Between our talk at eTail East with Invodo client Pure Pearls and discussions with Google about video sitemaps, video SEO continues to be a hot topic. Our ability to automatically generate video sitemaps at scale and ensure that the client’s domain receives the credit sounds impressive, but a client asked us today: why does it matter?
The picture above shows why it matters. The search for the term ‘ping G15′ (a simple search for a standard product) returns over 377,000 results. It’s very hard to rank on the first page out of 377,000. You can buy your way there with PPC, but data shows that 90% of consumers click on organic, not paid, links.
Properly implemented video SEO returns video on the first page of search results – on the client’s domain. Unique video content, a properly done video sitemap and attribution to the client’s domain are all that’s needed for two huge benefits:
Is further proof needed? What research and information would you like to see about video SEO? Let us know in the comments.
Today the people at SXSW started building the gigantic metal cage for this year’s Video vs. Social Cage Match at SXSW Interactive.
The buzz has already started over who will win this battle to the death between video and social. Craig Wax, CEO of Invodo, and Natanya Anderson, VP of Content Strategy and Delivery at Powered, will be the main contenders with Tim Walker, Content Manager at Breaking Point, as the referee/instigator.
Rounds will include:
In order to see this is epic match, you must VOTE! Create a free SXSW account here and then give the “thumbs up” to Cage Match: Social vs. Video. No ballot box stuffing – you can only vote for each panel once (but vote for as many panels as you like).
Don’t let 30″ metal cage and the intense training of both Craig and Natanya go to waste. You won’t be disappointed so vote today!
If you haven’t noticed, Verizon Wireless is breaking a lot of new ground with the use of video both on verizonwireless.com and on YouTube. So we took a few minutes recently for an email conversation with Dennis Mulato, Verizon Wireless Associate Director of Consumer Internet Sales & Marketing. Here’s what he had to say.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Dennis!
The First Annual Invodo Picnic is unfortunately behind us but what an event! Despite the Austin weather being quite hot, we all managed to have an excellent time.
The fajitas were amazing (thanks Mike!), you couldn’t beat the beats of Dylan’s musical stylings, and the company could not have been better. From bocce ball to a bounce house, the games, conversation, and great food brought us all together for an unforgettable fun filled afternoon.
I have to say, my favorite memory is seeing all the kiddos grabbing at the pile of candy fresh from the broken airplane pinata. Got to love such enthusiasm over candy!
Special thanks to Tracy, Dylan, Mike and every Invodian who made it! Can’t wait till next year!
Picture coming soon…
eCommerce Video is full of hidden complexities. From production to syndication, the number of elements involved is astounding. But don’t worry. Invodo makes video not just easy but really easy. Invodo is working with top eCommerce platforms in a variety of ways but with one underlying goal – To make adding Invodo Video to your product detail pages nearly effortless.
Today, we expect a lot from our eCommerce platform providers including robust architecture, merchandising capabilities, content management as well as an extensive feature set. But even more important to retailers today is the ability to easily integrate best-of-breed technologies similar to Invodo’s Video Platform.
While it is already pretty darn simple to add Invodo Video to product detail page, we have made our integrations even easier and more robust. We have added the ability to include our video via simple updates to your platforms business management tools. No coding or IT intervention needed. In a lot of instances, we have also added our video analytics capabilities and A/B testing functionality.
eCommerce platforms continue to realize the need to provide their customers with both access to full-service video solution and easy integration. Let us know what platform you use and we will work with you to make sure they have a built-in integration in place.
Get a sneak peak at how Invodo integrates with eCommerce platforms by watching the Invodo and Demandware archived webinar, “5 Steps to Sell More through Invodo Video.”
Next Up: Video and Email Marketing Solutions
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