Captains of Industry

By Ted Page, Captains of Industry
In a January 24th story in the Boston Globe, Scott Kirsner offers some good tips for getting your company greater visibility in search engines.

Kirsner suggest that fresh and useful content should be a part of any company’s strategy for getting seen. The Captains agree with this, but we’d go one step further. What’s needed is great stories that captivate the imagination of the people you most want to connect with. In the age of YouTube and Vimeo, when millions of people are snacking on short web videos every day, great storytelling on the web often means video. Any website today can be its own TV channel, with an audience that’s as narrowly focused as it needs to be, with video content that helps attract just the people who matter most to your company. A case in point is the media center for First Wind, a leading wind energy company. Check out this video for a wind farm in Utah that came about through the vision of a local high school teacher and his students.

This video and others by First Wind have been picked up by a range of blogs, essentially extending the audience of First Wind’s web TV channel – for free. The constantly updated web video content on First Wind’s site, combined with other fresh content such as news and interactive maps, has increased their site traffic by 50%. It’s important to note that search engines still have a hard time finding video content, but they do find the titles of the videos and other text that accompanies them. What people are really finding are the stories. That’s what matters.