Bideo puts a price on user generated content

Posted on 25 January 2010 | by Aaron Traffas, CAI, ATS, CES | 3 comments

A new site launches today and aims to use the auction method of marketing to allow users to sell news-related video to interested parties. We think it’s an interesting use of competitive bidding, and worth a look. Here’s the release.

BideoJanuary 18th, 2010 – New Orleans, LA – Bideo.com is a revolutionary online media exchange where creators of breaking news video and still images can manually protect and sell their content directly to publications in an auction setting. The Bideo message to creators is simple: stop giving away amazing videos and photos, and start selling them.

A tornado tearing across a field, a plane landing in a river, an amateur dunking on an NBA star, or exclusive shots of celebrities and athletes misbehaving, some pictures and videos are rare gems that are often the direct result of a camera phone being in the right place at the right time.

The increasing amount of valuable content being produced by citizen journalists is garnering interest from major publications, which are now welcoming an opportunity to access, purchase and publish such images. Brittain Stone, Photo Director for US Weekly, sees Bideo as a great resource for publications to obtain newsworthy material. “The Bideo format can be the efficient and trustworthy intermediary between those user creators and the buyer. It will be a way for us to tap into formerly ambivalent and often unattainable sources with ease and immediacy.”

HOW BIDEO WORKS

  • The seller uploads an image from a computer or mobile device, adds a description and sets the auction terms. The original file is stored on a secure server while a watermarked copy is created and listed in a live auction.
  • Bideo’s notification system automatically alerts relevant publications based on the item’s information. Sellers can also manually send notifications to their own list of potential buyers.
  • Buyers assess the image and bid on the exclusive right to publish it. A buy now option is also available.
  • The original file is transferred to the winning bidder’s account when the auction ends and payment is made.
  • The seller receives 75% (and up to 85%) of the final bid price immediately after the sale is complete, and the seller agrees to honor the exclusive license purchased by the buyer.

Founder and CEO, Pike Barkerding, sees demand for a service like Bideo.com rapidly increasing. “Everyday more and more breaking images are published by citizen journalists who are not properly recognized or compensated for their work,” says Barkerding. “Bideo seeks to empower this growing army of ‘right-place-right-time’ creators by giving them a simple, secure and profitable way to promote their content to interested buyers.”

For buyers, Bideo serves as a central, organized source for newsworthy user-generated content that is otherwise difficult or impossible to obtain. “I think we [Us Weekly] miss a lot of interesting and topical images that aren’t represented by the established agencies and therefore don’t percolate up to us in a timely fashion if at all. On those occasions when these people do approach us, negotiations are skittish and drawn out because the potential sellers aren’t familiar with the ground rules of our particular marketplace,” says Stone.

Why an auction? “Newsworthy images can be difficult to price, especially non-professional, user-created images. Think eBay meets iReport. By posting content in an auction, sellers can let the open market decide the price and get the true market value for their work,” says Barkerding. “The same dynamic also creates a chance for buyers to find great deals on exclusive footage.”

Another benefit of the efficiency offered by Bideo is the ability for buyers and sellers to forego pricey middlemen (agencies), yielding lower cost to buyers, higher commissions to sellers, and greater immediacy throughout. “This also makes it attractive to professional photographers looking to sell a rare exclusive,” says Barkerding. “They can sell it autonomously on Bideo and get a higher return.”

Barkerding sees Bideo as a no-brainer alternative to the popular practice of giving content away for anything less than true market value. “Listing is free, and if you think it’s amazing, odds are someone wants to buy it. You set the price, you control the sale and, if it doesn’t sell, you can still give it away. So, why not try Bideo?”

Last summer, a private beta version of the site was launched in Los Angeles with a specific focus on celebrity content as a test market. During this soft rollout Bideo has been working with several L.A.-based photographers and celebrity publications including Us Weekly, TMZ, People Magazine, Access Hollywood, E! and Star Magazine. Bideo.com will be launched publicly on January 25, 2010 to serve and connect all forms of newsworthy content to publications in media markets throughout the world.

For more information on Bideo, please visit www.bideo.com/invitation.

For media inquiries, contact Matthew Bowes or Skipper Bond at 504-897-0462 or [email protected] and [email protected].

What do you think about this auction application? Is it a great, new way to expose auctions to the media or does it provide barriers to the news process? Let us know in the comments.

Posted in announcements | Tagged , |

2010 Kansas Auctioneers Association Convention in Wichita, Kansas

Posted on 24 January 2010 | by Aaron Traffas, CAI, ATS, CES | Leave a comment

We’re putting the final wraps on the 2010 KAA Convention at the Wichita Airport Hilton.

Past presidents of the Kansas Auctioneers Association

Past presidents of the Kansas Auctioneers Association

Thursday night featured a meet-and-greet honoring past presidents.

Lynn Langvardt was the winner of the Kansas Livestock Bid-call Contest held in El Dorado on Thursday night. Last year’s livestock champion, Charlie Cummings, won the KAA Bid-call Contest this year at the state fair and was installed Saturday night as the new state champion.

Here’s some video that was streamed live via Ustream using a Motorola Droid. It features current IAC Champion Kevin Borger, KAA Champion Charlie Cummings, and others selling during the fun auction on Friday night.

Posted in community, announcements, bid calling | Tagged , , , , , , |

Brand your blog

Posted on 23 January 2010 | by Aaron Traffas, CAI, ATS, CES | Leave a comment
This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Internet branding

This week, we’ve examined domain names and email addresses as they relate to your brand. In today’s third installation of our Internet branding series, we’re going to take a look at your weblog. The same concepts that apply to your domain names and your email addresses absolutely apply to your blog.

Like email addresses, it’s really easy to get a free blog. Free blog providers include WordPress and Blogger. These free blogs assign a subdomain (the part of the domain that comes before the primary domain name) like yourauctionblog.wordpress.com. Some, like WordPress, even allow you to assign a custom domain name to your blog. This free blog approach is really great if you’re blogging about your grasshopper collection or you want to keep a diary of your trip to to the museum of bad marketing tactics, but if you’re blogging for business, you need to have your blog hosted professionally.

Your blog should be branded. Your domain IS your brand, so your blog needs to exist on your website in order to be properly branded. This rule means that the free sites are out of the question – unless you actually work for WordPress, your blog shouldn’t include wordpress.com in the domain name. Assigning a separate domain name to your blog is certainly better, but it still misses the target of hosting your blog on your primary domain.

WordPress
Image via Wikipedia

But wait! We’ve been singing the praises of WordPress for years, why would we say that WordPress is bad? The answer is that wordpress.com is a commercial service that will host your blog. wordpress.org is a site that hosts the WordPress software that you can download for free and install on your own website. By installing the software, you can leverage the power and ease-of-use inherent to the WordPress package while allowing your customers to go to yourwebsite.com/blog or blog.yourwebsite.com. By having a custom WordPress theme created, the user experience can be seamless among your auction calendar, your static pages and your blog.

WordPress isn’t the only blogging software that you can use on your website, but it’s certainly our favorite. Your web host may have different software that can be just as easily and quickly installed and configured to allow you to post your articles and news by simply logging in and typing.

Internet branding is simple. While it may be easier to simply grab a free account from somewhere, it’s far more professional to have a comprehensive, congruent presence that is consistently branded to provide a seamless user experience.

Posted in design, websites, advertising | Tagged , , , , , , |

Brand your email address

Posted on 22 January 2010 | by Aaron Traffas, CAI, ATS, CES | 1 comment
This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Internet branding

Yesterday, we examined some of the factors involved in selecting a domain name for your business. It needs to be a .com, match your company’s name, be short and be marketed in lowercase. Today, in the next installment of our Internet branding series, we’re going to look at your email address.

The worst mistake you can make to turn customers away is to use something other than your name for the username. This mistake was the at the top of the list in a recent survey. [email protected] and [email protected] worked great for user names in college, but now it’s time to use [email protected] or [email protected] or just [email protected]. If you have an address that is checked by more than one person, such as a generic company address, then it’s okay to find something generic like [email protected] or [email protected], but don’t use it for your company account unless it is checked by more than one person. That’s not the address to put on your personal business card.

Outside of the above offense, few other concepts seem more obvious than the importance of having an email address that matches the domain name of your website. Nevertheless, we still see some auctioneers who advertise to their customers a generic, free addresses from email providers such as AOL, Hotmail/MSN/Live, Gmail – or worse, from their Internet service providers such as Cox, SBC Global or Comcast.

Using one of the above-mentioned providers for a personal email account is okay, though it’s much more fun to register a domain name for yourself or your family to use for non-commercial purposes. Using an email address for commercial purposes that doesn’t match your domain name is simply unprofessional.

Your website IS your brand. Why on Earth would there be any benefit in advertising an address that doesn’t include your brand? Reasons we’ve heard cited for using a generic email account for business include the following.

  • I’ve always used this address
  • I have multiple domain names
  • Using Gmail makes me seem cutting-edge and hip
  • I don’t know how to set up email for my domain name
  • I like the tools offered by this provider
  • I want synchronized Outlook but don’t want to host my own Exchange server

None of these reasons justifies letting customers see an email address that doesn’t include your brand. The only reason listed that doesn’t involve lack of configuration or simplicity is the idea that customers somehow perceive Gmail users as advanced. This is true, but only in comparison with other free email providers. We all like to make fun of AOL and Yahoo users, but consumers equally ridicule Gmail users who use Gmail for business. It’s assumed that these users are either too lazy or don’t know how to set up their own, branded email addresses.

Gmail inbox (July 2009)

The solution is simple. Use a service like Gmail – Google Apps for your Domain is a particularly excellent choice – or a company that provides hosted Exchange server to allow you to have one powerful interface to check all your email accounts. It’s very simple to configure addresses from one or many domain names to have email delivered to one location. Through the use of rules in Outlook or filters in Gmail, you can easily keep track of all your accounts in one central location. When properly configured, each email you send will appear to come from the appropriate account. The methods to this configuration are outside the scope of this article and will depend on your registrar and your web host.

We’ve actually met auctioneers who have removed the website from business cards, relying on different colors to make the domain in the email address stand out, thereby conveying both an email address and a website on one line. This leap of faith that customers will recognize this strategy isn’t for the weak-at-heart, but it’s an innovative idea, nonetheless.

When is it okay to use an email address for business that isn’t matched to your domain name? There are two scenarios.

  1. You’re unemployed
  2. You don’t have a domain name yet

If the first is true, you’re probably not using it for commercial purposes unless it’s to send and receive responses from resumes. In this case, a Gmail account – or, better yet, [email protected] – will lend the most professional impression to a prospective employer. If the second is true, stop reading now, read yesterday’s post and then buy a domain name. The first year’s registration costs less than having your logo embroidered on a shirt, and is many orders of magnitude more valuable and important.

Your domain is your brand. Your email address is an obvious and easy way to promote your brand and show your customers that you run a professional organization.

Posted in advertising | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , |

Selecting domain names

Posted on 21 January 2010 | by Aaron Traffas, CAI, ATS, CES | 7 comments
This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Internet branding

Today we embark on a three-part series regarding Internet branding. Specifically, we’ll discuss how the choices you make for your domain name, your email address and your blog begin to build your brand before you think about designing a logo or writing a word of copy.

There are some rules to follow when choosing a domain name for your site.

ICANN Logo
Image via Wikipedia

Select a .com TLD
A TLD is a top level domain. .com, .net, .org were among the first and are still the most common TLDs in the United States. Unlike other TLDs like .gov and .mil, anyone can register new domain names with these three TLDs without restriction. The .com TLD is for companies or commercial endeavors. .org is for non-profit – you guessed it – organizations, while .net is for more personal projects that aren’t as official as .com or .org. There are now many other TLDs, and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is planning to begin to allow essentially an unlimited number of new TLDs soon, increasing the number from perhaps 100 current TLDs to possibly thousands.

The problem is that nobody remembers websites that don’t end in .com. Now you’re going to object, reminding us that the new domains offer specialization. “But .pro would be a great choice since I’m a professional!” No it wouldn’t. Professionals choose .com. “But .ca is available and I’m located in Canada!” Your location doesn’t matter. If you’re in the United States and advertising your commercial website, .com is for winners.

Own the domain that matches your company name
“We’re a US company and someone already has aaaauction.com,  .us works just as well!” No it doesn’t. If someone already has the .com name for your company, you absolutely need to change your business name. That’s how important it is that your domain name matches your company.

If your website is kansasbid.com, make sure that your company name is Kansas Bid and vice versa. If you try to get cute with your domain name, few will remember it.

Shorter is better
If your company is named for you, your first and best bet is your last name. In other words, if our auction company is called Aaron Traffas Auctioneers, we would look for traffas.com. It suffers from being difficult to spell, but we’d get around that problem by registering travis.com, traffis.com, trafas.com and so on, having each of the alternate misspellings point to the main account. However, since traffas.com is taken, we’d settle for aarontraffas.com, knowing that it was a little less desirable than traffas.com but not quite a deal breaker.

However, let’s say that we’re John Smith Auctioneers. Obviously smith.com is taken. Obviously johnsmith.com is taken. Do we look for johnsmithauctioneers.com? Now we’re getting into the problem of a lengthy domain name. The longer the name, the more difficult it is to predict misspellings, the harder it is to fit on business cards, the harder it is to read on billboards, and – worst of all – the harder it is to get customers to remember the site. Was it johnsmithauctioneer.com? Was it johnsmithauctions.com? Notice they never think to ask if it was .net or .org or .us or .idiot.

Own your domain name
This problem is rampant within the auction industry. Many auctioneers are approached from an upselling [read:predatory] website hosting company with a sales pitch that goes something like this. “We’ll host website for you and even register your domain name so you don’t have to deal with a registrar or mess with any of that techy stuff.” We really like it when they use the word techy, by the way. The company then registers your domain name for themselves and creates your website. Should you ever wish to leave, you can’t simply point your domain name to another provider because you don’t own it, they do.

Find out if you own your domain name. Go to http://www.whois.net/ and enter your website. Sometimes, as in the case with Network Solutions, it will tell you you have to go to the registrar used to register the domain name to see who owns it. Stay with us. This exercise is important. Your web host can be listed as the technical contact, but you must be listed as the registrant or you don’t own your website.

CamelCase isn’t for websites
This rule isn’t necessarily about selecting your domain, but it’s about how you present it to your users. It will probably generate some opposing comments, but we feel it’s both true and important. Websites are case-insensitive. That means that auctioneertech.com is just as valid as AuCtIoNeErTeCh.com. Why don’t we write our website using CamelCase like AuctioneerTech.com since that’s the way it looks in our logo? Because websites should ALWAYS be written exclusively in lowercase. Writing your site using intermittent capital letters may make it seem easier to read, but it also makes you seem a little less – to use the word from our patronizing, predatory salesperson from above – techy than the competition. Your customers notice the details, don’t give them the opportunity to think less of you because of something as simple as how you write your domain name.

Priorities
In summary, your website is the most important marketing component to your business. While many people will come to your site by clicking a link, far more will visit your site because they saw your website in an ad or because they’ve been there before. Make it easy for them not only to remember, but to guess. The first thing most everyone does when trying to load a site is to type the company name and add .com. If that doesn’t work, if we’re interested enough we may look up to see what it was supposed to be, either by referencing the ad or searching in Google. In this case, it’s already a strike against the site and the milk is a little more sour before we’ve even arrived at our destination.

Posted in websites, theory, advertising | Tagged , , , , , , |