This is a round up of my activities at Day Two of Internet World. Following on from yesterday the event was very well attended and you could tell who were the veterens of Day One as they turned up to talks and seminars at least 20 minutes before they were due to start in order to make sure that they got in.

For my part I attended four talks today and thought I would give you some details on each of them.

How Good Is Your Copy – Sticky Content Ltd

I am sorry to say I did not catch the name of the speaker as it was a change from the talk advertised. As you can tell from the title it was about the quality of the content that is on your site. It was good to hear that I am not the only one that gets issues around clients providing content on time.

The talk emphasised that when copy is not planned in advance it leads to it being rushed and this in turn means that the quality is not as high as it could be. Some of the tips that were shared included:

I think this last point is very valuable. You want your site to have the same look and feel throughout and this should carry over into the copy that is on the site too.

Video Is A Key Component Of Social – Gillian O’ Neil, moviestar.tv

Gillian is one of those people who is very passionate ablout her subject and this shone through in her talk. It was very much plugging her own product but I have to admit that her product is different to anything else on the market and is something that I would recommend to my clients.

Moviestar.tv is a website that allows you to post video content. You might think that it is like YouTube but for me the difference is the way that you can brand and customise your space on moviestar.tv. You can add your own logo, give it your corporate colours and have the ability to tweet and post your content on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Gillian has worked in the production of corporate videos for a number of years and imparted some useful tips such as making sure that you always have a call to action at the end of your videos. Hence if you watch my Day 2 video (when it finally uploads) you will see that I ask people to visit my website, thanks Gillian!

Another useful tip was to have a poster with your brand name and logo on behind you. I have a meeting with a printer on Friday and will be bringing this idea up with them.

Gillian also talked about the many ways that you could use video within a site and she had that sort of look in her eye that says, “I know something that you don’t, but I’m going to share it with you” that all evangelists, both religious and non religious share.

In actual fact I had spoken to Gillian on the moviestar.tv stand before the talk and was swept up with her enthusiasm, so much so that I signed up for the service while I was queueing up for the talk. I cannot wait to get back home to Blackburn so that I can have a real play around with my account.

Many Faces of Video – Fergus Dyer Smith, Wooshi

Another talk about the use of video. This was a more general one given by Fergus Dyer Smith of Wooshi. Fergus started out with some facts about video such as 60% of Internet traffic is video and he did point out that this is partially because video has large file sizes. He added that Cisco estimate that by 2013 this will have risen to 90% of Internet Traffic.

What I liked about Fergus’s style was the way he was very realistic in his talk. He quoted the fact that sites that incorporate video are 54 times more likely to show up on the first page of Google and qualified it by saying it would improve your chances but not necessarily by 54 times. I was a little surprised to hear that there are more searches carried out on You Tube than on Bing. However, it depends on what type of material you are looking for. As yet I do not think many people will conduct product searches on You Tube for instance.

There has been work carried out that says that there are 51 ways for a business to use video such as for testimonials, white papers etc. Fergus finished off by going through some examples. Doprbox, the cloud file storage company, changed their home page so that it consisted of an explanatory video with a download button underneath it and found that new registrations increased 30%.

Diamond Jewellery United are a website that sell jewellery, they added a video clip to every product page and they found that returns dropped 60%. The final example was that of Blendtec who make and sell food blenders in the States. They created a number of videos in which the CEO would blend unusual items such as iPods, lightbulbs etc. They even created a new site willitblend.com. Blendtec are now a household name in the States as a result of this video campaign.

The final point that he made is one that all website owners such think about “Websites don’t spread, content does”.

HTML5+ and Rich Media Mobile UI – Michael Niedhoefer, CEO, netbiscuits

HTML5+ is not some crazy extension to the as yet unagreed web standard, it is a brand name of a set of tools produced by netbiscuits to help create mobile websites. Michael is convinced that mobile is finally starting to take off and reported that pages created using HTML5+ increased from 4 billion to 6 billion pages served in the six months.

He talked about how too many people become obsessed with a single platform and blow their entire budget on producing a site for it and do not think that we are still in an emerging market and that you ignore platforms at your peril. Companies ned to adopta cross platform strategy, which made me think about what the web was like when CSS were first introduced and the differences between how pages would render in IE and Netscape, yes I know that shows my age.

Michael also talked about the differences between a web app and a native app. For those that do not know a web app is one that you can access via your browser while a native app is the type of app that you download from an app store and runs in its own environment on your device.