Ethoca, a privately held Dublin-based company with a breakthrough collaborative fraud fighting solution, is a great example of how to use video testimonials. Prominently displayed on their homepage is the CEO of TigerDirect, Gilbert Fiorentino explaining why online retailers (e-tailers) and virtually anyone in the business of taking customer-not-present payments should be part of Ethoca's Global Fraud Fighting Community. If you are in a business that suffers from payments fraud and you watch this video testimonial, you're going to want to join the community.
Steve Frook, VP of Member Recruitment at Ethoca, told me that they simply send their clients (members) a Flip video camera that costs about $200 and asks them for a video testimonial. The camera is portable, easy to use, and is customized with Ethoca’s logo and messaging (Ethoca calls their camera the Community Voice Camera). Frook adds “Prospective member of our community want to hear what existing members have to say – video makes this possible and assists us in achieving our goal of having existing members of the community recruit new members.” A brilliant idea that’s simple, cost effective and extremely powerful!
How can Ethoca take this a step further?
Ethoca has published the video on YouTube but it is not optimized for maximum exposure. The video is #8 if you Google "Gilbert Fiorentino". And I'm sure some people and perhaps Tiger Direct competitors are searching for information about him. At the time of this post, only 1 person made a comment about the video, saying "tigerdirect rules". This is fine, but Ethoca is not targeting fans of TigerDirect, they're looking for organization to join their community! I haven't done the keyword research, but I'd be willing to bet money that TigerDirect competitors, e-tailers and others in relevant businesses are Googling "reduce credit card risk", "risk management", "card-not-present payments", "credit card fraud", etc, etc.
Once Ethoca knows what their potential members are searching for they could use social media optimization techniques to improve the visibility. The video was published on Oct 31, 2008 but has only been viewed 490 times. The testimonial is powerful; now they just need more people to see it.
