Call me Scrooge, but I hate online video.

I know, I’m the only one. More and more internet marketeers are relying on video squeeze pages for one simple reason: they work. Adding a video to your squeeze page can give you a measurable boost in response rates.

So, what’s my beef? Here are the peculiar, ideosyncratic reasons why I will not watch the video on your squeeze page:

I can’t skim it. I see a blurry still shot of you talking at your webcam. What are you talking about? I have no idea. What’s your offer? Your call to action? I won’t know unless I invest my valuable time in watching your video to the end. Now, if your landing page was presented to me in text, as God intended, I could read the headline and immediately scroll down to your P.S. to see if it’s worth my time to read your whole pitch.

I can’t do anything else at the same time. I spend a lot of time on hold. I can skim your sales letter while I listen to a scratchy, ancient version of Jingle Bells by the Ray Rand singers while I wait for my doctor’s office to pick up, but I have to wrench myself away from other activities while I watch your video. Video is bad news for multitaskers.

Craptacular production values. I know I’m being picky here, but a lot of the “talking head” videos out there are just painful to watch. Bad lighting, bad sound, a slightly-off-kilter tripod…it just makes you look  like a rank amateur. I think it’s particularly ironic when self-described multimillionaire internet marketers post videos that appear to have been filmed by their toddler with a “My First Webcam” by Playskool. C’mon…take some of your internet millions and spring for an HD camera and real lighting!

Your video is practically keyword-free. Now this more a professional beef than a personal one. Unless you go to the effort to post your video somewhere that allows tags, and actually tag it appropriately, all the juicy keywords in your presentation have gone to waste.

So how can you get me to watch your video? It’s really, really simple. Post the transcript–or at least, a bullet-point summary–on the same page below the video. I can see it, and Google can see it. We all win.

Give me the option to consume your content MY WAY, or I hit the highway.

I tend to be a late adopter in everything except science fiction TV franchises (see “Firefly.”) I’m very content to have the world do the beta-testing, and get back to me when the thing is finished.

So I was pretty late to the Twitterverse. But back in January I started reading about it in earnest, when more and more clients started asking me for my Twitter name. Eventually I integrated Twitter into a promotional campaign for a client’s online event, and a month after that, finally got serious about Twitter myself.

I expected to find a “micro blogging” service, whatever that is. But what I found is actually far more interesting than that. I found people I had lost track of, I found information I didn’t know I was looking for, and I found connections with people who probably wouldn’t take my phone calls in real life. I also discovered a new way to lead (attract a lot of like-minded followers) and a better way to stay informed. What I haven’t found (so far) is the “fast, easy way to Internet riches” that so many Twitter spammers and quasi-gurus promise. (I’ll let you know when I do…from my hacienda in the Bahamas.)

What can Twitter do for you?

Twitter is still kind of the “wild west” in terms of a communications platform. You can do anything you want with it, really, and “the marketplace” will tell you if they like what you’re doing by either following you or not. Depending on your goals, you can use it to…

• Keep in touch with people you know in real life (people who take your phone calls)
• Build personal or professional relationships with people you don’t know but want to know (people who would never take your phone calls, if you could find their number, which you can’t)
• Provide customer service support/handle complaints (more large companies are using Twitter this way)
• Keep website members updated about activity on your site (check out the @HypnoThoughts Twitter Feed for an example)
• Send status updates about your event, promotion or campaign (“We’ve raised $600,000 so far!”)
• Share content you’ve created elsewhere (this blog post will be sent to my Twitter account automagically)
• Broadcast helpful info and news items about your field of expertise
• Entertain people (lots of comedians and TV networks have Twitter feeds–the funniest is @BrentSpiner, the actor best known for playing Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation)
• Advocate for your brand, cause, political viewpoint or candidate (see below)
• Create an RSS feed reader (RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication,” which is a way of subscribing to a news feed about a topic or person who interests you).

I’ve had some good strategic and tactical successes with Twitter. The biggest success is also the most surprising.

I’m a libertarian and Ron Paul fan, so I launched the account @RonPaul_2012, set up Google News RSS feeds to the account to post news stories that mention Ron Paul, and started following the @RonPaul_2012 account from my “real” account, @KathleenHanover. Following @RonPaul_2012 shoots Ron Paul news stories right into my Twitter stream (no more Googling.)

I was surprised when the first few people started following @RonPaul_2012. I was astonished when the account attracted over 250 followers in the first couple of weeks. And I’m gobsmacked that @RonPaul_2012 now has over 900 liberty-loving, re-tweeting constitutionalist followers. Yes, that’s more followers than my “real” account. A couple of times a week, people mistake the account for the real Ron Paul (who’s not active on Twitter, as far as I know.) I gently correct them.

So what is Twitter good for? Just about anything any other medium is good for, it turns out. And then some.

Hypnotherapist Scott Sandland created his own social network, HypnoThoughts.com, rather than rely on sites like Facebook or MySpace.

I learn SO much from my clients. If it weren’t for them, I’d probably be the last person on earth to dive into social networking. That’s why I’m glad to be working with Scott Sandland, a genius hypnotherapist who also happens to be an expert in creating community online.

When it comes to social networks, you have two options. In real estate, we call these renting or owning. When you rent space (on, say, Facebook) you have to put up with your landlord’s tastes, maintenance schedule, and personality quirks. You may have some leeway in decorating, but you’d be an idiot to invest much money in the place, because it will never belong to you.

Then there’s owning. When you own property, you can invest in improvements that increase its value. You can choose your own paint scheme. You can control who hangs out on your lawn.

When he set out to build an online destination for hypnosis professionals, Scott wasn’t satisfied with the big-name social networks (Facebook, MySpace, etc.) He wanted more control of the look, feel and functionality of the site. He wanted to invest in something he would own. So he started HypnoThoughts.com.

In its first two years, he has spent thousands of dollars on customization of the proprietary platform that HypnoThoughts runs on. But even more importantly, he invested hundreds of hours in creating an ecosystem, and defining how people in his community would interact with each other.

He has been relentlessly non-commercial (save for a few small banner ads) and tolerates no salesmanship on the site. The interactions between members feel more like a seminar, and almost never like one of those glad-handing networking events. The community, for the most part, is self-policing. Scott tells everyone that he almost never deletes posts, because he expects members to conduct themselves as professional adults. And for the most part, they do.

This ecosystem has been hugely successful for Scott, helping him to position himself as a trusted authority in his field–and just as importantly, as someone who is dedicated to advancing his profession. Members are incredibly loyal to HypnoThoughts as a community and to Scott personally. And the proof is in the membership roster: with nearly 4,200 members in just 2 years, and over 800 unique visitors a day, HypnoThoughts.com is by far the largest social network in the hypnosis niche.

When you create a social networking strategy, of course it makes sense to take advantage of the brand name networks. (In addition to HypnoThoughts, I’ve also helped Scott with his presence on LinkedIn, Digg, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and YouTube.)

But if you’re operating in a niche market, and you have the chops to become a true leader in your field, it may make  sense for you to invest the time and money in creating your own social network. Why?

• You control the branding.
• You control the content (and ownership of it).
• You control the Terms of Use
• You control marketing and promotion
• You drive traffic to your own destination
• You can build up equity in your own property vs one that belongs to someone else

Of course, owning a home is more work than renting. You have to fix the plumbing (er, servers). You have to cut the grass. But in the end, the payoff may be worth it.

Bearded, bubbly pitchman Billy Mays passed away today in his home in Florida, according to press reports. It was stunning news–Mays was only 50 years old, and kept up an intense schedule of travel and (of course) pitching. (My condolences go out to Mays’ family, friends and colleagues.)

Perhaps most famous for his OxyClean commercials, Mays pitched a long list of products and services. There’s probably a Billy Mays commercial running somewhere on TV at every moment of the day. And he was starring the the Discovery Channel show Pitchmen with Andrew Sullivan.

So what happens to all that content?

It was one thing when TV naturalist Steve Irwin was tragically killed by a stingray. When he wasn’t diving in shark-infested waters, or wrestling crocodiles, he was playing with poisonous snakes. It was understood that Steve Irwin’s career was hazardous, and I would hope that Animal Planet  had some kind of crisis plan in place in the event of his serious injury or death.

But Billy Mays was only 50 and in apparent good heath. Does the Discovery Channel have a crisis plan? Perhaps not. Mays was reported unresponsive by his wife at 7:45 a.m. today. I’m writing at 1:30 p.m., and the Discovery Channel’s Pitchman page mentions nothing about his death. In a Twitterized, viral news cycle, this seems odd.

And what happens to all those infomercials?

Screen capture from the Discovery Channel website: No mention of Pitchmen star Billy Mays' death.