Great minds think alike

Back in March I blogged about how to use Video.  In the May edition of B2B magazine there is a short interview with Jeremy Allaire who makes a few points that are very consistent with my post:

• The challenges of using YouTube as your primary video strategy: loss of control, experience and limited engagement.
• Leverage YouTube to reach customers, then bring them to your own site where you control the experience.
• Taking advantage of syndication to social networks (i.e. YouTube)
• Adding very clear calls to action to send uses back to your site
• The importance of metrics

i am not suggeting Jeremy read my blog and stole my ideas (I would be honored, he has been an industry visionary for years. I have been tracking him since the early days of Cold Fusion), just pointing out there is validation from an industry expert of these concepts.

Our fantastic Social Media Strategist, Dirk Shaw has a very interesting blog post about earned content. We have been chatting about how companies need to develop a content marketing strategy that includes content aggregation as well as content syndication.

If you are interested in learning more about social media you should follow Dirk at @dirkmshaw and you may find the white paper I wrote on Enterprise Social Media Strategies interesting.

How to Use YouTube as a Marketing Tool

There is no question about the importance of video as a key component of a marketing strategy.  We live in the age of the video-centric Web.

 

There are opportunities and dangers in using YouTube as a marketing tool.  First, it is important to understand the profile of the typical YouTube visitor. By looking at the most viewed videos, I think it is safe to assume most people spending time on YouTube are teens looking for entertainment – music videos, comedy or funny videos. This is not to say that is the only demographic using it.

 

The opportunity is to use YouTube as a distribution mechanism to fish for customers. The danger is in using it as your video platform. Let me explain:

 

There are a number of problems with embedding your own YouTube videos on your own Web site: Google may insert contextual advertising about your competitors and customers can click on the video to be taken to YouTube.com where they can get lost watching at Coke and Mentos videos, forgetting why they went to your site in the first place. In other words, you don’t control the experience. Any medium to large company probably is going to have to manage dozens or hundreds of videos, and you need a better way to manage those videos, to understand who and how they are viewed and to connect them with other resources on your site in a synergistic way.

 

You can’t do this with You Tube. You probably need a video platform that provides all these capabilities. You need to own your Video experience, because Video is as important as any content on your site.  This is why we built Vignette Video Services, to help companies who want to take control of their video strategy.  

 

The opportunity is to use YouTube as a channel to fish for customers. The ideal scenario is the opposite as what I described above: people go from YouTube to your site. Posting your content on YouTube to make it easy for people to find will probably increase your reach and viewership. What you need to accomplish is that at the end of the video customers don’t click on the funny video that Google is promoting but on your site because they need more information or they want to learn more.

 

At a minimum you should promote your site’s URL at the beginning and end of your video. you may want to create a series of videos and only make the first part of the series available on YouTube, customers would have to go to your site to get the rest of the story.

 

It is interesting that we live in the age of the video-centric Web, yet most of the industry is still learning how to use it. This tells me Video presents an opportunity to get ahead. It is an opportunity to build a strategy that gives you a competitive advantage.

 

The question is – what are you doing with Video?