maine web development, web design, internet marketing

YouTube recently took the title of fourth most visited site on the internet (behind Google, Facebook and Yahoo). Whether you consider YouTube a thriving online community of people searching for information or a huge time suck – you can’t ignore that people are on it and using it.

I have seen my fair share of cute, funny, gross, odd videos and shared them with my friends. I have also seen lots of great business content – how to videos, video blogs, product demos, presentations and more. Video is a great way to really put a face to your company, appeal to visual learners, build trust with your customers and reach out to your audience in a new way.

B2B Video marketing

B2B companies often drool over the shiny new toys that their hip B2C siblings get to play with but video translates into both B2B and B2C. In the B2B buying process, often the most time consuming piece of the process is the research phase. B2B purchases are large and usually take more then one person to make the purchasing decision. What better way to build trust with potential customers than with video?

A picture is worth a thousand words.. and video is worth like a zillion words.

Here are a few ideas for your B2B company when creating an online video:

• A message from your president
• Demo of your products
• Training, how to, or a presentation
• Highlights from tradeshows
• Client testimonials

As with any marketing effort, developing a plan and measuring results may be the most important part! You and your marketing team need to decide what content your audience wants to hear from you, how you are going to shoot your video, what you want to achieve etc. before you turn on your video camera.

Kyle and I did a short presentation this week at the Social Media FTW conference here in Portland on using YouTube for business. Below are our slides from the event. We are also hosting a roundtable next Tuesday on YouTube Marketing for Business if you would like to attend and bring your burning questions.

This video tutorial focuses on the popular open source blogging platform, Wordpress.  In this video, I show you the ropes of the Wordpress platform: how to add and edit new posts, and some of the basic features of blogs.

For the last two weeks, we’ve talked about how to get the gear to make a video and how to turn an idea into reality. Later today I’ll finally be presenting our webinar on using web video to tell your story, and today’s post is about how to get your video to do something once you’ve created it.

How you market your video is a unique representing of the type of video you choose to create. For example, there’s not much point in Christopher Penn marketing his welcome to my website video. Certain kinds of videos are meant to be shared and spread, others are intended to be more utilitarian.

So what are some of the types of videos you can make, and what’s the appropriate way to market them?

• Success Stories – Success story videos are excellent. They tell about your company in the words of your customer, helping prospects relate and building a trust relationship that is hard to tell in words alone. But are they going to get 1,000,000 hits in YouTube? Probably not. Put a success story video on your website, absolutely, and get the word out to people who will care about it. Put it in your company newsletter or highlight it on your blog. Make links to it prominent so that your website visitors will get to it. Maybe even burn a DVD to send to prospects who aren’t as web-savvy… it’s worth it!
• President’s Message – This kind of message should be prominently featured on your website, easy to find and concise. Sure, you can put it on YouTube, but without being on your site and being interested in your story, who is likely to care? Again, this kind of video is best suited to permission-based communications with people who are already interested in you.
• Viral Videos – What makes a viral video a hit is a combination of art, science, and good old-fashioned luck (okay, maybe timing has more to do with it). Unlike videos that are intended to go out to customers who are pre-qualified to enjoy your message, the very intent of a viral video means it has broad appeal. Instead of trying to influence the opinions of a chosen few, a viral video is meant to amuse the masses. NOW you can post it on YouTube, tell all your friends, tweet it, StumbleIt, Digg it… Start with the network of people who care about what you say, and then try to get that network to share it with their network, and soon you’ll truly have a viral hit. If your viral video doesn’t resonate well enough with people to get shared — well, take a coffee break, shrug, and get back to the drawing board.

As is the nature of online media, the way you get the word out about your video is a unique outcropping of what you have to say. Measuring success by hundreds of thousands of views doesn’t make sense for a product demonstration. More important is engagement. Whether people care.

We’ll revisit this topic soon and discuss some of the hard stuff — how you actually measure engagement and interest, and how you use that to modify your strategy. In the meantime, don’t miss Show Don’t Tell, Using Video to Tell Your Story!

photo credit: vancouverfilmschool

As I discussed last week, web video doesn’t require the same kind of equipment you need to shoot an amazing indie short. However, that doesn’t mean you get to skimp on the creativity!

The blessing and curse of web video is that you have only 2-5 minutes to say what you’ve got to say. You don’t need to try and make a two hour long story make sense, like a filmmaker does, but instead you have to compete with a dazzling world of distraction — email, Twitter, other websites, etc. Your video needs to come on strong and stay strong.

So how do you do this? There are many tried and true forms, and when it comes to business-to-business, you have the added advantage that viewers are not as entertainment hungry as the typical YouTube crowd. You can focus on more informative resources such as a message from the President, a testimonial from a customer, or just a description of what you do in a slightly more entertaining way. One particularly nice touch I like is Christopher Penn’s opening to FinancialAidPodcast.com.

Of course, an idea does not a video make. You need to turn the idea into words and images, and this is where even the simplest web video requires a touch of art. Turning on the camera and letting it run just isn’t going to work. You need to plan out what the video will be in as much detail as possible before you even think about trying to record it.

This is the process in filmmaking called pre-production, and as many a seasoned videographer will tell you, the more time you spend in this process the easier the recording will go, and the finer the finished product will be.

So what do you need in pre-production? These specifics will get you going:

• A script – Fancy software that uses the Hollywood screenplay standard is probably not needed. Instead, a simple two column format works. I tend to write it like play dialogue — SOANDSO says something, then paragraphs describe the visuals. A storyboard consisting of doodles of the frames that accompany the audio can help.
• The actors – Who’s going to be in the video? Are they willing to do it? Do they need to memorize their lines? What outfits does your script call for?
• A place to shoot – It all depends on your script, and there are trade-offs no matter where you choose to shoot. Interiors can be quieter, but are hard to light adequately. Shooting outside can get a very crisp shot with little effort, but you’ll be forced to deal with wind and possibly traffic noise fuzzing with your audio.
• Props – Flying monkeys? Check.
• A date and time – Once you’ve figure out what you want to shoot, who will be in it, and where you’ll do it, now you just need to get all of those elements into the same place at the same time. It’s not as easy as it sounds!

Even with the best of planning, a video shoot can be tedious and frustrating (Why DOES that plane keep flying by?!?!), but the more effort you put into the front-end, the smoother the process will go in the end. In reality, a good professional video team is more than just a bunch of guys who can wield a camera — it’s an organized, artistic company that can manage the logistics of a complex project, show endless patience as they do and re-do their work, master all of this technical gobbledeegook and use all this technology to convey a cohesive marketing message.

Next week we’ll talk a little about how to get your video out there once it’s done. Until then, have fun! And don’t miss my upcoming webinar on using web video to tell your story.