Check out this article by the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) on crisis communication.
There big takeaway, and I quote exactly: "Video dominates as online communications tool"
The article goes on to say: Organizations need to already have an established video channel that informs — or entertains — your key publics so that you have built an audience and goodwill before a crisis hits. Having an online Web presence will increase the speed of distribution and reach of your crisis response.
This is exactly what our online video magazines at Cantaloupe.tv do. We specialize in producing authentic, online video content which is the exactly what you need when communicating a crisis situation. And our web video platform, Backlight.tv, makes it easy to get that video up immediately.
The last thing you want to be worried about in a crisis is about how to get your video online. Backlight handles everything you need to get that video up immediately. Things you don't need to worry about with Backlight:
The file type. We handle mov conversion, mp4 conversion, mpeg conversion, flv conversion, and more
The online video player. Backlight provides you with that as well as an easy to use embed code
Online video hosting service. That's also included out of the box.
Distribution. Backlight helps you get your video on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, email campaigns, Twitter, partner websites, or wherever else you distribute online
Video analytics. Backlight provides you with all the online video tracking you'll need to determine the effectiveness of your story.
So don't wait for a crisis to hit before you start thinking about online video marketing and the video platform you need to distribute it. Take a look at our offering now.
It seems Bluelock has found a way to establish themselves as experts in cloud computing, and it seems a big part of that is their internet video marketing strategy.
I recently wrote a post about how their videos have shown up on a social network for cloud computing. Now it seems that someone else has grabbed the embed code for their LEGO demonstration of server virtualization and embedded it in their blog.
The ability to let others grab this video and spread it around is made possible through Backlight, Cantaloupe's online video platform. What kind of impact is this video having on Bluelock's business? Well, Bluelock can see exactly how many views their getting from this video placement by checking out the online video analytics report also provided through Backlight.
Another valuable feature is Bluelock's ability to change the ads in this video, that is, to change in-stream calls to actions. Even though this video is already embedded, Bluelock can control and change the message to viewers. (Check out the 2:20 mark in the video) Now they can actually convert these viewers into prospects or even customers.
I also think it's worth mentioning this quote from the blog:
"...yes, it’s an ad for bluelock, but the video makes virtualization a bit easier to understand..."
That is a suresign of successful video marketing. The company being promoted is visible, but that doesn't discourage the viewer because the video content is actually valuable in its own right. This is authentic web video production at its finest.
A successful viral video does not have to mean a million views. It means making it easy for your content and ultimately your brand to be shared and spread around.
Not only is Bluelock one of our clients, they are also a leader in "cloud computing," which at Cantaloupe we clearly get since our very own online video platform brings all kinds of cool things to the cloud like a video hosting service, video conversion online (many types including but not limited to mov conversion, mp4 conversion, flv conversion, mpeg conversion), video analytics, video uploading etc.
Well here is an example of how Bluelock has leveraged their videos to further their demonstration of expertise in the field of cloud computing. Using Backlight, they've embedded their videos into a community site specifically for networking around cloud computing.
What's really cool about this is that because the videos are embedded using Backlight, Bluelock maintains control over the messaging in the videos.
What do I mean? Check out the 56 second mark in the first video. Bluelock has inserted a video "ad" with a link back their website. This is the perfect way to convert otherwise casual viewers into potential customers.
There's no shortage of ways that Backlight can help you get more use and value out of your videos. Check out a demo today to see what Backlight can do for you.
The economy sucks. Got it. But does that mean internet video marketing is the first thing to go when budgets get cut? Some people might think so, but then again, those same types of people probably thought websites were a luxury marketing tool too.
Without a doubt, video is a medium whose worth is only going to continue to be validated as time goes on. Most marketers today don't have the video analytics to justify their spend - the direct impact on the bottom line is still hard to capture, especially in a b2b environment where people rarely click "Buy Now."
So in this tough economy, there's something to be said about every dollar that gets spent. There's less experimenting and more focus on proven strategies, and guess which medium is expected to have the greatest growth in 2008, the year of the tough economy?
That's right. Online video advertising.
Maybe you're not convinced that you NEED video on your website, but when you look at this chart you probably need to ask yourself what other marketers know that you don't.
The truth is, I've been sitting on this information for a couple weeks now. I just haven't been sure what to make of it.
The benefits are obvious. Search engines still rely nearly 100% on text to create relevant search results. Up until now, optimizing web video for search meant including the right text with the video. The obvious next step was finding a way to use speech recognition technology to convert the audio content that is already there to searchable text. The next step after that is making the image content searchable. (Which is well on its way. Here's an article)
What's been holding me back from talking more about this is I don't know what Google plans to do with this technology. Right now, your streaming video is only audio searchable if you upload it to YouTube (and actually, for the time being they're still testing the technology only on political videos).
YouTube is an amazing tool and has pioneered the online video industry, but it isn't always the best answer when marketing online with video. For one, the video quality output is too poor to use to put video on websites. And while YouTube does offer some video analytics, it's not as robust or as useful to business marketers as it needs to be or as you see with other video platforms.
At this point using YouTube for video marketing is a little like using hotmail for email marketing.
But at the end of the day, Google Audio Indexing (aka GAudi) is a monumental advancement for not just video marketing, but for search engine marketing as well. Everyone interested in either area should take 5 minutes and check out GAudi's FAQ page.
This is what a Cantaloupe client told me he wanted from us. I shouldn't have been surprised by this but I was.
Being at a firm that positions itself in the "internet video marketing" arena, I often get more caught up in the "internet" than the "video." I tend to spend more time thinking about video tracking and video analytics (it's probably worth noting that our blog posts around these topics are some of our most popular) rather than the "boring" digital video production side of things.
But anyone who has ever had to work with deliverables known as "the creative" has felt the pain of missed deadlines and misunderstood expectations. Manufacturing seems so anti-creative that sometimes people are apt not to apply the same principles that produce reliable and consistent gadgets to producing creative content - which if you ask anyone, they'd like to also be reliable and consistent, at least in terms of deadlines and results.
At Cantaloupe, we've experienced our own pains with delivering creative video production like manufacturing, but I'm happy to report that just in the past 4 months we've increased our success rate of hitting deadlines to 98% and there is really little to stop us from hitting 100% month after month.
The web side of things is important, but "content is king" as they say, and there's no point in knowing how to track and distribute your web video, if your web video isn't delivered on time and worth distributing.
A report put together by Convio, Sea Change Strategies and Edge Research tells fundraising professionals that they need to pay special attention to online video marketing. The report titled "The Wired Wealthy: Using the Internet to Connect to your Middle and Major Donors says: 5. Pay Special Attention to Video Maybe this is the single exception to recommendation four. Relationship Seekers are heavy users of online video and express significant interest in seeing more. Hire a professional producer, and ask a test group of donors what they think before launching to a wider audience. No single video is going to change everything; a series of modestly produced short videos will get more mileage than one blockbuster. Most “viral videos” never go “viral.” Don’t measure success merely by looking at how many times a video has been viewed. The real measure is whether the right people – your wired wealthy Relationship Seekers – have seen it, and whether it has inspired them.
For those who prefer bullet points, the key takeaways are:
Even with online video production, you should hire a professional
It's better to do multiple, shorter, "modestly produced" stories than to do one expensive, flashy video. You'll use them more.
As far as video tracking and video analytics, you need to look beyond number of views. It's about WHO saw the video, not just HOW MANY
Finally, viral marketing does not mean getting millions of hits. It means making something contagious in the true sense of one to one marketing.
To Cantaloupe, this isn't news. It's exactly how our Video Magazines were designed to be utilized. Multiple videos, modestly produced for long term conversations directed at the right permission-based audience.
He doesn't call it that, but Johnny Cupcakes has created a video magazine to promote the grand opening of his second store. His first location is in Boston, his new store will be in L.A. The whole video series started 3 months and the anticipation has been building ever since.
What kind of stories is he telling? An authentic reality series showing the making of his new store. It's ongoing storytelling and internet video marketing at its finest.
Seriously, I don't even care that this is a marketing vehicle because I'm so entertained by the story itself. And really, at no point in the video do I feel like he's selling me something. He's showing me something cool and the fact that he's selling something is completely in the background.
No only that, now I'm actually aware that he has a new store launching. I didn't know before and if he'd just left it at a text email with no video (see an example of his email below, it's a lot of text) I wouldn't have bothered to read it.
What else does he do that should be a web video best practice? He encourages people to send it on. I haven't seen his video analytics but I'm sure this video is seeing a lot of traction.
But viral marketing as I always say, doesn't need to mean an "epidemic." The fact that he's even given me something to share his company with, a referral tool if you will, makes it viral. Even if only one person sees this, this is viral marketing.
Think about how nice it'd be to have a web service software that allowed you to -
Show a video with your web cam and upload it to your website without help from developers
Create internet video landing pages
Rearrange your video magazines at the click of a button
Click one button and upload all your videos to YouTube and other internet video aggregators
Optimize all your videos for google video search and other internet video search engines
To store your website videos
To burn your website videos to a CD for use at tradeshows
To search your entire collection of videos so you can easily find the one with Brian the CEO talking about how his ski trip inspired the second generation product
Have more video analytics than you know what to do with
That list is alright, I have a ton more things I'd like to see in an online video software. I haven't even shared my best, but what would you like to see?
Update 7/28/08: A reader's comment (and thanks for commenting by the way) prompted me to clarify this post. The web service portion of Cantaloupe's product does some of these things (tracking and storing videos for instance) and we're currently gathering feedback for future developments. We'd love to hear from you.
We've been searching for a magic bullet when it comes to web video analytics. Something that can help our clients determine what's working and what's not. How nice would that be, to have one statistic we can point for all our clients, one universal equation that applies to everyone doing video magazines and online video?
The thing is, it doesn't exist, which is both good and bad. It's bad, because frankly life would be much more comfortable for us pragmatic and rational folk who like to validate our decisions with hard logic and firm research. We can't lift our arms to brush our teeth without knowing that we're using the best toothpaste available to our budget and our dental hygiene needs, let alone spend our marketing budget on internet video marketing.
It's good, because it reflects how web video can be used in a multitude of different marketing capacities. You can use it for HR purposes, you can use it to promote an event to cold leads, you can use it to build your brand, you can use it to educate during your sales process, you can use it as a tool for your clients to refer you - the list is endless as are the internet audiences.
With each purpose so vastly different from each other, the video analytics you'll want to look at are going to be completely different. It'd be wrong to try and force fit one statistic for everyone.
Peter Guber, CEO of Mandalay Entertainment which is the company behind Batman and Rain Man held a storytelling meeting at his house (sounds awesome, I wonder how Cantaloupe.TV can get an invite...) and this blog author's take aways read like a how-to for internet video marketing -
• "Let go of "it’s all about me" - you need to tap into something bigger" We learned this after producing our CEO stories Video Magazine. The concept - have client CEO's give testimonials as to why they use Cantaloupe. The videos themselves are powerful tools, and the initial response was very positive, but as ongoing storytelling tools they falter, because they're too much about Cantaloupe and not enough about our clients.
• "Be authentic - people can feel it when you're posturing" Blockbuster movies might have gargantuan budgets and the most sophisticated acting available, but they're still striving for authenticity, just like we preach with every online video we produce.
• "Create an environment where people feel safe and respected, so they'll respond honestly" Could anything be more important to online marketing? You want people to respond honestly to your messages. There's no point in either party wasting their time dancing around the truth, which means each party needs to feel comfortable expressing the truth.
• "Pay attention to the body language of your audience and respond accordingly" This is where video analytics come into play, and it's not so much body language as it is online behavior. Segmenting your database is really defining your audience. The more you can do it, the more successful you're going ot be with your web video efforts.
Time is like a "wild card" that can be used in place of any tool. What I mean is, let's say you don't have access to a tool like Salesforce.com that can help you automate the tracking of your cost per lead. All hope is not lost. You can still track it manually, usually using spreadsheets. It takes more time yes, but you theoretically get the same result.
Apply this to video on websites and Video Magazines. Cantaloupe knows that if push came to shove, you could probably execute something similar to what we do on your own. There isn't a whole lot of secret sauce in our technology.
The secret sauce is really in the process. It's in our method of story development, digital video production, integration with your website, proactive distribution, and ongoing maintenance. (Our video analytics does contain some secret sauce)
We haven't built our product just around this novel concept of internet video marketing; we've built our product around the idea of saving marketers time. We execute the whole process of a web video strategy so you don't have to struggle to figure out how to do it yourself, and we've even built some efficiencies along the way.
Ultimately, we believe online video is great, but not if it completely dominates your time.
Our clients use ongoing Video Stories to create deeper engagement with the clients and their prospects. Our Video Analytics tell us that the average visitor to one of our video magazines stays about 2 minutes. And that leads to Deeper Engagement.
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Check out this article by the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) on crisis communication.
videos and make it searchable?
including the right text with the video. The obvious next step was finding a way to use speech recognition technology to convert the audio content that is already there to searchable text. The next step after that is making the image content searchable. (Which is well on its way. 
This is what a Cantaloupe client told me he wanted from us. I shouldn't have been surprised by this but I was.
A report put together by Convio, Sea Change Strategies and Edge Research tells fundraising professionals that they need to pay special attention to online video marketing. The report titled "The Wired Wealthy: Using the Internet to Connect to your Middle and Major Donors says:
He doesn't call it that, but Johnny Cupcakes has created a video magazine to promote the grand opening of his second store. His first location is in Boston, his new store will be in L.A. The whole video series started 3 months and the anticipation has been building ever since.
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