Show me something I don’t know!
It’s time to get serious about your online video strategy

By Michelle Bauer
Published: September / October 2008

Viewers of Chris Matthews’ Sunday morning talk show know that at the end of each program, he challenges his guests to “Tell me something I don’t know.” Well, that may still work for Chris, since he is already on television and we’re watching him. But for the rest of us who have relied on the written word – in print or online – to do much of our communicating, we need to embrace more and different visual and interactive media strategies to keep reaching our target audiences.

For many small and medium sized businesses, trying to figure out how to leverage social networks, mobile media, and video effectively is daunting. Just when you think you have a decent online media room full of press releases, articles about your business and case studies, along come all these new media vehicles that you have to think about how to use in your marketing communications efforts.

With many of these new technologies and tactics appearing – gosh, it seems like only last week – how do you build an intelligent business strategy for using them? How do you benchmark something that’s been around less than two years? How do you determine ROI for a new tool or technology that’s still evolving, while you’re just beginning to experiment with it?

It’s enough to give a business owner a big headache. The good news is that many of these new tools and tactics are lower cost, more targeted, and much easier to track and report.

Here’s an example:

Old Way: Develop story ideas that will resonate most with your audiences and showcase your company’s product or service. Carefully disseminate these ideas in news releases, events, conferences, etc. Communicate with reporters serving media outlets in which you’d most desire your company, products, and services to appear. Hope that your target audience will read a very positive article about your company and do what you intended them to do: buy your products, call you for advice, change the way they think about your company, etc.

New Way: Take out the middleperson and communicate directly with your audience using video. More and more consumers are interested in viewing their information instead of reading it. With video files, viewers can watch a CEO deliver a message to stockholders, see a short news-style clip, view a customer testimonial, or check out a product demo. These clips can be posted on YouTube or put on your web site. Journalists, bloggers, and anyone else can forward those files or paste them on their blogs, Facebook pages and other sites, making them more viral. You can repurpose the content in other ways, too - at conferences and events, in press kits, awards applications, etc.

What’s really exciting, though, is mobile video. Mobile video is just getting started. According to a Nielsen 2007 report, only 3.6% of the entire mobile market was made up of mobile video subscribers. eMarketer recently projected that the number of mobile television subscribers alone will reach 462 million by 2012. Clearly, there’s lots of room for growth here. There’s also lots of opportunity to experiment with a share of your marketing communications budget so you can start developing and refining your mobile strategy today.

Online video doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg. Go for the highest quality you can get at the lowest cost. Your costs will vary a great deal based on the length of the video, the complexity of the production, and any travel or location shootings. Companies can spend as little as $5,000 or as much as $100,000 on just one video. While larger companies have big budgets and are the leaders in using online video, many smaller companies can plan to do 1 or 2 videos a month. If this still seems like a lot of money, consider that streaming or distributing a video online eliminates the cost of hardcopy distribution of CDs and DVDs, and the applications are mobile.

Viewers can let you know if they like your video or not, and offer feedback and other comments if you post it on YouTube, blogs, and other sites that offer response mechanisms. Measurement includes plain views or how many people have viewed the video, star feature ratings, comments with feedback, and marking your video as a favorite.

Youtube recently launched a new feature called Insight that allows anyone posting videos to the site to gather data about the people who are viewing them. Valuable information such as statistics, charts, and maps about your audiences is available. You can find out things like age, gender, and geographic location of your audience members, and the sites they visited prior to and after watching your video clip. And here’s the best part – it’s free!

So what are you waiting for? The next time you start thinking about a new message or story you’d like to tell, gather your teammates, grab a video camera and start shooting. Playing around will give you a sense of what might work best on video to achieve your goals. Then go out and hire a professional videographer and editor to make sure your first video effort is a good one!

About the Author
Michelle Bauer is the CEO & President of Common Language, a strategic communications firm headquartered in St. Petersburg, Florida. Visit www.common-language.com for more information. Or contact Michelle at michelle@common-language.com