ChannelOne Marketing

On the phone, our client was puzzled, maybe a little miffed. "My web video doesn't work," she complained. "Our video takes forever to download. Can you please figure out what's wrong?"

I recalled that a few weeks before, we'd offered to create a custom web player to showcase the promotional video we'd produced for our client's company. "No thank you," she'd replied, turning down the offer. "Our webmaster has it covered."

Moments after the call, I concluded that just about everything was wrong about how our client had staged the video on her website. From the web page, a lame text link downloaded a Windows Media file. And since the video was 10 minutes long, it was minutes before a viewer got to see anything.

In this case, the fix was relatively easy.  We quickly built a custom Flash-based video player, and within minutes our client's site visitors were seeing vivid, instant-on video right on the pages of her site.  But it left me shaking my head; how did our client arrive at a video marketing solution that's literally 5 years out of date, just by trusting that "Our webmaster has it covered"?

This, sadly, is not a rare occurrence. It is a scene I see played out over and over again by clients who rely on outdated and mistaken notions about how to stage video on their websites. And more often than not, those mistakes come from over-reliance on web designers who are not always up to date on the state of the art in interactive video.

After the call, I sat down and put together a list of the ten most common mistakes marketers make with video on their websites. The frightening thing is that the list is easy...and there were even more left on the cutting room floor.

Here, then, are the ten mistakes we see far too often:

1. Making web video deployment an afterthought. Very often, the production of a video is driven by a big live event, a trade show, or a special presentation. And only after the event is finished does the attention turn to internet deployment. That's too late.
2. Failing to use a modern video format. Flash and H.264 formats look great, work on Macs and PCs, and allow you to put your best foot forward. Windows Media, RealMedia, and most flavors of QuickTime are not formats you want to use.
3. Failing to have your video professionally encoded. There are lots of shortcut ways to prep your video for the web, but they use least-common-denominator parameters and often miss opportunities to make your video look as good as it possibly can. Video compression is still both art and science, and the best web video experts know the right combination of resolution, frame rate, bit rate, keyframe frequency, frame size, and deinterlacing method to use with any particular application.
4. Using YouTube the wrong way. YouTube can be an awesome vehicle for achieving reach with your video, but using YouTube to embed video on your own website is a real mistake for a whole variety of reasons.  While YouTube is attractive because it's "free", there are genuine costs to using it that every marketer needs to understand.  I've blogged about this previously in a Web Video Expert post, I'll offer a separate and updated post on this here soon.
5. Hosting video on your own server. Corporate web servers are simply not optimized for hosting video to be accessed from outside the organization. We know lots of stories of web videos that suddenly got popular and brought an organization's servers to its knees. There are far better solutions in the marketplace which can instantly scale to any level of demand generated as your video "goes viral".
6. Failing to search-optimize your video. Because it's impossible for search engines to discern the contents of a web video, Google and its peers rely on titles, descriptions, keywords,  news release pointers, and inbound links to decide when to show a video in its search results.  There is a new art of search optimization for web videos, and we'll be blogging a lot about that here.
7. Failing to issue a call to action at the end. Once you've engaged and touched a viewer with your message, they often are left asking, "So what do I do next?" We find that marketers are not always good at issuing a call to action -- especially when it comes to videos put out on YouTube or other public sites.
8. Failing to seed video through community connections. Tweeters, bloggers, and Facebookers love to be the first to talk about new video programs in their area of interest. Yet marketers too often leave it to these community "connectors" to discover a video on their own.  Proactivity pays off big-time in accelerating your video message through a special-interest community.
9. Failing to use email marketing effectively in conjunction with a video release. Video messages can inherently lift click-through rates for email campaigns. And email campaigns can have a profound effect on the distribution of a video.  There is a growing body of knowledge about what to put in your email message to encourage click through.  Hint: plain text links saying "watch our video" are not the answer.
10. Failing to use appropriate viral widgets with your video.  Do you want viewers to email the video with others who might be interested?  To embed it in their blog or webpage?  To Digg it?  To tweet about it on Twitter?  In addition to a concrete call to action (buy, donate, join, etc.), each video should have a well-considered "call to share" built in to the video player.

And that's just a start.  There are easily ten more ways to improve your video marketing program, by designing interactivity into the player, managing clip lengths, applying emerging measurement devices,  making the right choice between streaming and progressive download, and many more decisions.

You've invested thousands of dollars -- maybe tens of thousands -- in producing a video program or film that tells your story in a engaging, compelling way.  Why not take advantage of every advantage afforded you by the most powerful medium ever created?

The tools to help you do so are plentiful, but they are also confusing and rapidly evolving.  No professional marketer could possibly be expected to keep up with every option.  That's why we created ChannelOne Marketing Group, a team of top-drawer thought leaders (including David Meerman Scott, Greg Jarboe, and Janice Brown) whose job it is to stay on top of these tools so you don't have to.

We're looking forward to sharing our experiences with you -- both through the Channel One blog and through our work with many of the world's best brands on multimedia marketing programs for the web.

And the next time your webmaster says "I've got it covered" with respect to web video, make sure he know's what he's talking about.