Despite declining video production costs and the meteoric rise of YouTube and other free video-sharing sites, there’s no “free lunch” when it comes to marketing and brand management with online video. While some of the largest consumer and B2B brands have set up video channels on these sites, they offer marketers very little control over the context or audience. In fact, it’s not uncommon for content to appear adjacent to a competitor’s, or worse, a competitor’s advertisement.

 

In short video sharing sites are a great distribution channel, but they should be treated as such. A successful video communications strategy should always begin with your own Web site. By embedding video content into contextually relevant pages on a site, together with social networking features, podcasts and other documents, you can increase viewership and relevance, while controlling distribution.

 

The real key to making precious marketing dollars go further is choosing the most effective tools and techniques for video distribution and measurement. Choosing the right solution the most efficient way to enable an online video communications infrastructure is to choose a full-service provider that can minimize your effort and expense, while maximizing impact. With limited staffing, look for partners who not only offer software, but also the on-staff expertise to help you achieve your business goals, ensuring success relative to all aspects of delivery, promotion and SEO, security and control, interactivity and collaboration, analytics and monetization.

 

As IT can become taxed by the demands of implementing, integrating and maintaining an enterprise-class video platform, full-featured software as a service (SaaS) solutions can be especially advantageous in accelerating and containing costs related to a video-based communication strategy.

 

The solution you choose should include support for live Webcasts – press conferences, product demos and town hall meetings – with the ability to instantly convert these to on-demand video for later viewing on Websites, blogs and other social-networking platforms. This extends your media investment and enables people to tune in wherever and whenever they want. Tools that facilitate interactivity during live events, such as the ability to gather immediate feedback through Q&A, polling and surveys are necessary to ensure audience engagement.

 

Also look for solutions that allow you to easily tag video for search engine optimization (SEO) and offer flexible, light-weight video players that make it easy to publish video anywhere. Advanced options may include permissions-based video file download, embedding codes for blogs or partner sites and social networking features such as RSS & podcasting, user ratings and comment, and in-depth analytics for assessing the reach and effectiveness of your communications.

 

You might delegate these various online video functions to multiple vendors, each specializing in one or two elements of an integrated video solution. The challenge of this for resource-constrained teams is ensuring compatibility among partners’ systems and software, negotiating multiple agreements and expediting support while maintaining a modest cost structure. Across the landscape of enterprise video solutions, there are solutions worth evaluating that can meet all of your needs and cost requirements in a single-source package. 

The FeedRoom, www.FeedRoom.com, is a pioneer in on-demand video communication and a market leader in live video and rich media asset management.  Industry-leading organizations, such as Autodesk, Barnes & Noble, Boeing, Bristol-Myers Squibb, ESPN, Hewlett-Packard, MetLife, and The Pentagon rely on The FeedRoom's industry expertise to help engage audiences, build brands, montenize content and manage digital media assets more efficiently.