It’s a Video Revolution

People respond to visual communications – a picture paints 1,000 words, as they say.

In the past two years online video has transformed the communications landscape for businesses – and now the video revolution is fully underway.

Chew on these numbers a bit if you’re still not convinced that video is a powerful medium: 52% of all Internet traffic is driven by online video. More than 70% of all Internet users watch videos online. In a single month, YouTube presented 9.5 billion videos to 138 million American consumers. 123 million Americans watched videos online during every single month of 2007. When Cisco added streaming video to its website, the traffic to its website increased by 600%.

Savvy businesses are using video across the customer lifecycle from generating awareness to advocacy – driving better results and greater return from their online marketing investments. With the explosion of online video, businesses taking advantage of this medium are leapfrogging their competition with communications that break through the clutter and connect with prospects and customers.

If you’re ready to get the camera out, here are several take away tips that may help:

• Walk before you run. Start small and see what the possibilities are – video news releases, video articles or product tutorials are a good way to test the waters. Then you’re ready to move to bigger apps like video blogging and video podcasts.
• Edgy is good but B2B companies need to keep content appropriate for business audiences. Video will always have inherent risk (you can’t control perception as well as written communications) but you should not add to the risk by overtly offending the viewer.
• Always remain authentic and relevant to your audience. Don’t try to fool people with scripted or overproduced video content that has no real value.
• Video ROI measurement includes easy tactics like number of plain views, star feature ratings, comments with feedback and having your video marked as a favorite – so use them to your advantage.

As an industry, we’ve only hit the tip of the iceberg in terms of what video apps will emerge. No doubt about it – if used smartly, video is a killer addition to your PR 2.0 and lead generation arsenal.