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Broadcast Your Business
By: Joe Dysart
Issue: 2010feb
An exploration of the top 10 YouTube functions for viral video-inclined companies
While YouTube.com has emerged as a marketing juggernaut for promotional products businesses, many firms are also discovering the free video-sharing service has scores of other uses—all of which are also free for the taking.
Staff recruiting, client communications, product/service how-to’s and company news dissemination are all increasing in popularity on YouTube as organizations transform the medium into the Swiss Army knife of business communications.
“If you’ve never visited YouTube, you’ve missed out on the hottest thing on the internet today,” says Michael Miller, author of the excellent guidebook YouTube for Business: Online Video Marketing for Any Business.
Branders.com, for example, uses YouTube to market its promotional pens. Other promotional products businesses are also selling on the service, including FarFromBoring.com and Printable Promotions.
Meanwhile, PromozTeam.com pitches its promotional business franchise opportunities on YouTube. And Vistaprint offers a similar opportunity for entrepreneurs looking to become Vistaprint resellers.
One of the major reasons these and other promotional products businesses are flocking to YouTube is its unbridled popularity. Just a blip on the web’s radar a few years ago, the video-sharing service has rocketed to one of the most visited sites on the internet. These days, the service averages more than one billion video views per day, according to the company.
Organizations also find YouTube’s ease of entry and low cost hard to resist. Virtually anyone with basic computing skills can upload a video to YouTube—for free—in minutes. And since YouTube videos are generally viewed on a relatively small viewing screen, there’s no reason for businesses to endure painful video production budgets. In fact, Miller says the subtleties of high-end video production are generally lost on YouTube.
Plus, promotional products business users are saving significant coin by shifting video hosting responsibilities onto YouTube. Ordinarily a firm pays bandwidth transmission charges anytime a video on its website is viewed. But when the same video is uploaded to YouTube’s servers, businesses never pay bandwidth transmission costs, regardless of the number of views.
All told, it’s a frothy mix of remarkable popularity, ease of entry and virtually nonexistent cost that have the wheels of innovation spinning at countless organizations as they continually find new uses on YouTube. So far, here are the top 10 uses they’ve forged:
Marketing This is without doubt the most popular business use of YouTube, and can be wildly successful. Firms with shoestring promotional budgets have become overnight stars on the service, often with zany and off-the-wall marketing pitches. One of the classics across all industries is a campy series from blender manufacturer Blendtec called “Will It Blend?” The videos prove the mettle of the product by “blending” some rather unorthodox items in its blender, including an iPhone, rake handle and 50 marbles.
Other successfully irreverent takes on YouTube marketing include offerings from T-Mobile Dance,
Inspired Bicycles and Rosenthal Plumbing.
Recruiting Given that many firms already have videos that tout their businesses as inviting places to work, posting those same productions on YouTube is a no-brainer. Intel created an off-beat character to star in its recruiting video; Siemens took a road trip to a town its products have benefitted; and Google tours its campus and interviews employees and the company’s founder.
“Don’t limit yourself to a single, long-puff video,” Miller says. “Produce separate videos for individual departments and illustrate company values, employee benefits, facilities and the like.”
Product/Service How-To’s These videos can, of course, serve a dual purpose for businesses, offering detailed instructions for novice clients and customers while serving as a promotional spot for looky-lous. I personally mustered the courage to swap in a new, faster central processing unit on my PC—something I akin to open heart surgery—after viewing a slickly produced how-to video by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). Without the video, I would have never attempted the swap, nor even purchased the unit.
Company Video FAQs Any firm can leap over the image of a faceless, monolithic corporate player with on-the-fly videos that feature charming customer service people answering frequently asked questions. Sure, many businesses already have written FAQs on their websites, but there is something to be said for going the extra mile and offering the personal touch inherent in the video medium. That’s what AT&T did in its video FAQ on iPhone upgrades.
News Video Clips The beauty of posting your company news to YouTube is that your information is not sliced, diced or in any other way whittled down to a mere shadow of its former glory. Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, for example, recently posted an eight-minute YouTube video detailing his company’s acquisition of Zappos.com.
Focus Groups Many sophisticated YouTube users also use the service as testing grounds for commercials they plan to run on cable, broadcast TV and elsewhere on the web. YouTube’s free analytical tool, Insight, tests commercials’ marketing punch. Insight’s metrics include the overall popularity of a video, who’s viewing it, where viewers are coming from on the web and what keywords they used to find the video.
Client Communications When an e-mail or friendly phone call simply doesn’t cut it, many firms post videos on YouTube to connect with clients concerning project updates, personalized descriptions of new products or services and the like. The medium conveys the message that the company places a special value on its client or customer and is willing to go the extra distance to prove it.
Plus, such communications can easily be made private on YouTube by selecting the “private” option under its “Broadcast Options” variable. This ensures only the viewers you select get to see the video you’ve uploaded.
Employee-To-Employee Communications As far as Google, YouTube’s parent company, is concerned video mail is poised to become the e-mail of the next decade. In fact, Google has added “Google Video” to its business apps suite. This makes sense. Why not zip off a response to a thorny problem or challenge using video, if it’s easier to do so than in another medium? At the very least, video mail is a trend worth experimenting with and monitoring.
Employee Training Any company with multiple locations across the U.S. or the world can immediately see the benefit of posting training videos on YouTube and having the appropriate employees dial in. And by using YouTube’s “private broadcast” option, these companies can ensure the training videos stay internal. “Many companies find YouTube is a fast and effective way to disseminate all kinds of employee information,” Miller says. “Done right, it gets information out there in near-real-time, with all the benefit of face-to-face communication.”
Savings On Business Travel All the videos sent to employees and clients are also enabling business users to rack up substantial savings on business travel. Granted, there are plenty of instances where true face-to-face interaction is irreplaceable. But in many other situations a video overture is a bulls-eye compromise between basic e-mail and an all-expenses-paid business trip for one or more employees to multiple cities.
Joe Dysart is a Manhattan-based internet speaker and business consultant.
646-233-4089
joe@joedysart.com
www.joedysart.com
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