Raising Profile through Video

Jonathan Bowers, UKfast

There are different sorts of video presentations that can be made over the web.

Videocasting - streamed and/or downloadable.

Podcasts - series of short videocasts that are designed to draw repeat audiences.

There is a huge potential in engaging your communities with video content. The visual medium leaves the strongest impression on users and, because they can be personal, they break down the cynicism that meets most marketing messages.  Videos can be "a gift of experience to your community to gain their implicit interest".

The value in video can be seen more abstractly as improving the human angle of your site or community, and create intimacy. It also gives the feeling that you go further for your clients by creating richer content and, perhaps, will make more successful the attempt to convert visitors to customers.

Brand Republic makes a weekly report on companies who videocast. You could be seen as an organisation at the forefront of web content.

Organisations should remember, however, that the challenge is not about the technology, it's about finding dynamic content to be presented in the video content.

The element that usually makes organisations pause before using video is whether or not the quality of the video, or the content of the video, is questionable in it's usefulness. To this end, some organisations use satellite sites to host their video offerings, especially if they are encouraging an facilitating user-generated content.

Different hosts for videos are as follows: Jumpcut, Soapbox, Google Video, Veoh, YouTube.