Good video creation comes down to one simple thing: good story telling. The story must be authentic, it must have heart and ideally the person on camera, the Voice Over, or the pictures, telling the story should have passion.

B2B video is rarely about creating something that will go viral, though many can dream that that will be the result. B2B video is usually about professionals or management slogging through tomes of heavy content in an attempt to show their expertise or knowledge to potential recruits or clients. But the best is still yet to come. B2B should have the ability to communicate dense information (at least a bit of it) in an engaging and interesting way that makes it build a connection to the audience watching.

Like a good keynote speaker, a solid B2B video, will connect with the audience and leave them wanting more…more intelligence, more information, more time.

A recent brilliant keynote speaker I had the pleasure of meeting and hearing at the 2012 Legal Marketing Conference in Dallas, Jim Kane, a consultant, author and expert on loyalty between businesses and customers. Jim used amazing data, research, graphics and visuals, as well as videos in his presentation, to help weave his fast-paced and engaging talk. He built loyalty with his audience through his use of multi-media, but his story was first and foremost rock solid.

To create a great B2B video you need the following:

1) Know your goal before creating a script or outline.

2) Agree on who your audience is before crafting your style.

3) Create a story that is compelling and where possible don’t make it about you – make it about your audience.

4) Agree on the length of the piece – less than 2 minutes is ideal for the web.

5) If your content is very dense, consider breaking the pieces down into nuggets.

6) Define a realistic budget and work within it to create the best finished product you can.

7) If you can’t afford to shoot it professionally, make sure to light it well and use additional microphones that will capture sound properly.

Create questions that will drive the content of the piece.

9) You must edit the piece and add in basic graphics that provide expected details. Editing can make okay footage look great.

10) Video needs to live and breathe. Think about where it will reside before you shoot it. Your marketing strategy of the video should happen before you create it. If you don’t consider how to use it, it is like holding a special event but not doing any of the follow-up work.

11) Your website and YouTube maybe your only immediate thoughts but there are many more ways to use B2B video. Consider hosting on a professional site like VimeoPro or Vid4Pro.com designed just for businesses. Your videos won’t sit next to porn, kittens or babies there.

12)Consider pushing videos out through email, Social Media and QR codes.

13)Finally show your professionals how to load videos onto their smart phones or ipads so they can proudly show their videos in appropriate situations.

14)Rinse and Repeat.

Linda Orton, President, Intelligent Video Solutions, and Vid4Pro, LLC

Linda is President of Intelligent Video Solutions, which she founded in January of 2009 to best leverage her years of business development, creative and technology experience and to assist clients in the creation and distribution of web videos.

“Back in March, Obama for America (President Obama’s reelection operation) released a 17-minute film called The Road We’ve Traveled.

It’s interesting timing for this content marketing effort because the Republican challengers for the nomination are locked into a protracted battle that is unlikely to be decided until this summer.

The film is worth a look because it is classic content marketing. It is an excellent example of using video to tell a story.

As regular readers of my blog may recall, I love looking at US presidential campaigns as case studies in marketing that can be applied by all sorts of organizations. This is not a political blog, nor am I supporting a particular candidate by highlighting what they are up to.

The Road We’ve Travelled is directed by Davis Guggenheim and narrated by Tom Hanks. It gives an inside look at some of the decisions President Obama made and features interviews with President Bill Clinton, Vice President Joe Biden, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Elizabeth Warren, David Axelrod, and others.

Direct link to The Road We’ve Traveled on YouTube and on the Obama for America site.

Using video to tell a story

No matter what sort of organization you’re part of, a short film featuring interviews is a great form of content marketing. It works for companies, educational institutions, rock bands, nonprofits, individuals, and, well, any organization.”

1.You ought to because it increases the accessibility of your content

It’s compulsory for programming that was originally on tv as of this year, it’s also compulsory under US law for all devices large enough for video to support captioning.

2. You ought to want to because it’s another place you can optimise

Google has a Youtube bias, so put your video on Youtube to get it found by Google.Youtube uses closed captions to index their videos…

1.Proof that closed captions have an effect on Youtube and thereby Google rankings

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2.Free software from the national centre for accessible media

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3.More free closed captioning software, of the equine variety

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4.Speaking of which, here’s the horses mouth version of what to do.

5.Watch this dog, learn from it’s ways:

Anna Bateson, Director Of Marketing EMEA at Youtube will speak at On-LiVe UK this September about branded entertainment.

She will be joined by the founder and CEO of Adjust Your Set, Chris Gorell Barnes, giving a presentation entitled:

“Formats of the future – how branded entertainment is revolutionising today’s online marketing”

Branded entertainment- as old as tv itself, but one of the hottest topics in the worl, thanks to trailblazers like Redbull.

What would you like to hear about from Anna and Chris?

Your thoughts please…

I keep seeing KONY 2012 cited as justification for producing longer form content and I think this is a bit of an over-simplification, especially as regards our world of corporate videos and promotion.

You’re going to watch something longer-form (let’s just say)

IF:

Someone you know or someone you respect has flagged that it’s worth watching

LOADS (anything over 100,000 in Youtube terms) of people have already watched it (snowball starts…)

The crucial thing here is advocacy – the seeding with celebrities work that invisible children did with Oprah, Ryan Gosling, et al. is what really paid dividends here – and KONY MUST be seen as confirmation of the old rules of peer endorsement rather than any blanket raising of the time limit on videos.

What do you think? Was peer endorsement the key to KONY’s success ?

Here’s the horses mouth version from Youtube themselves

The first best-practice guide I could fine not written by Google themselves:

Here’s a quick how-to from Go Animate

Sound good? Get in there then:

Here’s where to get started

Woah, woah, woah, there Mr Marketing, i don’t even know what adwords is!

We’re involved in social media marketing and content marketing these days, but have been involved in direct marketing for years, and through it all Adwords still delivers. If you’re not involved with it already, you should be. Watch this:

As we know, on March 15th Youtube changed the way they serve reccommendations, to emphasise engagement over views.

This is part of an overall shift in the way Youtube want advertisers to look at them, basically. Youtube want you to watch for longer, not more often.

Part of their problem has been how hard it is to serve an advert on the majority of their content which remains of the 30-second dancing-dog variety, hence their expenditure ($200 million) to promote their premium (longform ) channels.

Now, according to Comscore,   this shift in emphasis has had an effect on Youtube’s viewing statistics  – the key sentence for me from Adage’s article is this:

“Before the change, YouTube would track the length of views up to 30 seconds, primarily to make sure each click led to an actual view. Now it’s tracking across longer timeframes to see if viewers watched two or three minutes of content.”

Views have been dropping off, but the number of minutes spent watching video has increased.

(Is this also partly because companies who used to be paid to stuff views have stopped stuffing views? Just a thought…)

As you can read in adage’s article Youtube is changing the way it measures, changing the way it serves ads, and changing the way it serves reccomendations, all in the name of inproving it’s offering to brand advertisers.

Greater engagement means more ads.

And whilst as a Marketing person I applaud this, as a forward-thinking consumer (;-) I’m with Chris Atkinson  – If as a brand you go the Red Bull Route, and produce content people want to watch, you don’t have to worry that they get up and boil the kettle, or go open another tab and watch Mishka talking whilst you ad is running.

The future is still brands becoming studios.

We’ll be talking more about that in September

Covering strategy, production, asset management, analytics, EVERYTHING to get a business of any scale up and running in the world of online video, this is an utter gem.

download here