What It Takes To Get Corporate Video Right (More Than You Think)

Video as content is raging on the Internet. These statistics from Online Marketing prove it.

• YouTube gets 2 billion views a day.
• 24 hours of video are uploaded every minute.
• More video goes up on YouTube in 60 days than all three major networks created in 60 years.

And that was last year, in 2010.

What’s ahead? In 2009, YouTube got one billion views a day. By the end of 2010, that had doubled. What will YouTube viewship hit in 2011? The mathematics would suggest four billion, but I’m guessing it will be closer to six billion. Like everything else, it’s happening too fast to measure.

But YouTube is just a piece of it. There are competitors, including plenty of enterprises with private channels (for example, the Green Interview). And these figures don’t include video resumes or other non-marketing uses of video, either. So I guess that means there’s a lot of video floating around, huh?

And a lot of that is corporate — both B2C and B2B.

According to this article at Grist, a survey showed 67% percent of the marketing professionals who responded were focusing on online video. That number was considerably higher than the number focusing on search, social media, webcasts or podcasts.

Grist says professional video production must go through five stages: scoping and planning; storyboarding and script development; film production; editing, mastering, duplication, and delivery; and integration into the marketing communications strategy.

Some of you will remember what happened when the desktop publishing revolution exploded in the mid-eighties. In the hands of non-professionals, technology pushed some corporations toward the much reviled “ransom note” style of communications. I can see corporate video heading in this direction, too — at least for a time.

That’s why I recently blogged for MarketingBrillo with a post titled: If You’re Making A Video Don’t Hire Just Any Writer.

As Grist so beautifully points out, effective video is a whole new skill set. Are corporate clients prepared to learn and insist on professionalism in this new content area, too? Or will many simply do what my blog suggested: Grab a camera and call a copywriter.

Let’s apply  the Grist to our video mill and make it professional.