Relentless competition pushed the online video industry to achieve great things. Competition is great, for sure, but, frankly, at some point, monopoly can make life simpler. When Flash became the powerhouse of rich media creation and delivery, it just made development easier, period. Sure Silverslight showed up and RealMedia has always been strong in closed settings, like universities, but by and large you could count on users to have a recent version of Flash player so they could see your content. For us, and our clients, last few years have been hassle-free. We’ve been creating Flash-based presentations—well designed, narrated, animated, including embedded videos–for public consumption, will much success. Even issues with accessibility have largely been tackled by Flash so our government clients are on board with Flash as a delivery tool. Federal clients are not early adopters of technology, I realize, so bear with me as I move with them away from the fossil that is Internet Explorer 6 to where this post is going.

This post, and our clients, are going mobile, to tablets and phones, and without i-naming names, the big boy in that space doesn’t like Flash (or Flash’s parent, Adobe). Federal clients that were forever locked to PCs and Internet Explorer are not only adopting more varied devices, but I also find that they are more eager to make their content available to the myriad devices used by their audiences. It’s a little bit like being back in 1997 again. Instead of Mac or PC, RealPlayer or Quicktime, it’s Android or iPhone, HTML5 or Flash. As I’m working through how I can give my clients the content they want delivered to as wide an audience as possible, I find myself heading back to my roots; to video.

What was once so hard to deliver is becoming the easiest. With amazing delivery services out there, like Limelight and Vimeo, to name a couple we use, it’s easy to create one video that is available across most—dare I say all—devices. Rather than develop a multimedia presentation in Flash, mixing narration, animation and video, why not just build the whole thing in the edit suite and deliver one big video?

One glaring reason is interactivity. Stand alone video is linear, so interactivity would be tricky, if not impossible, without some surrounding interface (HTML or Flash) or controlling mechanism (like a DVD player). Aside from that, though, if your content is linear, stand alone video might just be the answer.

Our team travelled to several former ranges, capturing the beauty of the lands and also learning about the technology used to remediate them. We interviewed policy makers and program managers as well as scientists and environmental experts and incorporated these viewpoints into the final award-winning video.

To learn more about the campaign, visit our portfolio page here: http://www.mindandmedia.com/aec-risk-com.html

Read more about Parent Sense in our website portfolio.

1. Unless you are a Hollywood or Television Producer (whose aim is to distribute their long-form content via Hulu or Netflix), short is best. Keep your videos to the 2-5 minute range as most consumers have little patience for anything longer than that. Our fast-paced culture promotes info-snacking and this is especially true of online video.
2. If you are producing videos to promote an idea or product or are fundraising for a social cause, include a call to action. The easiest call to action is one that will drive traffic to your website, so include a URL at the end of the video. And if you are distributing it via YouTube, Vimeo or any of the social networking sites, take the opportunity to include your site’s URL on the text box provided to describe your video.
3. If you are distributing your video via services such as YouTube and Vimeo, protect your intellectual property by including a bug that indicates where the video came from.
4. If you are thinking of using humor in hopes of creating a viral video hit and that its popularity will draw attention to your product, idea or cause, don’t do it on the cheap. Humor is difficult to do well and requires skill and real dollars to pull off. Most successful viral videos used for promotion have been created by large advertising agencies or their online subsidiaries. Additionally, although this is NOT written in stone, most edgy and humorous videos work well for edgy and humorous brands (such as the Axe effect series of videos promoting their line of men’s grooming products).
5. Include measurement in your campaign. The great thing about online video (actually, anything online) is that you can measure its effectiveness. If you are running any sort of campaign, you can keep track of how many people have viewed your videos and consequently, how many viewers visit your site after seeing the video. If things aren’t working as well as you’d hoped, you can always tweak your campaign until you get it right.
6. Contests work well to generate interest in your company, non-profit and government agency but if you ask people to create content on their own (videos about your mission, for example) you’ll have to be prepared to take the good with the bad (most video contests are run by publishing ALL of the videos created and then having your viewers vote on the best ones).
7. Tell a story about your idea, mission or product. Most people don’t want to be lectured or told what to think, they’d rather draw their own conclusions after watching your well-crafted and compelling video.
8. Be cognizant of who will be watching your videos. Obviously, you know who your target audience is and what you want them to do, so a runaway viral hit might not always be the answer…you may just get a lot of people watching your video but very little follow-up. And although by reading most articles you could be led to believe that only 18-24 year olds are interested in watching online video, the 25-54 age group is quickly catching up…especially if you let people share the video via social networking sites like Facebook.

Your ride ahead will be a lot smoother if you keep some of these do’s and don’ts in mind as you embark on the planning and execution of your online video campaign.

The panel was a good mix of speakers. A YouTube rep showed off some lesser known YouTube features valuable to those that manage a YouTube partner channel and social media campaigns. Blue State Digital showed off a pro bono project that leverages user-generated video and YouTube for itgetsbetter.org. National Resource Defense Council (NRDC) offered lessons learned about successful social media video campaigns. One interesting tip was that no matter how emotionally charged an issue may be, sad videos don’t do well in terms of going viral. NRDC showed a video they produced, that I would say prompts angers instead of sadness, and it is one of their most successful in terms of being shared and inspiring action. The best performers, however, are funny videos, thank goodness. I can only handle so many angry activists.

The presenter I found most valuable was Kay Morrison, a senior advisor in the office of web communications at the Environmental Protection Agency. Oh, and she’s also the liason between the Federal government and YouTube or maybe it’s Google. Regardless, that’s pretty huge. Ms. Morrison was the repository of info that every agency needs before plunging into social media, specifically YouTube.

What the other presenters never touched on was the unique challenges of creating content on behalf of the Federal government. They made everything seem so easy because they’re just creating and posting and accepting user-created video and collecting personal information and doing all these things that Federal agencies either can’t do or are afraid to do or are not sure they can do. Reasons or excuses for inaction, no doubt. Enter Ms. Morrison who had answers for all of it. Turns out there is a specific addendum to the YouTube terms of service specifically for Federal agencies that she can get for you. She also has vetted disclaimer language, privacy statements, and even terms of use for how the public can interact with a Federal social media site. For example, I asked Ms. Morrison about moderating comments. Can a Federal agency refuse to post my comment, what with the first ammendment and all? She says yes, and I don’t believe she was off the cuff with that answer. In her words, the agency can choose to not publish a comment, but they would never censor a comment and then post it. And that to me was worth the price of admission right there (that price happened to be zero, but you get me, right?). I’ve heard numerous Federal clients shy away from social anything  just because they didn’t know how to deal with wild/hateful/off-topic comments.

It’s so exciting to see certain agencies, and super stars at those agencies like Ms. Morrison, working to break down barriers that might keep the Federal government from leveraging social media as quickly, or as effectively, as for- and non-profit organizations. The wider the lines of communication between government and the people, the more likely we can truly have government by the people.

Oh, one last, awesome, tip agreed upon by the whole panel and audience. If you are a Federal agency producing a video, do NOT put a senior leader in front of a flag and agency seal and let them read a prompter for eight minutes. Not even two minutes. Just don’t do it. What kind of video would YOU like to watch? What kind of video would your audience and their friends like to watch? Let’s start there.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdEAY1XLapQ]

What’s the big deal, you might ask? The big deal is that the government has been, until now, overall pretty hesitant to publicly embrace this change in how we are communicating through Web 2.0 and social network initiatives. I have actually sat in on meetings with government media and public affairs groups that have been trying for a while to have their “top brass” understand and embrace these changes and they have been met with hesitancy and fear of this change. Questions of control and policy continue to brew up and a general lack of understanding of the significance of this new communication seems prevelent.

As I had explained to one person I talked to, you have to change the perception. That person, who works for a government agency I won’t name, was explaining that their top folks are afraid that if they start a blog, negative posts will appear. My reply to that is that’s a good thing. Today, people go to the water cooler in his organization and complain there (it’s not like it’s not happening). By providing a social network medium like a blog, yes, you might get complaints. But unlike the water cooler where you can’t hear the complaint to solve it, the blog will allow the organization to respond directly and publicly, letting all know what can be done. It also allows for a community of others to respond to that complaint as well.

It seems the Coast Guard gets this and I think that will be a good thing in the long run. They have even started using “Facebook” to get the word out. Next time you are on Facebook, look up “Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen”. You can join the page and become a fan. Now, it wouldn’t be fair to say they are the only ones. I know that the Air Force has created a group on Facebook as well. But the Coast Guard leader presenting as strong a statement as in the above video shows that they are serious about implementing this communication solution. I applaud them for taking such a stance as an early adapter government agency.

1. This visual dictionary of 53,463 nouns in the English language on one page

2. This incredible video that gives a visual representation of the Civil War in four minutes (please Google it if you have trouble with this version)

3. This animation of the Bayeux Tapestry

Notice the effect in each case of the use of multimedia to compress time and space, relate the visual and the semantic, and give a big-picture perspective.

In the case of the Civil War, for instance, we’re given an instinctive sense of the relative length of its major stages that would be hard to get from a written narrative, as well as an animated representation of wins and losses as control of territory: the time between Lincoln’s inauguration, Southern secession, and the beginning of hostilities; the seeming border stalemate through the middle of the country that begins early on and lasts for most of the war; the significance of certain battles for the control of territory; the seemingly glacial pace of the North’s acquisition of territory, as it moves like an amoeba across the map, until Lincoln’s second inauguration, after which the rate seems to increase exponentially. Meanwhile we get a running tally over time of the war’s cost in human life.

The dictionary is the most obvious case of the relationship between visual and semantic meanings, since it both matches images to words and orders words by the relatedness of their meanings. So you might learn that “Jell-O” and (oddly) “substance” are semantically close and then go on to explore visual similarities or differences.

Finally, there are some good reasons to animate a representation of the Bayeux tapestry: for those of us who haven’t gone to France to see it, it’s nice to get something of the experience by video. But then we need some compensation for the loss of the power of actually being in the presence of a 260-foot-long 12th century work of art—especially one that is also a historical narrative of a central event in English history. Since in this case the new medium—video—is a barrier between the audience and its subject; it needs to overcome that distance by drawing on its strengths. One of these strengths is movement: but what’s needed is more than a long (and potentially boring) pan of the tapestry. The new medium must tell the story in a compressed space that the old medium unfolded along 260 feet. So it’s helpful to have both a long pan of the tapestry and an animation of its content.

A highlight:

Over 57% of U.S. Internet users say they have watched or downloaded online videos, according to a July study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. But they’re not flocking to home videos. According to the study, viewers are most interested in news videos, followed by comedy bits and television shows. Research by Burst Media, an Internet ad network that studies the video market, echoed the findings, ranking news clips, movie trailers, comedy sketches, music videos, and TV shows as the top categories. The category that includes clips produced by users placed ninth out of 11.

I’m not surprised by that ranking, are you? But it’s not about from where, or by whom, the video is generated. This is about quality of content. And in that sense, sure, professionals have the upper hand. More years in the game, bigger production budgets, more contributors with proven chops as writers, editors, and directors. That’s not the point. The point is that user-generated content can be powerful, and can have a hell of a lot more impact than we currently expect from it.

I get that with the birth of user-generated content, the Web was flooded with, as Holahan put it, “skateboarding dogs and beer-drenched parties.” That crap will die down eventually, and good content will both rise up and find niche homes online. I leave the term “good content” vague purposely. I mean the really funny, the really unusual, the very passionate, the very dramatic, the most relevant.

In the past two weeks I’ve talked with folks about using user-generated video to help promote a park by letting visitors post video of their reactions and comments online. I’ve talked with folks who want to build a virtual museum from user-submitted interviews and stories. And I recently posted about Amazon allowing customers to submit video product reviews. All three are great applications of user-generated video. But in all three cases it still comes down to quality of content. People mooning the camera at the park, uninspired museum interviews, and lame product reviews would each render the respective intents worthless. BUT enthusiastic raves about the park, passionate storytelling, and insightful product reviews would each have greater impact than any professionally produced marketing piece could ever hope for.

Don’t write off user-generated video—just help it find its purpose.