Thursday, January 28, 2010

Online Video Platform Summit: Best Practices Roundtable - Online Video Publishing Strategies and Tools,

A best practice is a technique, process or tried and true method that can evolve over time through the process of discovery, trial and error or other process and is recognized as the most effective way to yield successful results. What may start as a good idea can develop in a standard practice that can be adopted by any group, organization or industry. When it comes to online video, best practices are commonly shared as advise or tips on how to produce, deliver and measure the effectiveness of your communications efforts. In this panel session from the Online Video Platform Summit, presenters from both online video platform providers and enterprise customers share their own best practices for online video publishing. Some of the topics include content creation, distribution, audience engagement, measurement, call-to-actions and conversion as well as both the opportunities and challenges for enterprise content creators.

Best Practices Round Table: Online Video Publishing Strategies and Tools
Moderator: Paul Riismandel, Director of Curriculum Support, School of Communication, Northwestern University
Matt DeLoca, SVP Sales and Marketing, KIT digital
Wayne Kao, VP Product Engineering, VMIX
Ken Kaplan, Broadcast and New Media Manager, Intel Global Communications Group
Linda Crowe, Digital Multimedia Communications -- Group Manager at Sun Microsystems

The opportunities have never been greater for businesses to promote their brands, products, and services with compelling online video content. The barriers to creating and distributing professional-quality video have been eroded with the development of affordable content creation tools and the solutions available from online video platforms. Still, if video is not one of your core competencies, it can become a costly and time-consuming effort. This session brings together leading industry professionals to discuss and demonstrate cost-effective tools, techniques, and best practices for online video publishing.


A Few Highlights from the Panel

According to Matt DeLoca, the things that companies should take into consideration when developing an online video solution are: content creation, management and distribution and recording. He noted that a few years ago, many companies didn't have the content or know how to create it, he said:
"It's amazing how things have transformed in the last few years, the presence of content is not the issue, the issue is how quickly they can get that content transformed and tagged. The evolution over the next few years is about distributing that content around multiple sections of the website as well as partner sites. And now it's gone a step further, it's really about socializing that content and making it available on lots of sites based on user preferences and the way they interact with the content. So, the most important thing I talk about with customers is, make sure you have good content and you've encoded it in the most appropriate ways for distribution, but really maximize the ways that you can leverage that distribution."
Matt added that there are two main principles to distribute you content. The first is to "push" that content under your own preferences where your audience is going to be - your web site, a press room, product pages other an Internet or Intranet site. The second piece is about making the content sociable for your viewers, which is more of a "pull" mentality, where they see the value for an extended audience to share it on blogs, Facebook pages and to apply their own distribution methods using their own preferences.

Wayne Kao said that for his customers, they start with the overall objectives to formulate an online solution. Their key is to create an efficient process and workflow so customers can focus on content creation and easy upload. Flip cameras have become very popular for many of VMIX's customers in the news and radio business since most can't afford the big expensive HD cameras. This form of instant online video publishing has really taken off and content creators can always go back later and refine the video with additional editing.

Both Ken Kaplan and Linda Crowe also talked about the "need for speed" in corporate video, and while there are clients and customers that still ask for content on videotape or DVD, most are happy to receive an online video version rather than a physical media asset.

The key is less focus on the technology and more focus on flexibility.


Related @ovpsummit Tweets

RT @dboyll: Check out Sun's viral "Shouting in the Datacenter" Geeks FTW! @llcrowe http://ow.ly/Dx30 #ovps09

RT @dboyll: @llcrowe advice for those building/buying OVP: focus on automation and flexibility to change w/standards & user needs #ovps09

OVP Summit Best Practices panel rounds out day one w/ @deloca @kenekaplan @llcrowe and Wayne Kao @vmix (didn't get his Twitter name) #ovps09

RT @dboyll: Linda Crowe is @llcrowe of Sun: check out their industry-leading enterprise OVP implementation, ChannelSun http://ow.ly/DwLb


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