You Tube

[KristineS]

One of our corporate partners is now making videos and putting the on You Tube. We've made videos in house before but have only used them at trade shows.

Has anyone ever tried marketing using videos on You Tube? If you have, what was your experience? Do you think it worked?

[Aaron Hats]

That's on my to-do list. Imagine you're considering a new hat and you see a video of a guy drive over the hat with his truck and the hat looks like nothing happened to it. I think that would be quite convincing to a customer.

My wife bought a new digital camera and it actually takes really good video too. I just need to find an easy to use video software so I can do some basic editing.

[KristineS]

I think there is some value to using video, I know we have discussed creating training and tutorial videos for some of our companies several times. I do, however, think that such videos are more effective if they are spotlighted on the company web site rather than on You Tube. It is pretty easy for things to get lost on You Tube.

[Aaron Hats]

You're right Kristine. I was thinking on the line of simply having YouTube host the video. I have a couple of our tv commercials there and any future videos will be hosted there but I don't think many people will actually go to YouTube looking for our videos.

[orion_joel]

I agree with Aaron it is quite easy to get lost on You Tube. More out of interest then anything i have a couple of times gone looking for different clips like music video's or such and it is quite surprising how difficult it can be to find the original clip, in between all the remade, clips and covers of the song. For specific topics and marketing i think it becomes even more difficult to cut through the clutter.

However i must admit that i have managed to find one or two very specific videos in quite different categories that have been very interesting to me, which were purely found by putting in random search phrases.

While i do not think that You Tube is the ideal way to market your business by just putting a video online, it is probably by far the best way to serve a video to your customer. You can host it on You Tube and then embed it into your website, and the only way they know it is not on your website is the You Tube Logo, however this is becoming to prevalent on so many video's people are really very use to seeing it, and i think it would not really adversely affect your business in anyway doing this.

[KristineS]

I think as a video hosting solution You Tube is a great idea. If you are trying to get noticed, however, it doesn't work so well. I think people hear stories about some video that went viral and think their work will do the same. Most corporate videos aren't going to go viral. They simply won't interest enough people.