Dear PR Department:
Why are the videos on our website copyrighted? Why are they in some weird proprietary player?
Why can’t people just grab them and put them on their blogs and websites?
I thought the whole point of making corporate videos was to get press and exposure.
Doesn’t making the videos impossible to share defeat the purpose? Aren’t we wasting a massive (and expensive) marketing asset?
Suggestion: Take every video the company has ever produced and get it on YouTube tomorrow. Link to the YouTube video from our sites instead of using our own player. If we do that:
- Every prospect who watches a video will be able to share it with colleagues, increasing leads and sales
- We’ll get more leads for free, because YouTube is the second largest search engine (bigger than Bing and Yahoo!)
- We’ll get a ton of free coverage and a ton of web traffic
- Our fans’ blog posts about us will be more interesting and accurate if they use our video instead of making up their own stuff
- Our web hosting costs would go down
Is there something I’m missing?
Thanks.
I think one issue is YouTube’s filesize limitations (2GB in size and 10 minutes). If you have keynotes, presentations, webinars etc, those are usually longer than 10 mins.
One more thing you could be missing is that YouTubes related video marketing not always is in favor of your brand.
Loss of control can be very scary for many companies.;)
I went through a process of letting go with my blog, I wanted to have videos posted on my domain and only on my domain but the web isn’t built that way. They go anywhere and everywhere, no matter what you try to do.
Even if you host the video on your own server with your own player people can download the video and post it on youtube. It kinda sucks, but it’s better to have the videos up there under your profile rather than some random person… and it’s just the way of the world.