This is a guest post written by Steve Rosenbaum of Magnify.Net (see below for details on Steve):
If video is going to be everywhere, and everyone is going to need it – how can you determine the best solution to fit your needs. Well, it turns out there are different kinds of customers that fit different kinds of solutions. So, let’s start by asking a few basic questions about YOU, and your video needs.
1. CONTENT
2. SPEED
3. INDUSTRY
4. GOALS
So, here’s the Video Personality Questionnaire:
CONTENT, you are a….
A Prolific Creator. This means that either you, your site, or your team shoots, edits, and publishes a large volume of video on a regular basis.
An Occasional Maker. You and your team make a few videos a week, no more than
10 or 15 videos a month.
An infrequent Video Author. Sure, you make a video ever now and then, maybe an
interview with the CEO or a rare video of your team at a trade show or public event, but
mostly you just don’t make video.
SPEED. How zippy are you?
Your a Speed Daemon. You’re site’s content is changing all the time. You’ve got a twitter account – and you tweet out news often and quickly. You post new blog posts, upload FlipCam videos, and expect your site to be updated in real time.
A Frequent Refresher. You’re not a realtime publisher, but you update your sites content on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. You endeavor to be topical, keeping content fresh and perky.
A Cautious Updater. You’re sites information is static, and updated only when needed. You publish white papers, and data, but not news or changing information.
INDUSTRY – what do your visitors expect.
You’re a Media Site. Your content focused on publishers, knowledge and how-to’s. You pride yourself in Curating the best material in your area of focus – and your visitors expect topical, timely, fresh content.
You’re a Brand. Visitors go to your site because they are buyers of your brand. They’re are coming to be part of your brand fan club. Or, they’ve got a gripe. They want to post, share, upload, and engage in your brand community – both as a consumer and creator of media.
You’re an e-commerce site. You’ve got great things for sale. Electronics, Books, Shoes, Crafts, you name it.
GOALS – what do you want video to do for you?
I’m looking to be the ‘it’ place to go. I want my visitors to consume text, pictures, and video from my site. I expect Video to increase the time visitors spend on my site, the number of pages they view, and as a result I want my SEO (search engine optimization) to help me grow my page rank and search results.
Ads. I’ve got an ad sever with DoubleClick, OAS, or XX, and I want to be able to drive pre-roll campaigns with adjacent ad banners on a coherent dashboard.
Cash – I want Revenue. I don’t have an ad sever, or advertiser relationships, but I want someone else to sell my pre-roll and just hand me a check. I don’t need to have a direct relationship or veto power over the ads on my site.
Using These Four Vectors, Content, Speed, Industry, and Goals – you can determine what kind of video user you are, and therefore what kind of platform you’re looking for.
THE MAJOR MEDIA MAKER:
if you and your team create a lot of video, then storage, encoding, delivery, and analytics are your core needs. You’ve got sunk costs – and how you need to get revenue back against plays.
If your a MAJOR MEDIA MAKER your priority is going to be finding a solution that has solid storage and delivery. You’ve probably got developers on staff, or on call – so you don’t need pages, or web dev tools, or even ad networks. You’ve got all that. You need a player, customizable, and an ad server.
Good solutions for the Major Media Maker are Brightcove, Kaltura, Ooyala, or building your own solution with JW Player or Flowplayer.
THE SOCIAL MEDIA MAVEN
You’ve got traffic, and community, and engagement. Now it’s time to turn that passion into action – and get your visitors to make video, share video, embed video, and spread the content and the brand with the power of your social network. Community is the driver here – and revenue comes from organic growth. So the core tools re sharing tools, video discovery – video upload of UGC, Curation, and building the largest most contextual collection of content that your community can share and grow.
If your a SOCIAL MEDIA MAVEN then video is driven by community. You’re looking to embrace upload, discovery, sharing - and of course monetization. For this use case, a Social Video Platform is a must. You probably have limited dedicated dev resources – so you’d like a solution that can be managed by non-technical staff.
Good solutions for this use case might be self sever video players like Vimeo or Viddler, or more full featured video discovery solutions like VodPod or Magnify.net.
THE BRAND BUILDING DESTINATION
Fans and friends are showing up at your site. They’re looking for knowledge – how to’s and FAQ’s. They want to find video that answers their questions -and they’re ready to share their product knowledge and passionate brand fanaticism with your visitors. Here the tools are about Aggregation, Curation, Filtering - and presentation layer.
Good solutions for you include solutions with integrated social media tools, robust API’s, a diverse mix of on-page players, and database driven video library pages. In addition, you may want to be looking for a Realtime Video Curation engine, and on the fly Sponsored Video Sections for monetization of brand partners. For an open source solution, Kaltura offers some of these features, as does Ooyala, and Magnify.net powers these solutions.
THE MONETIZATION MONSTER
You’ve got the traffic. You’ve got the content. You’ve got the costs. You need revenue, and fast. This means you need essentially a video ad server, or a player that bolts in to the best ad networks you can find.
For the hard core revenue driven site, the number one, two and three concern is ad serving. You need both players and pages- and you need tight integration with OAS and Dart DoubleClick ad servers. You need to be able to run multiple campaigns at the same time, and be able to provide advertisers with granular data about video plays, engagement, and off site video embedding.
Among the solutions for this complex integration are Brightcove, Magnify and Ooyala.
CONCLUSION:
Video is powerful, important, and able to provide a measurable impact on your site traffic and ROI. But understanding your content strategy, and your video sources, and then finding a video partner that can work with you to meet those goals takes some effort. Understanding what platforms provide – and exploring both the documentation and existing implementations is essential. Don’t assume that all whats under the hood is everything you need. If you need Ad Serving, take the time to set up a demo campaign and see how complex the dashboard is. If you’re looking to add Aggregated and Curated video to your offering, make sure that you’ve got a scalable solution that provides both sensible content and workflow solutions.
Video is here to stay. Welcome to the Realtime video web. It’s bound to have an impact on your business – so why not explore ways to make that impact measurable and meaningful.
About our Expert Guest Author: Steve Rosenbaum is founder and CEO of Magnify.net, a NYC-based solution that provides Aggregation and Realtime Curation of web video. He has been building and growing consumer-content businesses since 1992. He was the creator and Executive Producer of MTV UNfiltered, a series that was the first commercialapplication of user-generated video in commercial TV.
Follow Steve on Twitter: @Magnify
Read Steve Rosenbaum on CurationNation.org
