More and more people get their information online through video. There is a tsunami of video content flowing through the web today. In August 2009 alone, there were 139 million viewers of online video and 11 billion videos posted to the internet. More than 7 billion of those online videos appeared on YouTube.

Does your company have a video strategy or video content on YouTube? Do your competitors? Can you afford not to have your stories on this emerging channel?

YouTube, like Twitter and Facebook, is just another channel of communication, and it’s one that is being adopted by more and more companies. For the Web 2.0-savvy marketer, video is one more tool to add to your communications toolbox.

Page One PR recently created a video production group within the agency. We wanted to combine our traditional PR and marketing expertise with an ability to tell our client stories through video. Here are some lessons we learned on how to add video to your marketing and PR arsenal.

1. Don’t spend too much – or too little:
While it’s tempting to tap someone in marketing to produce your videos with a home camera and production tools, you don’t really want a video that looks do-it-yourself (DIY) or amateurish to represent your company. At the other end of the spectrum, there are corporations that pay more than $20,000 to a professional production studio to create their short video. In today’s marketing climate, that’s a challenging spend to justify, especially for a piece of collateral that may need to be updated a month from now. Even more frightening, while a professional production house knows well how to tell a story with video, they may not know how to tell a tech story or how to position your company’s message and product successfully.

2. Develop a visual element plan as well as the story plan:
We took people who knew all about writing product press releases and asked them to draft scripts to tell a product story. Sounds easy, right? Well, we didn’t always know how to organize the visual elements needed to tell the story. We tried several different approaches such as storyboarding software, drawing pictures on whiteboards, and using natural, unscripted settings. Here is the sequence of steps we now follow to create a video:

- Brainstorm visual and story elements. Three people sit in a room – the video director (person controlling camera on set), account manager (or marketing program manager), and producer (marketing manager who controls budget and costs or access to people like a customer). These people control the three interconnected elements of video: 1) feasibility of visual idea; 2) marketing messages and story direction; 3) cost, scope, and resource allocation for project. The cost is not just financial but can involve the high opportunity cost of asking for a CEO’s time.

- Write scripts with visual cues. We’ve found that drawing and the use of graphics takes too long for simple videos. We go straight to the script and use visual cues and shorthand that everyone understands. Here’s a glossary of film script terminology that we found helpful.

3. Clarify Responsibilities:
Initially, we just showed up at the client’s office with a video camera and some questions. While this worked for simple scripts, the process broke down for more complicated productions. We decided to clarify responsibilities into broad categories per project. Some of the responsibilities are: producer (budget); video director (controls camera, lighting, sound, editing and other post production tasks); set director (order talent around); costumes and props (loud colors or stripes are not recommended for the former); script writing (usually, account manager has ownership of the content). The key lesson here is to write down who is responsible for what part of the project and then review the status of each area prior to the shoot.

4. Assess executives, staff, partners and customers as acting talent:
Talent varies widely when it comes to video. Your marketing staff should start off with simple promotional videos as screen tests and then assess the types of videos that will work best for each individual. Develop video concepts around the strengths of your “talent.”

For more information, check out a recent video we produced and the process that went on behind the scenes:
2-minute video on Page One Video Services
Script for video (notice the suggested script differs from the actual video)