Alison Provost has a great piece on imediaconnection.com about video. Video has become an important tool to a communicator. At AHA, we have long been fans of video. Good video. Video with solid editorial content. Video that provides compelling content to the viewer.

AHA Take

While Alison’s entire article is interesting, you could just skip to page three and read about branded editorial content. In my opinion, that is where the value lies.

I have to admit that when I hear someone say they are going to create a viral video – I am skeptical. You can’t create a viral video. You can create a good video and pray that it goes viral, but you don’t control “viral.” And from what I have seen, creating a video with the objective of making it viral fails more than it succeeds. Producing an engaging, entertaining and interesting video that will appeal to your community has a much better chance of being shared.

At our Vancouver PR agency, we have our regular AHA Flip Cam Friday. That has been very well received. We are also working more and more with clients on creating a range of videos, from those made in-house using Flip cameras to working with videographers to create more news-like videos that showcase a story. For both internal and external communications, a Flip camera video is a powerful, yet simple tool. It can show a snapshot of your organization from the perception of your senior executive or from the reception. It can be a series of short clips or one longer video (not too long though). People like to watch videos, but they need to be engaging and entertaining. They can’t just be an infomercial about your organization. They need to be visually stimulating and to be interesting to the person watching.

We see a huge opportunity with video now and in the future. What about you? Are you using video or are you planning to?