Using Web Video on your Business site: A Non-Profit Example

Many large businesses use web video to communicate with prospects, customers and employees. Medium and Small Businesses are getting into it too, but some are hesitant. Those who are implementing video may or may not be doing so with the proper tools in place to analyze whether this or that clip is drawing in prospects and leading to new customers. Whether you place video on your site to help market, sell, or educate, you'll be better served if you know who is watching and whether that video is having an impact. This is a no-brainer to a lot of people, but it's new to those who are still working off the assumption that a website is just a glorified brochure and video on that website is the same as paying a premium for extra fancy graphics on the pages of that brochure.


Here's the example of m/Oppenheim Associates. 


m/Oppenheim Associates is a search company that finds executives for non-profits. They have begun incorporating video into their site by publishing to Blip.TV and then embedding the Blip.TV player back into their site. The videos they now have available are clips from a recent symposium and a couple of interviews that were shot Charlie Rose-style against black limbo. How you get to the video player is a little kludgey unless you've been given a direct link in an email, which is how I got there.

If you're on the site and you click on the insight link you can download .pdfs or watch individual videos by clicking on links in the right side bar. This is how those individual clips look.

The page behind goes dark and the single clip presents itself. You can get to the multi-clip player by following the More Videos link in red text at the bottom of the "Videos and Podcasting" sidebar if you've scrolled down all the way. Do the individual clips allow for better analytics? I don't think so; it's probably just a workaround used to add video to an existing page layout.


The video is there, it's also there in a convenient, multi-clip player, but you have to drill down for it. I looked to see if the Blip.TV connection meant that the videos on the m/Oppenheim site were being uploaded to other sites, but I don't really see evidence of that. There are three videos on YouTube and two on Facebook, but I didn't find any on Flickr or Vimeo.


Be that as it may, m/Oppenheim is going for it and will no doubt add more and more video as they go along. If the analytics are studied, different site placement and UI changes tested, the use of video will do more for the m/Oppenheim brand. The main thing is to get started and that's exactly what they're doing!