Building a corporate tv-channel, covering intranets, websites, headquarter malls and branch lobbies with screens and moving pictures is basically an easy exercise.
The rise of online video is often mentioned in one go with Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 and other current hip phenomena of the online world. Is is really an example of freeform emergent use of social software tools – or is it, on the contrary – still one person (representing the company) talking and the others (the employees, (potential) customers) listening?
Video itself is still a oneway media with littler interactivity. But the ways to produce and use online video are so manifold and easy, that it is easily possible to get more out of it then just some clips.
This text covers the four main issues you will encounter when you decide to embrace online video as part of your communication portfolio: Create a strategy and create a media environment that empowers you to act according to the strategy. Production issues – how to get started with the hands on work. Integration – ways to (strategically and technically) integrate your videos with your other online communication acitivities. Editorial work – you can handle a camera, you can embed mediaplayers, you know why you want to use online video, but what are the stories you are going to tell? Why should anybody bother to watch your videos?

Building the environment

Video channels on your intranet or your corporate website grant a much higher impact than the use of occasional videos online. Users know where to go when they are looking for your movies, you can create a layout that fits better to videos and you get space where you can tell your users what you are actually doing here.
This is important: a video page has to be more than just a list of links to your videos. Create meaningful headlines, write attracting teasertexts, use preview images to display scenes of your movies. The teasertexts should not only arouse curiosity, they also need to contain information: What is this video about, who is talking, what topics are they covering. Online users are very strict with their time: If they don't get what the video is about within 30 seconds, they are gone. Well written teaser texts can help to expand this time tremendously.
These are editorial issues, but you also have to consider the components (text elements, pictures, the user-flow) when creating the design and the contentmanagement features of your video pages.
These simple measures help to create a good user experience of your online video pages, but one question has to be answered before you can think about your video pages: Why do you want to use online video, want advantages to you expect, what is the difference compared to your other communication channels? Which messages do you want to support, how, and in which areas of your communication plan?
There are many possible answers:

• Videos create trust and credibility: To hear something ist better than to read it, seeing something makes us even more likely to believe it then just hearing it.
• Speed: an online-video is easy to produce (once your environment is set up) – in emotional and controversial issues, it may be easier to create a video (and if it's just a speech of the ceo) than to write a text. Videos are less likely to be questioned, they are not expected to cover every detail and every facet in a rational argumentation.
• Spreading corporate culture: This is how we are, act and look like – that's especially important in multinational companies. You can support the desired culture, but also show respect for cultural diversity in the same media.
• Emphasize important news: Create videos to support the big news (acquisitions, quarterly results, new boardmembers). User will learn to understand that this is important brecause it comes with a video.
• Show presence and transparency: Especially in tough times, presence and visibility of the managrement are critical. Videos may help to fight doubt and criticism.

These decisions may also influence how you design your online video environment.
Whatever you decide – don't hide your videos on a video page only. They need to be integrated as banners and teasers on the most frequently used pages, embed them in news, announce them in other online marketing channels you use.

Producing videos

Creating online video can be as cheap or as expensive as you want, as easy or as sophisticated. There are no limits; it's up to you.
Almost any digital camera that records moving pictures can nowadays be used to create online video; quality issues willl rarely occur with the recordin equipment, but more frequently with sound and light. It requires some experience to see what works out and what is really bad – just go ahead and try.
Recording is not an issue, but how do you get the stuff out of the camera? And what do you do with it then?
As a simple rule of thumb: With one camera, you can record one person – or several persons, if you dont insist on close ups or switching camera positions. That does not only affect recording, but also editing: With one camera, you don't have the material for sophisticated montage; all you can do/have to do is to cut off the beginning (where everybody is coughing and adjusting their ties) and the end (where they are looking in the camera and asking if they have been good).
This reduces the the editing possibilities, but also the work and the required skills: This kind of editing is easy to do and can be done also with standard software that you most probably already have on your desktop.
Using two or more cameras provides more flexibility and a more lively result – but is is generally the point, when professional support is required. There are way more possibilities in editing the material; - that requires practice – and some tools. You can learn this by doing – or by watching someone who does it for you in the beginning; that's usually a more effective way.
Where do you want to record your videos? Generally, your office wont be that beautiful, your actors wont have the time to travel to prettier locations and your won't have the chance to wait for the perfect light-situation. In short: the background of homemade videos is generally really ugly.
You can turn this into an advantage – it can also be a sign of credibility or efficient production, or you can turn your offices into a bluebox- or greenbox-studio. That sound like more than it is. All you need is a big green (or blue) blanket, that covers the background – and someone who knows how to edit greenbox-videos. Filming with greenbox requires professional support (they will also have the blanket), but no specific rooms.
So now you recorded the video, you downloaded it from the camera and did some editing – next step is to encode the video into a fileformat that is apt for online use. Before you decide on which format to use, you definitely have to do some research: What tools or plugins do your clients use? Which mediaplayers are available? Statistics can provide a lot of information; many tools do not only check browser versions and operating system of visitors on your site, but also the installed plugins. If your working on an intranet – ask your users (or your IT manager), there will most probably exist some standards. And finally, on the internet, you can run a trial offering several video formats for a while – and go on with the one solution that has been used most frequently.
Windows Media Video (wmv) and Flash Video (flv) are now the most popular video formats in the office world. Most users generally have both players installed. wmv has some advantages in offline use (if you want people to download videos or to watch them offline before you integrate them on your page (eg for approval). Flv-files on the other hand have some advantages in online integration: It's easier to use preview pictures, to create your own player -skins and to even add interactive features.
Still – for both players and fileformats, there are different codecs, versions, settings. The only way to find out what works for you is trial and error; and once you found settings that work – stick to them as long as you can.
Another encoding issue is the filesize: Bigger files provide a better quality, but they load longer and cause more traffic in your users networks. Office networks are quite intolerant with big downloads which may cause big videos to be blocked, downsizing your files to 1,5 or 2 MB per minute is a good rule of thumb.
The output size (how big is your video on the screen) depends on the layout of your video pages and on the filesize. Videos with less then 300 pixels width are perceived as quite small, 300 – 500 px width deliver a good user experience; bigger videos may cause filesize-, traffic- and loading-problems in average office networks.

You may still ask yourself what you need to do all this. Before you decide to buy something, check out what you already got: The Movie Maker is a very basic editing tool, that comes with the Windows Operating System, it can be used to cut wmv- or avi-files, to insert pictures and titles in your movie and to combine several clips into one movie. Some CD-burning-tools (eg Nero Vision) also offer some video-editing features.
Free or very cheap alternatives might be Quicktime pro, Rivax (or other tools using the ffmpg-standards). For encoding, there are even some hosted applications that don't require any download or installation at all – check out flvencoder.com or zamzar.com.
Anyhow – there is no need to be afraid of huge investments when starting online-video.

Integration

We have a movie. But how to we bring it to our page? - With modern contentmanagement-tools, this is dead-simple: videos can be embedded as easily as pictures.
The workflow is generally as easy as uploading a file, assigning it to a page and publishing it - done. The rest (if you did your research on which filetypes to use well) is handled by plugins and browser functionalities, that are already there.
On the other hand of course, there are no limitations in creating complex and sophisticated workflows:

• You can integrate an encoding tool with your cms, so that you can use any tzpe of videofile as source and your cms does the converting and encoding for you.
• You can build skinned players that integrate perfectly with your sites' identity.
• You can store your videos in the CMS or on any filespace (streaming servers only need to be considered as an option if you either consider a livestreaming or the publication of very long (30mins +) videos).
• You may of course also integrate a Digital Asset Management System (DAM) with your CMS (or with your encoding tool, or with both) – that may keep your contentmanagement workflows simpler and it adds additional opprtunities to your editing and publication process: Some DAM-tools offer digital rights management (DRM), they also integrate basic editing features, can be used as collaboration platforms to work on the video in a team before the publication – it depends on your plans, ideas and budgets.

A beginners workflow for video integration does not need to be perfectly seamless and fully integrated – you won't do it that often. But it should be simple: Avoid forcing editors to copy or type any ids, use normal cms-features and no erroneous hacks to edit texts and pictures – and don't forget to add these descriptive elements to your video components: Every video need to be supported by additional text-information, at least by a title, a teasertext and the releasedates, information about length and an authorline are optional additions that also make sense. – or the users simply won't understand it.

Editorial work

We have set up a video strategy, designed built a video channel and gained knowhow and experience in producing videos. But what are we doing it for, and, even more important: How do we keep the video channel alive, where to interesting topics come from and how do we transform them into movies that attract our audience?
Developing editorial standards means to define specific formats that are easy to reuse. That can be a periodic interview with the CEO, a speech of senior managers, a newsflash that briefly mentions and explains current issues, documentary-style reports or a fully flavoured news feature with presenters, interviewers, newssections and included reports. It's up to what you want to achieve – and of course it depends from the time and budget you can invest.
Developing a corporate identity for videos can also be very efficient: It helps users to recognize your efforts, it improves the recall values even if you don't publish videos frequently, and elements from the CI can be used in combination with the teaser elements that link from your other pages to your video pages. A basic CI consists of an intro (keep it short!), a corner bug (the little icon in the top left or right corner) of the screen, and and icon that can be used with inserts.

Videos are a great tool to either break news or to support and explain big topics. To embed them in your general editorial plan, align them with other media (if you have some, eg. corporate magazines, intranets, blogs) and the contents you plan there. Videos can not stand on their own – this is something that online video just does not do yet. Too often, connections are bad, users are running out of time or don't have the possibility to turn on the sound (the ipod generation with omnipresent earplugs or headphones is not yet the main office audience), and sometimes, especially in offices, people feel bad if they are watching videos. That's astonishing, but something we hear again and again when questioning users. TV is still linked too close to entertainment – that's also an important reason why online videos have to be kept short. After 30 seconds, the majority of users thinks of turning the video off. Three minutes are the maximum length for a video with one topic. Complete newsshows that cover several topics may be longer, in that case you should also consider to offer several versions: one file with the whole show in full length, and additionally all the topics as single files so that the users can decide on their own what part to watch when.
Another frequently practised way to involve users and to make sure the content is interesting for them, is to involve them in the topics. Especially in Intranets, it's easy to ask users what they want to see next, which questions they want the CEO to raise (and answer) in his next speech.

Videos require a lot of editorial work – it's not enough to just turn on the camera. They are actually more work then writing a text (except for the recorded speeches): You need a story, a text, you have to decide about which scenes, additional slides or pictures to use, you have to decide about additional sounds and you may need a speaker.
If you want to do more than just recording speeches (which is definitely ok, too), you should question yourself why you are planning to do a video this time: What does it do more than a text would do? That's a question you probably have to repeat quite often – until your formats are well established and really speak for themselves.