Similarly, affiliate network Market Leverage has gone down a similar route with it’s MLTV weekly broadcast, viewers can access a Tivo-like interface to access segments like “Where’s ML”, rather than drag their mouse randomly across the program timeline.

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In my view, some of the issues for affiliates leveraging video will be:

• Interesting content: being able to brainstorm and come up with interesting content on a consistent basis like iJustine or Lisa Nova will require a conscious effort to “think video” as a key part of your strategy, rather than something you just tack on.
• Intuitive design and concept: Successful video often focus more on the entertain aspect, more than the teach or sell angle. I bet many viewers tune in to GaryV to see what he’s going to do next, the wine appreciation naturally develops as you watch more episodes.
• Caution: Some effort involved: While text blogging and content creation require little effort, an effective video strategy will require some effort in storyboarding, setting up the set, shooting the video and post production. On the other hand, if you’re one of a handful of marketers in the space and using it effectively, you have a headstart on the rest of the pack.

Johnathan Stefansky had some great tips from his “Ask the Experts” session on using video effectively. Some points:

• Shelf life: A video which remains popular a year later can be considered to have an exceptional shelf life.

• Call to Action: if you don’t have one in the video, you’re merely being entertaining

• Limited analytics for video: Still fairly limited and restricted to mainly hot zones, data like geo location, time stamping, etc are fairly limited.
• Positioning: Video location “above the fold” will have a higher response rate, compared to below the fold
• Get to the message quickly: In a split test for wedding favor videos, a direct “zoom-in, zoom-out”, voiceover, information packed video, outperformed a QVC style walkthrough 7-minute long video. Take the audience into consideration – the average viewer was a wedding favor buyer who viewed 6-7 videos before making a decision, so getting to the point was important in this case.
• The video indexing black hole: Flash technology (the majority of web video is encoded in this format) is a black hole to Google and is difficult to get it indexed effectively. Meta data like video titles, descriptions and tags are important when labelling your video.
• The CDN factor: The Content Delivery Network (CDN) that your video is delivered across does affect the user experience. Akami seems to lead the field when it comes to video streaming

For more video strategies, check out: Friday Podcast: Video Strategies With Melissa Salas