Sharing video, YES. Social element, YES (Do I even need to qualify that?). Caution and doing it properly to maintain message and brand integrity? Holy cow yes!

That’s all I meant. Plus to be honest, the videos weren’t really the viral type anyway so the likelihood of them being shared in any sort of social media way, in my opinion, is zero. Therefor they really didnt need to be on YouTube. They were commercials and pretty tame commercials at that. I think they were on YouTube for convenience and bandwidth more than the social component.

Now if they did a UGC Video contest where people could upload their own “Arrived” videos.. Definitely on YouTube. If they did a series of “crazy” commercials, music video spoofs by employees or members or something like that – that could be viral and you would totally want to do that on YouTube. Look at what it did for the US Navy. There have been so many crewman, seamen and officers making spoof music videos that the rumor is that the Navy is trying to leverage the popularity into a recruitment campaign. That’s the kind of stuff that goes viral. That is how you use social media. Compelling content.

Please don’t get caught up on the whole YouTube vs Self-Serve debate. This was more about the integrity of the marketing message where it mattered – the home page of the site. Not a technological issue of the best way to stream video to your CU marketing site. Having alternative media on your home page is bad occluding your message is bad, no matter who the viewer is. It is like having your member’s cooler friend come up and interrupt your sales pitch and pull your member away from you costing you the sale. The difference is, you have the opportunity to close the door and keep that friend out.

Now the awesome thing is that the folks at EDS are paying attention, they fixed their video to no longer show related videos.

Thanks to everyone who has put me to task for my statements. I hope I cleared up any confusion on what I said an what my position is on the subject.

Your target audience is Gen Y – they know how YouTube works and will not hold you responsible for “videos like this” In fact some may think you’re pretty cool.

Their dad – aka your current member? – not so much…so their kid will have to explain it to them – once again, making you cool.

I think EDS did a great job because they are pioneers in this arena………most credit unions are afraid to get into the social media sandbox for fear of making a mistake.

Now, understandably, not everyone wants their videos shared. But I’d expect that to be the rare exception for a marketer.

The reason why I am still hesitant to stream videos from YouTube is that even when you remove related videos the embedded video still links back to youtube which brings up the related content (albeit not within the corporate site frame so less of a big deal). What is a big deal is that this can take people away from the site you want them to stay on and browse. This also causes you to lose the ability to accurately track user activity on the site. This is important to me, and should be important to the credit union. Not everyone will click on it, but it is there to be clicked.

Ultimately, and I think the review shows it, I think the site is good. I think, after a few minor changes, it could be great.

A YouTube tip I would recommend: When generating the embed code, click off “include related videos” and you will never have the problem of unwanted video content making its way onto your site. The pros of hosting with YouTube definitely outweigh the cons.