Video can be a very powerful tool for getting a story across when its used well, but when its used inappropriately, it is worse than useless; it becomes a hindrance to your objectives. Like this.Video: Low-Cost Search Tactics. But first the intro

Although search marketing is not known as being an extremely expensive marketing endeavor, it still takes some monetary resources. Not every small mom-n-pop business has the budget to fund these efforts. There are some small businesses that even have to make a choice between paying utility bills and investing in search marketing strategies.

Matt Van Wagner of Find Me Faster explains that, in spite of these circumstances, the Web offers every business an opportunity to be found, even with a small budget. First and foremost, a business needs to have an online presence with a website. The site does not need to be elaborate, but needs to be able to operate and provide basic functions.

Apart from the statement of the bleeding obvious (you can't be found on the web if you don't have a website, nor in the phone book if you don't have a landline, just in case you hadn't figured that out) it turns out that this video is what the journalism business calls a puff piece, and it essentially wastes 3 minutes of our time, by the end of it we are barely any wiser than before we started.

But the biggest sin is that, even if we had learned something useful, we couldn't do anything with it. Outside of a single person operation, most organisations need to be able to share information and provide actionable resources to their governance structure. We can't "quote" a video without transcribing the content and to expect others in our organisation also to watch the video to learn what we now know is to waste 3 minutes times however many people there are in the group.

Ironically, the key to the whole video is perfectly summed up on the page already, in the last paragraph.

He recommends utilizing David Mihm’s site called GetListed.org. This site gives actionable tips and information for small businesses and the best part is, it is free. If you are going to do paid search, Van Wagner suggest being conservative and local in what you do.

Perfect, that's all we needed to know from this interviewee, except perhaps that GetListed only lists you if you are in the US. Nevertheless, this video is a valuable lesson in multimedia.

1. Don't treat your video as if it was a news broadcast, the web is not TV any more than it is a newspaper or a radio station.
2. Use it for high impact, emotional engagement or entertainment - show me the problem, or the solution to my problem, make me laugh or cry so that I will want to share the experience with others (also known as viral marketing).
3. If you have inspiring, animated or exceptional talkers, by all means video them but keep the wafflers and the bores away from from the camera.
4. If you are trying to convince people to act, give them resources to use. That means easily copied and pasted text (NOT pdf files), graphics like photos and charts that they can put into a document for their decision makers.
5. Give both versions, the whole story and the exec summary so they can know what they are talking about in detail but get people's attention with the key points
6. Never forget that good multimedia is expensive. The tools may cost almost nothing, but the experience and training to use them well is priceless

Seen any really effective use of video for NFP use? drop the URL in the comments so we can all check it out.

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