Inform, Educate and Entertain

What kind of videos should you think of making? Lord Reith, the first Director General of the BBC, had a maxim – that everything the BBC made had to inform, educate or entertain. That's what you need to do with online videos as well. So should you make them yourselves? The answer to that is “it depends”. I know of companies that have been tempted to make their own with mixed success, the ones in the US adopting the technology much more successfully than their UK counterparts. One of the early success stories was a simple campaign that didn't even start out as a campaign. Blendtec makes blenders for the commercial market in the US. They wanted to increase their sales. This is what they did http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qg1ckCkm8YI That's an example of how a simple idea “Does it Blend?” – the first video hardly cost them anything to make – turned into a something viral.