We’ve talked plenty on this site about the importance of creating a smart online video strategy, one that complements and advances your specific brand message and provides a roadmap toward the right style of video for your company.

But what about the video that you can’t affect? In particular, the hundreds of thousands of customer-generated videos now freely posted on YouTube and other sites that dole out brand opinions and product reviews to millions of passionately interested viewers.

How do you go about making that part of your video strategy?

That’s the marketing challenge many retail brands now find …

I interviewed Chris Wood, Video Production/Project Manager for Kiddicare, the UK’s largest and favorite online (and offline) retailer of baby supplies. Chris is the visionary behind the company’s innovative video programs.  We discussed how his company may be a model for what the future of video in online retail could look like.…

I originally wrote at ReelSEO about Amazon.com’s new program – Amazon Studios – a business partnership with Warner Brothers studios for featuring and paying new filmmaking talent (both filmmakers and scriptwriters) with an eye on making big motion pictures. Since then, I’ve had time to muse on the peculiar partnership between the world’s #1 online retail store with a major film studio, and share with you here my proposal for Amazon Studios to provide a much better video commerce platform – not just one for feature-length filmmakers, but for the existing customers already supporting Amazon.com.…

Grant Crowell interviews Video Commerce Consortium’s own Founder, Justin Foster, who moderated the panel, “New Strategies for Marketing and Ecommerce.” Justin and I discussed the new opportunities with video in for getting discovered and monetization, user-generated video innovations with retailers, and the different priorities around online video between marketers, talent, and producers.

A significant piece of new legislation, affecting all online video producers and creators, was signed in to law in October. The result could be added cost, legal exposure, and liability for online video creators.

The 21^st Century Communication and Video Accessibility Act requires that producers and content creators of online video must provide closed captioning. This has significant implications for e-commerce video, as these legal requirements will apply to all content producers, not just traditional television networks. While there is discussion of only requiring television producers to comply, the wording in the bill could be interpreted to mean any …

Video Analyst Grant Crowell interviewed the video commerce company EXPO about this week’s announcement with digital measurement firm comScore, on the marketing potential of user-generated content. According to the report, results indicate that the highest performing user-generated product reviews contained many of the same sales elements seen in professionally-produced television commercials.

One would be hard-pressed to find a singular label that describes EXPO. You could refer to it as a consumer-generated video review site of manufacturers products. You could also describe it as a moderated social commerce video network, where the “social” is about users sharing product experience and offering advice about those same products. In my interview with EXPO’s president Bill Hildebolt, he talks about the value of their business model for e-commerce, and the special challenges of balancing search engine visibility for their own brand with that of their clients.…