Video is becoming ever more important to online business. In the few minutes it takes to read this post, at least 200 hours of video will be uploaded to the Internet and 8 million or so videos will be watched. And these stats are for YouTube alone.

With so much video about, you’d think every mid-to-large-sized e-commerce site would be running a well-oiled, high impact video program by now, but you’d be wrong.

Many e-commerce merchants are still learning the hard way that producing and incorporating video that boosts traffic, conversion and brand value isn’t as easy as it seems.

Before launching…

Despite this year’s record e-commerce consumer spending on Black Friday, creative online video ads and other video marketing content appear to have been widely underutilized. Nevertheless, I’ve managed to put together a list of what I’ve found to be the most notable Black Friday videos online, along with some holiday marketing tips on what retailers and e-commerce brands can do to utilize online video marketing for the rest of the holiday shopping season.

I interviewed Luke Glasner, Co-Principal at RedPill Email, an email marketing vendor providing analysis, strategy, and optimization services in email, search and social media. Luke was one of the featured speakers for the recent webinar hosted by the Email Experience Council: “Video Email: When, Why, and How.” In this post, Luke shares with us his experience in planning calendars and integrating specialized content production around video in email marketing.

In our continued “how-to” series on creating product videos in retail and e-commerce, I interviewed Jon Schroeder, Video Director and Editor for Crutchfield Electronics. Jon shared with us about Crutchfield’s own formula for effective ROI and customer relationships with how-to videos, as well as some tips for what other retail and e-commerce businesses can be doing with instructional videos today. (To read more about why I think how-to videos are effective for retailers and brands, and for some tips on creating them, you can read my previous article, “How-To” Product Videos Tips for Every E-Commerce Business.)

There are so many amazing things that you can do with online video once you have the video assets.  We read about trends, new ideas and examples everyday here on the Video Commerce Consortium and at ReelSEO, and everyday I get excited about what business are doing with their video strategies.  There are also tons of great articles with convincing ROI figures from online video but there are still literally hundreds of e-commerce sites stagnant in their development of a video strategy.  I’m sure there are probably thousands of reasons for this from budget constraints, timing, and lack…