Episode 6 of the Sitepro Podcast is now available. The Sitepro Podcast was created to help educate clients and the community about various aspects of web, video and other multimedia content. This is the third of four episodes of the podcasts that will on the the Grace Lutheran Foundation and all the multimedia work that Sitepro has produced for them. Be sure to subscribe to get all of the episodes of the Sitepro Podcast.

     Armed with a tag cloud and an RSS feed spitting your company’s insights into the twitterverse, you might think you’re good to go. Don’t. Like most things, there is always something else you can do to make your social media presence more effective. The first of these is a flickr widget.

Your Company Video: The Pro’s and Con’s of YouTube Hosting

This is part 2 in an onging series  called "YouTube Video 101". See this post and others to learn how hosting videos through YouTube may apply to your business.

Social media is all the rage these days. From building company Facebook profiles to placing videos on YouTube, a lot of businesses are jumping on board. YouTube is a great medium for putting the right kind of video on (I’ll get in to what may be the right kind of video in another post). With an audience of nearly 330 million user’s world wide, the format cannot be ignored. You can use YouTube hosting to present your video content to this audience as well as embed video feeds from YouTube in your company website. While YouTube presents some incredible new possibilities, there can be some drawbacks that companies may not be fully aware of. This post explores both the pros and cons of using YouTube’s service in business applications.

5 years ago clients typically wanted videos in a format that they can easily hand out such as DVD or interactive CD. As a multimedia supplier, Sitepro.com was unique from other production companies in that we were streaming videos within client websites as well. While physical deliverables and inter-website distribution have still been a stronghold, more clients are inquiring about services like YouTube, Facebook and other social media applications.

While there are lots of other social video sites out there, YouTube has proven to be the top of the crop. Did you know that YouTube is the number one video site on the internet? Get this: It’s the 4^th largest internet destination in the world and the #2 search engine behind Google and before Yahoo…….just huge. Often clients ask me questions like :

"How can I get my Video on YouTube?"

"How can we create a Facebook account and put my videos in it?"

"We just want to make some simple videos and upload them. Where do we start?"

Follow this series, YouTube Video 101, to gain some insight on these questions as well as thoughts you may not have considered when developing videos for social media and website use.

For those unfamiliar with the term "Hat Trick," it's a sports term referring to any one player scoring three times within a single game. If you're like me and grew up on the local ice rink, it's a hockey term. Today's blog isn't about bone crushing hockey action, but instead the Telly Awards. The Telly awards (3oth anniversary this year) recognize the best in local and regional television, web and film production. This year Sitepro was fortunate enough to win three awards on three submissions, hence the "hat trick" reference.