By Katerina Caterisano
Remember TV advertising in its heyday? YouTube can provide near that level of value for your company— only it’s free, and it’s watched voluntarily.

You may think of YouTube as a goofy place where people post time-wasting, if not adorable, videos of cute kittens, but consider the following:

When flooring company salespeople go to see prospects, one of the most useful things they can do is a demonstration— how a product or service works. YouTube gives your company a venue to demonstrate products and services anytime and anywhere— no appointments, no time constraints, no interruptions— just one click and your customers and prospects can see your products and services in action. In conditions that you control— from lights to ambient noise, you are in charge.

Another thing for flooring companies to think about is the fact that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. Yes, right after Google. In fact, as of July, YouTube made up about 28% of Google’s searches.

All aboard
Every company should be on YouTube—there’s no reason why not. Aside from the fun aspects (cute kittens playing on your flooring, for instance), YouTube brings real value to your company’s marketing.

First of all, YouTube gives high-value links back to your website for extremely strong Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Second, YouTube is a free venue for people to post videos that anyone can watch. Funny, interesting, or useful YouTube videos go viral and are voluntarily watched by hundreds of thousands of people.

At Network Design & Communication, one of the very first things we do for all our clients is create a YouTube channel for them. By creating channels, company’s have the ability to get content placed in a single location, with its own YouTube URL, along with the ability to create their profile and keep their brand consistent.

In order to generate lots of views, it is suggested to keep the running time to around five minutes or less—this also stays within YouTube’s 100Mb file size limit.

People often forget that YouTube is a social community as much as it is a video-sharing site. As such, it is perfectly acceptable and valuable for everyone concerned to let other users know about our content, our thoughts, or our admiration of their work.

In order to contribute to the online conversation and provide value, you can create playlists and comment on other people’s videos, repost them, and—especially important—subscribe to their channels.

Share and share alike
Internet culture is all about sharing: The best practice is always to comment, participate, subscribe and repost. As you do this for others, soon enough they will reciprocate—and bring more and more customers and prospects to your videos.

As a social community, You- Tube has groups that exist for users to discuss and share videos. You can browse for groups to join by category, or create your own group from the YouTube Groups page. For flooring, places to often look for include facilities/operation managers, handyman or how-to groups.

Remember I mentioned early on in this article that YouTube is also a search engine? By tagging videos you can bring customers straight to your YouTube channel. Tags are keywords that come from research and appear in the title, description and tag fields for every video. And remember the SEO? The single most useful thing to do is to place your company’s URL address at the beginning of the description field.

Choose category correctly
Don’t forget to choose the correct category for your videos. This is the stage that is most often rushed or overlooked, but check out the other popular videos in your market: you’ll see how they have been tagged and categorized in order to attract searchers.

A special note for shy people: If the thought of creating videos fills you with horror, remember that you can easily transform a PowerPoint presentation into a movie and post that—or you can create a simple slide show with your voiceover, soundtrack or music—non-copyrighted, of course.

Because Internet culture values information above all else, as long as your information is useful, no one will mind your production values.

If you are really shy, you can gather other people’s individual clips into your flooring context so that viewers can find related content quickly and easily without having to search for the individual items themselves. By putting in the time and research you can provide this service and boost your Web traffic without ever recording a single video of your own.

In closing, here are a few of the many sale-raising uses your can do for your video:

• Welcome video for your website home page.
• Sales video or promotional message for your products or services sales page.
• Videoblog post for your company blog.
• Brand or image-building video for distribution to your list (Hint: Send them the link to your video).
• Share your videos on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more.

Good luck, have fun and we look forward to watching your video (especially if it has kittens in it).

Katerina Caterisano is president and founder of Network Design & Communications in New York, which combines technical proficiency with effective, brilliant design in public relations, marketing, publishing, graphic design, research, copywriting, and website development and optimization. You can contact her at 212.431.4675. And don’t forget to look her up on YouTube, NetworkDesign.