Is YouTube Inappropriate for Business Video?
On Friday, Marjorie Webb, one of my newsletter subscribers, responded to the case study I wrote about CYBRA’s MarkMagic YouTube videos. She writes:
The commercials themselves were informative, interest-piquing, and mildly amusing. However, I have some issues with the YouTube distribution vehicle.
While watching the MarkMagic Forms commercial, YouTube brought up a list of ”related videos,” including a Snoop Dogg video, “Sexy Banned Commercial extended version,” and “Banned Commercial Aerobic Class,” all of which had erotic thumbnail images.
At the very least this is inappropriate in a business environment and at worst is offensive. To me, at least, it diminishes the business credibility of the product. Surely there must be some way to widely disbtribute business information without mixing it with the vulgar and obscene.
I agree with Marjorie, and as Morty Schiller has posted previously in a comment, YouTube could have a business filter or perhaps start a BizTube site for business. 
For the record, YouTube does have some “filtering.” If you click on the “Videos” tab, you’ll see a list of topics, including “Science and Technology.”
However, the categories and “channels” mainly apply to consumer-related topics, including music, sports, politics, and news.
Regarding my own viewing habits, I will either follow links that people send me, or I’ll search for particular videos by name or subject if I’m doing research. I don’t have time to surf YouTube to see what’s new.
What do you think? Should business videos be displayed along side inappropriate material? Or should they run separately? Does the inappropriate material reflect poorly on a company’s brand and the company itself?
About the author: Dianna Huff
A B2B web marketing expert, Dianna helps B2B companies grow through SEO, marketing writing, and social media. A frequent speaker, Dianna has been quoted in numerous blogs, books, and articles; her client list includes large and small B2B companies across the U.S. Follow her on Twitter @diannahuff. To receive her e-course on creating great B2B marketing content, subscribe to her newsletter, The MarCom Strategist.
June 9th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
Hey Dianna, another use that people forget is to put the video onto YouTube, then imbed a viewer in a site (or blog). In that case, the viewer need not go back to the YouTube site. Smart B2B companies take advantage of that.
June 9th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
YouTube is not inappropriate unless you deliberately use the search function to find inappropriate stuff. I unwind with it at the end of the day sometimes by watching a jazz clip, and that activity is not interfered with by the fact that others are watching bikini mud wrestling. None of the bad stuff is SERVED to you; you have to go get it.
June 9th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Bob,
I wasn’t concerned with the bad stuff elsewhere in the site, just with the images that showed up next to the B2B video I was watching. (Those images, unfortunately, were served to me.)
Just a note: I use YouTube to watch knitting instruction videos and have never had anything inappropriate display there. I assume this is because the keywords for knitting don’t inadvertently overlap with potentially offensive material.
June 9th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
David — As is implied in the case study I did of CYBRA’s video campaign, not all companies know exactly how to go about doing a viral video campaign. Morty Schiller, for example, did not know that some companies restrict YouTube access.
So some marketers may not know to embed a viewer in the corporate site.
Bob — My son likes to watch a video, called Kosher Boy, that is a spoof of a popular song. The comments to that video are appalling. Granted it’s not in a B2B context, but in this case, the bad stuff, in the form of comments, is served to you. The same goes for any video — business or not. YouTube is a much less controlled environment than business blogging.
And I agree with Marjorie. I don’t like the idea of erotic images served up with my business campaign.
June 10th, 2008 at 3:34 am
Dianna,
David is right. And you can also convert the videos to Flash®, then provide a Flash player, instead of the YouTube player, on your own corporate site.
A popular Flash player is JW FLV MEDIA PLAYER 3.16, which is €20 for commercial use.
June 10th, 2008 at 9:18 am
Mac, Yes, but then what is the point of doing a viral video campaign? Do you have any anecdotal data on how video (which is now basically a commercial residing on a corporate site) helps with leads / sales?
June 11th, 2008 at 3:07 am
The way I see it if you create something in the form of a BizTube you may be limiting yourself to a large portion of the YouTube audience. Yes you have no control over who get posted around your video, but when you know what you are looking for YouTube can be an extremely valuable asset.
June 12th, 2008 at 3:43 am
Dianna and Marjorie — I have to agree with you. The contextual videos that come up with CYBRA’s videos are often, shall we say, out of context.
We had to do tweaks like putting quotation marks around the tag for “MarkMagic.” Otherwise, even though MarkMagic is one word, videos came up with anything to do with “mark” or “magic,” including magic tricks by some guy named Mark! On the other hand, YouTube can’t guarantee what’s going to come up alongside my videos any more than the Wall St. Journal can guarantee what other ads will show up on the same page with any given ad.
I don’t think YouTube (or Google) have any legal or ethical obligation here. But it would be nice if they provided some kind of warning label or disclosure that YouTube videos may be blocked from being viewed in office environments. That would give pause to anyone launching a B2B video campaign.
David — We did try embedding a YouTube video viewer on the MarkMagic landing page http://www.markmagic.com like the one I put on my blog http://wordrider.blogspot.com/2008/04/from-hard-sell-mail-order-copywriter-to.html but the corporate firewalls blocked all YouTube streaming… even an embedded video on another web page. We had to put up our own video files to get past the gatekeepers.
Bob — YouTube is as “appropriate” or “inappropriate,” in a literal sense, as the people tagging videos make it. It’s not just a question of smut. It’s also a question of relevance. I just did a search on YouTube for “bar code printing.” The second video listed was the MarkMagic Printing episode. But the list of “Related Videos” YouTube automatically showed on the side of our video included(among mostly relevant selections): “Cucumber trumpet, March of bee,” (I’m not making this up!) “Space Monster: Destroy Nashville,” and “The Beatles I’m a loser”! OK, I’m a Beatles fan. But what does “I’m a Loser” have to do with bar code printing? As the song says, “I’m not what I appear to be”!
Mac — As Dianna said, converting YouTube videos to flash files is easy enough… but it defeats the whole purpose of posting them on a popular site like YouTube! The idea is to make it easy for people to watch and share them.
Bill — The videos Dianna and I have been talking about are only aimed at an industrial market. We put them on YouTube to reach IT people and business owners who use IBM System i computers and need an easy way to print bar code labels, RFID tags and electronic forms. But they also, like Bob, watch YouTube for information and entertainment. The CYBRA videos aren’t meant for people looking for family (or “inappropriate”) entertainment. The idea of putting the videos there was that business marketing doesn’t have to be boring. At the same time, we’re not competing with rock videos.
June 12th, 2008 at 9:35 am
Morty, Yep, yep, and yep.
June 12th, 2008 at 10:36 am
[...] blogged about it. Marketing luminaries David Meerman Scott and Bob Bly both chimed in with comments. What [...]
June 18th, 2008 at 9:55 pm
They don’t call it the wild, wild web for nothing.
I guess I shouldn’t send an email campaign either. The subject line might appear in someone’s inbox right before or after spam for enhancing pharmaceuticals, and the recipient’s eye might accidentally wander to the offensive subject line.
Heh, reading this blog and the responses makes me feel young. Thanks!
September 13th, 2008 at 10:53 pm
A separate business video portal is definitely the way to go. I think businesses want a clear “business only” platform to market their business online. YouTube is for fun free self made (and usually poor quality) home made videos for the sole purpose of “Broadcast Yourself”.
Any “BizTube” portal needs to be clear and about “Broadcast Your Business”.
Interesting though that BizTube.tv is already producing, hosting and streaming videos for business. I guess it’s only a matter of time before one of the big players acquires it as the name describes what the service is.
May 27th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
For what it’s worth, we provide a B2B site where each company has it’s own customizable playlist and branded page so the content is always relevant. We use youtube as one of several aggregators as enablement sites to more targeted video consumption:
http://www.connectedsocialmedia.com
Also, viral happens on its own but serial messaging can certainly improve engagement
great post
January 22nd, 2010 at 7:46 pm
Our corporate firewall not only blocks YouTube, but also blocks videos embedded onto another site from there.
It seems as though the only real solution in avoiding this problem is to post it on you tube in addition to your own site with a seperate flash player, and a simple link to the youtube version.