It used to be that everyone was asking us for a “viral” video. Now everyone is asking us how to measure video Return on Investment (ROI).

Video ROI is a topic we think a lot about at See3 and, unfortunately, there isn’t a simple answer or one that fits every organization.

Generally, we think video should be measured in similar ways that you measure other content investments by connecting the ROI of video to broader organizational goals. Views are fine—just as website visitors are fine—but it only gets you a sense of the total amount of engagement.

Here are 5 questions to ask yourself when evaluating your organization’s video ROI.

1. Does Video Move the Needle?

Let’s say you make a video designed to influence a small group of elites (lawmakers, corporate decision makers, etc.). In that case, video views don’t seem so important at all.

Like in any communications effort, your key metrics should reflect your key objectives. A video that we created for the Maryland State Teachers Association only received a couple thousand views, but we consider it a big success.

Why? Because the goal of the video was to influence a debate about education funding and the state-level policymakers and journalists that matter in that debate all heard about the video, passed it on, and watched it. It worked.

2. Does Video Help Your SEO Strategy?

Many people forget about this fact, but SEO is a huge part of your video strategy.

YouTube is the second most popular search engine. That means more and more people are discovering content on your issue through YouTube—if you don’t have content that’s strategically titled, described, and tagged, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity.

Video can also jump you up in Google rankings.

In fact, a Forrester study found that “any given video stands about a 50 times better chance of appearing on the first page of results than any given text page that Google has indexed”. Make sure to submit a Video Sitemap to Google and chart how it affects your rankings on target keywords.

3. Does Video Improve Your Conversion Rates?

Video is now used widely on websites, landing pages, and even as a hook in emails. Are you testing these conversion rates with and without video? When does it work and when not?

The answer isn’t the same for every organization, so make it a point to test how video affects conversion rates for each use.

4. Does Video Help Spread Your Message?

We often find that video helps in blog and social network outreach.

Facebook fans respond well to multimedia content and are accustomed to sharing videos among their own networks. Similarly, we’ve noticed that online campaigns with embeddable video gets picked up by bloggers more easily. Do you have a similar experience? If you’ve had trouble building relationships with bloggers, video may be the element that greases the wheel.

5. Does Video Engage Your Constituents?

YouTube and TubeMogul both offer analytics tools that help you assess viewership and engagement.

These tools let you see spikes and trends in views, where your video was embedded and viewed, and how long viewers tend to watch each of your videos. Take a look at this data and see if you can gather any insights about which video content works best, what is the optimal length, and how much coverage your video received beyond your own network.

Final Thoughts: We are moving toward a world where a website and a TV channel morph into the same thing. Determine your organization’s video ROI is a central question you have to answer in order to take full advantage of this new world.

At See3 we have worked for organizations that have it in their mission to be accessible. For example, See3 client Easter Seals is all about helping people with disabilities. They need to model being accessible in their physical spaces as well as on their website.

See3 Director of Interactive Marketing and Fundraising, Shirley Sexton was the VP Interactive at Easter Seals for 8 years. She couldn’t do everything she wanted to do with video because videos playing in a Flash player — like those on YouTube — are not accessible. If you can’t see and hear it, it won’t work.

We have created workarounds for this within our own projects. And when asked about broader-based captioning what we have always said is that it’s a value, but it’s expensive. Someone has to create good captions before they can be added to the video.

We have been watching carefully the advances in speech recognition online with interest. People such as David Pogue are big believers in speaking into their PCs instead of typing. It didn’t seem a huge leap to us that someone would take this technology — which is amazing — and apply it to video. [Here's a review from Pogue of this software from 3 years ago, and it is much better today than it was then.]

So it came as no surprise to us that Google is the one to step up. They have been leading advancements in all kinds of translation and other technologies, and oh, they also happen to own the biggest video site on the web, YouTube.

Here’s the lead from today’s NYTimes:

In the first major step toward making millions of videos on YouTube accessible to deaf and hearing-impaired people, Google unveiled new technologies on Thursday that will automatically bring text captions to many videos on the site.

While the technology can only insert captions on English language speech, Google is giving users the choice to use its automatic translation system to read the captions in 51 languages. That could broaden the appeal of YouTube videos to millions of other people who do not speak English but could use the captioning technology to read subtitles in their native language.

The speech recognition technology that Google uses to turn speech into text is not new; Google currently uses it to transcribe voice mail messages for users of its Google Voice service. But Ken Harrenstien, a deaf engineer who helped develop the automatic captioning system, said the technology had never been applied on such a large scale.

“This is some thing that I have dreamt of for many years,” Mr. Harrenstien said speaking through an interpreter. “To see it happen, is amazing.”

You can read the whole article here.

You have to be able to make fun on all this stuff that we live on the web. Here’s a good one:

Link: [College Humor]

I recently conducted a little experiment with my work Inbox. When I left my position at Easter Seals, I had seven-plus years of research covering the field of nonprofits online flowing (more like gushing) in daily via email newsletters, listserve digests, etc.  I felt guilty every time I hit delete without reading them, because I knew there was gold in them thar emails, but the sheer volume was more than any one person could consume.

When I set up my new Inbox here at See3 Communications, I decided rather than sit down for hours conducting a massive re-subscribe, I would wait and see what professional enewsletters I really, really missed. After three months, it’s been a cleansing experience (for my Inbox and my brain). But more importantly, it helped me identify the really great ones. If the topic of nonprofits online is also your bag, I hope you’ll make room in your InBox for these enewsletters that refused to be forgotten.

NPAdvisors e-Fund News: Thought provoking weekly articles on online donor development written by Rick Christ and Heather Fignar. If you’re responsible for online fundraising in any capacity, each email will either reinforce your efforts with well written points to use with upper management, or give you a good kick in the pants for what you need to be doing.

ASPCA: Oh, how many good ideas have I “borrowed” from ASPCA online over the years? I always keep one eye on these folks because they’re just so darn good at what they do. In my defense, I’ve adopted three rescue kittens in the past year. Or did the enewsletter make me do it?

Alertbox: Jakob Nielsen’s column on Web usability: Not for nonprofits only, his lessons on Web (and email) usability are universal. I’m an avid follower for his invaluable research on user-centric Web site creation, but I love him for his forthright use of the word “bad”. “Bad content, bad links, bad navigation, bad category pages… which is worst for business?” Go get ‘em Jakob!

All of these enewsletters share two key ingredients — they consistently bring me information I need and are very well written, so they’re worth my valuable time and a joy to read.

What enewsletters can you not live without, and why? There’s still room in my Inbox for something new….

Internet traffic hit a record peak on Tuesday as millions of people around the world sought to watch and read about the inauguration of President Obama.

The web and TV are coming together and we saw evidence of that yesterday. The web isn’t quite ready to handle the traffic, but we are seeing video content bringing more people online and keeping them online for longer. Text will always be important on the web – the multimedia nature of it makes it more interesting than TV which is a passive medium. But video is becoming the dog to the text tail and nonprofit organizations — and businesses — need to get their online video game on.

From today’s NY Times

Internet traffic in the United States hit a record peak at the start of President Obama’s speech as people watched, read about and commented on the inauguration, according to Bill Woodcock, the research director at the Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit organization that analyzes online traffic. The figures surpassed even the high figures on the day President Obama was elected.

When people are checking for election results or the score for a big game, they tend to produce smaller bursts of traffic spread out over several hours. On Tuesday, everyone wanted to watch video, and that produced bulky streams of data traveling from media companies’ data centers out to people at work and in their homes.

Data from CNN.com captured the uniqueness of the online surge. CNN said it provided more than 21.3 million video streams over a nine-hour span up to midafternoon. That blew past the 5.3 million streams provided during all of Election Day. At its peak, CNN.com fed 1.3 million live streams simultaneously, according to Jennifer Martin, a spokeswoman for the site.

Akamai, which helps companies meet demand for their online offerings, worked with media companies like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Viacom to stream live video. It reported a record-breaking day, feeding up seven million video streams at one time.

1. Tell a story.
If you want your audience to identify with your mission, you need a compelling story that connects your work to real people. If a story moves you, it will likely move others as well—and become the foundation for deeper involvement.

2. Be relevant.
People respond to what’s going on around them, so try to relate to the news or the calendar as much as possible. You’ll also have a better chance at success if you’re pitching your video to bloggers or other websites—they’re always looking for something current and fresh.

3. Tell them what you want.
You have their attention, now tell your viewers how you want them to engage, whether it’s donating money, visiting a website, or volunteering. They won’t know to give unless you ask for it.

4. Be brief.
Few people are watching your 7-minute online video—that only works when you have them locked in a room. Try to get everything out in 2 minutes or less.

5. Videos don’t raise money by themselves.
Your organization should think of online video as one of many tools to fit into your fundraising program. Adopting video into your organization is critical, but it has to be a means instead of an end.

6. Embed video on your donations page.
The distance between the “play” button and the “donate” button should be short. Also, give your viewer the right web tools. Can the viewer forward the video to a friend, subscribe to your RSS feed, get involved, and sign up for your newsletter right there on the spot? If not, they should.

7. Put video at the center of a campaign.
Video is often best used in the context of a campaign. A campaign can be raising money for a particular village, trying to reach a specific goal, or giving limited to a specific timeframe.

8. Empower your viewers.
Ever heard of peer-to-peer fundraising? Encourage your audience to pass your videos along. Make the embed code easily accessible within your page so your video can reach a broader audience.

9. Create a media library.
Start gathering your footage now—you might have all the ingredients already! Building a media library is a valuable long-term asset for your organization. Have a camera ready for every important event. Ask volunteers to document their work and make it available for future events, trainings, and online use. Using existing footage you get more bang for the buck.

10. Test.
You don’t know if something works unless you test it. Send out emails with video and some without, and measure the results. Each nonprofit will have different nuances, and you’ll want to know when using video is most effective.

11. Know when not to use video.
Truth is, your strongest donors will likely donate with or without online video. They have been already, right? They don’t need any extra convincing. Use online video for attracting new audiences, for driving specific campaigns, for empowering your membership to spread your story or for deepening or expanding existing relationships.

Brian Reich and I often speak on the same subject — how nonprofit and causes can use social media effectively. Brian wrote a book called Media Rules! which goes over the big issues that have lead to an online communications revolution.

I have my way of explaining these things. I talk about massive media fragmentation, permission marketing and how the infrastructure of TV and the web are coming together.

Brian covers the same ground, but in a different way and I want to share it with you. This is from an email he sent to folks who attended his talk at the Cause Marketing Forum, where See3 was a sponsor.

Here’s a quick explanation of the new world we are in, from Brian Reich:

In my book, Media Rules!, I address this in the context of three big themes:

Everything is fragmented and blurred: It is necessary and expected that our society will evolve and the impact of those changes will be felt by all organizations. But never has our society changed so quickly or and never have organizations been so dramatically impacted. We are all challenged to adapt in ways, and at levels, not previously imagined. And with little sense that the chaos will settle down any time soon, it is important, new frameworks for operating – and succeeding – must be developed and manage along the way.

Small Can Be Big: Our culture and economy are increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As a result, what you sell is different. How you sell is different. The services you offer have changed. The expectations of those who shop, and share, and create are shifting as well. New markets have been created, for products and ideas alike, and organizations must determine whether to participate, and if so, how.

We Are All Connected: Technology has fundamentally changed our culture. The online world is about connection, community and conversation. And as the online world goes, so goes much of what the rest of the world thinks and acts on. What we know about each other is changing, or in some cases just being learned. How we think and the decisions we make are increasingly driven by many voices not few. Total control has been replaced by complete understanding and participation.

If you haven’t already, go buy Brian’s book Media Rules.