In December I read about Traffic Geyser and was completely hooked. Traffic Geyser is a site which encourages and assists video producers by automating the uploading videos and podcasts to many sites. Already aware that a lot of sites do not allow promotional films I set about making more of a 'Tips' style film for O.C. Screeding which would include some references to the company. Since most sites have a limit of 100mb I knew that it had to be short and also thought that people might be more inclined to watch a 1.5 minute film than a three of five minute one.
I worked late into the night editing this film and was possibly not paying enough attention to how I was sitting as I began to suffer from RSI in my right hand. This was very painful and curtailed my blogging for the past few weeks. The film got finished and you can view the results of my editing at O.C. Screeding/Film.
During my enforced absence I began to wonder about the wisdom of uploading the same film to lots of sites with the same title and description. I could see that this might result in duplicate content, a subject I have discussed before at Defogging the Connection Between Social Media and Blogging. So I decided to upload the video to lots of sites and to vary the descriptions. I soon realised that a lot of sites, although keen to have my content, were not as keen to give a link back to the O.C. Screeding site. Because of the nature of the company i.e. they provide floor screeding in the London, M25 and South East of the UK I reflected that my mission to put this film up on as many sites as possible world wide might not be the best use of my time.
They have had good results in terms of referrals from entering their details on directories that connect to the construction industry in their geographical area and perhaps getting them to focus on doing more of that might be a better use of resources. If I had made a funny viral film, that would get watched around the world, I might have made a different decision. I was not so inspired and the film is functional rather than funny. It is a useful addition to their website and will definitely be a great help to those who are new to floor screeding.
The sites that I found allowing a link back to content owners websites are YouTube, Video.Google.com, and Video.Yahoo.com. Uploading videos is time consuming and getting Traffic Geyser to do the legwork could be use useful and I recommend that you leave off the description from the automated process and return to all the sites after the upload and write a fresh one for each site.
