Now that everyone is a creator, your company is either swimming in video - or will be soon. Video comes at you fast - and if you don’t get ahead of this complex digital medium, your people and your IT resources can quickly be dragged every which way. An apt analogy would be trying to win the Iditarod at the mercy of a team of stray dogs of vastly different sizes, strengths, skills, endurance levels, etc. - who’ve never met before you say mush. That's not exactly a recipe for success.

When developing your video management strategy, it's important to put just as much (or more) energy into designing your ingest workflows as your publishing workflows. You’ll be ahead of the competition if you do, as ingest is an oft overlooked - but critical - part of the planning process.

Your first order of business should be to consider the video metadata. As your video library expands, the more crucial it will be to have consistent, detailed video metadata populated to keep everything organized and accessible. Consider your distributed team of video creators, publishers, and consumers that all need to access your organization's video assets. If you set up video workflows that prioritize video metadata population, you enable all your stakeholders to arrive quickly at the relevant details about any given video.

Yet - too often - video metadata is treated as an afterthought. There’s a tendency to put a lot of effort into the video, and toss it over the wall once it’s “delivered.” Nobody likes data entry, but that approach won’t work at scale. Once you have thousands of videos under management, the ones without complete metadata can’t be found. Your videos become missing corporate assets; you may as well write them off.

Now you could have an intern watch every clip and tag them, but accuracy could be low, and how real-time could that possibly be?

Instead, I’m arguing that it makes the most sense to *pre-pend* video metadata. Your video should follow the metadata population. It can be done automatically - like the to: and from: metadata for a letter’s envelope is programmatically addressed on every form letter you’ve ever received. Or how your bank or insurer’s call center won’t start speaking to you on the phone until your account metadata has shown up on the service agent’s screen. Because the content of the call depends on the context of the call.

How on earth do you “front-load” or “pre-pend” video metadata as you ingest? It’s actually a LOT easier than most of our customers expect. Any ingest interface can be customized to automatically insert sourcing data for a clip - whether in a web form or a mobile app, in our system or yours. It means you’ll never face that video-minus-metadata situation again. Video publishers’ jobs get easier and more foolproof. Certain publishing can be automated - like for internal spaces where human review/approval might not be necessary. Plus, depending on which video metadata you make publicly searchable, all that metadata can boost your SEO results.

And this next point can’t be made emphatically enough: your analytics team will adore you, too. Without standardized video metadata, it’s mighty hard to answer questions like “how many leadership videos last month featured our CEO?” or “which product lines weren’t promoted with video last quarter?” or “which language subtitles do our Malaysian customers prefer?” And there’s also governance benefits; nobody wants end-of-life product videos out and about, or clips hanging around of ex-sales leaders making statements that contradict your new strategy.

In part 2 of this post, I'll walk through some examples of how uStudio customers are strategically designing ingest workflows to pre-pend video metadata.

If you'd like to learn more about how the uStudio Platform enables these types of custom tagging workflows, click below to request a demo.

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