What started with a pilot with a dedicated channel for the Whitehouse in June 2009 now forms an integral part of SlideShare’s offering for brands. According to CEO Rashmi Sinha from SlideShare: “We have been thinking about channels for a while, and spent almost 6 months building it.”

Today it’s here – alive and kicking. SlideShare branded channels now form an integral part of their offering to advertisers (see slide 18/20). SlideShare co-operated with Federated Media, Universal McCann and Microsoft to build the branded channel dubbed the Microsoft Office Parent Toolbox: “work, play and everything in between” the channel’s tag-line reads. It features presentations and documents centered around home and family usage of Microsoft Office products. The channel can be reached externally with a brand-name friendly URL-structure. Simply add the name to SlideShare’s URL: http://www.slideshare.net/MicrosoftOffice. Please note the use of capitalization in the brand name – this makes it easier for users to recognize branded content from Microsoft Office in SlideShare’s (and Google’s) search results.

However, the branded channel is more than an environment within an external medium for showing off branded content. SlideShare deliberately chose to stay true to its original course. SlideShare branded channels are seamlessly integrated with the community’s core features: allow users to upload and share presentations with one another.

Through integration with a branded channel on a social network, brand owners can benefit from the community as oppossed to building traffic to their own website from scratch.

With the use of branded channels, SlideShare advises its advertisers to also work with channel curators and bloggers. The Parent Toolbox channel is moderated by Asha Dornfest (Parent Hacks), an authority in the parenting space. Dornfest, however, shares blogging responsibilities of the channel with some of the Web’s most talented parenting bloggers: Danny Evans, Ree Drummond and Maggie Mason, among others. They are swapping tips and documents that make family and home life easier and actively engage in conversations with users. Users based in the USA, in turn, are motivated to contribute content as well – everytime they upload, they enroll in a sweepstake in which Microsoft gives out 50 Microsoft Office licenses.

The vibrant community of SlideShare offers brand owners the opportunity to benefit from the virality aspects, as opposed to building traffic from scratch. Aside from integrating blog content on the channel, SlideShare also allows for inclusion of video content on the channel – both real life stories of users and product tips and tricks from Microsoft. For example, see this video of the Cheese Guy that uses Office to keep track of his scientific approach to producing cheese: “I especially like Roquefort [...] which is like smelling old soccer shoes. Cheese is molding bacteria, with controlled delay.” Love it or hate it, this is fun content to watch. What surprised me, however, is that Microsoft decided to host their videos on SlideShare, instead of YouTube and then embedding it within the branded channel on SlideShare. Single-source video really helps in terms of video SEO.

Expect more advertisers to follow Microsoft’s lead: “This offering is open to other advertisers, this is just the first one,” said Rashmi Sinha. SlideShare, however, declined to give specific details on the investment involved, other than that it involved a media buy requirement, comparable to what Google uses for YouTube. “Right now, we are negotiating one at a time,” SlideShare’s CEO said. “We are talking to more advertisers and expect to see more channel announcements in the future.”

The beta version of Adobe Story is now available in Adobe Labs. This end-to-end workflow solution allows those involved in a video production process to work alone and/or collaboratively on scripts. Since metadata is now accurately recorded in the crucial pre-production phase, one can imagine what value it has for all the other phases – up until publication to multiple screens. Instead of trying to describe audio or video through speech-to-text or video recognition tools, which nonetheless remains valuable for archive material, Adobe recognizes the importance of metadata.

One can easily imagine what effects this will have in terms of Video SEO and Video Monetization. Since all metadata is available, publishing video will become easier. This certainly streamline VSEO efforts, although some SEO-friendly copywriting skills will still be required. Interactivity is another one: by having the dialogue available, you can make the content more easily searchable or make that paid-for product placed cereal box or Gucci dress instantly clickable.

There is one catch, however: much like the name of the product implies, it works for stories: that is, scripted content. Non-scripted content (news, interviews) still depends on either manual transcription or automated speech-to-text software.

At SES Amsterdam, I interviewed various experts. Watch the result below:

Dutch advertisers and their SEO advisors seem to be waiting for the arrival of the next golden goose called blended search. According to Wolter Tjeenk Willink of Traffic Builders, most are still “struggling with the basics of SEO” and do not yet have a video strategy. Those who do, choose to optimize their assets for the search results in Google first, before adopting a content syndication strategy.

For the following two reasons, I find it strange that so much focus goes out to the future prospect of blended search, whereas the opportunity with content syndication is now:

1. Google + YouTube = Universal Search
   If any videos appear in the SERPs (very sporadically in the Netherlands), Google seems to be favouring YouTube and Google Video more than other sources (read: video on your own site). Since Google Video is no longer accepting new uploads, more companies should be interested in video content syndication on the most popular platform out there.
2. YouTube > Yahoo! & MSN
   For the first time, in november 2008, YouTube as a search engine was bigger than Google’s competitors Yahoo! and MSN. Although these are US-based statistics, YouTube takes up a leading position in the Netherlands as well.

Read the article (in Dutch) on Frankwatching as well.