In my last post, I talked about how formatting is important in helping clients get through your longer thought leadership pieces. We really need to slice things up and give people as many entry points as possible.

The same is going to be true with video.

You’ve probably heard of in-video searching, in which the major search engines are starting to try to parse the web’s video content so that you can find specific scenes within the videos. Of course, as with everything web, there are a few startups that are out ahead of the big boys, such as VideoSurf, which serves up thumbnail pictures of what it deems to be a representative sampling of the videos that it returns in a search. You can skim through them to get at least some sense of what you’re in for. (Here’s a recent NYT article that looks at VideoSurf and other video search technologies.)

I think video search has big implications for B2B marketers. My sense is that for B2B thought leadership, viewers will want to skim videos the same way they skim written content. It should cause video producers to slice their videos more finely than they do today, just as the web has sliced up journalism-favoring sliced up checklists like FAQs over long, unbroken narrative articles. Video producers are going to need to break even shorter videos into logical sections, with transitions between each-just like news programs. If the thumbnail technology takes off, it may make sense to put more text into the videos than we do today, so that someone viewing the thumbnails could select a subsection to watch more easily.

While we wait for video search to become more practical, it makes sense to surround your videos with text-based ways for people to find them. But apparently, we aren’t even doing that. According to this Forrester survey, only 20% of marketers bother to put keyword terms into the filenames of their videos or write search-engine friendly captions. It also makes sense to put a transcript of the video on the same page to make it easier to find.

Are you having luck getting B2B clients to watch your videos?