Joe Taylor, publisher of the industrial websites waterandwastewater.com and powderandbulk.com, has brought online video sharing to the industrial sector. With its easy upload tool and social tracking tools (such as most viewed, viewer voting and tagging), Taylor's industrial video communities (see here and here) bring a new impetus for equipment marketers to create an entirely different breed of video.

I did a few B2B corporate and marketing videos BTI (before the Internet), and I have to say I'd do them differently today. I'd make them shorter. I'd lose the music soundtrack, and maybe the voiceover narration, too. I'd spend less of my video budget on a single video's production values and more on increasing the number of videos.

Just Show the Machines at Work

I like the simplicity of this machine demo where all kinds of foreign objects, from a rubber glove to a tennis shoe, are dropped into a shredder used to keep sewer lines clear of debris. I also like the ability video gives you to capture action. This demolition of grain silos is from Poland.

Humor also works, though the humor in this conveyor video is more for insiders. For those who missed the joke: the guy with the shovel wouldn't need to be there if the conveyor belt were just a foot longer. If you're really bold, you might even figure a way to make this "happy wastewater guy" into a viral marketing campaign.

This Bulk Solids Pump (BSP) video is a good example of what happens to a traditional marketing video when it's moved to an online video sharing site. Seeing the BSP's unique technology in action works fine, but the soundtrack is a bit out of synch. You can see same video here (bigger Quick Time file, a little better sound and picture). If I were developing this video today with Joe Taylor's new sites in mind, I'd keep it shorter and simpler and just let the machine do the talking.

How Taylor Created His Video Sharing Sites

To create his industrial video sites, Joe Taylor says he started with the free open source Mplayer (also see the Wikipedia article) and the closely related MEncoder that enables visitors to upload their own videos and convert them on the fly to a small Flash file. Taylor did his own customizing and says he spent about $2,000 on outside programming help.

Getting Around the Corporate Barriers

Forget about trying to go to YouTube from inside most corporate networks. Like many organizations, my company's IT department has setup barriers to block employee access to potential bandwidth hogs, such as music downloads and streaming video sites. Taylor's sites haven't been immune to these barriers. Sometimes marketing people can persuade IT to loosen the rules for business-oriented sites (my request to allow Taylor's sites was promptly acted on by our IT manager).

But rather than leave it to chance, Taylor has experimented with different naming conventions that might keep the barriers from ever being raised. He found that a URL like http://video.powderandbulk.com was a certain invitation for blockades to rise, where www.powderandbulk.com/videos didn't set off nearly as many alarms. With the growing migration of business into the social networks with their music and video and 3-D reality, this issue is going to become an increasing headache for IT managers.

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As I mentioned in a post on PowderandBulk.com, I was at the Powder Show exactly 10 years ago, introducing K-Tron International's first website (we now have about a dozen and the number keeps growing). Believe it or not, crowds gathered in our booth to see the Powder Show's first-ever demonstration of a website. I ran the demo from a CD because there was no broadband available then.

I'd say blogging for most businesses is at about the same point the World Wide Web was 10 years ago. It remains to be seen if business, especially small to mid-sized companies, will find the resources to enter the blogosphere to the extent they have embraced the web. I suspect that community sites like PowderandBulk.com, may become the preferred medium for most companies. Unlike the industrial "web malls" that had a brief but spectacular rise and fall, blogging communities will likely start slow and grow over time. They offer companies the opportunity to blog without the time and financial commitments, and legal risks, of hosting their own blogs. That may appeal to a broad range of companies.

Don Dunnington
IAOC President

During our first blog week devoted to industrial online communication I interviewed Joe Taylor, one of the pioneers in web sites and e-newsletters for process engineers and manufacturers of process equipment.

In discussing how his web sites have helped form a sense of community among his regular visitors, I asked him if any of his regulars had sought to further the community spirit. He replied:

"Some of the regulars have suggested that we should build a tree house or start a club. There is a feeling among process engineers dealing with bulk solids that they don't have a way to congregate with their peers. There is no professional society focused on their field. Who knows, maybe a blog could help serve that end."

The idea took hold, and Joe continued to call to talk about it from time to time. Finally, a couple months ago Joe said he was going to build that tree house and asked if I would help. The PowderandBulk.com blog was launched July 18.

Joe wanted to host the blog on his own server. He chose Movable Type from six apart because he wanted to buy a commercial package that offered support. We've found the software reasonably easy to setup, and except for the lack of a rich text editor, the user interface is friendly and intuitive. Joe found a great rich text editor plug in at FCKeditor, an open source HTML editor that offers the most editing features I've ever seen in one of these tools.

Joe has just begun furnishing his new tree house. He's in the process of recruiting contributors, which I know from experience here at IAOC takes some persistent missionary work.

In IAOC's first industry blog week, Todd Van Hoosear noted that blogging has been slow to develop among engineers, with the exception of software engineering.

In our second industry blog week, Paul Gerbino, publisher of ThomasNet Industrial Newsroom and the Industrial Market Trends blog asked the question, are blogs and wikis viable industrial business models or simply light conversation over drinks at a social gathering? 
Paul proceeded to demonstrate over the week how blogs and wikis are already serious tools for serious players.

Hi everyone, just wanted to give an overview of how blogging is used at IBM.  

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