10 tips to make the most out of YouTube

Do you remember what the Internet was like before YouTube? That was in February 2005, and if you’re reading this, you can, of course, think back past 2005, back to an era before all those videos of dancing cats were just a click away—when the only way to see embarrassing wedding videos and stupid stunts was on “America’s Funniest Home Videos” (now available on YouTube, of course). And if you saw a really funny video, you couldn’t share it with your friends and colleagues. (You had to find other ways to goof off at work, like sending long, unfunny jokes by e-mail.)

Hard to remember, right?

These days, more than 13 hours of video are uploaded every minute to YouTube. And now, YouTube is the second-largest search engine, behind Google. ($1.65 billion seemed like a lot of money for YouTube in October 2006, but that seems to have been something of a bargain.)

Larry Weber devotes an entire chapter in Sticks and Stones to “”The YouTube Juggernaut,”” and I think it’s one of the most important chapters of the book. Weber writes, that YouTube, “”the largest of the video sites by far, will be at the core of everybody’s video reputation for years to come.””

Yet a lot of companies still don’t take advantage of online video.