Announcing the Video in Practice Contest Winners!

Our first-ever contest, the VIP contest, began months ago, and today we're pleased to announce the winners.

"VIP" stands for "video in practice," and the contest was designed to reward not only exceptional online videos created by businesses or organizations, but also the effective use of those videos on websites.

The readers of OnlineVideo.net voted in phase one and helped us come up with our finalists. Then, in phase two our judges (Mark Douglas of Key of Awesome; Troy Dreier of OnlineVideo.net; Jan Ozer, author or Video Compression for Flash, Apple Devices and HTML5; and Mark Robertson of ReelSEO.com) took over and chose the winners. The judges rated each video and site on five categories (storytelling and messaging, technical quality, use of social media, search optimization, and overall site integration). Their scores were then totaled.

Judging the finalists wasn't easy, by the way, with so many strong contenders

"As a person who makes online videos for a living, I tend to be a little cynical and can pick apart what is wrong with most online ads, but I thought all the finalists did a great job and made it difficult for me to judge," said Mark Douglas. "They all were entertaining and extremely engaging, and that's the name of the game online when you're competing with the rest of the Internet for attention."

Not that all the judges were so generous with praise: "I saw some really creative videos (including Sawbuck Reality and San Jose 24-Hour Fitness) and many that were not so good," said Jan Ozer. "The most common mistake seemed to be using tiny videos embedded in a Web page. Cripes, people, if you're not using at least 640 x 360 video in this day and age, you need a really good reason why."

So here then are our winners. Congratulations to you all. We'll be in touch shortly to arrange delivery of your prizes.

Small Business: Sawbuck Realty

Large Business: Sybase

Local Products and Businesses: In Motion Video Productions

National Products and Services: Moosejaw

Nonprofit, Government, Educational, or Other Organization: The Brooksie Way Half Marathon