Everything on your web site – text, graphs, photos, video, sounds, etc. – can be turned into someone else’s embedded content. By the same token, when you use a stock photo, or upload a video you’ve produced, that content is also embedded on the site.

The trick is to make sure that any content that’s of value to your business, or content that still belongs to someone else, is protected so that when people do move your stuff to another location, it can’t be changed and every copyright or trademark is protected.

It could be a sales pitch or an ad that’s uploaded to YouTube®, a PowerPoint presentation or whitepaper that someone placed on slideshare, or photos that a competitor posted to flickr®. The questions you want to be asking are:

  • Do I need to protect my content at all costs?
  • How do I protect and/or give credit for someone else’s content I’m using?
  • Should I allow visitors to download and use some materials on my site, but not all?
  • What are the advantages and disadvantages to letting people share my content with others?

There are bloggers out there who would advocate that you make everything you post available for sharing because as Jeremiah Owyang notes in his Web Strategy blog, “The community will ’scrape’ content that is valuable to them, often without attribution. Get ahead of their behaviors for your content and package it for them.” [sic]

However, you say, “A B2B company doesn’t create information that people would want to use elsewhere.” To that we would ask, “Why not?” You want visitors to become clients. And you want clients to keep coming back. To do that, you want to “liven things up” with photos, video product demos and more. Just make sure your IT staff uploads the content so that it can run in a non-editable format on Windows Media Player or Quicktime. Type in “embeddable media player” in a Google® search and you’ll even find free code from a company called Streamalot.

Or, consider taking advantage of embeddable widgets from social media/marketing sites like friendfeed.com that can link your content to facebook and twitter. Better yet, create your own widgets that customers will want to download and keep on their desktops. Remember, always give them a reason and a way (a link) to come back to your company web site, your sales team, and your business partners for more detailed or expanded information.

Then once your “widgets” are out there, use them to data mine and track customers – what they visit, where they see/find you and your competitors, and where they “socialize” with other potential buyers.

In every business there will always be things you can control and forces beyond control. The key is to find ways to maximize the value in both types of those relationships.