As I've written about in a series of posts, Blacksburg Media is making a corporate video for Handshake 2.0 to be released next week. I expressed my very rational (not!) reasons for initiating this project on my corporate blog.  I was drawn to waiting to view the video for the first time at its premiere. Z. Kelly Queijo, founder of SmartCollegeVisit, made a survey for us to help us seek guidance from others and to explore the issues of corporate use of social media - of which a YouTube video would be one medium - more fully.

• Should Anne preview her new Handshake 2.0 corporate video before the public sees it, or should she wait and view it for the first time with the public?
• What do you think? Anne wants to know. How risky is it to share branded media before the CEO has seen it or approved it?

Although I am one of the 2 who voted, "Yes, go for it!", the simple, elegant graph that results from a survey created with Google Docs made the way clear.

I previewed the video.

Were our corporate message and our corporate brand conveyed accurately enough that I could have seen the video for the first time at its premiere? Absolutely. I tweeted what I felt after viewing the video.

Before previewing, I wrote on my personal Facebook page:

I feel like previewing the video and asking for a change is like asking a poet to revise a sonnet to rhyme this word, not that one. I want to share the first reading, to share the unveiling with everyone else, like everyone else. Ah, well."

Did I see any moment in the video - any rhyme - that I would change? No, I did not.

Did I see wording in the opening text that I would like edited a tad to more specifically do the branding work I intended that I may not have conveyed fully during initial conversations?  Yes.

As a CEO responsible for the direction of my company, should I have previewed the video? Probably, yes.

I also wrote this on my Facebook page:

You know why I don't want to preview the video created by Jarred Foresman of Blacksburg Media... ? Because at the beginning of the project, I asked him to create art and let go.

He did. It's art.