• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, August 21, 2014

Building a community typically requires giving stuff away for free. In the case of Google and Bing, the search engine indexing the best content across the Web partly contributes to generating the highest search statistics. Since free tools that generate community efforts work for Google, Facebook, and Microsoft as well as a bunch of other companies developing products, CEO and co-founder Jim Yu said BrightEdge will give it a try.

On Thursday the company rolls out its Community Edition plug-in for the Google Chrome browser. It provides free access to Data Cube To-Go, a data repository of billions of pieces of content from across the Web, and Content Optimizer To-Go, a recommendation engine for content optimization. The move is intended to give marketers insight into the performance of digital content, competitor content, and receive performance-enhancing recommendations.

Taking an industry leading position, BrightEdge CEO and co-founder Jim Yu told Search Blog the company began with the notion of supporting earned media to help marketers create content and drive it through social and search. Through the platform, marketers can dig out the keywords to increase the amount of times that viewers share the content. 

Brands will spend billions of dollars creating content this year -- an estimated 27 million pieces daily -- but Yu asks how much actually drives performance. The challenge becomes driving performance -- developing the extra ordinary pieces that consumers find, use and share. Yu cites stats from the Content Council that estimates 42% of the more than $43 billion spent on marketing went to some form of content marketing.

Yu, who co-founded BrightEdge, spent time at Salesforce.com. He knows about building communities. Salesforce founder Marc Benioff built the company based on building a community of app developers.

A B2B Video Marketing Benchmark Study from Demand Metric, released in June, suggests that video spending rose among 63% of B2B marketers. Of the B2B professionals who participated in the study, about 69% have used video for B2B marketing. The remaining 31% have not begun using video in their marketing strategies, but plan to in the future. Some 82% of marketers who have tried video marketing have found success in reaching their campaign goals.

The video content marketing survey fields answers from about 398 marketing, sales and business professionals; 28% of whom are dedicated to the B2B channel. It runs through obstacles, advantages, and ways to increase lead generation and online engagement.