Mashable recently interviewed social media expert Brian Solis, the auther of the End of Business as Usual: Rewire The Way You Work To Succeed In The Customer Revolution. Brian talks about the crucial role online video must play in the transformation of businesses into genuine social enterprises, what’s holding them back, and what it will take for them to overcome.

So Brian, what role do you see online video playing as part of this transformation for businesses – as part of this “change agent” you’re mentioning here?

I’m glad you’ve asked me this since I’ve been experimenting with video a lot myself, recently. I believe that the future of business is storytelling, and video must play an increasingly important part in that – whether it’s an organization, whether it’s a company, whether it’s the government.

While we’re seeing some very interesting examples of video used in storytelling today, we’re really sort of seeing it still from a monologue standpoint. Now an organization may have one or more videos that is interesting or sharable (or even goes viral), but they’re mostly designed with a top-down marketing take. Meaning that, these enterprises have the mentality of, “I want to create this one video and I want a big bunch of people to see it” – rather than it actually becoming a part of the day-to-day communication – much like we would see an e-mail or phone chat; or in some regards, even tweeting and blogging.

Video storytelling puts a human face, puts an emotion in the way that other mediums can’t handle; or, are not designed to handle. I think that video is among the more perfect social objects there. Especially with all of the new technology taking place because you can carve it, you can edit it, you can remix it, you can just take out certain snippets that are appropriate for your audience; and you can have the voice, the person, the character, whatever it is, bring the story to life in just such a wonderful and engaging way that really what we’re talking about doing is not just engaging the viewer, but causing the viewer to share it; and then more importantly, to take action. So I actually believe that we haven’t even begun to see what’s possible yet (with online video for business communications).