March 20, 2008 | Thursday
Von.x: There will be video
By Jackie Danicki - Blogger in Marketing |Online Sales |Social Media
One of the hottest topics at Von.x in San Jose this week has been online video. No, I don’t mean YouTube; it’s great, but so 2007.
The real buzz right now is in the arena of live video on the web. As you can see from the photo that Von.x organiser and media powerhouse Jeff Pulver took of me, everyone in Silicon Valley is filming everyone else. Out of all the people in the room, I was one of the 70+ per cent who were armed with video capabilities (my trusty Nokia N95). But does this have any ramifications or implications outside of the geek sphere?
This was the upshot of a question I posed to Skype‘s Jonathan Christensen, Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur, Qik CEO Ramu Sunkara, Robert Scoble, and Ustream.tv co-founder Brad Hunstable. (Full disclosure: Qik gave me the Nokia N95 so that I could play with their product and evaluate it as a keen observer of this space. I’m also friends with the former CEO of Ustream, who still advises their board.) Apart from Scoble, all of these blokes are in the innovation game and their businesses are allowing users to do some seriously cool things online. I expected them all to have solid answers for me on their vision for how their video technologies will enable companies to make more money.
You can watch the video of their responses, though be warned that apart from my voice (assisted by a professional grade microphone), the sound volume is not brilliant. But I can save you the trouble by telling you that none of these guys had a satisfactory answer.
Loic did an admirable job of answering, but none of them really said what I wanted to hear: Online video is an extension of the conversation that brands should be having with customers anyway. Not only that, but the conversations that customers have with one another - no participation from the brands necessary (or in many cases desired) - should provide valuable insight into how to deliver ever-improving products and services. (Aside: Qik itself is a good example of this. Rather than splash out on PR firms or TV ads, they invest budget in putting video-capable mobiles in the hands of power users and novices alike, in order to get feedback on how they can constantly improve their service. They also invest time: Send them an email to report a problem and you will receive a response within moments.)
The scope for raising profits by listening and responding to reasonable customer feedback is expanding by the day. Doing so may not be as sexy as something involving logos and straplines, but if done right, it makes a business more money. Not to mention the fact that it is much less labour-intensive as well as cheaper to let customers do much of the heavy lifting in the form of evangelism, falsehood correction, and brand awareness. Such an approach is not bad for a company’s credibility either, to put it mildly.
Right now the penetration of video-capable mobile phones is not massive in Europe and North America (Scoble lamented having to carry both a Nokia N95 and an iPhone, as the latter does not do video). But these tools are extremely usable and useful even as they are still undergoing rapid, necessary changes - such as improving the audio quality, which the video above demonstrates is clearly an issue. This is exactly the right time to have the techies and anoraks putting the services through their paces so that they will be “ready for primetime” and more mainstream adoption. The iPod was considered too technical in its early days and now look at it.
I’m most interested right now in Qik, as it’s not just live video but live streaming video from your mobile. You can also record offline, make videos private, and receive questions and comments from viewers while filming. The possible applications for this in terms of marketing and product development are simply mind boggling. So I’ll be visiting Qik HQ early next week and getting a closer look at how live online video is developing and what that means for advertisers and advertising itself. There will be video (of course)…
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