Web Video as Social Media

I've got kind of a double post today, one where both the message and the medium for that message are worth discussing. I've been working a lot recently in video for the Web. It seems everyone is suddenly interested in doing videocasts, or vidcasts, or vlogs, or whatever you want to call them. I've been working at the high end of the spectrum, partnering with a production crew to shoot broadcast quality corporate videos for the Web, and recently I've started experimenting with video at the other end of the spectrum--the kind you can shoot with your own video camera and produce on your desktop.

I've just completed a video explaining what RSS means for marketers for my marketing technology newsblog MarketingRev. RSS is a critical technology for all marketers to understand, because it is rapidly reshaping the way content is accessed by consumers. RSS readers as standalone applications have been hovering at about 12% market penetration--which made RSS important, though not front burner for most marketers. But driven by the adoption of RSS among businesses and content providers, RSS readers are now being incorporated directly into operating systems, email clients and Web browsers, and are rapidly becoming ubiquitous. Marketers need to get up to speed quickly on a whole new paradigm of content.

I'll let the video explain the fundamentals of RSS. But I also want to talk briefly about video as a social media. As I said, it seems like everyone suddenly wants to do videocasts and post them up on iTunes, YouTube and Yahoo!. Video can be a very compelling medium, and it has a lot of applications in the age of social media that marketers should understand. It's also becoming a lot more accessible, with video production and streaming technologies available at a price that makes it viable for even a shoestring budget.

While producing the RSS video for my own site, I've also been working on a number of professional productions at the same time. It's been an interesting study to shift back and forth between a highly structured sound stage and a guerilla production with a handheld mini DV camera. One produces a very polished video; the other produces a raw video document. Both can be good or bad, both can be highly edited or untouched, but what's interesting to me is how people receive them, and how that reception seems to be evolving.

Highly produced videos often have the feeling of being highly edited, of being relentlessly on-point and packaged. The epitome of spin. You can watch this process happen even as a casual observer during filming. Let's say you want to do an interview at an event and the lighting is bad. So you move to a place where you can control the lighting. But now it doesn't look like you're at an event. So you bring in some props from the event to make it look right. Suddenly you're constructing reality. Even if it isn't deceptive, it does take on the feeling of being somehow artificial.

If you were doing the same interview at an event with a handheld camera, the most you would worry about is pointing in the best direction to get the best light you could manage. The production quality is low, but the immediacy and sense of reality is very high. 

Why this is even worth discussing is that viewers interpret everything. In the age of YouTube, I see a lot of people associating crunchy home video production as being more believable and more truthful than highly polished video. If you've ever seen the Scoble Show, you know what I mean. Everything about the productioni is amateur, but it has a very high level of believability. It's just a guy with a camera asking his own questions. But this also seems to have a finite shelf-life. If you're used to watching television with high-quality production standards, how long will you have the patience to watch bad editing and amateur productions? For most people, the answer is probably not very long. As more and more people and businesses begin producing video for the Web, better standards of production and quality will emerge and attract more viewers. But will the perception of authenticity and truthfulness evolve as well?

However you interpret the democratization of video, one thing is certain. It's a little bit of a wild west right now on the Web, which makes it the best time to put a toe in the water. I'd love to hear any anecdotes about videocasts you may have, or ideas for Web video programs and campaigns.

Comments

[Randy]

Great read - very informative.