Video: Why?

David Reich's MarketingProfs piece on blog video makes a great point: blog videos are often a great way to lose the attention of your audience.

Is it any wonder, then, that I find my mind wandering as I watch a blogvid that runs on? How many of us have the time, ability or budget to produce a slick video to post? Most of what I've seen so far have been talking heads, perhaps with some props, but still basically talking heads. Deadly on TV and, to me, hard to watch on a blog if it runs too long.

What's too long? To me, much more than a minute or perhaps two is it. Even if the verbal content is good and well-delivered, it becomes a challenge to watch as it gets longer. I start looking for the toolbar to try to zip it ahead.

For my online friends who have been doing vids, I say this with all due respect and ask your understanding. I'll still watch your vids, because I do want to hear what you have to say.

BUT, why can't it be said the old-fashioned way of blogging...in writing? If it's written, it's easy to re-read a sentence or paragraph for clarity, before I post a comment.

I'm with David. The written word is an amazing tool. You can use words to communicate all kinds of complicated ideas. They get subtle shades of meaning across. They can be printed out for later reference. They can easily be emailed to colleagues. You can read them on a plane. You can read them on your mobile phone. You can read them during tedious conference calls. You can read them without disturbing the person sitting four feet from you.

And they're a random access medium. The reader can skip ahead, go back and re-read something. She can skim at high speed or carefully focus on every word. They put the user in control and as a result are probably the most user-oriented medium there is.

Video has its place. Video can show you things that would be hard to follow in a written description; the video that Apple put on its site as a promo for the iPhone is a great example (it convinced me to buy one because it made it obvious how many features worked, and it served as a quick start guide when I got the phone home). I'm not saying video is bad.

I'm just suggesting that if you can't figure out why you shouldn't be using a simpler, lower-bandwidth, more flexible, and more user-controlled medium for your message, then you shouldn't be making a video.

At the risk of sounding judgmental, it's highly self-indulgent. Look, I can make a video! Look, I didn't have to bother to organize my thoughts and write them down; I'm just going to talk at you! When I'm on the receiving end of that stuff, my strongest reaction is that this communicator has no respect for me or the rest of his audience, and I usually stop watching.

Video has its place. It's just turning up in a whole lot of other places lately. A good maxim: use the simplest possible medium for everything. You will probably still find yourself using video - but the videos will be better and more meaningful for your audience.

Audience size: everything old is new again

As characters are often saying on the television program Battlestar Galactica, "All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again." That's what I thought when I came across this post on evaluating your audience from Robert Scoble:

Chris Shipley’s Demo Conference proved to me it’s not the size of your audience that matters. It’s WHO is in the audience that matters. She has a micro audience. Usually about 1,000 people. But they include VCs, bloggers, journalists, and other influencers on whether startups get noticed or not. She usually has 60 companies on stage that each paid $18,000 to be there and most people in the audience paid more than $1,000 to listen to them.

That this is treated as some kind of revelation tells us something about new media's persistent case of amnesia. Scobe is absolutely right, of course, as anybody who was sitting there in the 1980s poring over BPA audits for print pubs in order to determine what the most efficient way to reach the right readers, rather than the most readers, was.

I don't mean to be overly critical here; I suppose it's a good thing that Scoble wrote about this, and I suspect that lots of people who hadn't given this much thought now will, and that's good. One of the great strengths of online media is the ability to create content that serves niche audiences cost-effectively; niches that never could support print are now served by content producers, and that's great news for marketers who want to reach them.

It's just that reading this stuff makes me feel like I'm watching a toddler figure out how doorknobs work.

It seems obvious that we'd turn to the lessons of old media to figure out how to make new media work - as publishers, advertisers, or consumers. Some things are very different, but a lot of things are not. It's been trendy to declare traditional advertising dead and insist that a revolution has changed everything; the truth, of course, is far less dramatic than that.

So here's a recommended new year's resolution for 2008: don't throw out the past and don't forget history. Old media still matter (and in some market segments, matter more than new media). For marketers, the trick is to remember the whole picture - not just the most exciting shiny and new parts of it.

Web 2.0, Web Two Point No, and BlogWorld Expo

I am heading off to the BlogWorld Expo this week; if you're going to be there, let me know. It looks like a good conference and set of vendors, so it should be the center of the world of blogging for a few days.

It's interesting, though, to note that while blogs have become absolutely mainstream, some companies don't get it. Have a look at Mary Schmidt's tale of complaining to American Airlines and mentioning that she'd blogged about her bad experience with them, and how they replied:

We have received your email, however, because of company online security procedures, we do not engage in researching online blogs. However, your perspective has been noted. Ms. Schmidt, thank you for your interest.

Because of security reasons, we can't look at a web site? Oh, okay. That was followed by the ultimate "Please drop dead, you annoying customer, you" closer:

This is an “outgoing only” email address. If you ‘reply’ to this message by simply selecting the reply button, we will not receive your additional comments.

The whole tone is "Look, we really don't want to hear your stupid complaints." It's hard to imagine why airlines like American are in trouble these days, isn't it?

How behind the curve is American Airlines? They still haven't figured out blogging and social media, and others are already getting over it. One of the biggest cheerleaders of all things Web 2.0, Steve Rubel, suddenly announced that he's realized that all these companies doing pointless things in overly complicated ways with no prospects of ever making money are kind of silly:

Let's face it, we're skunk drunk and it's because of money. It's almost like we all need to enter Betty Ford Clinic 2.0 together. This time, it's not stock market money but private equity, M&A, VCs and to some degree the reckless abandonment of logic by some advertisers who are perpetuating what is sure to end badly when the economy turns. Hubris is back my friends.

I don't disagree with Steve, but he's been one of the biggest cheerleaders of everything silly on the web. (And he admits that in the blog post: I give him a lot of credit for that.) He's not alone in this assessment; apparently the money guys at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers have figured it out, too:

"We have absolutely no interest in funding Web 2.0 companies," says Randy Komisar, a partner at Kleiner Perkins. He mentioned this during an after dinner conversation last week. He said he had recently told John Battelle, one of the organizers of the rapidly growing Web 2.0 Summit conference, that the term no longer had the same positive cachet it once had. In the VC community it clearly has a negative one.

But lest this be seen as sudden sanity onset, consider this commentary from Tom Foremski in that same blog post:

Web 2.0 companies will now have to reinvent and redefine themselves. And reprint their business plans. They should also remove any mention of "long tail economics." I have a bad feeling about the longevity of that term in the investment community. It sounds a touch too W2.

Nixing anything "long tail" is an easy way to future-proof a business plan for a few months longer.

"Social graph" is doing great right now, so make sure you pepper your business plan with that term. "Social platform" still has legs. And "attention economy" is a ricochet term with a bullet.

That passage makes my head hurt, mostly because he's right. But it leaves me wondering what ever happened to ideas having some relevance beyond buzzwords. The idea of Web 2.0 has not gone away. The long tail concept is an interesting and valid one, but the term became trendy and started being applied to all kinds of things that weren't particularly "long tail," and now it's pretty much just something to set off our BS detectors. The same is true of all the various social media buzzwords.

There are valid concepts behind all of this, and people will figure out how to make businesses based on them. Of course, for each of those businesses, there will be 99 hopefuls with half baked ideas vomiting out a stream of buzzwords in a sort of dadaist Word Salad 2.0.

Interesting times, anyway. Meanwhile, off to Las Vegas.

Giving your Marketing Away

Mack Collier has a nice piece in MarketingProfs about show social media changes marketing. It's a nice piece because it doesn't overreach and has some specific examples what companies have done and what you can consider doing yourself in this arena.

He notes:

There are risks involved. Letting your marketing speak in the customer's voice instead of your own can mean that sometimes your intended message isn't communicated as you would prefer. But if your marketing is spoken with the customer's voice, it will be more authentic and will better resonate with your target market.

This is the part that people often forget; give your customers power and tools to talk about you, and they might say things that aren't what you would have chosen. Still, for many marketers, the power of motivated customers outweighs the risks. It also, I think, keeps companies honest; if your customers start saying things you don't like, there's a reason, and you ought to be thinking about that.

No Web Dessert Before Dinner

Back in the 90s, many marketers dreaded the inevitable web eye-candy request from an executive. You remember them: "Can't we have... I don't know, something that moves on the home page? It's so boring." Yep, the well-crafted copy that explained what the company was about and why a visitor should care, the images chosen to bring key ideas to life... boring! Let's add a stock ticker scrolling across the page! Now we are the web elite.

You would have thought that the success of sites like Google and Yahoo! (before they tarted themselves up and became the current visual nightmare) would have demonstrated that well-organized content that meets a user's needs is the most important thing on a site. No, not really.

But technology has advanced and it's not scrolling stock tickers (or the hideous Flash headers that were on one corporate site I was involved with - I'm sorry, they made us do it), it's video. Video is hot. Video is now. Video will solve all your problems!

That's kind of the message of this MarketingProfs piece by Jerry Bader, who is a senior partner at - surprise! - a firm that does multimedia for the web.

Now, don't get me wrong - I'm not anti-video. You can do great things with video. Video can bring concepts to life, put a more human face on your staff, demonstrate product features, and - of course - entertain.

What it can't do is correct fundamental problems. So when I read this:

A well-crafted, expertly presented marketing message is like a seduction: If you're not generating any excitement, don't expect to produce any sales, either.

Boring mission-statement gobbledygook and keyword-laden palaver are not the same as an enticing video. An engaging business story, well told, is like a juicy wet one planted right on your audience's lips.

... I find myself thinking, well, no kidding. Yes, good video is better than bad copy. Also, good movies are better than terrible books, and big things are bigger than small things.

If you haven't managed to articulate your message in words, guess what? A video is going to provide the same confusion in an exciting new way.

It's also important to remember the limits of video. Video demands more of the user. It means they need to be visiting your site from a location where they can play your video without annoying everyone around them. (Unless your target market is jerks.) It's content that they can't scan while they're on a boring conference call. It's content that will be more challenging for users with mobile browsers. It's content that might do something simple and annoying like make them turn off the music they're enjoying in iTunes just to hear what you have to say.

There are two unforgivable multimedia web sins. The first is automatically playing audio - this makes me me leave a site, never to return, especially if it's in an ad. The second is content that you cannot get without listening to an audio clip or watching a video. If you're going to make me work that hard to hear what you have to say, I'm leaving. These are both especially horrendous mistakes on B2B sites - and, by the way, you'd better hope none of your potential buyers are blind or deaf!

Video is a great extra, but it does not replace copy. If copy is bad, fix it. If your site is really boring, it means that you probably have content that's off-target or design that obscures important information - fix it.

Bader uses the analogy of a whipped cream on your dessert at the beginning of his piece... and I wish he's followed it through. You site architecture, graphic design, and most of all copy are the main meal. Make sure it nutritious and tasty for your visits. Then, serve up a great dessert in the form of multimedia.