Image by williamcho
Video is one of the most powerful media available to the modern marketer. Never before has it been so cheap and easy to put video content in front of billions of consumers. YouTube just celebrated its sixth birthday and released some (quite frankly) ludicrous stats:
- More than 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
- YouTube serves more than 3 billion views-per-day
In the face of easy video production and uncanny levels of video consumption, I find myself pondering one question: why do marketers still make shitty videos?
I’ll probably write a few posts on this topic, but for now I want to leave everyone with some food for thought when considering video as a medium for your marketing efforts.
Before you make the video, do this little thought exercise:
Imagine it’s a rainy, cold Saturday afternoon and there is a marathon of your favorite TV show (Lost, House, Battlestar Galactica, etc.) You are more than happy to curl up and watch. In the middle of one of the episodes, you hear about a video online. If you wouldn’t stop watching a rerun of a show you enjoy to check out the video, THEN DON’T BOTHER MAKING IT.
99.9% of all brand videos fail this test.
Save yourself time and money. Don’t make videos that suck.
Last week, Matt Peters published an article extolling the need for thoughtful consideration of the already-cluttered state of information most of us exist in, these days. For individuals, this means floating in what can seem like a vast stream of information (be it news items, tweets/status updates from friends and family, or announcements from brands and organizations), and dealing with the challenge of filtering that information in ways that make it meaningful. Like any irrigation system, assuring that information in the stream, no matter what the source, gets to the right destination is essential. For brands, and for marketers savvy enough to get in the know, this means understanding how your audience filters its streams already, and determining how best to make your messaging mean something to them.
When I look at the ways I filter my own information streams, it’s a combination of tools provided by the social networks on which I’ve chosen to be active, and some home-made tools that were born from those most organic drivers of innovation: circumstance and convenience.
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Image by Danndalf
This post has been rattling around in my brain for many months now, never quite finding its true form. It was not until yesterday that I realized my frustration in finding the appropriate expression was not due to my own cerebral impotence, but because the question posed in the title is, in fact, one of the most difficult marketing questions of our time.
If we are more connected than ever before, why has it become more difficult than ever to make a connection?
Please note that I am making use of the varied definitions of “connected.” We are more connected, in that we are more “joined”, or “linked,” but a true connection (“association; relationship”) is harder than ever to establish and maintain.
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By alancleaver_2000
The vast majority of posts here on Context Over Dogma deal with social media specifically with respect to use in marketing. But as we all know, social media has implications throughout our lives and across numerous business and personal disciplines. Every so often, we like to address a non-marketing facet of the social media world in which we live and play. These issues will, in some way, affect us all.
Early last week, I came across an article that detailed goings-on at The Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. During a recent job interview with the Department of Corrections, Officer Robert Collins was forced to give up the password to his private Facebook account. Rallying to Officer Collins’ defense was the ACLU, which sent a particularly scathing letter to the Maryland Department of Corrections, in which it called the move “a frightening and illegal invasion of privacy” and stated that “[n]either Officer Collins nor his Facebook ‘friends’ deserve to have the government snooping about their private electronic communications.”
I shared the article with my own Facebook friends, and watched the comments roll in: “NO!”, “$%*& NO!”, “%@#&#* &#*&@!” etc… If colorful metaphors can be taken as indication, clearly, a nerve had been touched.
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Image by NickNguyen
In business, I hear a lot of talk about “touch points.” Consumer touch points, customer touch points, even employee touch points.
Touch points are important. The more you “touch” a consumer, the deeper your brand gets embedded into them. This, however, works with both good touch points and bad ones. A bad customer service experience is still a touch point, and will leave a lasting mark in the mind of the consumer.
But I think we need to also talk about “trust points.” Rather than looking at how many opportunities we have to touch a consumer (i.e. engage with them somehow), let’s look at how many opportunities we have to deepen a consumer’s trust in us (a “trust point”).
This is something I have been thinking about lately with our own clients, but I urge you to munch on this morsel as well. In a typical week, how many trust points do you have with an average consumer? With all of the social media tools available, brands have more opportunities than ever to gain trust and keep it. Unfortunately that means brand also have more opportunities than ever to mess up and lose a consumer’s trust. But that’s for another post.
Don’t just increase touch points, increase trust points.
Image by Beverly & Pack
If I had a nickel for every time someone brought up “brand voice” in a marketing meeting over the past year, I honestly think I’d be a millionaire. “Brand voice” is one of those concepts that’s easy to say, but hard to correctly put into practice. Over the past few months, however, it has occurred to me that a discussion about “brand voice” isn’t even the right discussion to have. We need to be talking about “brand voices”
Oh…that’s right…plural!
There has been (and still is) entirely too much emphasis on creating a massive, omnipresent Voice with which a brand communicates to all consumers at all times; as if consumers would rebel and lose faith in the absence of this Arch-Voice to guide them along the dark paths of the modern world. This is absurd, and its silliness has become even more apparent as conversational mediums such as Facebook, Twitter, Quora, YouTube, and blogs increase in importance in a brand’s communication plan.
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This past weekend I was part of casual (but lengthy) discussion on short-form versus long-form content, and it got me thinking more about the nature of and uses for both.
I think it’s probably safe to say that the rise of Twitter has had a direct relationship to the rise of short- (even micro-)form content. There was even a fantastic spoof video a while back about “Flutter: The New Twitter”. But the existence of Twitter didn’t create the long vs. short discussion, it merely altered our definitions of long and short. There is certainly a part of me that agrees with Tris Hussey that it is “kinda ironic that blog posts are now considered ‘long form’ content.”
But the fact of the matter is this: people should spend less time discussing which is better, and more time figuring out how to use them together to create the best possible messaging results.
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