Comments on: Field Trip

By: Transparency - It’s not just for the US President-Elect

Transparency - It’s not just for the US President-Elect — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 16:16:11 +0000

[...] even worked on Capitol Hill for a few years in a profession that has been made mostly obsolete by video. He used to tell stories of smoking cigars after work with Democrat and Republican senators alike. [...]

By: Whit Andrews

Whit Andrews — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 01:33:36 +0000

Dan: I wouldn’t say different. But WE ARE BLOGGING. Now, I will say that I think the average Gartner blogger is better than the average Flogger. But compared to Malcolm Gladwell’s most recent work, or any other broad thinker, of course our blogs are less meaningful. But I think that you’re making a point for me I wish I had made. At the same conference, I watched the guy doing the sound boards video his configuration set-up. I assume that was because if he ever comes back to the hall in question, he wants to know what settings he had started with, and it was easier to do a short video than it was to do multiple stills and stitch them together with pano software. What else might he find that video to be useful for? Obviously, can’t say just now.

The point is not that all video is just as entertaining as other video. I am NOT a deconstructionist. The point is that video, as an effective recording, archiving and communication medium, has passed the ignition point.

By: Whit Andrews

Whit Andrews — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 01:17:11 +0000

Laurent: Damn, that’s a nice piece of outlier research. Good to hear from you!

By: Whit Andrews

Whit Andrews — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 01:14:15 +0000

To Stessa: You know what? When we realized that LOST was really cool, we just watched it online to keep up. Right now, I have no cable, no satellite, no broadcast — all I do is watch DVDs. Last time I was sorry about that was New Years’ Eve, and the guys in the other half of the duplex let us use their TV. We took a blanket.
Haven’t missed it since.

By: Stessa Cohen

Stessa Cohen — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 13:33:16 +0000

Starting to count the people I know who watch tv only via video online. Still on one hand but I expect that to change.

By: Laurent Pacalin

Laurent Pacalin — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 22:09:58 +0000

Although only a digital immigrant I recently played sleuth and joined the digital natives on YouTube! I explored the correlation between “brand” and the number of video viewers for a selected set of companies. The results were quite surprising! The companies I selected are enterprise apps companies Oracle and SAP, Internet juggernauts Yahoo and Google, Salesforce.com as the enterprise 2.0 proxy, FaceBook as the Social Network / Internet platform, and Microsoft as Microsoft.

In an effort to remain objective, I chose to be very quantitative. I added up the number of viewers for the first five videos for each company, sorted by “relevance” and “all time”, as well as the number of comments and ratings. I then created a ratio that I call the “Viewer Responsiveness Index” – VR Index – to characterize the engagement of the viewer vis-à-vis the video. Details are on my blog at http://laurentonmarketing.blogspot.com under “You Tube and Viewer Responsiveness Index”.

Et voila, the winner on total views is FaceBook with more viewers than Google and Microsoft combined! And, first place for the VR Index goes to Microsoft with a score of 3.80, but keep on reading as the numbers themselves aren’t the whole story.

Indeed, quantitative analysis is great but it can only take you so far. So let’s enter a more subjective and qualitative world.

Oracle and SAP have the worst VR Index which may be explained by the fact that their videos are geared at techies and that watching a video about SAP NetWeaver or Oracle Fusion doesn’t necessarily generate a lot of excitement. By contrast, Salesforce.com videos are packed with humor and more fun to watch. So, while total viewership is the lowest of the companies surveyed, Salesforce generates a VR Index of 3.41 with mostly positive comments!

So by now you must be thinking: How is it possible for Microsoft to obtain such a high VR Index? Well, if you work in Marketing at Microsoft, don’t get too smug… The most watched video for Microsoft is Microsoft Surface Parody with 1,550,904 viewers. And, Punish Your Microsoft Developer garners 214,280 viewers alone… I guess people like to make fun of the Redmond Empire.

Google’s technical videos got a little bit more traction than Oracle’s or SAP’s, but what really boosts Google’s numbers are the Google Earth videos that all told reach nearly 2,000,000 viewers. As for Yahoo, the number of total viewers would have fallen below 80,000 if it weren’t for a Japanese video called Hard Gay Japan with 203,392 viewers.

So, where am I going with all of this? One thing is for sure, as the video-web becomes more important than the text-web, companies will need to keep an eye or two on what’s happening on YouTube. And while one could argue that comparing Oracle to Google in the context of YouTube is not meaningful, I hope that everybody will agree that comparing Google to Yahoo is very relevant! The unresolved question is whether the VR Index is a backward or looking-forward indicator.

By: Dan Sholler

Dan Sholler — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 16:35:24 +0000

Hmm,
Despite all of the stuff that you can find these days, I still think that there is a limit to how much video you can have.

I don’t know about you, but I watch television and get annoyed when there is poor camera work, poor editing, bad composition etc. I am willing to relax my criticisms for some of the things I find (either on TV Or on the web) if the ideas they express are unique, innovative, or interesting, but I fear that for many, the quality bar that we are dosed with daily from television may be hard to surpass.

It is true, that the capital costs of producing a video have been removed as a barrier, and it is also true that the distribution has opened up. What has not changed, and where it may stumble, is on our expectations. It takes quite a lot of skilled work to produce good video. This is why even the untrained eye can notice a qualitative difference between the daily soaps and your favorite weekly serial. (they have enough time to get it right in a week, but not in a day )

My feeling is that there will always be a space for cell-phone videos of random music concerts, but they will be consigned to the space where videos of my cute puppy and my 2 year old climbing the stairs go. The videos that people will watch will be those that either have a great deal of effort put into their quality, or that manage to capture an ephemeral event. We end up with 3 kinds: The ones that look like TV shows, the ones that are just lucky to be there and capture the spirit, and all the other stuff. I freely admit, that my video falls into the third category.