A man of diverse interests, David provided us with some good bits that got left on the cutting room floor. His hierarchy of bass players has Phil Lesh exceeded by Bootsy Collins, and John Paul Jones ahead of both of them. If you are an enterprise (or institution) employee, like a trainer, marketer, recruiter or holder of numerous other enterprise (or institution) positions relevant to Market7, you can look forward to such raconteur skills from David as he simultaneously regales you with the promise of our software to elevate your video production efforts.
Recently, I was asked to write an article for Elance about creating compelling content that would attract traffic. You can read the entire Article here. For you M7 blog devotees, here is a summarized version:
Everyone loves candy. Your viral video or vblog should be like C-A-N-D-Y. Yummy, yummy candy. To make my point, I call upon some of the most delicious treats available.
1. York Peppermint Pattie (Provide value)
Your video should have a purpose just like this little treat. It gives you a wonderful little sugar rush, makes you feel refreshed and makes your breath minty. You must know exactly what minty-fresh value you are providing.
2. Snickers (Tell a story)
Your video should tell a story like this perfect combination of ingredients. The video starts with the introduction (chocolate), immediately sets you up with what to expect (smooth caramel), slaps you with a salty problem to solve (peanuts), and brings you back down with the solution and resolution (creamy nougat). Every video should be a story and every story has a beginning, middle and end.
3. Hershey’s chocolate bar (Keep it simple)
A classic, no more or less than it absolutely needs to be. Unspoiled by any unnecessary bells and whistles, The video is truly created in the editing. Nothing that doesn’t have to be in the video should be. Boil your video down to the simplest, most pure version possible.
4. M&M’s (Hidden complexity)
I love these little morsels of goodness. It seems a fairly simple candy but as you eat them, you are surprised by the versatility. Your video must be like a pack of M&M’s. It should feel very simple, easy to consume, and unintimidating. But for those brave souls who wish to dive into a deeper experience, you should have that experience available for them. Offer hidden complexity for treasure-seekers.
5. KitKat (Interactive and shareable) The KitKat was made to share. I mean, the little pre-partitioned wafers are just begging to be broken off and handed to your friends. Your video should be set up to share and allow for social interaction. Provide your audience with the opportunity to interact and they will reward you with full engagement, referrals to your site, and repeat visits.
6. Almond Joy (Easy to understand what it is)
Is there any question that there is Almonds inside this thing? Your content should be as clear as possible about what is inside. You need your audience to know exactly what they are getting into. The title and thumbnail are the most important tools you have for quickly conveying content type. If you are in love with a name that doesn’t provide clarity, try adding a sub-title to help out.
7. Milk Duds (Bite-sized and plentiful) Have you ever started watching a movie with a box of these little fellas? They are a perfect movie food: easy to eat, easy to share and they seem to last FOREVER. Your video should have some sort of regular distribution. Frequency and regularity is a close second behind content quality for online video. If you want to release a new episode every week or month or whatever, then declare it to your audience and STICK TO IT.
Other sweet tricks:
There are other things that will help build an audience like “stir up a controversy”, “report on a current event before anyone else”, and “cross-promote with other content” but those are all a matter of personal style. They are good things to do but may not work for you or your content. The seven sweet tips above, however, are perfect to whet any appetite.
I recently had the opportunity to attend the annual Amazon Web Service Conference in San Francisco called start-up project.Although the event is still fairly new and what I would call cozy, two key insights became very apparent to me during the ridiculous hot afternoon in the city.
One is that the cloud is real. This might be a “duh” to some of the more technical readers of our site, but to most business people like myself new technologies and big shifts in methodologies are a big black hole until your start meeting and validating this with “real” people. And make no mistake some the of the best and brightest people are really pioneering all sorts of standards and tools to make sure that this phenomenon is getting the proper miracle grow to continue its exponential growth.
The second key insight that is abundantly apparent is the power of the cloud. Most technology falls into the more hype than practical application bucket.Some even make it to as good as advertised. Then the select few actually make it to the change your life scenario. And I can fully attest that I am so glad that we are fully riding the power of the cloud.The best way I can describe what the power of the cloud is to make a really lame movie analogy to one my favorite flicks.So for all you Lucas fans out there having the cloud is like being part of the Skywalker family, which really means core potential will never be an issue period.
What a crazy economic week we’ve just had. Although, any trader who took the week off would return to work on Monday morning to discover that the S&P500 had actually gone up a few points. In the mean time both Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch vanish / get absorbed and AIG also has a new owner, the US government. I’m hoping for the best, and am resisting opining on topics in fields like general economics and politics here, so I’ll constrain it to the fact that I’m hoping for the best.
People are frequently asking me what impact economic downturn could have on Market7’s launch and prospects. I actually don’t worry about economic externalities right now. For one thing, those things that are in our own control provide enough to consume us. Also, we just started sales last week. We’re proceeding from a zero basis so it doesn’t take too much success to achieve growth. If we must face an economically challenging period, now is actually a better time for us to go through that, instead of when we’re trying to establish growth above already-robust performance.
If times are going to be tough, I think our offering actually has some distinctive appeal relative to the times. I used to work for a company which provides technology for advanced consumer video services like VOD and HDTV. While the tech bubble was deflating around 2000-2001 one of our executives pointed out that video services can be recession-proof since the family ordering a VOD movie for five bucks is saving a lot compared to parking, movie theater admission and of course the snacks. And I suppose he was right; the company made it through that period and has gone on to flourish in better days.
Video’s capabilities to efficiently disseminate rich content also underscore the case for the sort of organizational video production that Market7 facilitates. Employees can access training programs in the most convenient setting instead of their time being consumed by scheduled on-premises programs. Ambitious occasions like product launches can be broadly shared without requiring expensive travel. Corporate call centers can be relieved by customers getting front-line support by accessing video tutorial information.
By the way, note that for similar reasons to those cited above, corporate video production can be green too. I’m sure we’ll get up a post on that at some point.
All aboard! We have officially left the Pilot leg of our journey and arrived at the commercial launch station on the Market7 express. A few factoids on our trip.
147 Pilot users graciously took the time to test and give us feedback
14 Software releases comprised the pilot phase of development
37 Pilot productions were managed through the Market7 platform
0 puppies or kittens were harmed in the making of our project
Amazing engineers and dedicated pilot users cooperated to make this commercial release happen on time. Any of you familiar with the software development world know just how special it is when you set out a release goalmany months in advance and hit that goal precisely on time. Add to it such a significant milestone as a commercial release and you have something we here at Market7 are very, very proud of.
There have been a special group of core pilot users whom we have put a lot of trust and faith in, soliciting their opinion to help keep us working on the right things. I would be remiss not to take this exciting moment to thank them personally. Brent Bye of Boxwrench studios, Alex and Joe Lindsay of PixelCorps/DVGarage, Bob Tracy of Westroad Media, Ericka OBenar, Alex Oliver, John Korossy, Bradley Robinson, and Matt Chapman and many others who graciously took their time to try out our software and give feedback.
The work has just begun as we remain focused on continued improvement to our software. But for at least the next fifteen minutes, we are going to sit down, kick our feet up, and enjoy this little victory, the first of many.
1) That’s Shannon whom you can see peppered throughout this blog & elsewhere on the Market7 Web site site as a director of creative development with darker hair, which I’ve been assured will become the case again before long.
2) That’s the video.Market7 application working in Internet Explorer! Our pilot projects have so far just been sanctioned in Firefox, but recent development work has us operational in IE and in Safari, which will be pushed out to the world when we go commercial very, extremely soon (we’re starting to count in terms of days until launch).
If you pay attention to technology industry news, perhaps even if you don’t, you’ve most certainly noticed Google’s launch this week of its Chrome browser. Major themes include providing a more efficient, stable and secure platform for accessing application functionality via Internet. These are themes Market7 endorses too as a provider of Web-based applications.
Less covered, but even more squarely within our domain, was Google’s simultaneous announcement of a video sharing application within the enterprise. Video, enterprise — that’s our market! This is cool, as for one thing our year old company frequently receives questions about the magnitude of potential success in our newly emerging space. We believe that the timing to focus on enterprise video is ripe because of a confluence of trends such as more accessible production resources, faster bandwidth, and rising user familiarity with accessing video in multiple modes on multiple devices. So there’s another conviction we share with Google which finds its enterprise video opportunity sufficiently large to unveil in sync with its much-hyped browser launch.
The actual application Google is launching resembles an internally accessed version of YouTube. Videos can be uploaded for certain recipients or for all enterprise members, and those videos can receive comments, tags and ratings. This promises to enhance organizational effectiveness through broader, more intelligent access to the distinctively engaging, illuminating and persuasive medium of video. And Market7 elevates those organizations’ abilities to efficiently and effectively get video produced that can be circulated internally through environments like the one Google is launching, or circulated more broadly through other mechanisms.
Market7 welcomes Google’s public entry to the enterprise video space and we are excited by the synergies of our activities and opportunities to collaborate.
Another Vertical! I am getting sucked more deeply into these conventions than the Olympics ever had me, as attested by my twitter stream. There is some really good (& some not-so-good) speaking going on, and some compelling prospects still coming up. Along with sports, and, um adult entertainment, oh and also religion and education — anyhow, politics has long been one of the fields leading in realization of video technological innovations, a notable example being the rise to prominence of Pseudo.com through its 360-degree live coverage of the 2000 RNC.
As an increasingly obsessive start-up guy, any non-Market7 thought that rises in my head immediately beckons its company-relevant peers, so as I start pondering this election season I quickly segue to considering what usage our offering may find in political activities. So we’re talking to people in this field. And the reception’s good. Political video production tends to be tightly time-constrained, logistically complex, multi-handed, and subjective in nature which raises the priority for clear, organized and consensual collaboration — areas in which video.Market7 excels. Stay tuned.
Seth, in between meetings,
at Il Fornaio Palo Alto
writing this blog post
We have two panel proposals up for South by Southwest (SxSW) interactive content festival for next year. If you love us, you will click one of the two panel links below and vote for our panel! (Yes, you have to create an account, but it is SOOOO worth it to support our fabulous team).
In the development of our software, we have collected a ton of best practices for video producers and their clients. It seems fitting to try and leverage some of that in the form of an informative and fun panel.
