User Generated Content Most Often Wrong For Enterprise
February 26th, 2010 by Seth Kenvin
That Old-Timey Video Isn’t Good Enough For You
- Have sort of had blogger’s-block lately, but a few developments this week catalyzed a torrent of thoughts to express, so to avoid an overly indulgent post, will try to contain this to pithy bullets.
- Our stupendous PR consultant Brian Baumley (check out his three pages of results for us) has recommended recently that we could have some fun with xtraNormal, which we have done, see video below.
- Just the other day saw TechCrunch coverage of a (frankly, kind of dull) video with Twitter exec/founder Ev Williams video from ~10 years ago including some old-timey intro footage, and a few weeks ago TechCrunch covered unearthing of a much, much better video from ~ 5 y.a. of Tw e/f Biz Stone, also anachronistically stylized.
- inspired by bullets above, PRESENTING! A Viral Humdinger
- Hope you found that video witty, but know it also has a message: Flip cameras, iMovie softare and YouTube accounts, and cute & easy tools like xtraNormal, make many think that enterprises don’t need to pay dedicated, high-end production talent and can go the UGC route for content. — Not true.
- 15 years ago some people started to expect professional organizations might have web sites built by employees in spare time with tools like FrontPage, and probably 15 years before that people expected that all brochures would be similarly done from general employee pool with onset of desktop publishing tools. — These both also have never turned out to be true.
- Web development, print design and other media endeavors are in fact done by hybrids on behalf of corporations, of large institutions and even of major media publishers — a little bit by crafty employees with off-shelf tools, some by particularly skilled & dedicated internal professionals, and still plenty by major external agencies revving up the big guns.
- Thus it will be with video and as organizations of all sizes and types use this effective and increasingly available & usable medium throughout operations, expect some to be someone like me playing with xtraNormal, and a lot to be projects with substantial budgets & teams including serious professionals in the craft.
- xtraNormal is in fact fun and useful to play with and we look forward to availing such functionality in our pre-production software for better collaborative scripting and storyboard development.
- Back to the top few bullets above, in addition to the Ev & Biz videos, recent TechCrunch stories have also included broad criticism of the PR field including with aid of xtraNormal software. Well, we’re not sure how warranted that is, and at least can point to Brian Baumley as a shining counter-example of exceptional PR professionalism (yet another field in which solid professionalism can be just as vital as ever even in these Web 2.0+ days).
- You get the sub-title of this blog post? Reference to an old spiritual, very familiar to those of us who read Inherit The Wind in middle school with a generous teacher who screened the (highly professionally produced & staffed) film after we finished.
