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Right, this question, this topic here, is "social media and video."
So, it's video's role in b2b marketing for IT products and solutions.
And one area of interest to me is case studies. In particular, video case studies. So, there
are people out there who produce these for corporates. They make the video, the professional
video. They'll interview the customer. They'll get all the sound bytes, the certain quotes
that are needed. And make a very professional production.
Anyway, on LinkedIn, there was a discussion group for IT marketers where I actually mentioned
(I was inspired by Matthew's post about Riverbed), that this company were making Riverbed customer
videos that I quite liked. It was a talking head, you know the ones I'm talking about.
A talking head, about 8 minutes long, it was a real customer describing why RiverBed was
their ideal solution for various issues.
But some of the marketers on that group looked at the video and came back with some good
comments. And the gist of it was they said that eight minutes was too long, and any surveys
and results that they've done suggest that lots of people are bailing out after two or
three minutes on customer-type, case study videos, on YouTube. (That was my understanding,
on YouTube.)
They reckon, and they went through the whole video, that the interviewer should have been
shown, it shouldn't just have been a talking head.
So, just generally, with that as a setup, what do you think about video as a tool that
can get a vendor's message across? Do people have time to watch it? Should they only be
two or three minutes sections? Any thoughts on that, Matthew?
Yeah, I think there's some value in it. I do think that two or three minutes is probably
about right. I don't necessarily think that the interviewer needs to be shown. As long
as it's a human being, talking about a product, and I can't tell from their eyes moving, some
of these videos I can see, you can tell, they don't come off as genuine.
There are some videos I've seen of customers for various products on various vendor sites
where they're talking about the product and they're genuinely excited about what it did
for their business.
I can relate to those. I was in a corporate office last week. This particular company
had bought a particular vendor's product. Then there were videos of one guy in particular
that was kind of one of the top managers from the IT side that was on this website. I'd
never met the guy in person but I'm sitting in a cubicle and I'm looking into this guy's
office. I'm sitting in a cubicle right near his office and I recognized the name and I
recognized that i saw that guy on those customer videos. I was excited because here's a guy
I saw taking about this product and, you know, here's this guy ten feet away from me in his
office. And that's where I know him - from a video on a vendor website. It's just kind
of a surreal, weird thing.
But, you know, I think there's some use to it. I think there's validity to it. But again,
it doesn't have to be too long, and make sure it's a real person talking about a product
that they like, not reading a scripted message. Because then it's, you know, you can spot
a fake pretty easily. So as long as it's genuine(?) I think there's some value in it.
Why shouldn't you, why shouldn't people be passionate about the technology that they
use. I mean, it's OK to be passionate about any number of other things, why can't people
be passionate about the technology that their company uses. And if a vendor made that happen,
why shouldn't they be able to speak highly of it?
I don't see it as a big problem.
Thank you.