I spent an hour or so this Saturday morning watching the latest news, opinions and hearing about interesting trends at my Latitude E4200 in my living room with a nice cup of coffee. Nothing unusual, but it did dawn on me that, once again, my wonderfully large TV is sitting there gathering dust. I’m sure it will turn on for the Missouri/Oklahoma game tonight, but it’s not where I’m most often going to learn and relax.
What’s happening is nothing short of revolutionary. YouTube had 63 million US-based visitors in October. More surprising is that YouTube also had 770 million search queries, which makes it the third largest search engine, according to Compete’s October Search Market Share.
It is amazing what we can watch in a short period of time. Today, I started out watching a video of the President-elect Obama transition team, since I’m a real fan of how they are using social media to tell their story. I’m often asked who we look at for ideas and I have to say that President-elect Obama’s team is a leader in this area. As an aside, I also thought it was pretty cool to see that Dell laptops and desktops are doing their part in the transition.
I then checked out our YouTube channel for Dell. Our team creates over 500 videos per year. Next year, this number will probably double since it takes us very little time to turn on our flip phones and do a quick vlog interview. Today, our video on design evolution at Dell caught my eye and I also noticed that we now have over 1400 subscribers to our videos. Interesting that RSS feeds to a blog like Direct2Dell only tell part of the story. I subscribe myself to as many video channels as I do to feeds from blogs.
Next up, I checked out our new site we are doing with the British Chamber of Commerce called www.smallbusinessadvice.tv. Michael Dell’s interview is featured this weekend. Good advice for all of us!
To be candid, I find myself ending the hour going over to Hulu to watch SNL shorts and just unwind for 15 minutes. As this experience becomes more “normal” for all of us, it really speaks to a few important trends for any organization.
1) are you telling your story in a way that your customers can see you, hear you and get to know you beyond the written word? Think of the transition team example. I feel like I know what they are thinking by watching their videos…
2) who said that we always have to email written copy to get a point across? The trend of people signing up as friends of video channels is real and growing. Google has over 54,000 subscribers, by the way. They have learned how to utilize YouTube better than anyone, but no surprise there.
3) Audiocasting or “podcasting” will grow in importance. Why shouldn’t we be able to actually hear the quotes in a news release or a document in the future, rather than just read them? Why wouldn’t we be able to see the latest videos and audiocasts on any topic from a company and it’s customers in one location?
All of our stories will increasingly become more personal as video sharing becomes increasingly mainstream.
All the best