Time for a Story
Saturday, November 23, 2013
Marbella weather is beautiful today, and so it put me in the mood for video story.
We have always told stories from beginning of time, tales that are passed on from one generation to another. So has how we tell them really changed that much? Once upon a time we would communicate through smOKe signals and old ships masters would use flags upon their ships to talk within the fleet stretched out across the oceans. Is it so strange that emails today carry a flag signal to know we received their message OK?
But it's what we say, how we say it and the story behind it that counts and indeed survives because humans want to share that story.
No wonder that the X Factor videos that go viral are the ones where the contestant has a good story, touches our emotions. Apparently 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000 times faster in the brain than text. So it's not hard to believe that posts with videos attract 3 times more inbound links than plain text posts. (Source: SEOmoz)
Videos are becoming an increasing part of our lives and the global media consumption that's getting fatter on them. YouTube continues to be the McDonalds of video where the masses gobble up 6 Billion hours of video every month.
YouTube also sees 100 hours of video uploaded every minute and Cisco predicts that in 2017 every second, nearly a million minutes of video content will cross the network. To watch just one months of video content will take an individual 5 million years.
Whilst video internet traffic equates to over 50% of all online consumption, no one seems to be predicting it will show any sign of slowing down for years, and depending on what research stats you believe, the consensus is that at least 80% of traffic will be video within 3 years.
No wonder, it has been in our lives for a long time, and its usage, accessibility and our ability to make, watch and share it grows, shoved along of course by mobile and social media.
Fuelled perhaps by those stats, it makes us seriously think about including video in our websites and marketing material especially in this economic climate and when we read reports that people spend 100% more time on sites with video according to Marketing Sherpa.
Also Viewers are 85% more likely to purchase a product after watching a video of it. Add that to the fact that 68% of online video viewers share video links, and according to Cisco people will spend an average of 17 seconds on a website but over 2 mins on a video, it makes us want to grab our camera and tell a good story on film.
Filme online is also having the same affect and will of course dwarf traditional TV viewing as we know it. Films online are so easy for most of us, that we can't imagine not being able to review a film and have it on our device within a few minutes.
So we are all about video video video. Whether you are a digital native or not it seems to be one of those things that we believe has been around forever yet keeps feeling new and exciting. Perhaps we think You Tube has been around forever, but it was only launched in 2005 on Valentine's day, yet to millions, YouTube is the love of their life.
But video is not that new at all. The first machine patented in the United States that showed animated pictures or movies was a device called the ''zoopraxiscop' or "wheel of life.'' Ironic perhaps when we loOK at how the World Wide Web became our wheel of life, and most of that is set to be spent watching video on it.
A lot of that will be self-content, but isn't that how it all started anyway over a 100 years ago?
The oldest surviving film on record is an 1888 short filmed entitled; Roundhay Garden Scene. It was directed by French inventor Louis Le Prince filmed in West Riding of Yorkshire. For me it was odd to learn that the woman in the movie was called Sarah. I have a sister called Sarah and a sister who lived in West Riding, I digress.
Nevertheless it was self-content footage, and self-content made well over a hundred years ago and is the oldest surviving piece of footage in history.
Perhaps I read too much into it but I find it fascinating that that short film, uploaded and still viewed on You Tube today, loOKs uncannily like a gif. Just a few seconds long and recorded at 12 frames a second.
In June 2012 Vine flickered on and 4 months later was snapped up by Twitter. Based on self-content sharing of videos lasting just 6 seconds, so that's back to around the same length of the 1888 film, is there a link or am I just going Round the Garden.
Is there any point in going further back in time to loOK at our digital world of communication to see if we are all going around in circles or cycles? LoOK at the Ten Commandments, engraved on stone. Where are we now? Carrying around our tablets, our modern bibles that we live by, not made of stone but evolved from an iphone.
And as Steve Jobs famously once said '' … you can't connect the dots loOKing forward; you can only connect them loOKing backwards.
Tags:
Marketing, Video Marketing
We have always told stories from beginning of time, tales that are passed on from one generation to another. So has how we tell them really changed that much? Once upon a time we would communicate through smOKe signals and old ships masters would use flags upon their ships to talk within the fleet stretched out across the oceans. Is it so strange that emails today carry a flag signal to know we received their message OK?
But it's what we say, how we say it and the story behind it that counts and indeed survives because humans want to share that story.
No wonder that the X Factor videos that go viral are the ones where the contestant has a good story, touches our emotions. Apparently 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000 times faster in the brain than text. So it's not hard to believe that posts with videos attract 3 times more inbound links than plain text posts. (Source: SEOmoz)
Videos are becoming an increasing part of our lives and the global media consumption that's getting fatter on them. YouTube continues to be the McDonalds of video where the masses gobble up 6 Billion hours of video every month.
YouTube also sees 100 hours of video uploaded every minute and Cisco predicts that in 2017 every second, nearly a million minutes of video content will cross the network. To watch just one months of video content will take an individual 5 million years.
Whilst video internet traffic equates to over 50% of all online consumption, no one seems to be predicting it will show any sign of slowing down for years, and depending on what research stats you believe, the consensus is that at least 80% of traffic will be video within 3 years.
No wonder, it has been in our lives for a long time, and its usage, accessibility and our ability to make, watch and share it grows, shoved along of course by mobile and social media.
Fuelled perhaps by those stats, it makes us seriously think about including video in our websites and marketing material especially in this economic climate and when we read reports that people spend 100% more time on sites with video according to Marketing Sherpa.
Also Viewers are 85% more likely to purchase a product after watching a video of it. Add that to the fact that 68% of online video viewers share video links, and according to Cisco people will spend an average of 17 seconds on a website but over 2 mins on a video, it makes us want to grab our camera and tell a good story on film.
Filme online is also having the same affect and will of course dwarf traditional TV viewing as we know it. Films online are so easy for most of us, that we can't imagine not being able to review a film and have it on our device within a few minutes.
So we are all about video video video. Whether you are a digital native or not it seems to be one of those things that we believe has been around forever yet keeps feeling new and exciting. Perhaps we think You Tube has been around forever, but it was only launched in 2005 on Valentine's day, yet to millions, YouTube is the love of their life.
But video is not that new at all. The first machine patented in the United States that showed animated pictures or movies was a device called the ''zoopraxiscop' or "wheel of life.'' Ironic perhaps when we loOK at how the World Wide Web became our wheel of life, and most of that is set to be spent watching video on it.
A lot of that will be self-content, but isn't that how it all started anyway over a 100 years ago?
The oldest surviving film on record is an 1888 short filmed entitled; Roundhay Garden Scene. It was directed by French inventor Louis Le Prince filmed in West Riding of Yorkshire. For me it was odd to learn that the woman in the movie was called Sarah. I have a sister called Sarah and a sister who lived in West Riding, I digress.
Nevertheless it was self-content footage, and self-content made well over a hundred years ago and is the oldest surviving piece of footage in history.
Perhaps I read too much into it but I find it fascinating that that short film, uploaded and still viewed on You Tube today, loOKs uncannily like a gif. Just a few seconds long and recorded at 12 frames a second.
In June 2012 Vine flickered on and 4 months later was snapped up by Twitter. Based on self-content sharing of videos lasting just 6 seconds, so that's back to around the same length of the 1888 film, is there a link or am I just going Round the Garden.
Is there any point in going further back in time to loOK at our digital world of communication to see if we are all going around in circles or cycles? LoOK at the Ten Commandments, engraved on stone. Where are we now? Carrying around our tablets, our modern bibles that we live by, not made of stone but evolved from an iphone.
And as Steve Jobs famously once said '' … you can't connect the dots loOKing forward; you can only connect them loOKing backwards.
