Imagine. You just produced a great video for your company and pushed it on YouTube to go viral. But as you browse YouTube to proudly show it live to your staff, it turns out the original movie has been altered a hundred times by angry customers who embedded signs advising viewers to stay away from your product. Of course, the altered versions ended up being more popular than the original video. Unrealistic marketing nightmare? Not so sure.
While it remains pretty hard for non-professionals to edit a YouTube video and modify its content, this will no longer be the case with the era of 'open video' about to start. Videos are the last all-sharable frontier. With minimal knowledge and tools, it's easy today to copy, alter and post text and images from about anywhere to about everywhere. Right click on a jpeg picture and your done copying it from the web. Double click on the copy and it will open the picture in your favorite free photo editing application, enabling you to modify the image, add text and save it as a new picture, ready to post on the Internet. But that's not the case with videos. Videos are coded in tens of proprietary formats, causing insurmountable barriers for the average user willing to edit part of the content. And worse, popular so-called 'video sharing' sites like YouTube simply make it impossible to download the original video file without sophisticated hacking software. Technically, "sharing" videos on the Internet is much like traditional "broadcasting": a one-way communication. And that's why marketers love it. Broadcasting our commercials, whether on TV or on the Internet, is a practice we know and can control. The challenge is to achieve maximum exposure. But we control the message. We control the positioning. We control the brand image.
Open Video is about to change the way video can be shared and edited on the web. Mozilla's latest Firefox 3.5 browser already enables users to play back videos without the need of proprietary plug-ins such as Flash (the proprietary format used to play back most videos on the web). The next step is to get rid of proprietary encoding formats, and allow viewers to edit video content as easily as they would edit a series of pictures. Right from their browser. Have a look at this short demo (http://people.mozilla.com/~prouget/videos/ogv/DCI.ogv) and imagine this is a commercial featuring Steve Jobs playing with two iPhones. What would you like the Firefox logo to be replaced with? A Google Android Phone logo? Just go for it!
If you think that it's already a challenge to moderate your message board, follow your tweets, and to keep some consistency across your social media initiatives, be prepared to the real challenge of open video combined with social media: the ultimate consumer-empowering tool about to rise. How are marketers going to deal with it remains an open question. I personally like to think that it might help us go back to the essence of communication: building promises that make sense to consumers and that can be kept. If you're scared about angry customers spoiling your viral 'open video' campaigns, a good start should be to understand why they're angry and improve their experience of your products before building any kind of social campaign.
Dig deeper:
>> Open Video demo
>> Technology Review: 'OurTube' (Sept/Oct 2009)