Why brands should consider the video conversation

Lauren Luke is the 27 year old single mum from South Shields whose make up tips are watched by a global audience of millions on YouTube.

She ditched her job in a taxi firm 18 months ago and started selling makeup over eBay. She was answering so many questions about applying her products by email, that she started to create video demonstrations on YouTube.

These videos were shot in a bedroom, produced with a laptop and webcam have had over 5million views. A typical clip will run for 10 minutes, have 100k+ views and 1k+ comments. Fast forward 18 months and Lauren is launching her own makeup range and writes a weekly column for the Guardian.

Stories like these have been a feature of YouTube since it launched in early 2005. Semi-pro filmmakers could film a few scenes on a mini DV video camera in the morning, plug the cable into their computer and use free software like imovie to make a 3 minute video promo to upload to YouTube that evening.The reason that video is going to explode into the mass market in 2009 is that the means of production have been simplified.

The recent Cadburys Livebrow MPU extended their dancing eyebrows TV campaign by letting users film themselves using their webcam and submit it via the Flash MPU into a competition.

Its easy to capture and upload video from most modern mobile phones, but the hot video product at the moment is the Flip Minos camera. It costs £99, uses solid state storage, a built a built in USB connection and has a simple workflow that lets you publish to YouTube on the click of a button. Cisco are hoping that this will be the perfect device to go mass market and democratise video. They have a serious interest in high bandwidth infrastructure and purchased the parent company, pure digital last week.

In a move with a similar end result, naked conversations author and rabid video blogger Robert Scoble recently announced he’s moving to hosting company Rackspace to work on a new video network.

So if video is going to overtake text as the currency of social networks, what lessons are there for brands? The workflow for video has been radically simplified with a variety of channels and tools for creators. My advice is to take a lesson from Lauren Luke and engage your users in a warm and honest conversation.

This post originally appeared on March 23rd 2009 on Brand Republic