…therefore we are.

Mentioned it in Safe Haven for Pirates, but wanted to flag up Charles Leadbetter’s ‘We Think‘ book-come-video-synopsis again on two counts.

1. That We Think is a fantastic concept/vision and a credit to Charles’ own ability to innovate, think outside the box and all of those other cliches
2. That I could definitely get into this ‘watch a 4 minute video and pretend you’ve read the book’ malarkey.

Surely there’s an enterprising opportunity there – to make short, digestible, video summaries of interesting texts/docs and ideas, so that the time poor (can’t help myself, dropping cliches all over the shop today) can still be plugged into the founding concepts of work such as this.  Far from detract from books sales, this has actually inspired me to purchase We Think, as the synopsis is sufficiently appetite-whetting to loosen the recession-induced, iron-clad purse strings.

YouTube is online video, online video is YouTube.  Newer sites are popping up and growing in popularity, such as Vimeo, Viddler and VideoJug, as the web becomes more and more closely linked to video production, but YouTube is still a good place to start.  However, don’t be fooled into thinking if it’s on YouTube it’s found an audience, millions (literally multiples of millions) of videos are uploaded just to YouTube every day.  You now have to work harder to carve out a viewership and the best way to do this is to aggregate.

Use it to:

Err…aggregate.  Create your own YouTube channel, brand it, set your status as a Comedian, Musician, Director, or – my personal favourite – a Guru; and then assume the mantle of expert, collecting and sharing content about your area of expertise.  Yep, that’s right, you don’t even need to be creating video content to be a sharer of video news.  A good tactic is to create Playlists.  Organise similar videos, or those that tell a story, teach parts of a process or give a rounded view on a subject together into playlists that form specific watching for a viewer.

What you could get:

A direct feed of engaging and noteworthy video content, maximized for usability by your clever organising and streaming of content into relevant lists – making you a valuable source of information to friends, colleagues, contacts, followers and fans.

Engaging is worth repeating, in an environment when everyone has a web presence and your website is your single biggest marketing asset and communicator of your brand values, differentiation is often elusive.  Although your site might be brimming with goodness, getting someone to browse around for long enough to find it is a challenge in itself, so streams of watchable, specific, engaging rich media is invaluable to making your site stickier than a jam doughnut on the beach.