The Wardman Wire

The first myth I am going to dispell is the one that says you need a lot of money to make a success of video on the internet. Look at Obama Girl for example; for the cost of a choreographer and a hot model the people behind the series have become major successes in the United States with the videos receiving a combined total of views that stretches into the millions.

But what if you don’t want to become the next big internet producer? What if your audience is voters and political activists? Could you still reach the same dizzy heights?

The Content Problem

The thing with the Obama Girl video is simply that it is sexy, short and catchy. On the flip-side there are political videos that are quite drab by comparrison yet still manage to make an impact in their target areas. The key is the message and how you’re conveying it. If your message is too complicated and the video too cumbersome people won’t take to it and they won’t send it on to friends, but if it’s a concise message that can be expressed well through a visual medium people will probably respond well to it.

Got the Message, Got the Video, Now What?

Let me introduce a new friend of mine. It’s name is Blip.TV and the thing that seems to encompass what it does is a saying that I first saw on Jag Singh’s blog, which has a lot of meaning to me:

“Content may be king, but distribution pays the king’s mortgage.”

Blip seems to recognise this and gives you spades of options to spread your message far and wide. There’s cross-posting to MySpace and blogs, for example. For a full set of features check out their website.

One of the best features is the ability to transcode your videos to multiple formats. You can offer your video as a download in the source format, let people watch it online in the cross-platform Flash format, or even transcode it to an iPod format - that’s right - with Blip.TV you can hit multiple distributions with one file. I’m so impressed with it that I’ve put a load of 18 Doughty Street content on it - the Boris Johnson interview for example.

The thing that Blip.TV offers is video delivery in a way that both you and your auidence want. With it’s API you can pull the video and data over to your own website and show it in the way you like - people don’t have to watch it on the Blip.TV destination site.

YouTube or DIY-Tube?

Then there’s the big question - What’s it like next to YouTube? Wouldn’t a political video get more exposure on YouTube?

The answer is that you should put it on YouTube anyway. Blip isn’t necessarily a replacement, but something that is complimentary to your campaign. Sure, you can embed a YouTube video, but with Blip you can customise things, offer the source file for download and even offer a “send to your ipod” button.

Jargon Buster

Thanks for reading my guest column here at the fast-growing, always interesting Wardman Wire. I thought it might be useful to provide some definitions to the more technical terms mentioned here.

Cross-Posting

• This is when you submit something to one site, like Blip, and it automatically posts it to your own blog or MySpace account for you.

Cross-Platform

• When something works on a PC, Mac, Linux or any other computer platform.

Transcode

• The process of converting a digital video format from one form to another.

API

• Stands for “Application Programming Interface”, which basically gives programmers and designers access to the source code of a given application so they can use it for their own purposes.