The discussion features an all-star panel of individuals in the social media space: Jason Falls, Paul Gillin, C.C. Chapman, Chris Brogan, and Brian Solis. I’m interested in your comments below. Did they achieve the stated goal of “cutting through the hype of social media?”

Last Saturday I attended Pod Camp Boston 4 in the Campus Center of UMass Boston – a great facility to have an unconference like PCB4. There were many folks there that I have grown to know and respect in the local social media and online technology community and it was great to catch up with them. I was also fortunate enough to be part of a panel discussion with Steve Garfield, Bob Collins, Skip Bensley, and Joselin Mane titled “Web Video: Where is it going and where will it end.”

I went to PCB4 armed with my FlipCam Ultra HD video recorder and captured some video of a couple of the sessions I attended, as well as the entire session on Online Video.

Enjoy!

Want more? Well, being a session on Online Video, there were plenty of video cameras. Here’s some video of the presenters doing their thing. Or, if you’d like some quiet time, below are the slides from our presentation as well.

As with any new trend or marketing tactic, there is some trepidation to getting started. When I’m talking to someone who is interested in starting a video marketing strategy for the first time, the conversation invariably turns to the question, “Yeah, but how do I get a video to go viral on YouTube?” Every profession has that one or two questions that just keep coming up over and over and you have to understand the impetus behind it, and address it with care and respect. This is just one of the common misconceptions that is specific to my industry – online video marketing is all about creating whacky videos for mass distribution on YouTube. After explaining that there is no set formula for viral videos, and that as a B2B Marketer you probably don’t even need one anyway, for a few hundred times, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I asked the supremely creative team at PermissionTV to answer this question once and for all – How do we do YouTube? Here is their reply. Sometimes, it’s just best to give people what they think they want – or is it?

This is a pretty ingenious idea that’s more than just an agency gimmick. With over 78 million unique visitors in June of 09, YouTube gets a ton of traffic. There’s plenty of eyeballs there. The content stands on it’s own, but being video you also get the added benefit of not just sight, but sound and motion too.

I’ve seen other approaches like this. Boston area agency Modernista once redesigned their entire website to be a series of Delicious links. Now’s it a collection of links to content sites like Flickr, Wikipedia, and social media sites like Facebook. A small frame-like overlay instructs you:

Do not be alarmed.
You are viewing Modernista! through the eyes of the Web.
The menu on the left is our homepage. The blog is ours. Everything else is beyond our control.

At the end of the day, people are visiting your company or product website to get information – pure and simple. Who says your company or product website needs to be hand-crafted, self-hosted, unique combination of art, utility, and technology? As digital marketers, we should be focused, instead, on creating the content that visitors find useful and create conversion paths that engage visitors and get them to raise their hand in interest.

Tell me what YOU think. Leave a comment below – will the traditional online home evolve into a situation where there are no more websites – just content?

The panel itself was comprised of bigwigs in the online video market, who mostly played it safe when answering questions by Will Richmond or the audience. With high level executives present from competitors Google/YouTube and Amazon video, I was anticipating at least a little point-counterpoint. A couple of times, Will prompted his panel very directly to take the gloves off and engage in a more “spirited discussion.”

Overall, the key theme discussed was “convenience.”  Aside from Next New Networks stating that “competition” will breed new “features” in online video, there was absolutely no talk about what the exact features are, or how specifically, online video might disrupt the traditional TV-based subscription model.

This is the second event I’ve been to that’s been sponsored by VideoNuze and moderated by Will Richmond. The previous event was MITX’s “In’s and Out’s of Making Money on Online Video.” I found the discussion at that event to be pretty surfacey as well. Maybe that’s because Will seems to be such a nice guy – I met him at the VideoNuze VideoSchooze (a social mixer, not a panel discussion). There’s a fine line between being accommodating vs. being a push over, and I won’t pretend to know how to continuously be on the right side of that line. But still, my 2 cents is that Will needs to develop a system to challenge his panelists and tap into what they are passionate about. Passion on the panel would inevitable spread to passion within the audience for the topics.

What do you think? If you’ve hosted, moderated, or be on a Q&A panel, I’d love to hear your thoughts on how to stimulate spirited discussion without coming off too pushy. What works and what doesn’t?

Feel free to share this video player or embed it on your own blog using the “Menu” button.

The videos were originally uploaded to YouTube. I consolidated them into a PermissionTV player for your viewing enjoyment. Click the “Menu” button to get all kinds of video sharing options. I’m sure Carlos and Tom would be happy to see their videos embedded on your blog.

What do you think – funny enough to be viral?

• Waikit Lau is co-founder of ScanScout, “the market-leading in-stream video advertising network.” Waikit showed a demonstration of the product, which included an example of an overlay video, an overlay banner, and an overlay custom flash animation (swf).
  

  Waikit Lau of ScanScout

  Waikit basically let the product do the talking, which was nice. We saw how you can utilize their product to produce fairly complex, but easy to implement ad units on top of your video content. It was clear to see how to make money from online video using ScanScout.

• Mark Pascarella is President and CEO at GoTuit Media Corp, which “enables publishers to transform entire video libraries into a superior Gotuit-enabled experience marked by best-in-class navigation, video search, targeted advertising, virtual remixing and personalized viewing.” Mark also showed a demo of the product, which showed how to apply metadata to video to give user fine grain control over types of content to watch, but it was conspicuously devoid of any advertisements. However, it wasn’t that hard to see how a combination of a 3rd party ad server and pinpoint video content accuracy could result in a high number of impressions. Mark summed it up using this example: if you’re selling ads against Major League Soccer content, your audience is probably most interested in all David Beckham goals. You can leave the rest behind.
• The last and longest speaker of the night was Chris Johnston, Senior Vice President, Director of Integrated Production at Mullen. Chris spent an awful long time showing us the GM Used Car Ambush, a brand awareness site that Mullen produced. It’s a great site, but I was confused as to why it was part of this panel. First, all of the “video content” was produced by Mullen in support of this website. Second, there were no advertisements in the site. Instead, it was souped-up brand awareness / viral site, that hopes to get its target audience to change its perception of the target brand. Whereas ScanScout and GoTuit provided solutions that enabled you to actually make money on your existing video, I was hard pressed to see the relevancy of hiring a high-priced ad agency to get comedic talent, buy a van, shoot hidden camera spots, get the “victims” to sign waivers, post-produce and edit the video, design a concept site, build the Flash components, sit back, and hope it results in someone actually buying a car.

Grainy iPhone pic of Will Richmond addressing the crowd at the VideoSchmooze

Here are some highlights:

• I met Will Richmond and thanked him for organizing the event. Will is a great guy, very engaging and intelligent.
• Catherin Frederico is starting an online video destination site around Nutrition and Nutrition consulting. I thought of Gary V, Episode #1. Gotta start someplace.
• Stephen Shenefield is working on a consumer electronics device that consolidates all sources of media (tv, phone, internet) and “transforms the home technology experience.” Sounds cool.
• Interesting conversation with David Carver about his former life working on engineering high speed video delivery network servers.
• Met Emily Gannett whose founder of Klickable.TV a 3 person startup that is somewhat competitive with PermissionTV. We had a drink and shared some war stories. Online video can be tough!
• Dan and Rich from Collegiate Images were up from Florida and decided to swing by. Collegiate Images is “the centralized licensing and rights clearance agency of video and still images for colleges, universities, conferences, bowl games and broadcast rights.” Great niche, well executed, and great content to work with all day long!

Overall, it was a nice little mixer that focused on the local Video 2.0 space. Check out a few more (poor quality) pictures that I took with my iPhone. It was nice to meet everyone there. For those that I wasn’t able to give business cards to (after I ran out), feel free to drop me a line in the comments below and we’ll connect.