As the YouTube generation leave college, they will eventually arrive to positions of power and influence. They will become your next buyers and customers. And their language is video. If you are not speaking their language of choice, your company will be left holding a pallet of cathode ray tubes.
Now is the time to realize that video is the new lingua franca of the web. If you’re not using video to communicate your value, then 1) you are not reaching your future buyers; 2) you are absent a YouTube channel where you could be collecting thousands of subscribers; 3) you are not selling in the world’s largest marketplace.
Simply put, companies need to go where their customers are. You need to open shop on YouTube with a library of short and engaging video clips that tell your story, that explain why your products/services matter, or should matter, the problems they solve, etc., much as a print magazine piece would. But print magazines are dying along with newspapers, and the attention-deficit generation would much rather click a play button than read an article. These videos do not have to be Hollywood quality. On the contrary, amateurs are the respected auteurs in this wild and wooly world.
YouTube stats are staggering:
Six billion videos viewed in January 2009 (comScore); spends $1 million a day on bandwidth; the third most visited website on the Internet, behind Google and Facebook (Alexa). On October 9, 2009, co-founder Chad Hurley announced that YouTube was serving “well over a billion views a day.”
So it amazes me that IT companies, so quick to embrace technology, are ironically not embracing YouTube as the ultimate sales channel for reaching out to audiences that will have access to big corporate budgets one day.
Pitch Wagon 