Suddenly everybody’s promoting the use of video as a marketing tool and a better way of distributing information generally. But I have a problem with that.

Agreed, there are advantages to marketing via video. When selling a product:

• You can present directly to the prospective customer
• The customer can see you and make a judgement about the ‘authenticity’ of your message.
• You, as a marketer, can hold their attention and communicate directly.
• The customer, unless they hit the stop button, is forced to watch the whole presentation until they get the message.

While I’m not disputing all of the above, I really hope video doesn’t take too much away from the online experience.

Let me explain

I recently watched Rosalind Gardner’s video outlining her predictions for affiliate marketing in 2010. While the video was obviously meant to be a quick overview of her research and I appreciated it as such, I missed the functionality that a similar presentation in text would have provided.

To me, hypertext is the defining principle of the Internet. Where once we had flat one-dimensional text that could only be mined by delving further into physical libraries of information, we now have deep links that can take us practically anywhere we want to go.

For example, Rosalind mentions that “Forrester Research predicted that by 2014 affliate marketing would become a four billion dollar industry”. This is information I might want to read, but video, unlike hypertext, doesn’t let me take it any further. Certainly I can do a google search on Forrester Research and come up with the information myself, but somehow I now expect the online author to do that work for me.

Hypertext is what makes the Internet such a powerfully persuasive tool. By allowing us to drill down into deeper levels of information and ideas we can make better judgements about the facts presented to us.
Let’s not get too far away from that.

But don’t ignore video

Video is obviously great for people who have poor English skills and to pitch to those who just hate to read. As an instructional tool it’s brilliant. Screen captures, presentations, demonstrations of how things are done, these are all powerfull methods for getting a message across.

I intend to use video when it’s appropriate, but perhaps with straight-to-camera pieces it’s a good idea to include links underneath the multimedia box that point to the information referenced in the presentation. That way we get to take full advantage of all the Internet has to offer.

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