Extreme elevator pitch, anyone?
I just stumbled on this web site called 12seconds.tv. Essentially, it’s to YouTube what Twitter is to blogging; an extremely short-form media of do-it-yourself video clips. You upload a short video (they make it very easy for you to do this), everyone sees it, you look at others’ submissions, and go from there. The only thing different about this service, from the ridiculously ubiquitous Internet video sharing service, is that it’s short and quick. According to their FAQ page, 12 seconds is what takes an average viewer to lose interest in what they are looking at. Now, personally, that’s more scary than interesting, and it’s probably not even true. But that doesn’t stop a bunch of people posting videos, mostly of themselves, sitting in front of the computer.
So, how is it relevant to you?
Well, it’s probably a fad. The contents that are up are not really interesting, and there just aren’t that many people using it (yet), which is the number one problem for a lot of cool ideas developed for the web these days.
There are, though, a few things that can be of interest to you. I might even call them lessons.
- Keep things short. It might be obvious, but brevity is a good skill to cultivate in marketing. Do you think you can come up with an interesting enough pitch for yourself in 12 seconds? Go ahead, try it (if you have a webcam, this could literally take only 12 seconds). You will learn a lot from it, I promise.
- Take a successful model, and then change just one thing. Is there a big player in your field? Can you change just one thing that they are doing, create a new genre, and own it? Starbucks, Fedex, Amazon and 7-Up all succeeded by doing just that.
- Keep it focused. What’s brilliant about 12seconds is that it’s so simple. They didn’t add a “24-second video” category. They aren’t selling t-shirts. These things might seem self-evident to you, but it’s surprising how easy it is to get distracted sometimes.
Here’s my favorite of the 12second videos:
Things Eating Things on 12seconds.tv
Surprising how much of a story you can tell in 12 seconds, isn’t it? This, without a spoken word even.
