What do you get when you combine video, social networking, micromedia, and a very savvy French entrepreneur? You get Seesmic.
The site is a social network where the primary content is video. Users record video, post it to the site, and other users reply in video.
Seesmic is the brainchild of French blog star Loic Le Meur and aims to do to video conversations what Twitter did to text-based conversations.
The site is in pre-alpha (only about 300 users are testing it now) and a lot will change over the course of the next couple of months. I'll repost when it goes into beta. In the meantime, enjoy the video:
Here is an example of the user-side of the video experience from Seesmic:
Key takeaways for marketers:
- The move toward video as an intimate, personal form of communicating is here.
- Technology has caught up to consumers and video is easy to record on Seesmic directly via the browser.
- Conversations will be mobile on this site down the road so you can create, send, and reply to videos from a mobile device.
- Content created by the users is remixed into a daily best-of video that is then shared with everyone.
- Hooks into YouTube, Twitter, and Skype help auto-promote content to larger, external networks.
- The company is asking that users make suggestions to them via video.
- The openness of the company in sharing how they are growing is a model that more companies should follow.