The San Francisco real estate blog did a Craig’s List search and found that the number of listings using the word “reduced” is on the increase. Looks like housing prices are coming down a bit. It’ll be interesting to see just how far they’ll come down. In my neighborhood we just bought into the prices have actually increased a bit, but that’s cause the sun is out and HWY 1 is open again.
Day: September 24, 2006
Google is missing an important marketing angle: video demos
I was just over reading Steve Rubel’s blog where he links to a BusinessWeek article about Google and its struggles to improve its business. I guess Google has noticed that most people only use one thing, the search engine (Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, was quoted as saying that even its most die-hard fans can’t remember many of its major products).
Well, remember that Adobe Acrobat 8 video demo I put up last week? Turns out it had 50% more visits than our other podcasts last week. This isn’t the first time I’ve noticed that, either. Over on Channel 9 our videos regularly got more visits than the Web site for the product or service we were discussing.
It’s a YouTube, er Google Video, world.
So, here’s a little test I did. I searched for:
Blogger Demo video. None found.
Google Calendar Demo video. None found.
Google Desktop Demo video. None found. Even worse is that there’s one of my videos there from Channel 9 showing off a competitive product.
Google Dodgeball Demo video. None found.
Google Earth Demo video. None found. Oh, there’s another one of my Channel 9 videos again.
Google Groups Demo video. None found. Another one of my Channel 9 videos are there.
Google Maps Demo video. None found. Another one of my Channel 9 videos are there.
Should I go on? I could — seems like almost none of the Google product teams has put a simple video demo of its products up online and if they have, they certainly didn’t make them findable. Seems to me that this would be a great thing to do for Google. I’m sure such videos would be linked into Wikipedia’s list almost instantly.
So, here’s my offer. I’ll come over and do an interviewwith each of your product teams and get a five-minute demo of your products. With my sooopppeeerrrr dddooooppppeeeerrrrr Sony HD camcorder. For free.
That’s what we did on Friday for Scrapblog and Jajah (I don’t charge for this, and am doing it for lots of little companies — we’ll even have a new show we’ll announce soon where it’ll be even easier to get your demo online, you won’t even need to convince me via email that I should come over).
Even better offer for Google? I’ll even put all the Google ones up on Google Video as well as put them on the ScobleShow.
Oh, how powerful is this? Well, do a Google search for “Adobe Acrobat 8 video demo” and what do you find? My video. And, yes, we’re getting visits from Google so I know someone is looking for video demos of products.
Anyway, want to do a demo? 425-205-1921. You won’t even need to pay $30,000 like you would if you were going to this week’s Demo conference (everyone who gets on the stage there pays for the privilege and everyone in the audience pays too).
Why do they pay? Because they know the power of demoing to an influential audience. Funny thing is that there’s a far cheaper (and more effective) way to do the same demo on my show. By the way, the number of people who’ve now seen the Adobe Acrobat 8 video I did is many times bigger than the attendance of the Demo conference this week.
It’s amazing to me that Google hasn’t done this on its own, actually.
Om, Mike, and Robert are on the phone
What happens on a Saturday when Mike Arrington of TechCrunch, Om Malik of GigaOm, and me get together on the phone? Well, TalkCrunch is what happens.