Who's Watching Me?

Nick Desai, CEO and founder of Juice Wireless, has an interesting and thought provoking column over at MediaPost today. He looks at the millions, or even billions, of user-generated videos that are being created, and wonders: who's going to watch that user-generated content anyway?

The answer to that question is in the phrase "of little broader interest." That isn't a problem as much as a positioning statement. True UGC--defined now as the stuff we all post, on the fly, in whatever "grainy" quality we shoot with our unstable hands and cell phone cameras and camcorders--will succeed as part of something JuiceCaster calls Social Broadcasting.

We define Social Broadcasting as sharing the content you care about with the people who care about you. Videos of me singing Kenny Rogers' "The Gambler" at 2 a.m. at some bar in Hermosa Beach are only rolling-on-the-floor hilarious to the people who really know me well. The people who know that I am basically never up at 2 a.m., never at a bar, and never sing.

That concept is social broadcasting. Sharing your videos with the people you know. Those people will care. While the core of social broadcasting is socializing with the people you know through videos, social broadcasting does expand out in concentric circles.

Read the whole thing, because I think he raises some valid points. But I think that we need to go further. It may be fine to say, it's fine if my dozen friends watch my videos. But as marketers, or as communicators, how do we reach a larger audience? And, as marketers, how can we get OUR messages out to the millions of people watching these social broadcasts? How do we monetize it, so that somebody can pay for all that bandwidth?