Old-School Marketing… with Video?

If you read the collected works of some of the world’s greatest marketing minds, you’ll likely come away with a single conclusion: that the world is moving away from the kind of marketing they teach in business school.
Instead, people like David Meerman Scott would have us believe that marketing is becoming something more organic than measurable. Indeed, people who share Scott’s way of thinking want us to stop thinking about marking in terms of ROI altogether. We should rather think about it in terms of motivating large groups of “ordinary” people to become de facto brand evangelists, and trust in them to provide a return eventually.
And they’re right — that’s all great advice. The problem is that despite what Chris Brogan and Julien Smith might tell us, certain indivudals within a company will not be swayed by marketing budget proposals including the words “community building.” I’m thinking primarily here of investors concerned mostly with profits, and not necessarily with how people interact with the company.
These kinds of people — and they’re not bad people, mind you — are interested on what they’re getting for their investment. For the past several decades, this has been a calculable figure. In fact, for some of these kinds of businesspeople, it is difficult to imagine a situation in which this figure cannot be realistically calculated.
So it seems as though there’s a dichotomy here. On the one hand we have community-building marketing tactics that are great for spreading your message between peers, but which are largely impossible to quantify. On the other hand,  you have traditional marketing tactics for which you can calculate return in actual dollar-figure amounts with relative ease. You can’t have both, say the new marketers, because the old methods effectively ruin any community-building tactics you might employ, and vice-versa. You must choose.
Or must you?
It seems new marketers often forget about the power of video. And I don’t just mean the power to engage an audience. Every time a video is played, data is generated. Somewhere there are bits and bytes streaming from a remote server to your computer screen, and they move in particular ways depending on what buttons you push. Often times that data is never collected. And even when it is, very rarely do you get to see all of it. But it’s all there for the taking, if you have the right tools.
So what if you could use video to spread your message between peers — a very new-school idea — and collect specific data on the back-end so you could figure out how many members of a certain community are moving through the funnel? What if you could, as Scott says, “create a world-wide rave” and be able to calculate its ROI at the same time? And all without interfering with that video’s ability to be shared?
If you could do both, wouldn’t you?
To find out how this is possible, you really owe it to yourself to see the Flimp platform in action. Luckily, we run demos every day from 2-2:30 EDT so you can do just that. Click here to reserve a spot on a day that is convenient for you.