Weboo’s Blog

This blog entry will discuss how fast the web responds to events from the ‘real world’ and how understanding the market and leveraging associated technologies can ultimately lead to heightened growth and brand awareness.

Last night I attended the Future Music Festival at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. The event ran for about 10 hours and included music by some of the worlds leading electronic music artists such as Ferry Corsten, Carl Cox, Infusion, The Egg, Felix Da Housecat, Nick Warren, etc. The event attracted roughly 20,000 people from their late teens to early 30’s.

I hadn’t been to an event at this venue before and I was excited as I knew the music and weather were going to be good. I made sure my mobile phone was charged and my camera’s memory card was empty. I was destined to utilise my geek toys to their maximum and hopefully create some happy memories for myself and my friends.

As the day wore on I began to take photos and decided to play with my camera’s built-in video capture facility. I was surprised at how well the feature worked and that was when I got the idea of putting some videos of the event on the internet.

I had seen videos on the internet of other live events before. Usually the videos are good but capture only snippets of the action and usually without context. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that taking a video of an act performing their trademark song will make a popular video on the internet.

So, as the closing act, Ferry Corsten, rolled around and started belting out track after track, I grabbed my camera and headed to the heart of the action – the front of 20,000 people underneath a massive, state-of-the-art lighting setup – where I captured the video which would ultimately lead to this blog story.

At 10 pm the event finished, I left and headed to my car for the 40 minutes drive home. I was worn out but eager to see how my videos had come out. So at 11 pm I downloaded the first video off my digital camera, viewed it on my computer and within 15 minutes I was uploading the footage to youtube. Once the upload had begun I went to sleep – I was exhausted!

The next day I woke and finished uploading a few images and some other videos to the internet. By the time I finished and got around to reading my emails I found a few alert emails from youtube reporting the video I had uploaded last night had received some comments. As you can imagine, I was impressed. This meant people had found my video without me having to be awake or even try to publicise it.

I was happy with the comments, someone commended me for uploading the video so quickly, and other people loved the moment the video captured. I was extremely impressed at how quickly people found the video and that it had already been viewed over 200 times.

I have been thinking about this phenomenon all day. As more and more comments appear on youtube and the number of views of the video increase, I began to think how easy it would be for businesses to quickly promote themselves to like-minded people.

It is no surprise that video online is taking over the internet. I think this case study highlights the success I can have without any forethought of planning. Imagine if I had intended to publicise this video and had added it to this site, forums which discuss electronic music, emailed it to my newsletter, etc. This small video could have been easily seen by thousands of people.

So my little 1 minute and 3 second video of last night’s performance has now nearly been online for 24 hours and has recorded 8 comments, been added to 19 youtube users favourite lists, and been viewed 784 times.

If you are interested to see the video, find out how its statistics are going, or read the comments I refer to please visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y09lw7SLBHg.

I have included the video below in case you would like to view it: