In real estate only three things matter: location, location, location.  In online marketing three things will have the biggest impact on your success or failure: videos, videos, videos..

Video is the most powerful medium available because it quickly engages all of your senses.  You unconsciously assess the authenticity and level of relationship you want with any person you watch.  Some of the aspects you notice are: voice inflection, voice tone, voice speed, facial expressions, eye contact, body posture and body movements.

These details compose a picture that affects your Somatic Indicator Bias, or how interested you are in another person.  Combined, they make up 93% of delivered communication while the actual words spoken only account for 7%.

Read the full article here.

We have definitely hit the age of participatory media.  Old mass media is very sick and broadcast methods of interruption marketing have gone from annoying to impotent, but I don’t agree with the idea that mass media will die.  It will be re-engineered like all industries must in this time of change.

According to the loud mouths in the media, the birth of TV was supposed to kill radio.  Then cable TV was supposed to kill standard TV.  Then VCR home recording was supposed to kill visits to movie theaters.  Now the internet and video games are supposed to kill TV.  It’s just more ‘look, the sky is falling’ hoo-hah.  (And any opportunity to use the word ‘hoo-hah’ is one I’ll take because it’s fun to say.)

Even newspapers will never die.  The industries of the past are crumbling and newspaper subscriptions will continue declining, but they’ll always be around in some fashion.

That said, the era of participatory media is in full force.  It was a babe when blogs and YouTube hit the scene, but  now it’s how young people get most of their news.

As generation Y is poised to dominate the population in a few years, all communication and business marketing methods are shifting to two-way or multi-channel platforms like blogs and Twitter.  Gone are the days where advertisers could win the day by shouting unwanted messages to an unsuspecting public or when you had to wait until TV told you what was happening in your world.

I’s all about community, transparency, trust agents, authenticity and tribes.  Although, for now the signal to noise ratio is still way off as old school people and companies still try to use new multi-channel platforms to broadcast obnoxious marketing messages no one wants without being genuine contributors to conversations people are looking to have.  If they aren’t helping, they’re hurting.  But they’ll learn, or they’ll die.

On another note, you probably remember the famous “Wassup” superbowl commercial in 2000.  What you may not know is that is was originally a short film done by a college student and then Budweiser hired him to remake it into a commercial with beer.

Watch the original ad below and the follow up to it in 2008 with the same actors.  Note how this user generated content (UGC) powerfully conveys information about how the world changed in eight years.  Then think about how much information you’ve learned in the last week or month from UGC videos, blog posts, Twitter tweets and other sources.  It’s a brave new world.

Click here to view the embedded video.