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The problem with multimedia - redux (2)
By barney | January 5, 2008
Look, people,
You still don’t get it.
Audio and video have their place, I’ll not gainsay that.
But think about it.
I can read faster than you can talk - even if you’re from the New England region in the US.
My preferred sensory input is kinesthetic, but I can accept audio and visual inputs as well.
But I cannot listen to an audio and take notes very well.
Why? Because if I’m writing a note, I miss the next - possibly important - bit while I’m doing the note, you may have said something important that I missed - because I was concentrating on what you had said just previously and was jotting down my thoughts on that significant saying.
That means I have to run the audio again, probably several times, in order to garner every iota of info in it.
Let’s say it’s a short audio, 30-45 minutes. That’s an hour and a half of my time at a minimum that I have to devote to your message.
Do you have that much time to spend on one message? What happens if there are twenty or so such messages (a conservative estimate, at best)?
I don’t.
So most of your Internet marketer audio messages get ignored.
I just don’t have the time for them.
And video is worse!
Here’s an example.
I got an email from Jay Jennings entitled Why I Decided to Quit Internet Marketing, and clicked on the video link.
(I’m not dissing Jay here, just offering this as an example of why I don’t pay attention to video sales pitches.)
I hit the link, got a still picture of Jay, and the download ceased at 3%. After an hour, the download/buffering was still at 3%.
So I refreshed the page, right? 0% … I couldn’t even see Jay’s Mohawk, ya know?
Now, I have a fairly speedy connection. Of course, the problem could have been that all the thousands of folk on Jay’s list were hitting the server, so it just couldn’t serve me - sorta, kinda, The Straw that Broke the Camel’s Back (Aesop’s Fables, if memory serves) syndrome.
Or it could be that Internet congestion was higher than usual - possible, I guess, but I doubt it.
Or maybe my provider was throttling me - again, possible, but all else was working with the usual speed.
Point is, for four days I couldn’t see that video.
Doesn’t matter what the content was … I couldn’t see it.
Then, once I did see it, it took five times as long to watch as the same material would have taken to read.
And, to top things off, it was a talking-head video, news-desk style. No demonstration. No displays. Just Jay sitting at a desk, talking into the camera.
So basically I wasted parts of four days to see something that would have been more effective had I seen it in an email or as text on a blog.
Again, It’s not my intent to criticize Jay … the scenario above applies to almost every video that has been pushed my way.
However, that scenario does demonstrate my biggest gripe against all that pushed video: it didn’t have to be. There was no compelling need for a video. There was no demonstration of a product, no how-to instruction, no display of flow charts or mind maps.
There was just an announcement, one that I could have read and processed in a fifth of the time, had it been textual.
OK, this has gotten long and I need to shut it down. But there’s more coming on this topic.
- no 30 [%] -
Topics: Technology |
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