Spielberg pops up on Seesmic
Seesmic, the video discussion site, has gone wild this morning as Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford, George Lucas and more big names from Indiana Jones 4 join a Q&A session on the site. — It's a simple enough idea but incredibly exciting …
Context & Ripple Effects
Seesmic entered 2008 with $6 million in initial funding, a live demonstration of its video technology at LeWeb3, and an April acquisition of the Twhirl Twitter client. Its May partnership with Disqus to offer video comments broadened the service beyond standalone video conversations.
The Cannes Q&A with Spielberg, Ford and Lucas gives that product strategy a conspicuous entertainment use case: a film’s principal talent is participating in the same conversational format Seesmic is trying to distribute.
First-order effects
- Seesmic gains a marquee demonstration that its video-discussion service can host direct exchanges between major film talent and an online audience.
- Indiana Jones 4 gains a participatory promotional channel featuring Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford and George Lucas rather than relying solely on one-way publicity.
Second-order effects
- Seesmic’s Disqus video-comments partnership gains a stronger sales example for publishers seeking to add recognizable voices to comment threads.
- The Twhirl acquisition and this film Q&A together position Seesmic to connect video conversation with the social-web audiences gathered around other communication clients.
Third-order effects
- If film campaigns repeat this format, promotional access to cast and creators becomes a feature of conversational platforms, not only of press events and publisher-controlled interviews.
The trend: Entertainment marketing is beginning to treat online conversation platforms as venues for talent-led audience engagement rather than merely channels for distributing clips.