Last night I had the difficult task of saying goodbye to my best friend, Alyssa. She and her mother planned a 43 hour road trip to Tucson, Arizona, to move Alyssa back to school. Unfortunately for me, I am now best friend-less on the East coast.
I put off saying goodbye for as long as I could yesterday but figuring that Alyssa and her mother had to be up at 4 am I knew I had to face the music. What I thought was going to be a tear-filled, drawn out, sappy send-off ended up being a long hug and a “see you tomorrow on iChat.”
Skype, iChat, whatever you want to call it, there is one thing that’s certain, video chat has changed everything about long distance.
As a college student sometimes I feel like I’m living a double life. I uproot my entire life a few times a year and go from seeing the same people everyday to not seeing them for 4 months. Video chatting has become my saving grace. It’s how my best friend and I survived our freshman year. Even last year, when leaving home was a little easier, we still made a date in cyberspace at least once a week.
Of course, staring at someone on my laptop isn’t the same as sitting next to them but it makes those thousands of miles seem a little less daunting and millions of people seem to feel the same way. Skype alone has more than 520 million users worldwide and internet giants Yahoo, Google, and AOL all have their own video communication services too.
It amazes me how the media has started to use this revolutionary technology. Interviews can be conducted across continents and everyone from the nightly news to MTV now has the ability to see their viewers when they have a comment or question.
Some trendsetting marketers and advertisers are using the technology to do marketing research. Marketers can conduct focus groups with people from multiple states in the most comfortable setting…their homes. Video communications allows marketers to accomplish the difficult task of humanizing their company by putting a face on their brand in the simplest and most literal sense.
As a video chat fanatic, I’m curious to see if this type of marketing communication will catch on…what are your thoughts?
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Tags: AOL, google, silvertech, Skype, video chat, video communication, video marketing, Yahoo
