Daphne Kwon, ExpoTV (Podcast and Interview Transcript)

And then it’s fun because you had asked about my background and so I think the one thing and it’s funny because lot of the Dow Jones Conference that I am not, it’s very West Coast heavy and there is a lot of startups from the West Coast here and one of the things I noticed about video is a lot of people treat it like it’s just a piece of technology, it’s just a bunch of bits and bytes and you can algorithm everything. And while that may be true that you can algorithm everything, there is an art I think to video that has been not given enough attention. And so in our office in New York we have a lot of people from entertainment companies including two executive producers you know that’s their life dedication is to how to tell a story and we really try and focus on the power of video not just being searchable in some algorithm-driven result but rather a good story, a well told demonstration. Those are the things that I think people need to understand video is a little bit different than text, than parsing out numbers in a chart and it’s changing the Internet to become much more storytelling-driven and personal than just bits and bytes of a chart that can be broken down.

Lisa Padilla: Right. I am really glad to see the way that that is presented on your site too. I noticed sort of how to do a great video section which is really easy to follow and I think it helps with your overall quality on your site right which makes it a better service for everybody.

Daphne Kwon: Yeah. And the other thing is, and we need to get much better at all of that, one of the things we need to do is actually have a video about how to make a video you know to walk the walk kind of thing. But the other thing that we noticed that people most often do is look at each other’s video and so you know what you like when you are watching it and so people you know 70% of our users, or our creators have never uploaded to another video site. This is a very different way of telling a story and this is a story that Lisa you tell to people who you know about products that you bought that you love or that you hate; you had a terrible airline experience or you bought a great new wine and you tell your friends about it and you can tell that story. And so we are finding that people if they are comfortable and can talk about something that they know, you can extract a story out of them that they don’t really know how to behave on Revere or on YouTube or on Metacafe; they are not sure how to behave there because they have never been good at creating an entertaining story. So those are I think a lot of the things that I am noticing again at this conference, and it’s great that they are really trying to apply technology to it, it just feels like there is a little bit of art missing from the science and hopefully they are a company and YouTube is doing a great job trying to provide some editorial background and celebrate some great videos that you might not have seen so people are trying to get into it but I think video needs a lot more than the text has in Web1.0.

Lisa Padilla: Okay. And let me just take a quick break to invite callers if they want to call in and ask Daphne a question or talk with us about online video opinions. So the number to call in is (646) 478-4956 and also on http://www.blogtalkradio.com, Lisacast has a live chat going also; I just want to bring in a question from that chat for you sort of as a stopping point between questions here. There is a question from chat room and that question is, how come these things happen to their community so is there a business application for ExpoTV perhaps to tap into feedback from customers into their corporations about their products or internally or what are your thoughts on that?

Daphne Kwon: Yeah I love that question and I love the way that it’s phrased. It feels like to me that one thing that’s missing from ExpoTV because we haven’t paid enough attention to it but we are absolutely going to in the upcoming months is because this is a product discussion it’s really missing that the manufacturer is not involved right now again because we really haven’t been reaching out to them but we are now at the place where we feel like consumers are comfortable, they trust us and so we are now going to start inviting in manufacturers and brands to join the discussion. And one of the things we say about 5% of our videos are negative so they have rated a product 1 or 2, yeah and 85% are positive and that tracks with text reviews generally and it tracks actually with word-of-mouth generally when people speak, 6 out of 10 times they mention a brand, it’s positive. But the 5%, what we would love to do is we always say don’t stick your head in the sand and pretend like people aren’t speaking badly about your product ever but let’s go out and reach out to them. [Full article]