Business Bytes
Feb 22, 2011

The Shared Experience

 

In the old days, businesses would blast a single message through newspapers, radio, and TV.  Interaction was reduced to snail mail, phone calls, and face-to-face meetings.  But with the internet, everything is now interactive.  It's all about a shared experience and most of us are still trying to figure it out.  I know I am; it's why I researched how to get ReTweeted.

My attention turned to the concept of shared internet experiences when I encountered the video service Epipheo, which uses the idea of providing epiphanies through video.  When do you share something on the internet?  When something makes you laugh?  How about when something could solve that annoying problem you have?  Epipheo uses the latter idea to create videos that are engaging.  Epipheo (epiphany plus video combined) are visually pleasing videos and clearly sell a product or service by describing the problem they solve.  And most Epipheos use humor to boot.

While Epipheo is working on being a trusted source of online video advertising, ViralHeat Human Intent analyzes social media influence for clients.  ViralHeat Human Intent takes information from Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz and YouTube and searches for the keywords that are important to their clients, such as people expressing a need for a certain product or disgruntled posts about your competitor's product.  I'm not sure how effective analyzing Google Buzz could be:  who really uses it?  The system can be trained by identifying posts that are not useful.  ViralHeat Human Intent is seeking to analyze the shared experience.

These two products seem to be offering a way to reach a customer more effectively in the social space of the internet.  Epipheo is helping businesses have a bigger impact in the shared world by creating videos they hope will be shared, or at the very least remembered.  ViralHeat Human Intent gathers information floating around in social spaces that are hard to get to.  Somewhere in the social space, there is a customer waiting to be found and contacted with engaging content.

Curt Finch is the CEO of Journyx.  Follow Curt and his company on Twitter.


Curt Finch has more than two decades of software development and distributed workforce management experience. In 1997, Curt created the world's first internet-based timesheet application and the foundation for the current Journyx product offering. Curt has a B.S. in Computer Science from Virginia Tech. His book, All Your Money, is available on Amazon. @curtfinch