Had it not been for a cable supplier in Arizona, who already had the domain name covid.com, then Vloggi may right now be trying to undo a disastrous rebranding exercise.
You see, back in January, before the novel coronavirus was a thing outside China, we were tossing around ideas on how to encapsulate our technology of collaborative video production. We kicked around CollabVid, VidCollab and Videco before settling on CoVid for a tagline. It had it all, or so we thought.
Luckily for us, the new coronavirus soon had a name and we soon shelved the tagline. Then the lockdown happened our lead engineer Jeremy went into full coding frenzy and used the confinement to rebuild and refactor the entire platform. Work we had planned to do anyway before we could relaunch with a robust, scaleable version of our platform.
I used the time, meanwhile, to go back to customer interviews. Although the initial need for crowdsourced user generated video came from the travel and tourism industries, right now not a whole lot of people are travelling.
So we needed to pivot our sales and marketing activities. One thing that came back time and time again as we talked to more and more potential customers in different sectors was how hard it was to make multi-person video stories. Vloggi makes that simple, so we settled on Easy Group Videos as our new tagline.
We also realised that traditional video production is no longer possible due to social distancing. Film crews can't fly and can't really work in teams. So location shoots are out. We call our platform video production in the times of social distancing.
One of the more interesting discussions we had was with the media agency of a major Australian supermarket. Their entire television commercial forward calendar was junked, for being too salesy at this time. They wanted authentic videos shot by the customers in their local stores. Stay tuned for more news on that.
Universities too contacted us to get community content filmed and produced by their students.
So we put community call-outs at the heart of the new user experience. We are still ironing out some bugs in our new site, but soon we're going to re-launch Vloggi as the easiest way to create video stories as a group.
But it won't be called CoVid!
#coronavirus #covid #marketing #video
