One characteristic of the new socialverse we have entered is unmarketing. Emphasizing pragmatic and authentic communications over tightly engineered and polished. Unmarketing tends to favor raw expertise over filtered ideas. Unmarketing favors content over commercial messages. Unmarketing is audience specific rather than audience generic.

Here’s a great comment in reaction to a recent Dell video that gets at this:

On another note, I think videos like this are a very effective way to help potential customers internalize what a product really is in a way that is simply not possible from reading a website or product brochure. If you’re selling HPC hardware  you owe it to yourself to lay out a couple hundred bucks for a cheap video camera, grab a systems engineer, and start shooting short video tours.

But don’t tell marketing: over producing something like this with scripts and professional on-camera talent is a guaranteed way to make sure that people will point and laugh at your lameness.