Andy Plesser is hoping to stand on the shoulders of Amanda Congdon, Robert Scoble, and the producers of "Ask a Ninja." They've shown video blogs can attract an audience. He hopes his new vlog business can, too.
Plesser is a veteran public relations man in New York City, who's worked with clients including Wired, Salon, and CNET Networks. So he knows the impact and power of television. And as a guy who's worked with new media, he knows its power too, specifically the impact of blogs.
A few months ago, Plesser decided to try it himself. He launched Beet.TV, a five-day-a-week video blog featuring interviews with VCs, new- and old-media journalists, podcasters, and tech industry analysts. It started almost as a hobby, Plesser said in an interview. Now he thinks it's his firm's next big business opportunity. Using consumer video equipment, and grabbing interviews at conferences (which Plesser may also produce), and mining relationships developed over several decades, Plesser's blog has become part of a morning site scan for media types.
His attending Vloggercon in June gave Beet.TV a big traffic boost. Plesser learned about Robert Scoble's ankling Microsoft and blogged it. That spiked traffic which, this chart shows, put the vlog on a lot of RSS readers.
It is, however, more than a hobby now, Plesser says. It's a "proof of concept." He considers Beet.TV a template for the next big thing in public relations. "It's the first vlog to cover a vertical business or industry."
The second such vlog is already up, produced by him for one his firm's existing clients, the Fordham Law School. LawClinic.TV uses the same template as Beet.TV, same format to profile how students learn about the law, ... video clips and a few words. Another vlog for MIT's Technology Review is going to launch next month to cover tech in academia and business. "Producing something like this on their own would have been difficult," Plesser said.
Creating these next-generation vlogs has not been as simple as picking up the camcorder and showing up at a mixer. Plesser says the level of quality has to be kicked up when you're doing it for clients. Viewers expect it and, certainly, the folks paying the bills do, too. So he hopes to raise investment money to bolster facilities and staff.
It seems likely there will also be big competition. Firms like SmartBrief Inc., a Washington, DC based publisher of industry newsletters, is a likely candidate to leverage into this channel. Other b-to-b e-mail publishers and even bloggers are candidates, too. And other p.r. firms will surely get into it.
Plesser sounds confident. "As a public relations executive with 25 years of experience, I understand crafting original, creative communications programs. My firm understands the imperative of customization," he said. "Cookie cutters don’t work."
Listen to Plesser talk about business and "vertical" video blogs.
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