I often read articles warning us that the internet is becoming flooded with too much content. I certainly agree to an extent, but many of those articles are looking in such a blinkered fashion - there certainly is a lot of content on the internet that we can access via computers and mobile devices, but what about the emerging technologies?

A little while ago I attended a talk on helping new technologies become less scary to the consumer. To cut a long talk short, the answer is to bring familiar content to that new technology, as it somehow makes it less daunting to use. The content will bridge the gap between the old and new. A great example is Apple, they brought out the iPod when a number of other music players were already in the market but were struggling to gain traction with the consumer, but what did Apple do differently? iTunes is the answer. Apple brought loads of content in the shape of downloadable music to the iPod, all those familiar songs people all know and love were now easily accessible.

Last year we saw the release of VR headsets by several big brands, Oculus Rift (Facebook), Google Daydream, HTC Vive and Samsung Gear VR (Powered by Facebook's Oculus). This is a big shift in the VR market, and with so many big players investing, it has a good chance of taking off. Do you know the one thing that they really need to make the VR technology make its way into people's lives? Content that is interesting and useful. Unfortunately, like most new technologies, VR content is currently thin on the ground.

This is a great opportunity for marketers to produce some really great content in a less crowded market. The good news is that this doesn't involve you investing and creating your own VR application, the big VR players know how important it is to crowdsource content, so they are creating apps that consumers and brands can create content for. The new Facebook 360 app is out for VR headsets, it takes all those 360 videos and photos from Facebook and lets VR headset users access them in a 3D space. The great thing about the 360 videos and photos is that this content is used on the desktop/mobile version of Facebook as well as the VR headset, so you can cover all bases.

If you don't think your business is ready to create 360 content, then look to your audience. Consumers are uploading their own 360 content to Facebook, some of those are probably your customers, so leverage them and crowdsource your marketing content.

 

By Anna Bravington, account director at Redweb


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