At Nine Lives Media Inc., we continue to evolve and polish our video content efforts. Our FastChat videos across MSPmentor, The VAR Guy and WorksWithU have received more than 10,000 views so far in 2009. Not bad considering we focus on extreme (but growing) market niches rather than broad topics. And we’ll continue to add far more video content in 2010. Here’s a recap of where we’ve been and where we’re potentially going.

Our early video efforts, launched at the Autotask Community Live conference in March 2009, frustrated us because:

• We wound up with far more footage than we had time to review and edit.
• We were sidetracked learning video editing tools.
• And quite frankly, I wasn’t too interested in being a video personality. We wanted to put the camera more on industry experts and less on Nine Lives Media Inc.’s staff. (At least until I lose about 20 pounds…).

Here’s a look:

Gradually, we developed and refined a FastChat video format — typically three questions and three answers in a three-minute conversation. We also dumped our expensive video equipment and wireless microphones for low-cost, handheld high-def cameras.

The reasons:

• We were tired of carrying around all that expensive equipment.
• Blogs sit at the center of our universe. And video blogs — all that set-up and editing — threatened to slow us down. Simple low-cost equipment and shorter video conversations matched our business model.

By the time the Atlanta Linux Fest arrived in September 2009, our video interviews with Canonical (developer of Ubuntu Linux) were getting closer to our goals. Here’s a look:

We continued to refine our video efforts and actually went with even more simplified approaches at the N-able Partner Summit (October 2009), Astricon (October 2009), Oracle OpenWorld (October 2009) and ConnectWise Partner Summit (November 2009). Here’s a look at one video from those events:

Our next stop is Cisco Partner Velocity, a marketing conference for Cisco channel partners (Nov. 10-12, Paris). We plan to shoot a range of video at the event.

When will we stop adjusting our format? The simple answer is never. Readers often note that we’re constantly tweaking and changing the functions on our web sites. The same holds true to our approach for video content.

Thanks for watching. And for reading. Oh, and for listening to our podocasts on both MSPmentor and The VAR Guy. More on those another time.