Great Interview Of Loic Lemeur

Loic Lemeur  may have been experiencing problems with his latest start up seesmic, he remains one of the best French entrepreneurs, an example to follow. I watched recently this video interview, which is very interesting. Loic speaks frankly about the issue he faced as the CEO of Seesmic, his mistake, and his will to keep moving forward. This is very inspiring, especially in these times, when it is so difficult to experience success.

I wish Loic good luck for the future, and I hope LeWeb 2012 in Paris will be successfull.

Is Seesmic Dead?

Do you know about Seesmic? Seesmic is nowadays a desktop client which enables its users to combine their Facebook and Twitter accounts among others.

But Seesmic, prior to that, was a start up focusing on online video conversations. The idea was to create a community of people which could talk together thanks to videos. Loic Lemeur, the founder of this company had a lot of faith in this business. Actually, I have been pretty impressed by the development of the company. Nevertheless, the crisis hit up the Silicon Valley, and it seems that Loic Lemeur has been seeking another path for its company.

This article of the New York Times exposes the reasons why Seesmic has changed its goals. Mainly, it seems that the video conversations was hard to be adapted by the mass market. I have been since the beginning doubtful about the fact Seesmic could become as big as blogging for example for that matter. But I still believe the idea is great and should be considered not as a mainstream service, but maybe to transform the service to propose it for example to companies for focus group or other ways.

That would be a pitty if indeed Seesmic would be abandonned.

Seesmic Shows

I have always liked the Seesmic concept even though I don't really use it. Thanks to Loic Lemeur's blog I have been following the company's debuts thanks to its daily videos. I remember also he hired at some point French blogging celebrity Vinvin in order to develop content in Seesmic.



I believe the purpose was to propose on Seesmic a combination of both professional and amateur content.



In fact a part of Youtube's success has been based on the different online shows it can propose. The Internet has been able to become a true medium of content. Thanks to new technologies it is easy for an individual to create high quality video content.



Unfortunately, it didn't seem to work and I believe the project has gone in limbo.



Nevertheless I deeply believe that Seesmic could create a great way to develop professional content, especially based on the sport shows concept.



On the radio and TV there are a lot of talk shows where the audience can speak up and give their opinion about a topic. That sort of looks like the kind of interaction you could get on Seesmic. I think that it could be interesting to create that kind of show on Seesmic and then propose it on another public platform (itunes? Youtube? Emule? Espn.com??) To consume it.



On Seesmic's point of view that could have many interest. First it could be a great way to advertise the service. It could also help Seesmic to launch its advertising platform (as Robert Scoble says, and as previously shown on this blog, professional edited videos remain more attractive to Internet users).



I think this type of "professional content" concept should be seen more in details, but it should probably come from the users more than the company. Or maybe a TV channel like Espn would be interested in adding such a show.





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Youtube Develops Interactivity With Street Fighter

Check out this youtube video.


This shows new features of Youtube. Now you are able to interact with the video. This is a great news, because it actually create an added value to the simple fact of watching a video.

New great features have come up lately in terms of video content.

• We have seen with Seesmic that you could interact with communities thanks to video.
  
• We have seen you could have dynamic content with new Internet enabled TVs.
• Tivo demonstrates how you could propose customized content based on previous consumption.
• Youtube is going a step further, by allowing the audience to interact with it. The audience could actually participate on the go to the program, and therefore contribute to the content.

I believe the perspective of this technology is great. What is sure, is that TV content consumption will dramatically change within the next few years thanks to all these new technologies.

I can't wait to see some new apps based on this technology to see a little bit better what could be the potential of it.

Seesmic is laying off people

Tough times. Tough decisions.also read my blog post http://www.loiclemeur.com/english/2008/10/tough-times-tou.html

I was saying on this blog that Loic Lemeur's lack of new posts on his blog might be a sign of problems, and I might have been right... Today Loic Lemeur has announced he was laying off 7 people of the Seesmic's staff.  Some other blogs are now speaking publicly about the difficulties to raise funds for start ups.

First of all, I want to wish good luck for the people that have been laid off. I know it might be hard. Their expertise, their skills should not be questioned, and I am sure this experience building up Seesmic will help them a lot.

Secondly, I am very sorry to hear that Seesmic will be affected by the crisis. I want to encourage you Loic, to tell you that a lot of people are supporting your business. As a Chinese proverb says: "In order to overcome adversity you need to face it". Keep faith! You can't always have the market supporting your growth! And actually, on the long term, it might help you out as some of your competitors might get out of business. I am sure you have the experience to go through this crisis smoothly.

I strongly believe Seesmic has a great future in front of it, and will become a major service on the Internet.

Are Loic Lemeur and Seesmic doing fine?

I wanted to speak today about Loic Lemeur, our French superstar of entrepreneurship, and CEO of Seesmic, a great online video start up that I recommend you to check out. I have been a follower of his blog the past year and a half, and I love to get news about his activities and the development of the companies. However, Loic, and I understand that, has decided to stop broadcasting his "Seesmic du Jour" a daily video telling us what was going on with Seesmic and his other projects. As I have said, this was a huge work to get a video of great quality everyday. He then decided to stop, because maybe he was not finding the feedback he was expecting. I regret it, but ok.

The problem is Loic has always been a great blogger, blogging at least every day. And for the past weeks, his contribution has been very small. That is the reason why I am rising some concerns. I am not talking about that only because I am decieved as a fan of the blog and the service, but also because this is not good when a company doesn't communicate.
 One of the thing I have learned about btob communication, is that when a company is not attending a conference or stopped their advertising programs, this is not a good sign. It shows to your customers and competitors you are not doing good, that something is going wrong.

I wish Loic will start back a little bit more on his blog, and I hope this does not mean that Seesmic is experiencing problem (I know the actual economic environment is probably not good). I also wants to encourage Loic and wish him all the success possible.

Good luck Loic, and I hope to see you soon when you'll stop by Paris.

Recruitment and web 2.0: Stonfield Inworld hires via Seesmic

Do you know about Seesmic? This is the new video social community on the web, created by French entrepreneur Loic Lemeur. The company ambitions to give a new dimension to web 2.0, enabling users to chat and converse with videos.

Even though Seesmic is still in a beta version, the community is pretty impressive. Now some new ways to use the service are springing. One of them that I find very interesting is the recruitment idea. Some companies have indeed started to use the website to hire some new bees.

Among them, I wanted to talk about Stonfield Inworld, a French web agency specialized in virtual worlds (like Second Life). They are using Seesmic to interview candidates. What I like about this idea is that you are able to check right away the candidate skills to communicate.
Further information can be found here.

Seesmic and Search Engine Optimization: my advices

Loic Lemeur, French serial entrepreneur that I often quote in this blog, has posted today an article on his blog where he asks for help in order to optimize Seesmic, his online company, in Google. One of his main mistake was to use a 100% flash version of the website. This is the first advice I can give: Never use 100% flash version while creating your website. Flash might be an advanced technology to create website, it might be pretty, but it is a real handicap while trying to optimize your website. The only people that could use a 100% flash version of their website would be luxury brands, like Gucci or Hermes, that have a great brand equity and don't really need a great exposure on the web.

Google loves text: all its indexation is based on text. It does not analyze video nor pictures. This is why it is important to provide him text in order to help him understand what your website is about.

Anyway, Loic has understood his mistake, and in a great effort of modesty, he is asking his community to help him improve its SEO (which is actually a real "2.0" behavior).

Here would be my main recommandations:
- First you need to pick the main key words you want to optimize: You need to make a research thanks to Google ad, to identify which of the keywords are more seeked by Internet users. For example, let's check if "video community", or "video service" have a high volume of search. Sometimes you think that some keywords perfectly match your website, and you would like people that are seeking them to land on your website, but these keywords have a low volume of search. You need to identify these words that both people search and correspond to your site and focus on them.
-Once you have these words, you need to ad them as much as you can on your website. You need for instance to add them in the title of your site: instead of having "seesmic" in your title, it is far better to have "online video community", if these words are the proper terms to optimize. You also need to add these different words in your meta descriptions, and the pictures of the site.
-Custom all pages titles and meta. In order to have a good Google Pagerank, it is important to customize each pages of the website, and not to have the same page titles for all the pages. Each pages will then be taken into consideration by Google.
- As you have said, Flash is a great issue while trying to optimize your site. Try to give as much text information as possible: give a name and a description to alll your videos and pictures, try to add as much text as you can, tagg the videos and so on.

For such a big company as Seesmic, based on the web, I think they need to seek for an expert, that will help them set up their SEO strategies. But with these simple advices, Seesmic should be able to have a great pagerank.

What I would do if I was the CEO of Seesmic

Do you know Seesmic? This is the new company started by Loic Lemeur, French entrepreneur and star of blogging. The service is a video on-line community. In one of his last blog entries, he asked to his community what it would do if it were the CEO of Seesmic.
I think Loic Lemeur has done a great job promoting his new company: the whole web was talking about it even though it was in its Alpha version.
Here would be my action plan:

• Develop the communities: Not the community (sing), but many communities that user would create depending on their . This is the main challenge of Seesmic in order to get out of its "Beta" stage. Each online community has developped their own services to develop personal communities (groups on Facebook, hubs on Viadeo, communities on Youtube...). This is very important to incentive the creation of community, that could
  
  
• Focus on the partnership with companies: Now that the service is operational, counting a large community already, it would be good to start focusing on how to monetize the business. I know Seesmic hired a person dedicated to this service. But as a CEO, this would be my priority N1. Will I be able to develop some focus groups via Seesmic, advertising programs? This is a large question that should be consider at this stage of the development of the company.
  

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