Visual Networking Still Hot Despite Economy
Consumer spending is down and many of us are opting for frugal alternatives where we can find them, like taking our lunch to work or hosting a dinner party rather than a night on the town. Interestingly enough, the economy hasn’t created a slow down of online activity, especially for sites that have visual networking capabilities.
A recent report from Morgan Stanley, analyzing economic and online trends, found that Internet Broadband has become, “The last thing consumers let go of…with less money to spend on social activities, they are spending more time on Internet using social networking technology to connect with others.”
For example, more than 3 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day and according to Morgan Stanley’s Economy and Internet Trends study, “Globally, YouTube is the second site people spend the most time on.” In addition, a study conducted by comScore during February of 2009, found that 100.9 million viewers watched 6.3 billion videos on YouTube.com, that’s 62.6 videos per viewer.
Earlier this year, I attended the Cinequest Film Festival in downtown San Jose, and while I was there I met with Lee Shepard from the Cinequest publicity team. We discussed how Cinequest partnered with Emerging Artists Productions to leverage social media and raise awareness of the festival, independent films, and film makers. The online presence of the festival grew considerably, propelled by visual networking, in the form of rich video integrated with blogs and social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.
Lee’s team also taught the independent film makers how to fish, so to speak, to promote their specific films and raise a greater following going forward through the use of visual networking.
In this video Lee covers the new media applications used throughout the Cinequest Film Festival in greater detail:
How do you use social media or visual networking most? We can discuss in the comment section below, Twitter or Facebook. Happy Monday!!! 
Click here if you’d like to visit the Cisco consumer site and learn how Cisco is providing visual networking experiences for your home. Also, you can click here to learn more about Cisco’s Visual Networking Index.
Posted by Johanna Fry at 11:12AM PST
Johanna Fry
Cisco Around the Web