I was only thinking a few days ago that I hardly ever pick up a pen these days and now Arena Flowers have made it even less likely I will in the future. They’ve just added a video feature to their website giving customers the option to upload a special video message to be delivered along with the flowers. When the flowers are delivered, they are accompanied by a card with the URL where the video message can be viewed on the Arena Flowers site
Video has been around for years and it constantly surprised me how slow it’s been to catch on on the Internet. We were all promised that video would replace pictures and text in no time at all, but it appears to be the fact that images and text are simply faster to consume. However for an occasion like flowers video is perfect for the personal touch and recipients will doubtless be willing to invest the time to view the clip.
Arena Flowers is (surprisingly, why has no one thought of it before?) the first florist in the world to provide video messaging. Arena’s Will Wynne conceived of video messaging as a perfect addition to Arena’s offerings and partnered with vzaar to power customer films.
Arena Flowers’ strategy uses the advantages of both professional video hosting service from vzaar and a free service with YouTube – vzaar powers the videos on Arena Flower’s homepage, while simultaneously uploading to YouTube to take advantage of the built-in audience there. Will Wynne, CEO of Arena Flowers explained there is no way they’d put a YouTube video on their homepage. It simply wouldn’t look professional enough.
While we’re talking about video I have to give a mention to the guys at vzaar. Having founded the company with the intention of providing video for eBay listings it appears they were way ahead of the curve. Undaunted they have reinvented themselves to provide high quality video hosting for corporate customers, which is ideal if you want to host video for your own website without the frames and advertising the comes with free providers.
Finally if you’ve not used Arena Flowers before we at Tamebay have and love their service. They deliver nationwide and there’s currently a 10% off coupon code on the Arena Flowers website.
