The video above was shot on a hand held camera and posted on YouTube. This video attempts to capture the presentation of the BlackBerry Curve 8350i at a launch party held recently in what looks like a warehouse or really large storage room. The videographer should have invested in a $30 tripod – the Blair Witch Project shaking camera effect started to make me nauseous after fifteen seconds. The sound is terrible – you really have to strain to hear the hollow echo of the speakers voice. There isn’t anything specifically offensive or negative about this video – presumably it was well intended. That said, for all intents and purposes the video is unwatchable – it gives little more than context to the presentation – it’s just too hard to understand.

What’s the point of showing this video? To highlight the new reality for brands. People are creating (unauthorized) content that reference your products and services every day. ’Videographers’ are everywhere, tagging their content and uploading it to video sharing services like YouTube – and there is precious little you can do about it.

Does this activity affect the perception of a brand? Should companies be trying to do something about this? Can they intervene and provide better content that will be found in place of the inferior content? Can they help videographers (like in the above example) by providing better audio facilities at speeches? Should they be aware of their surroundings when they make presentations? Should they anticipate that more and more people will have video cameras and invite those people to come up to the front and guide them on the best way to get high quality audio and video? Should the brand police be watching out for ‘rogue content’ and politely posting responses that link back to better quality information – or would this be too intrusive?

Maybe all this attention is a good thing. Perhaps brands should encourage anyone and everyone to talk about their products and services – regardless of the quality of the content generated and regardless of the quality of the discussion? As long as there is a conversation going on around your product and it is positive, where’s the harm? Sure a lot of the content is going to be poorly written or poorly recorded but as long as your stuff is being discussed, isn’t that the point?

Or does any of this even matter?