Consumers making their own mark on products

(CNN) -- In decades past, major manufacturers could count on consumers being relatively passive about the product experience.

Then came the Internet, and consumers banded together in forums, and on sites like Epinions.com, to share their product experiences via the written word. If that made manufacturers nervous, today a whole new level of anxiety is being added by online video sharing sites.

On YouTube, VideoJug, Metacafe, 5min.com and similar sites, users can review, dissect, inspect and share notes on all manner of services and products.

One Metacafe.com video, for instance, shows how a padlock from a major brand can be easily opened in a few minutes by anyone with folded-up pieces of aluminum from a soda can. It's been viewed more than 300,000 times. Not exactly great publicity.

"Teardown" videos show a product being methodically taken apart. One YouTube clip (viewed 700,000-plus times) shows the Nintendo Wii console being dissected piece by piece.

"Unboxing" videos regularly attract thousands of viewers curious to watch others open their newly purchased products. (Some sites, like Unboxing.com and Unbox.it, focus exclusively on this genre.)

Unboxing clips sometimes poke fun at packaging or product flaws, but they're often inadvertent, and effective, marketing. A YouTube clip showing the video game "Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock" being opened has attracted over 230,000 views and more than 1,200 comments. The latter range from "Great unboxing" to "I couldn't stop watching it" to "I may have to get it now."

Positive or negative -- or a little of both -- product-focused videos are likely to increase in number. Video-sharing sites, notes Joe Laszlo, an analyst at market research firm Jupiter Research, "create an audience for very short, very fast, very share-able video clips that make for a quick, easy break from other activities."

It's likely that some of those comments about "Guitar Hero III" came from people in their office taking a break from work. Meanwhile how-to videos are bubbling up for assembling or maintaining brand-name products -- but they're not necessarily coming from the manufacturers themselves.

Many small shops and resellers, for instance, are busy posting how-to videos to help their local customers and others.

"It's bottom-up media serving consumers' constant need to quickly understand DIY tasks and projects," says Kirk Olson, a consumer strategist at trend research firm Iconoculture.

"The broadest impact will be within products that demand complex setup, assembly or application. Think home improvement, cooking, beauty, consumer electronics."

A spare-parts supplier in the UK offers how-to videos on maintaining and repairing household appliances, both at its own site (APart4U.com) and on several video-sharing sites.

One clip shows how to unblock a Dyson vacuum cleaner, another how to replace the fan motor on a Siemens oven. A bike shop in Michigan makes YouTube clips to show how to assemble a Schwinn multi-speed bicycle.

Paralleling the rise of consumer-driven product videos is a growing niche of customers who like to physically modify mass-produced products.

A three-year-old magazine and video-laden web site called Make appeals to this audience, showing how to modify cameras, cars and modems so they'll do things that the manufacturers certainly never intended. A tagline for the magazine teases: "Void your warranty, violate a user agreement, fry a circuit, blow a fuse, poke an eye out..."

More niche still are consumers who like to "steampunk" their products. Usually this means giving an ornate Victorian design sensibility to bland (they would argue) consumer electronics products. You can learn how to steampunk a computer keyboard, for instance at the Steampunk Workshop. The instructions, of course, include videos. E-mail to a friend

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