After years and years of mobile phone companies trying - and failing - to sell video-calls as an alternative to voice calls, mobile video is finally taking off, but not in the way everyone expected.

What has taken off instead of the calls is mobile video blogging. Whether streamed live to qik.com or recorded and posted to YouTube or Seesmic, video functionality on a mobile phone has finally found an audience.

For those of us working in the creative sector, it poses a few great opportunities, both obvious and not so obvious. The obvious one is just to use it - as more and more platforms provide ways to make video shareable, via embedding, emailing and friending on video-specific social networks, it becomes an ever more useful way to reach our audience.

It’s also still very much at the early adopter stage right now, which means that you will have an audience for what you do based on the shared space of the platform, not just on the shared space of your work. So if you're a musician, you can meet a whole new audience who just happen to be on Seesmic or Qik and follow you because you're interesting, not because they are fans of gamalan or grime or whatever kind of music it is that you play.

The other thing that we can use it for is to allow people into our world. Video is personal in a way that static images, written words and even recorded audio can't be. It's as close as we can get to sharing your space, so make the most of that sense of familiarity. Whether you tease people with small glimpses into your process, or stream hours of live footage of you painting or talking about your latest novel, allowing people to see you at work can give them a much greater sense of connection with you.

As the video market fills up, we'll need to start thinking of ways to stand out. Ignoring the obvious 'outrageousness' angle that we could take here, we're better off thinking of the video as being part of a visual brand. If you're going for a more corporate, slick look, you could have idents that top and tail your videos, you could do all your videos with a back drop. Even the angle you film from can be a part of your visual brand.

The use of interesting video edits or effects can be very effective too. Kosso, the founder of Phreadz.com, a multi media threaded conversation platform, has come up with a format for 'cloning' himself on screen - 3 Kossos talking about what's happening at Phreadz makes for a very strong visual brand.

Like all media outlets, the best discoveries will come through play - take it too seriously at this stage, and you'll probably miss the magic that's possible by giving some room to the spontaneous. So have a think about your visual brand, then get on and start building it. Once you're happy with where it's at on your chosen platform, start to embed it on your blog and invite some response. It could be a whole other side to how you communicate online!

Are you already using video? How is it working for you?