In terms of ‘production value’, this is the lowest quality video we’ve made in years. The cameras are shaky, the angles weird, the colours don’t match the audio is all over the place.
But who cares?
But we love it! https://vimeo.com/108328728
Real people, authentic stories
This clip works because it’s about people who genuinely love Wordcamp. Why make a slick commercial when you have this going on for your brand?
Video production value – does it matter?
People in our industry can get a bit carried away with focussing on making really slick looking video, but does that mean the content is effective? Video production value is important in many contexts, but there’s no substitute for showing a community of people who love your brand. That’s when you really start cooking with gas.
Miles Davis once said that jazz is about the notes you don’t play. Communication around building trust is not about more information: that will just overwhelm our audience.
How we decide who to trust
The people we want to connect with make decisions about who they trust based on what seems to be very little information: a short story, a few non verbal and visual cues. How does that work?
Thin Slicing
Thin slicing is the ability to find patterns in events based only on “thin slices,” or narrow windows, of experience. Studies have shown that brief observations can be used to assess outcomes, at levels higher than expected by chance.
How this applies to video
An interesting aspect of visual content is that we are surprisingly good at assessing someone’s skill level and intelligence. The research is mind boggling; humans can fairly accurately assess someone’s intelligence and personality just by looking at someone’s photo. We’re not describing prejudice here; this is measurable and the experiments have been repeated with similar results.
People behind the brand
We can use thin slicing and our ability to assess personality by communicating around the people behind brands. Staff profile videos are a great application of this; a 20-30 second video will give our viewers enough information to assess whether they’re a good fit with your culture and values. https://vimeo.com/99794385
Authenticity – you can’t control the outcome
To stick with the jazz analogy; if you write out the whole composition, it stops being jazz. Staff profiles can backfire if they’re overly scripted and contrived. If you do profile videos, you have to allow for variation and deviation. As long as you everyone on board on values and your brand essence, diversity of delivery and opinion will only further strengthen your brand and the communication of purpose. https://vimeo.com/102607249
LinkedIn profile videos
Once you have the staff profile videos in place, you can greatly improve the impact you have by adding them to everyone’s LinkedIn profile. Here’s a tutorial on how to add a video to your LinkedIn profile.
I’m always fascinated by how social media can be an amplifier of ‘outrage’, whether it’s Actual Outrage or Social Media Outrage.
Perpetual Outrage
In this video, Geoffrey Stackhouse, managing director of the crisis media training outfit Clarity Solutions discusses some of the underlying causes of Social Media Outrage and offers some ideas on what you can do to manage outrage. https://vimeo.com/118392785
Storybombers – the Outrage Industry
Story bombers are those who hijack your story and create a new narrative around outrage that furthers their cause.
What’s the psychology here?
I love comedian Charlie Brooker’s take on this: “Is it a narcissistic compulsion to demonstrate how much more thoughtful and sensitive you are than the ignorant clod who offended you? An earnest belief that a better world will only be reached after several thousand hours of angry dissent over absolutely every linguistic transgression ever made? A cathartic howl of vague personal unhappiness disguised as a campaign of improvement? Or just something to do between bowel movements?” Read the full article here.
How to be ready for outrage
Because of story bombing, outrage needs to be part of our communication planning. Here are three of Geoffrey’s key points around managing outrage: 1. Monitor your social media constantly. 2. Apology early and often – be seen as empathetic and present. 3. Brace yourself – but don’t be silenced. If your view is considered and well argued, social media can also be a amplifier of the support for your story.
Are we ‘offended’?
I’d love to hear about your experience of outrage, have you been baffled about how a throw away remark can become a social media Sh*tstorm bigger than Ben Hur?
Good news! LinkedIn is finally getting on board the Video Train with the launch of the LinkedIn Professional Portfolio.
LinkedIn now lets you upload images, videos, presentations and documents to your profile to add a nice visual to the otherwise text heavy platform. You can add video and images to the summary, experience and education sections of your profile.
How to add video to your LinkedIn profile: video
Here’s a quick video on how to add video to your LinkedIn profile.
How to Add Images and Video to Your LinkedIn profile: step by step
To add images, documents, presentations or video to your LinkedIn profile, click “Profile” from the menu at the top, then choose “Edit Profile.”
Upload or embed your video
Under each of the entries in your Summary, Experience and Education sections is a new icon—a square with a (+) symbol. Click this button to upload a file or add a link to the video or image you’d like to share.
Adding links
If you want to add a link, type or paste the link to your content into the “Add a link” field.
The link can be simply a copied and pasted link from Youtube:
Titles and descriptions
To edit the title and description, move your cursor over Profile at the top of your homepage and select Edit Profile.
Scroll to the media sample you’d like to edit and click the pencil icon in the lower-right corner. Click inside the Title and Description fields to edit the text, then click Save. You can also move media samples from one section to another.
Do this by clicking the drop-down menu under “Move this media to” and choose the section of your profile you’d like to move it to.
Boom!
Click ‘add to profile’ and you’ll see your video appear in your profile.
To rearrange items within the same section of your profile, click and drag them to the spot you want. Any questions? Get in touch!
Good news,: your video is live! The ‘bad’ news is, your business video is not going to perform miracles by itself: you’ll need to put in a bit of work to get in front of the right people now!
What’s a result?
Getting a result is not about the amount of views you get: it’s about getting the right views. Your video needs to be seen by the right people, resulting in actions like contacting you, booking you on a speaking gig or asking for a quote.
Three steps towards results
To make sure you get results, we need to make sure your video: 1. On the right platform. 2. Easy to find by search engines like Google. 3. Easy to use, share and embed. Here are some good starting points:
Video platforms
Vimeo
At Hunting With Pixels, we love Vimeo because it’s free and high quality. Vimeo is a video platform that makes your video look much cleaner and crisper than Youtube and you don’t get annoying banner ads or related videos. https://vimeo.com/huntingpixels There’s a very reasonably priced Vimeo Pro option too.
Youtube
Although it’s a video site, Youtube is now the second biggest search engine and the place where your audience will look for content so you have to be there. Make sure you don’t just upload your video though; put a enticing title, a well written description and relevant tags on your video so your video actually turns up on search results.
Clickable links to your website from Youtube
Make sure you put the full url of your website in the first two lines of your description, so something like: ‘https://www.huntingwithpixels.com.’. Add the ‘http://’ bit will make the link clickable. It needs to be in the first two lines because that’s the only bit of text you will see without having to click the ‘more’ button, which almost noone does.
One load – video seeding
There are dozens of other platforms out there, but Youtube is the one with the biggest reach by far. If you want to be on a number of video platforms at the same time, you may want to look at video seeding software like One Load: http://www.oneload.com/ One Load will automatically upload your video to dozens of platforms in one go. Personally, I’m not sure if that scattergun approach is going to get you a lot of relevant leads but it can’t hurt either. http://www.oneload.com/
Places to send your content so it can be found by prospects
Assuming you’re in the B2B space, here are some good places for your content the be.
Seems like a no brainer, but I see a lot of our clients send links to Youtube to their database. Don’t. Use this opportunity by getting the video to create traffic to your site: that’s where your contact button is! Write and article around your video and post on your site. The article can provide additional information and useful links; video and written content really complement each other well.
Sourcebottle
SourceBottle is an online service that connects journalists, writers and bloggers with ‘sources’. Make sure you become a source by post the similar article to the one you make for your site on Sourcebottle: don’t simply copy the article and paste it on Source Bottle. Google has software that checks for duplicate content online, and once that’s been flagged your article will not turn up in search results so take the time to reword. http://www.sourcebottle.com/
Slideshare
Slideshare is like the Youtube of slide decks. Create an interesting looking slide deck with a good title, then embed your video in it. You’ll be surprised how much traction this can potential get. It’s also a good place to find slides and ideas for future presentations. http://www.slideshare.net/
Social media
Here are some thoughts on what platforms are useful for you.
LinkedIn
Great tool for B2B engagement (engagement, not hard selling) and reaching specific groups of professionals. Great for the services industry. A good place to start B2B collaborations. LinkedIn now has a blog tool that allows you to write articles and embed Youtube videos easily; this is where you need to be for B2B.
Facebook
Facebook works well for B2C engagement and any events you may be running. We’re not convinced about B2B engagement.
Twitter
If you have a decent amount of followers, send a tweet linking to the article on your website. Twitter is generally useful for collaboration, engagement with other professionals and regular updates to your clients. Twitter needs a lot of quick responses to work for you, so only worth doing if you have the time or if you just love the quick fire responses. I’m not a huge fan myself.
Other platforms
And then there’s a gazillion other video/social media platforms. All very clever and interesting, but not likely to get you results unless you put a lot of effort in. I’d recommend sitting on the fence for now.
Wait, there’s still the world outside social media
Newsletters
Never call your newsletter ‘newsletter’. Do that and you can pretty much guarantee noone will click. If you’re going to use your database to update your clients on a regular basis, offer something that’s one page, well designed and relevant. Add a video to that and on average your click through doubles.
Events
Video is being used on displays a lot. My view is that for it to have any effect it better be good, and it needs a tangible; something to do right there and then. If you use video as a nicer version of a bill board, you’ll get the same results as bill boards; not a lot of traction unless you’re everywhere.
Get personal!
Ultimately, what your video needs to do is engage people. Getting people engaged is not a process that you can automate or templatise; the more targeted and personal you are, the better your response rate. So instead of sending the same thing to your entire database, think about how you can add a personal message like: Hey Robert, how’s life at the Hunting With Pixels HQ? Just did a talk on the Curse Of Knowledge at Ignite Sydney, knowing you’re a bit of a psychology buff I thought it might interest you:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E64gxVhDUQI I don’t know about you, but I’d click on that. Good luck!
A while back we did an exercise with the wonderful Kat Kinnie of Thought Cloud around values. Values matter, there no question about that. The question for me was; how does it matter for the rebrand of Hunting With Pixels?
Did we go backwards?
What I realised was that we started our thought process the wrong way around. We started with thinking about the clients we’d love to work with, then work back to how we should project ourselves to create the connection.
Personality vs Character
What we were trying to do is to assume a personality. That’s not a bad thing necessarily; we all assume different versions of our own personality depending on the situation. We all have a formal self, and a parent self and a neighbour self, a football club self and so on. All these personalities are you, but with a slightly different emphasis to suit the situation; that’s natural and totally fine.
Character
Character is what you actually do, not what you project. When it comes to our business, core values and character really matter, because they’re the basis of our brand identity. Personality is what gets people interested, character is what builds a sound business. Our client expect high quality, consistency, social intelligence and trustworthiness. That’s based on core values and hard work.
So here’s what our values look like
Hunting With Pixels core values.
Our core values
Authenticity
Collaboration
Respect
Innovation
Future orientation
So how does this relate to business
Here’s the thing that totally sold it for me: Knowing and understanding your core values makes things really easy.
Here’s what happens when you know and understand your values.
It’s easier to produce content and explain what you do. Writing becomes easy.
Identifying who your idea client, collaborator or coworker is. Values are important to create flow; instead of rationalising about how you can fit a square peg in a round hole, you instantly see why it’s easy to work with some people, and difficult to work with others; it’s all about whether you share values.
Your culture is your brand. It makes it much clearer for other people what you are about.
Here’s how we apply this idea.
When we made a new showreel, we wanted to add a more personal touch. So instead of showing a series of nice looking shots, we talk about the kind of people we love collaborating with based on values. http://vimeo.com/25540698
What are your thoughts?
We’d love to hear about how you apply your values to your brand. Did it change the way you communicate?
We are really honoured to have set up the shoot for the first Mojo Sessions, the new project of Gary Bertwistle, a leader in innovation and creativity whose passion is making people think differently. With these series of short interviews, Gary aims at showing us the human, innovative and creative part of some of today’s Australian Business Leaders. The shoot took place at a very intimate spot: the Chapel at St Andrew’s College in front of a live audience of students from the Sydney University. During the shoot, we didn’t only had the pleasure to chat with Gary about his idea of having a one on one conversation in a special spot but we also had the chance to chat with his top level interviewees about leadership, entrepreneurship, their different motivations and inspirations that drove them along their paths. This was just the very first chapter of a series of short interviews where the audience will get a human perspective of some of Australia’s top business leaders. Stay tuned to get inspired and moved by Tim Power, managing director of 3PLearning; Professor Michelle Haber, head of the Children’s Cancer Institute Australia; and Bruno Maurel, Chairman of Creative Activation. And last but not least, we would like thanks our crew for making it happen: Tomas Ybarra, Dimitri Zaunders, Stephen Rangott, Alex Bradshaw, Spencer, Virginie Laverdure, Cristina Alonso and Robert Moorman.
