Today I am frantically racking my brain, thinking if I’ve forgotten to buy Christmas gifts for everyone. I’m pretty sure I’ve ticked off everyone on my list, but there may be a Christmas Eve scramble to wrap something found in the bottom of the closet for the cat. The cat hates to be left out.
Anyways, while we’re on the subject of the holidays, this is one area where a quick video greeting goes a long way. Instead of sending Christmas cards, here are a couple of ways you can quickly send out a video message to customers and friends over the holidays. I’ve come up with a couple of examples of different styles of Christmas greetings, see which one is right for you.
Just a simple camera and a quick hello? Here’s one Lady Gaga did a couple years back. I’m sure this year she’d have a bigger budget to dress up like a fully lit Christmas tree.
Here’s an example of a video done for an internal audience, from NASA administrator Charlie Bolden. The thing he does really well is acknowledge that there have been hard times at NASA, but goes on to explain how the agency is heading towards a brighter future.
The final example of a great holiday greeting comes jazz artist Roxi Copland. If you’re doing any flying in the US this holiday season, this one is for you.
When people start out with online video, the first setup you usually have is a webcam. It’s a fantastic way to start, because it doesn’t cost you any money. Turn on the camera, start talking. Easy breezy beautiful.
Now while this is a great way to get started, it’s not a great place to stop. Having a video with one person talking to camera without a lot of other stuff going on works up to a point. People that are very dynamic speakers are better able to pull it off than most, but even that isn’t optimum.
When I think of videos with a speaker that work very well, I think of the TED talks. Talks that are no more than 20 minutes in length, TED brings the best and the brightest speakers from all walks of life to tell us something we didn’t necessarily know before in an engaging way. For an example, here’s Scott Stratten’s speech at TEDxOakville.
Now this is an incredibly powerful talk. Scott is a speaker who is in demand and shows an incredible amount of humanity and skill to command the room like he does in this video. All that being said, if he made the same speech in a room by himself in front of a webcam, it wouldn’t have nearly have the impact this video does.
We humans like to get cues from the audience. Being in a room full of people, being a part of that collective, is something we all have experience with. When you watch Scott giving his talk, in our minds we are a part of the audience in the room with him. When we’re sitting in a room hearing a talk, we have no expectation for any other kind of visual stimulation, the social cues of being in a lecture theatre work well enough to keep our attention.
When someone is alone talking to camera, we don’t have that feeling of being in an audience. Television has known this for years. Talk shows have studio audiences or they feel second rate. Sitcoms have laugh tracks, so we are socialized into laughing along with the audience. If a show is shot like a movie (Modern Family comes to mind), the laugh track would seem strange, but when it’s a standard studio show, the sound of the audience laughing is crucial to the presentation.
When you’re talking to a webcam, there aren’t any situational cues that help us. Instead of fighting the uphill battle of trying to engage viewers with your force of personality alone, take the easier way out.
Show people what you are talking about.
Video is visual. You don’t have to put the camera on a tripod and talk to it. Pick it up, walk around with it, show me something in your world that illustrates your point. Eventually you will get fancy enough to actually edit together some shots with your voiceover, but start with just showing me something.
Here’s a very simple video from Meghan at Geek Girls Guide showing off her office. Nothing fancy, but it’s much better than talking to camera and telling us what her organizational system is.
Something like this can be done with a simple Flip-style camera that you voice-over as you shoot. So the next time you’re thinking about shooting a video with you telling us about something, figure out a quick and easy way to show us.
When you’re starting out with online video, often you’ll look to TV to get some idea of how the big boys and girls do it. Television has a lot going for it, including a little bigger budget and a few more people working on the show. That being said, there are certain secrets to their success that can easily be co-opted. The biggest one of all is the schedule.
One of the beauties of video on the Internet is that you can watch it wherever and whenever you want. Television has one stream, and things have to happen on a schedule (your DVR notwithstanding). While it means great things for viewers, it also means content creators can put out stuff whenever they feel like it. Great? Not so much.
I don’t know about you, but if something on my list has the “when I get around to it” tag on it, it doesn’t get done. My goal for this blog is to have a new post every Tuesday morning (yes, Tuesday Morning, I know). If I don’t have that self-imposed deadline every Tuesday, things won’t get done. On my local Port Moody events blog, theV3H.com, there has to be a post every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 9am. No exceptions. I think we’ve missed one or two slots in the 18 months we’ve been doing it. Because we have that schedule burned into our head, we ship.
In my day job at Global Television in Vancouver, when we have a news show that starts at 6pm, it means it starts at 6pm. If we’re seconds out, there are emails and recriminations. Now the viewer can watch it online, or record it on their DVR and watch it later, but they can expect a new show to ship at 6pm no matter what. Thousands of viewers every night would be gone pretty quickly if we got loose with the start time.
What does all this mean for you, the video producer? Consistency is key. It’s not even the consistency of producing the material, it the consistency of the release schedule. You can do 10 videos or 10 blog posts at once and schedule them to release slowly over time. Get your audience used to that schedule, and let them know. Put it nice and big on your site, “New Post Every Tuesday” and you’ve now given your audience a reason to come back every week.
There are so many distractions and things vying for our attention online. Having a schedule means I don’t have to waste time checking back. Even though many of us solve that problem with RSS readers, it’s going to be a small part of your audience who are going to know how those tools work. Having that schedule works for anything, from online video to blog posts – even when you show up to talk to people on Twitter.
So tell me, when you’re putting together content for your web presence, what’s your schedule?
Had a great conversation the other day with Lisa from Caffe Divano, one of my favourite coffee places ever in Port Moody. If you’re anywhere in the area you have to check it out. We were talking about what it takes to get people interested in your product, to get the word out. The thing that makes Caffe Divano different is that all the food is made fresh right in the store, with high quality ingredients. They don’t scrimp on the coffee and the amount of beans you get in your morning cup.
Now I’m a tea guy, and I mentioned that I love their loose-leaf tea, it truly is some of the best I’ve ever had. Lisa then tells me this great story of how her and her husband discovered that tea in a cafe on a trip to New York. She found out it was from a company called SerendipiTea, also in New York. She went out to meet the owner who makes the best tea blends ever. Now they get it from the ladies at SerendipiTea for their little cafe in Port Moody. It’s a fantastic story behind my little cup of tea that afternoon, and the thing that makes it great is that there are real people involved. It’s not a big faceless multinational supply chain. It’s Lisa’s quest for better tea that brings her to the tea lady in New York that brings the cup she’s sharing with me.
Every interaction is one-on-one
Let’s face it, we’re branded out. While the promise of cookie-cutter products for cookie-cutter people created vast fortunes during the age of mass marketing, we lost something. We lost knowing who runs the business, we lost connection with our neighbourhoods, we lost the joy of discovery, when we could tell someone else about a fantastic cup of tea. Now, because we can connect easier than ever before, we’re starting to get it back again. But in order for that to work, we have to give people something to connect with, we have to tell the story in a place where people are going to find it.
Your website can’t be just a place where people get the basics of your location and operating hours. While those are job #1, it’s also a place where we tell our stories. Johnny B Truant calls it Storyselling. If everyone in the neighbourhood knew about Lisa’s fantastic tea, and the stories behind everything she sells, it becomes something worth going out of your way for. In the story of your business, creating that connection is going to make all the difference.
For most of my professional life, I’ve worked for very large television networks. The biggest of the big. In Canada, think Global and the CBC, in the US, think NBC. The operations that have many affiliates and thousands of people working for them. They are massive organizations that bring in billions of advertising dollars. These ad dollars came from the television network’s ability to gather millions of people in their living rooms to watch the same program at the same time. When these massive businesses were built, television became the primary conduit for information and entertainment for people around the world. Nothing like it had ever existed in the history of humanity.
When Neil Armstrong took the first steps on the moon in 1969, an estimated 600 million people watched on TV, a full 1/5th of the world’s population. Television was barely 20 years old, but it was, and still is, the dominant communications platform.
While television defined an age, it wasn’t the medium itself that built the massive businesses, there was something more at work. You’ll find it at the intersection of government and money.
Broadcast television was build on the scarcity of the transmitters
There is only so much radio spectrum to go around, so the government sold radio spectrum to the highest bidder. Generally the highest bidders were the people who could also afford the massive costs of putting up the transmitters. That double barrier to entry, the available spectrum and the money to run it all, created such scarcity in the marketplace that a TV transmitter became a license to print money.
But what happens when the transmitter is your webcam and a laptop?
The economics of the television business are changing rapidly because anyone can broadcast to anyone using a laptop and Youtube. Companies no longer need the time between the reruns of Gilligan’s Island, they can talk directly to their customers online.
Now television isn’t going away anytime soon, but what does this mean for your business? What does this mean for your cause? When the transmitter is in the hands of everyone, how can we change the world?
