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.

Happy Holidays from all of us at upNext Media.

photo credit: Marc van der Chijs

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.

photo credit: Aaron Escobar

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.

Photo from Redvers on Flickr

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?

Canon 7D vs. Barbie Video Girl from Brandon Bloch on Vimeo.

OK, you’re thinking about getting a fancy camera to do some video blogging. But let’s face it, you don’t have a lot of money, and you have a whole lot of Barbie clothes lying around that aren’t being put to good use. Have we got a solution for you.

The surprising thing, for a camera that is essentially a creepy gaping hole in Barbie’s chest, the footage isn’t too bad. Just make sure to keep Barbie’s hands out of the shot when you’ve got something important to say.

Check out the original post at Buzzfeed

And so reads one of the famous early cartoons about the Internet, published in the New Yorker in 1993. Back then, in the Internet of text news groups and 14.4 baud modems, it was pretty easy to keep yourself hidden.

Now, 17 years later, the social media explosion has changed that somewhat. Funny aliases have been replaced by real names. Your real identity is necessary if you want to get the most out of Facebook, or else how will people find you? While we are actually showing our face online, to most people, we are still just a face on the screen, not a real flesh and blood person. Getting to know someone online is still pretty much through reading what people write. And if you have a hard time writing (like I do sometimes), it doesn’t really convey what it would be like to sit and have coffee with you.

So how can you give people the idea of what it would be like to be in that coffee shop? Fire up the webcam and record a quick hello. Immediately you’ve become that much more real in the minds of your online friends. And when you’re competing with dogs with keyboards, a little humanity displayed through online video goes a long way.

While I’ve been absent from these pages, I’ve been busy on what is now our main outlet, theV3H.com, where you can experience the best of news and events about the Tricities.

You can see some of the quick videos we’ve been doing for theV3H at our Youtube channel, TheV3HTV. Suffice it to say that upNext Media has been busy building web properties, and soon we’re going to be launching new products and services to help you make awesome online video. Stay tuned!

Our project editor Colin McQuillan’s lovely wife Jackie gave birth to a beautiful 7 lb, 11 oz baby girl. Mom and baby are doing great.

Congratulations!

One thing you can say about 2008 is that it was never boring. Now with everyone all worried about impending economic collapse, this holiday season promises to be a little more subdued. It will probably be good for all of us, as we can now remember the true meaning of the season (it’s dark… let’s eat!).

For many of us, our businesses tend to go into a little hibernation until 2009. So here are 5 things you can do in your business while the phone is quiet.

1. Show your partners, customers, and employees a little appreciation

Now that the year is over, take some time to thank those who work with you. Life is a lot better when you have a good team, so make sure your team and your valued customers knows how appreciated they are. A little gift, a phone call, a nice email are all appreciated. This is something we should all be doing on a regular basis anyways.

2. Reflect on the year that was

Take a look at 2008. Often in business we end up dealing with the problems that are right in front of our face instead of working on the longer term projects that will take our business in the direction we want to go. The new year is a good time to reflect on how you used your time over the past year.

3. Plan for the year ahead

It seems that everyone is predicting that 2009 is going to be a terrible year before it even starts. With a big recession being predicted, many businesses are throwing their hands up before we even get going. While 2009 may not be a year with cash flowing through the streets, there is no reason that your business can’t succeed in the coming year. Businesses that do well in a recession tend to focus on saving people money, the more you can demonstrate how your clients will be better off in the long run if they continue to do business with you, the better off you’ll be.

Also, with everyone in the market scared off, a recession is a great time to retrench and build value. There’s less competition for everything from office space to employees, so businesses can be built much cheaper. Many great businesses like Google were built in the down market. Be ready to reap the benefits when the market turns around.

There’s something one must always remember when doom and gloom is all around, especially on the news. Media sources are very good at telling people what has happened, but are very bad at predicting the future. When the media is saying that things are truly bad, it most likely has already happened. Be greedy when others are fearful, that’s when fortunes are made.

4. Skip the Christmas Cards

That’s right, skip the Christmas Cards. Everyone expects Christmas cards, and they are fun to get, but they very easily get lost in the shuffle. Why not send out cards to all your wonderful customers when they aren’t expecting it? Send out valentines, or Halloween cards, or pick a bizarre holiday (Talk Like A Pirate Day is a great one). Make your business remarkable by doing something different.

5. Get to know your family again

Running a business is not the easiest thing in the world. There are many demands on your time, and often it is your family that gets short changed. This Christmas, I’m taking two weeks off to slow down and spend some time with my loved ones.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and all the best from everyone at upNext Media.