Video produced by Time To Get Social

The legendary lion in one of his last interviews which was taped in 2007.  There’s also a great documentary on HBO right now about Ted Kennedy that gives a much more in depth look into the powerful legacy he leaves behind.  For more big thinkers and thought leaders, check out Big Think.

]]> http://www.joedigitalblog.com/targeted-distribution/ted-kennedy-thought-leader/feed 0 http://www.joedigitalblog.com/targeted-distribution/5-steps-to-creating-great-video-content http://www.joedigitalblog.com/targeted-distribution/5-steps-to-creating-great-video-content#comments Wed, 05 Aug 2009 21:00:45 +0000 Zach Jordan http://www.joedigitalblog.com/?p=432 Keep Reading]]>

1.  Craft an informative, relevant and entertaining brand story

All the technologies, websites and social networking tools are useless unless there is a compelling message.  Everyone has access to these tools, but it’s the understanding of these tools as they relate to your brand story that really make them valuable.  It’s also very important to know your audience and their threshold for total running time.  You can often get people to pay better attention and watch more of your content if you break it into smaller bite size chunks.  This will also help people distribute your content more readily if they like it.

2.  Know your audience and what brand messaging they respond to

There’s a growing sea of content and audiences continue to fragment.  While it may take some time and some leg work, you can now find out where your audience is viewing related content on different video platforms and social networking hubs.  Locate the passion centers that are relevant to your messaging and connect with these audiences by using familiar language and terminology.  Get to your audience at their time of need and you will have loyal participants for life.  Forget the ways of spam!  Now it’s about being personal and specific.  Find the relevant groups on Facebook, Vimeo, YouTube and Flickr and reach out to these people.  Engage them.  If it’s great content, they’ll thank you for it.

3.  Shoot in HD

TVs are already shipping with Ethernet ports and the days of Internet TV are upon us.  While it may be somewhat more efficient to shoot on standard DV for web use only, the name of the game today is future proofing your brand story and messaging.  Once your high quality content is in the digital ether, it will be there for years to come.  If you are shooting efficiently, there will be footage you may not utilize right away and can monetize through other channels and platforms.  Additionally, your footage you shoot for online use may eventually appear on a 42″ OLED in somebody’s living room.  The way to stand out, is to make sure you have a high quality story that is shot on HD so that you can maximize your budget and your brand’s reach.

4.  Utilize interactive storytelling techniques

TV audiences are considered “lean back” as they don’t invite participation (unless it’s high quality and emotionally charged content!).  The new “lean forward” audience DEMANDS to be engaged.  Now that you have an interesting story, what elements are you going to include that will allow your audience to interact with your messaging and play along?  Make a list of all the relevant social networking tools that can be used to enhance and amplify your brand messaging.  This may come in the form of a widget, Facebook application, or iPhone application.

5.  Craft a relevant distribution strategy

The Joe Digital equation: High Quality Content + Strategic Distribution = Loyal Participants was born out of the idea that all great content can and will resonate with audiences only if it’s brought to them at their time of need and on the appropriate platform.  You might think that making a video and putting up on YouTube is a distribution strategy, but think again.  By the year 2013, we will be drowning in video content.  Know your audience and research where they are interacting with your messaging and video content.  In some cases you can put your video up on the larger sites like YouTube, but you will have to do an incredible amount of marketing to drive the eyeballs to your video if your audience only plays on MSN or Yahoo.  In this new digital playing field, it’s not about volume, it’s about loyalty.  Find out where your audience lives, get to them at their time of need with something interesting, authentic and relevant and they’re yours forever.

Photo Credit: Rick M

One of the key components of our company’s branding mantra is the need for personal engagement through authentic messaging.  Our formula always stresses (1) specific and personal = loyal and (2) keep it real.  In other words, no brand is going to earn consumer attention and loyalty without delivering something of real value (content) that can get past what we like to call the extremely sensitive BS meter that exists in today’s marketplace.  In a recent post, Diane Verde Nieto (CEO of Clownfish, London) takes this point to an even more granular level that we should all take to heart.  It’s not just about “getting past” the BS meter.  It’s about doing so because your brand genuinely lives and breathes your brand message.  Diane points out that corporate social responsibility (“CSR”) efforts, in which brands incorporate their corporate causes into brand messaging, are a key route to building a loyal relationship with the target audience.

So, so true.  A great CSR effort can make a major difference in the eyes of the audience and the returned favor of loyalty.  But like all things, it has to be done correctly, which as the author points out, mean honestly.  In this market where the consumer wants and demand it all on their terms, honesty is paramount.  All brand content has to be authentic.  CSR driven content must be even more.

I was recently discussing with some colleagues the need for brands to do what Diane suggests, walk the walk at the core of their business.  That means, don’t just take on a cause and promote your “stuff” with it via window dressing.  Rather, prove to your audience that you are for real by making your CSR effort internal and sincere and not just for the public’s eyes only.  This means that from the ground up in the company, the CSR must be a 24/7 subtext of the business.  Employees, management, hell, even outside vendors have to live it.  Be this genuine and your content effort will do a lot more than get past the BS meter.  You will be believed, trusted—and remembered.

If good brand storytelling is about hitting emotional touchstones, I can’t think of a more emotional campaign than matching up brand CSR and the things that your target audience genuinely cares about.  Per the post, women do need soap—but they choose Dove because the brand (via their self-esteem, female oriented content efforts) literally cares about all of the other things that women care about in their daily lives.  Dove passes the sniff test because, in fact, they care….inside and out.

The opposite.  Look at some of the failures where brands have disingenously jumped on the healthy or green wagons.  When a brand’s message is no more than profit driven “fashion”, they can smell the rat. We won’t be fooled or green washed.

There are lots of “green” organizations for example.  But which of them deserve and earn our trust?  The ones you can believe because they have proven credibility.  Case in point?  We recently did a video celebrating the 40th Anniversary of Friends of the Earth.  It was a labor of love and we know the content is going to help this Godfather of environmental activism because they are, demonstrably, the unrelenting, uncompromising organization that was there before anyone would listen and is still in the thick of battle now that we know we’re killing the planet.  Our company (hence my vendor argument) lives this way.  It was a creative and passionate marriage that we hope continues for a long time.

It’s tough out there.  In a prior post we talked about the new “Simplifiers” who don’t want to be sold “stuff”, but rather, offered personal, important experiences.  So how does a brand differentiate itself and earn the attention it needs to prosper?  Don’t “sell”.  Present something people need / want  and place it organically in the context of the bigger picture.  Connect with the things in our every day lives that matter.  Do so honestly and with integrity.  It’s human nature.  Common cause, common experience equals community.  I don’t want to emotionally connect with soap, but I might with the soap community that cares.

We recently produced a marketing video for a great organization, Friends of the Earth.  In a whirlwind tour, we conducted 14 on-camera interviews in DC, NY, SF and LA, in less than five days.  Normally, our team is opposed to checking any baggage whatsoever, but due to our hurried schedule, we were forced to check a few pieces of equipment.  In an effort to avoid any lost luggage, we booked direct flights for every leg of the trip.  United Airlines had other plans.

Sunday

On the first leg of the trip from DC to LA, United Airlines lost our tripod.  This wasn’t a verite project, so this was an immediate issue.  As a result, we had to scramble when we got in to DC late Sunday night in order to secure a tripod for our shoot on Monday morning.  Fortunately, Billy at R&R Lighting, who was already supplying us with our lighting gear, was able to accommodate us at the last minute by referring us to Karen at Voxcam.  After filling out the lost luggage form in person at the airport and on the phone, I was assured that our tripod would arrive on the next flight and would be delivered to our hotel before we departed for NY on Tuesday morning.

Tuesday

Can you imagine our surprise when we left the hotel in DC early Tuesday morning and we still had no tripod?   As our plane taxied from the terminal the flight attendant notified everyone that it was now time to “turn off all electronical items” (yes she said electronical).  Before I was forced to turn off my phone, I called Alec, our contact in NY at RGHLighting and he promised to get a tripod delivered to our Manhattan interview location before we landed.  In addition to shooting a few of the FoE luminaries, we were also shooting Jayni and Chevy Chase so I wasn’t very thrilled about the possibility of having to shoot their interviews handheld.  We touched down in NY and I turned on my phone.  There was a message from Alec: he had come through with the tripod.  Outstanding.

Immediately after the interviews in Manhattan, we grabbed a taxi back to the airport and I thought I might give our buddies at United Airlines another call.  Not only did they have no idea where our tripod was, they didn’t have any record of the several reports I had filed over the phone during the last couple of days.

As we boarded the plane and took our seats in the back near the lavatory, the overhead bins appeared to be full.  When I lifted the latch on the last compartment to see if there was room for my jacket, a hand appeared from nowhere and slammed the compartment shut.  A loud voice shrieked behind me: NO!  I turned around to see a male flight attendant flush with anger as the other passengers looked on at the potential confrontation.  I laughed and took my seat.  This overhead space was apparently reserved for douche bag flight attendants.  Next stop San Francisco.

Thursday

The case of the missing tripod had gone cold.  I was continually re-routed to overseas call centers where the United Airlines operators didn’t speak a great deal of English, let alone have any idea where our tripod might be.  Fortunately, Ryan at First Camera in SF was the 3rd company on our tour to come through at the last minute with a rental tripod.  Solid.

After wrapping up the shoot at the FoE offices in San Francisco, we headed back to the airport for one last flight back home to LA.  As we checked in at the kiosk and inquired about the location of our tripod, we were told it had been delivered to our hotel and was waiting to be picked up…in Washington, D.C.

While cave drawings present the first foray into the power of visual communication and storytelling, we are just beginning to understand how the human brain becomes an unstoppable force when trained visually.  Peter Coyote is one of my favorite actors and he hosted a show on PBS called Brain Fitness 2.  A powerful example of visualization they depict is a taxi driver in London: these guys (mostly guys) train for years studying maps and images to get the layout of London imprinted on the inside of their skulls.  Using imagery over an extended period of time, these drivers have increased the size of their brains – the hippocampus to be precise.  This is exciting.  We’re already steeped in an incredibly visual time in history.

We’ve always said, video screens are the real estate for the 21st century.  Everywhere you look there is a way to captivate people’s attention with compelling, entertaining and educational messaging.  Video search companies keep popping up and electronic billboards are starting to feature face recognition.  How long will it be before we can rely entirely on an image and visual representation, without the use of text and meta tagging?  We have only begun to realize the true potential of  video and it will be exciting to see how a new visual language evolves.  Whether or not you were born digital, if you’re visualizing, sharing and communicating your thoughts through sites like YouTube and Flickr, you’re taking part in this extraordinary language experiment that is just as exciting as it it sometimes annoying.

Zach Jordan

So, arguably, these guys are the collective Jefferson and Lincoln of UGC  video for both their declaration that content and distribution would no longer be in the hands of the few and for their technological proclamation that delivered on the promise and set the online video space free. Two giant sculpted faces down and two to go (the three of them will just have to learn to share).

But long before the launch of YouTube, the first large-scale UGC video success story had already been alive and kicking for over 15 years.  It was 1989, when a then little-known television producer had a notion, a bit of technology and an understanding of the inherent human desire for self-expression and more than occasional idiocy.  Meet the George Washington of UGC, the creator of “America’s Funniest Videos”, Vin Di Bona.  (Note:  I worked with Vin as his President of Worldwide Development for almost five years.  However, that doesn’t make any of the following any less true.)

In 1989, Vin was already quietly making pioneering efforts in the television format business.  While it is common place today to have prime-time filled with Americanized versions of foreign television hits like Idol, over two decades ago, Vin was busy establishing the first significant ties between Hollywood and overseas producers and broadcasters.  He was one of the first producers to import a foreign format for American television. On one of his many trips abroad, a bit of “technology” gave him a notion.  He noticed that the Japanese were rabidly into the newly developed home video camera and knew that the wave would be coming to the States.  A few glimpses into what people were capturing on video later, and the rest is history. For every somber wedding vow captured on tape, there were many more brides passing out and grooms calling their betrothed by a different name.

The show launched in 1989 and soon Vin and his production company were receiving thousands of user generated video submissions per week. And so, a franchise was born.  The show is still running on ABC, 20 years later—the longest running entertainment program in ABC history.  It has been sold to countries all over the globe and has single-handedly created a universal fear among men, any time a kid, a baseball bat and an exposed crotch are anywhere in sight.  Think about it.  An entire television juggernaut based completely on submitted content. So Vin gets carved in stone on the far left of the UGC Video Mount Rushmore in the GW slot—the Father of UGC, long before the acronym existed.

So who gets the last spot?  Who will be the Roosevelt of UGC? He spoke softly, carried a big stick and moved the US into an expansionist adventure. The analogous next phase in UGC will be finding editorial, commercial usage and creative indexing solutions for the morass of material floating about.  Whoever can harness the raw power of UGC, expand its influence in branding, entertainment, building community, and expanding the inalienable right to free expression will get my vote.   Now get to it.

Peter J. Schankowitz