Frederick Van Johnson’s POV while he records us on his podcast This Week in Photo

I’m so honored to have been interviewed on #podaster @frederickvan amazing series This Week in Photo, the world’s most popular photography podcast network! We had a great discussion about creativity, filmmaking, and what it takes to be a multihttps://thisweekinphoto.com/-platform content creative. #podcasts #ageofconversation #contentcreator #storyteller #videoproduction #GALSNGEAR

The Transcriptives Premiere Pro plug-in allows editing video with text (courtesy Digital Anarchy)

Transcripts rule. If you are a video content creator like me, you know that getting transcripts of interviews, and even transcribing b-roll audio, can massively speed up the video editing and publishing process. Here’s how.

Faster Video Editing. If you’ve ever scrubbed through footage listening for soundbites, you know it’s time-consuming. Even listening at double speed. It’s much faster to scan through an accurate transcript, then pull your top pick soundbites together into a timeline for final selects.

Making Your Selects. Once you have your interviews in hand, it’s time to log your best takes.  Thankfully there are great digital tools to make the transition from field shoot to final edit seamless. In FinalCutPro, you have the Lumberjack system, which lets you live log on your shoot and tag soundbites in the field, and also set up your top soundbites for editing. For those working in Premiere Pro, the Transcriptives plug-in from Digital Anarchy is a great way to go to simplify the soundbite-tagging-to-editing process. And these systems also speed up your captioning and subtitling workflow.

Blogs, Websites and Social Posts.  Be sure everyone in your communications department has access to your interview transcripts.  Transcripts are great source material for pull quotes that can be sourced for social media posts, blogs, publications and e-newsletters.

Captioning. Once you have accurate transcripts, captioning is a breeze. You can output your final transcript of a show and upload it directly into a publishing platform such as Vimeo or YouTube. Or you can create your own captioned version. (Processes like Transcriptives captioning workflow makes this extremely simple.) My preference is for the latter.  After speaking to many users for the accessibility chapter of my book Nonfiction Sound and Story for Film and Video, I learned that auto-captioning can not only be inaccurate, but also poorly timed. If a caption comes too early, for example, it can give away a story line without letting the viewer draw those conclusions for themselves.

Where to Get a Good Transcript.  These days, you can get fast turnarounds on transcripts—often in a matter of hours. For straightforward and brief interviews, I’m a fan of automated services like https://www.rev.com/. For people with accents, those who speak very fast, or lengthy interviews, I prefer the human touch with a service like Noble Transcriptions. Don’t count on the YouTube automated tool. For $1-2/minute, accurate transcripts are your best tool for storytelling.

Amy DeLouise is a video content creator helping organizations tell a better story.

You’ve got some interviews lined up for a company video. Maybe you’ve already got a list of questions. But will you be able to turn those soundbites into a compelling story? Before filming, you may need to do some brief writing. Namely, a short creative brief, conduct some pre-interviews, and develop a story arc. As a professional video scriptwriter and producer, here are a few of my top tips for some writing that will help your video end product.

  1. Creative Brief. What’s the look and feel you want to convey? Who is your target audience? And what are you trying to get them to feel and do after watching the video? What are the delivery specs and what platforms will it play on? Who has final approvals? What’s the budget and timeline for delivery? Detailing the answers to these questions is essential before you roll on any footage. Often, I like to add storyboards to my creative briefs, so everyone can discuss looks and agree on a visual style. You can use tools like Storyboarder Plot or the more high-powered Frameforge. You can certainly reference other videos on YouTube, but be careful. If you don’t know the budget and timeline of those projects, you could be setting a goal you can’t achieve. And don’t forget that even a crappy sketch can help everyone on the team visualize the look!
  2. Pre-Interviews. Whenever possible, conduct pre-interviews. If you’ve pre-interviewed someone, you can build rapport in advance of lights-camera-action. You can also get a sense of key stories and anecdotes and how to approach your questions. You’ll also get a sense of their personal style, which will again help you conduct a better interview. A solid story arc drawn from these interviews should include a brief introduction or back story, a key challenge or turning point, and a resolution. And ideally also an opening hook. (I’ll leave that for another post.) By pre-interviewing your subjects and thinking through your story arc in advance, you’ll get better soundbites and avoid missing an important element.
  3. Story Arc. Now that you’ve got the lay of the land in terms of who your main characters are and the stories they can tell about your subject, you can start to lay out a possible story arc. This doesn’t mean you can’t stray from this idea once you are in the editing room. But a solid story arc can help you decide which questions are most essential when you have limited time for interviews. You can also start to understand what additional visuals you might need to tell the story, whether they are stock images, archival content, or b-roll.  For my video projects, I like to have these elements in my story arc:
    1. An opening hook—something to grab the viewer and get them into the story.
    2. Background – an extremely brief explanation of what we’re talking about—which can come from interview soundbites or a narrator.
    3. Central challenge or conflict – every story needs some tension, even nonfiction. What created change in the central character’s life? What did the product do to change the world of the customer?
    4. Resolution – Some final thoughts or a resolution of the central challenge gets you to the end.
    5. Call to Action – If you are making a fundraising or advocacy video, there may be something you want viewers to do after watching. “Get involved by clicking this link” etc.

You don’t have to be a Hollywood screenwriter to make your interview-based nonfiction story better. But you will find that doing some writing in advance of filming will improve your video storytelling and impact. In an upcoming post, I’ll talk about taking the story arc plan and transcripts and turning them into an editing script.

For more details on video scripting, see my LinkedIn Learning course http://bit.ly/HowtoScript

Photo by Gabriel Benois/Unsplash

You just got invited to moderate a panel. Great! By the way, it’s going to be virtual. Oh dear. As a virtual event moderator, you are the stand-in for the audience. Your engagement throughout the interview or discussion will make a difference in how the audience perceives the experience. And if the recording will include you and your reactions and questions, it’s even more important to consider how you will appear on camera. Here are some tips for making your event more lively and interactive.

  1. Make sure your face is “alive”—your facial expressions, your engagement directly to camera, and your responses to the speaker are all essential for making the experience feel more personal for the audience. Practice in the mirror or in a private video call with no one but you on the line.
  2. For livestreamed events, let the audience know at the top of the interview and at regular intervals that you will be taking questions.
  3. Don’t expect the audience to immediately ask questions when you open the floor, so have a set of relevant questions ready for each panelist.
  4. Be sure you have a production team member save the Q&A and/or Chat so that any questions not answered live can be followed up by you and/or your interviewee. You can then post these questions and answers through your website and social channels–another way to promote post-event engagement.
  5. Come up with creative ways to engage the audience and make sure they feel represented, even if their faces do not appear in the livestream or recording. Ask people as they arrive to type in where they are tuning in from, if this is a nationwide or global event. Ask people to share one obstacle or challenge relating to the session topic.
  6. Promote virtual applause. One fantastic tip I got from my friend Jeff Greenberg who is an experienced virtual trainer, was to come up with a letter that stands in for applause. I usually change the letter depending on the topic. On a recent panel I moderated during the One Woman, One Vote Film Festival, Wonder Women Behind the Lens about visual effects artists and editors, we used the letter “W”. I asked attendees to “throw down a W in the chat pod any time you want to applaud the speakers or support what they are saying.” We had a lively discussion with lots of “WWWWWWW”’s in our chat that helped our panelists know there was an audience cheering them on.

Keeping an audience lively and engaged when you can’t be with them in person is a big challenge. That’s why being a virtual panel moderator is much more like being a television host or MC than it is like moderating a live panel. But with some advance planning and these tips, you’ll increase your audience engagement.

 

Amy DeLouise is a digital media expert, and virtual panel curator and moderator.

Well produced videos are essential for informing and engaging audiences during virtual and hybrid events.  In this article I’ll take a look at some best practices to ensure your pre-recorded videos support the success of your virtual event.

1. Make Video Content Snackable – At a live event, you have a captive audience. Plus the dynamic that occurs when everyone is together in a room.  In this world, a 5 minute or longer video can keep the room engaged. Not so for virtual events. Everyone who tunes in has other distractions in their immediate area—children, pets, emails, and work on their desktop that needs attention. Enter snackable content—short videos that engage, entertain and inform, while propelling the theme of your meeting or event. Roll-in videos for live events, with the exception of panels—and we’ll talk about them in a moment—should be no longer than 2 minutes.  Better yet, a series of 1:00 spots that work to set the stage for a particular session, or act as transitions between sessions.  This length will also allow your video to be hosted natively on Instagram during or after your event—an added social media bonus.

2. Video Transitions are Key – At a live event, when a speaker is late, you can ask your MC to take a few more questions from the audience. At a virtual event, remote feeds can fail and tech problems can result in your team needing more time.  If you lose your audience now, you might not get them back. Having a few videos of various lengths available to you to play at any time can be helpful. This could be a Year in Review video, a light-hearted video put together by staff, or a promo montage of upcoming sessions. Having at least two videos of 2-3 minutes in length on standby each day of your virtual event will give you a little breathing room for those unexpected moments. You should also create a little animated “We’re having technical issues but we’re working on it!” video that you can play if all else fails. After all, you are effectively putting together a broadcast and you don’t want any dead air.

3. Ensure Your Video Plays Back Properly – It’s amazing how often organizations spend tons of money producing great video content, but forget to test the delivery formats prior to output. If you are streaming your event from a platform like YouTube, be sure your video is optimized for that platform rather than asking YouTube to convert your specs. The conversion process will introduce garbage—technical term!—that you don’t want in your video.  Unless your platform is a professional 4K streaming system or specifies otherwise, I’d recommend a frame rate of 30fps and 1920×1080 as your video delivery size, with an audio sample rate of 44.1Khz and bitrate of 128kbps.

4. Provide an Engaging Home for Your Videos – Where will your videos live after the event is over? Can you set up a hub on your website or the event site? You can still host the videos elsewhere, such as your YouTube or Vimeo page. But putting the videos on your website—with and without subtitles—can ensure more hits post-conference. Be sure you have already created written content that explains the context for each video, and any action steps you want the audience to take after watching. For example, if your event was a fundraiser, a video featuring one of your organization’s projects can include a link to a Donate Now button. Don’t wait until after your event to set up your video hub. Be sure to write the copy and links in advance, and have it ready to go.

While we hope for live events to be back soon, virtual and hybrid events will be the norm for the future. And well-designed pre-recorded video content will be a big part of those events.

Amy DeLouise is a producer, interviewer and moderator for live and virtual events and videos.

Many people are kicking off the New Year with a career transition. Whether you are looking to advance in your current job or switch to a different career track, you might find it useful to conduct a personal SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

Consider Your Core Values

But before we jump into that, take a moment to assess your Core Values—what it is that matters to you in your current career. These should be broad ideals, not necessarily specific to your current job. For example, I like being able to make a difference. In my work as a video producer, I’m able to do this by telling important stories. But if I wanted to make a career shift, I could look at other jobs that don’t involve video, but still have making a difference as a core value. What are the values that make you tick? Jot down at least two.

Identify Your Strengths

Now, consider your strengths in two categories—those that help you in your chosen field, and those “soft skills” that could help you advance in any career.  For example, if you are a video editor, your strengths might include being able to learn a new editing software quickly. This strength can go in both columns, because your ability to upskill and apply new capabilities to improving your job is a talent that you can apply to any job. Another strength might be the ability to complete work under tight deadlines. In other words, you are good at time management. This is a soft skill that can apply to multiple careers. Make a two-column list of your top 5 strengths and identify which are unique to your current job, and which can be applied more broadly to other work opportunities.

Define Your Weaknesses

I like to think of these as personal challenges to overcome. Mine include being impatient with people who might take longer than I do to come to a decision. What are your challenges? Some common ones include Imposter Syndrome—feeling like you aren’t the expert you really are in your chosen field.  Or perhaps you are risk-averse. This can be a strength, particularly if you are in a field such as accounting. But if you are an entrepreneur, not being willing to try new markets or products can be an obstacle to success.  Identify at least 5 of your top weaknesses or challenges. Consider what tools you might have for overcoming those challenges. Strategies can include finding a mentor in a particular area of interest, joining a professional organization in order to transition to a new market, or taking an online course to improve your skills.

List Threats

I know, it’s out of order for the acronym. But I like to list threats before heading to opportunities. Threats can exist within your organization. Or they can occur outside, in the economic ecosystem. Occasionally a single threat can affect both. I think we can all agree that the Coronavirus created a massive external threat that affected many internal business systems, including funding and staffing.  More common threats might be managing your time when a company has a heavy meetings culture. Or working in a field such as energy that is going through a major transformation, which could eliminate your job.  List your top three threats.

Find Opportunities

Now you see why I wanted the Strengths, Weaknesses, and Threats listed first.  You can now be thinking about opportunities that maximize your strengths, help you avoid or conquer threats, and give you the chance to overcome your weaknesses. Relocating might be a solution for a market that is saturated with too many employees with your skill set.

Tools

If you’re someone who likes to use apps to visualize your work, here are some tools to use for your SWOT exercise:

http://creately.com/SWOT-Analysis-Software

https://www.gliffy.com/

http://www.wikiwealth.com/swot-analysis-generator

You might also enjoy Jim Collins terrific book Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck–Why Some Thrive Despite Them All.

Whether you write them on a napkin or make a jazzy chart, stay focused on your Core Values and then assess your SWOT. It’s a great way to kick off a successful New Year.

 

Amy DeLouise is a digital media entrepreneur who often leads business workshops and has authored a number of business and digital media courses on LinkedIn Learning.

Virtual events and interviews are here to stay. And if you’re tapped to conduct an interview remotely, you’ve got a big task ahead of you. Prepping to host a virtual webinar or remote interview has some similarities with doing it live, but also some major challenges and differences. I’ll share a few common obstacles and how to solve them in this article.

  1. Curation is Key. One of the keys to a successful remote interview or panel is being sure you have the right person for that conversation. Just because someone is a subject matter expert, for example, does not make them a great interview subject, particularly in the virtual environment. Whenever possible, I pre-interview people—a “screen test” of sorts—via Zoom so that I can see if they will work well in a virtual environment. Some questions I want to answer during this brief 20-minute video call are:
    1. Is this person lively and engaging?
    2. Do they have good examples and stories to tell?
    3. Does their topic fit into a larger story arc for the panel or event?
    4. Will they need a lot of cueing for answers?
    5. Do they tend to go on too long in their answers? (Cutting off someone in a virtual interview is much more difficult than in a live event—you’ll have to literally interrupt them, which is not ideal, as opposed to using body language in a face-to-face setting).
  2. What Will the Audience See and Hear? Thinking through in advance what the audience will see and hear is critical to making any successful video content, but especially for virtual or livestreamed events. When your audience isn’t captive, they can easily switch the “channel” and consume some other content if yours isn’t compelling. So how can you convey the story and keep them engaged?
    1. Does the interviewee have good lighting, audio and camera setup? If you are not shipping a camera-in-a-box setup or having a local camera operator film the interview, you may need to rely on Skype or Zoom. Someone who looks like they are in the witness protection program will need your help to get their lighting better positioned for their face.  I’m a fan of the Aperture M9 LED, the Fox Fury Rugo, and the Lume Cube Mini as affordable options that you can ship to an interview subject. I’m not a fan of ring lights, by the way, as they do make the “devil eye” look for most people, and don’t work well at all for those with glasses. For audio, I love my Saramonic lavalier. I have the Blink 500 because I can also pair it with my phone for social media recordings (if buying this system, be sure you get the correct version–there are ones for Android or iPhone). The MPOW headset is a decent low-cost choice, if you don’t mind a headset in your shot. Or the Rode smart lav if you prefer a lavalier. Remember that computers and drives have loud fans, so be sure your subject is as far away from them as is practical when you are ready to record.
    2. Does your “talent” have some visuals to share? What format are they in? If a Powerpoint, can you view slides in advance and make suggestions for what will be most engaging? (Often I suggest some top selects, and we can provide the entire deck as a downloadable resource for registered participants afterwards.)
    3. If this is a video interview rather than a panel discussion, will we have access to photos or video clips to intercut into the interview at a later date? Sometimes I will even have the interview talent record a side-angle shot of themselves with their phone for some of our questions and send that to me, so I have an angle to intercut with the primary shot. (Teach your interviewee to use WeTransfer.com or Hightail.com to share large files so they don’t eat up your Dropbox or Box drive space.)
  3. Be Prepared. As an interviewer, the pressure is always on us to be more prepared than the interviewee(s). Most importantly, we need to set the subject at ease, and ensure that they feel they are coming across well. Here are some ways to be sure you are prepared.
    1. Create a flow or outline for the conversation—one that will make sense for the audience and your event theme. Be sure to share it in advance with all panelists, including which questions or themes you are likely to ask which people (which is based on your pre-interview and research homework).
    2. Have at the ready a primary set of questions that follow your flow, but also a secondary set of questions ready to go in case the audience isn’t highly interactive.
    3. Teach less experienced interviewees how to speak directly to their camera, rather than to their screen. This will make an enormous difference in how the audience responds to them. And as interviewer, remember to do the same. I put a sticky note with a smiley face just below my web camera lens as a reminder. (For more tips, here’s a LinkedIn post I wrote about looking better on your next virtual call.)
    4. In a webinar format, be sure you take advantage of the “green room” feature and give panelists a custom link so that they can enter the webinar early, get a chance to chat with each other and with you. You can take this time to review the format and agreed-upon flow or outline, test microphones, adjust lighting, and be sure everyone’s internet connection is stable (turning off notifications—here’s how on a Mac and here’s how for Windows 10, disengaging Dropbox syncing, and disconnecting any VPN). And don’t forget to take a group screenshot for PR purposes!

Moderating virtual panels and conducting interviews in virtual settings can be challenging. But with these strategies, you can make the experience fun, engaging and rewarding for you, your interviewees and your audience.  In a future article, I’ll get into the tech side of remote video recording. I’ll also be doing a post on how to get the audience engaged in a virtual panel discussion, so stay tuned!

Amy DeLouise is a digital media expert and producer/curator/moderator for virtual events.

Upskilling is vital. If you are seeking a job, ensuring your business is nimble, or tackling a career challenge, upskilling will be an essential part of your new year. Here’s why.

If you run a business

Upskilling employees is cheaper than replacing them.  

According to Gallup, replacing an employee is expensive:  from one-half to two times the employee’s annual salary. And that’s probably a low estimate. When you lose an employee, you lose their relationships with customers and their knowledge of critical systems and workflows. A better investment is upskilling them on what they need to succeed.

Upskilling can help you diversify your team. Women and especially women of color lost significant ground during the pandemic.  Even prior to the crisis, progress toward parity between men and women in technical roles had been falling steadily.  Upskilling has been shown to improve diversity in leadership ranks, which is not only the right thing to do but also improves the bottom line. Be sure to make advancement learning available to ALL employees, of every race and gender as well as people with differing learning styles.

Technology is speeding up. And yet half of executives feel that a lack of familiarity with technology is a barrier to digitally transforming their companies.  A global survey of 4,300 managers and executives shows that 90% of workers feel they need to update their skills annually just to keep up. This is one area where retraining can help.

If you downsized your business during the pandemic, upskilling your workforce can help you gain relevance.  According to McKinsey, “to emerge stronger from the COVID-19 crisis, companies should start reskilling their workforces now.” Two researchers from the Aspen Institute say adding skills is the only way workers taking on new roles in downsized companies will be able to function: upskilling “is a lifeline that turns an overwhelmed and unprepared employee into one with the knowledge and skills to take on new tasks confidently and capably.”

If you are a worker…

Upskilling is essential if you want to move up.  Employees can take on new leadership roles when they add new knowledge and skills. With all the remote learning opportunities available, it’s great to know that e-learning boost retention by 25 to 60% (as opposed to 8-10% with traditional training).

You need tech skills for the distance economy.  In 2017, the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that as many as 375 million workers—or 14 percent of the global workforce—would have to switch occupations or acquire new skills by 2030 because of automation and artificial intelligence. One Brookings study found that the share of jobs requiring a high level of digital skills more than tripled—to encompass nearly a quarter of all jobs— between 2002 and 2016.  And the share of jobs requiring AI skills has grown 4.5X since 2013. The benefits of digital transformation are everywhere, from improving customer engagement and revenue to boosting employee morale.

Adding a certification to help you do your job better and get better pay. Workers with certifications such as PMP (Project Management Professional) earn more than their non-certified counterparts. According to one study, PMP’s earn 22 percent higher salaries than their non-certified peers across 42 countries.

If you are self-employed, now is the time to increase your learning. And you may even get tax deduction for the cost.  In addition to improving digital skills, consider what knowledge will make you better at running your small business. For example, there are loads of great courses in everything from public speaking to accounting on LinkedIn Learning.

 

Amy DeLouise owns a digital media company and helps people improve their digital and entrepreneurial skills with courses on LinkedIn Learning.

Coming up with client profiles can be a fun exercise in strategic planning.

As busy creatives, we are always racing the clock. We might be rushing to deliver a portfolio of new photos for a client. Or working overnight on a new website. Or finishing a series of final edits in order to deliver videos for a virtual conference. Whatever we are working on, we will probably do it again some time soon. So it makes sense when marketing our creative businesses to develop packages of products and services that help our customers get what they need, when they need it, and help us deliver quality for a consistent price. One of the ways we can do that is by planning ahead for common types of projects for predictable types of customers and organizations. In short, building customer profiles.

Creating prospective customer and project profiles can actually be a lot of fun. It’s a good strategic planning exercise for a company retreat. First step: put yourself in the client’s shoes. What are the problems they need to solve? What would be the financial and time pressures on such a project? What “pain points” could you solve for this type of company or organization?

Figuring out the answers to these questions before you are faced with the precise project can help you market your company and your solutions, and set yourself apart in a crowded field. They can also help you consider how much time and staffing you’d need to accomplish those projects quickly.

Let’s say you own a graphics design company. There might be four profiles that show the different problems your customers face and the solutions you can provide. You want to focus on different sized customers, because their structure affects the kinds of problems they face.  A small company might need help with a website design or refresh. They don’t have anyone in-house with the time to do it. They can update the content themselves, once you set it up for them, but they have a limited ability to do major design changes. For this kind of client, you can create a template approach that can be customized, since they won’t want to spend large amounts of money. But it is also a great gateway project for other, bigger projects.

By contrast, a large company with a big in-house design and communications shop might have a completely different set of deliverables for a website redesign. They may want not just a new website but an entirely new logo and brand redesign, along with brand identity elements for every channel, and a brand guide on how to use them. There might be feedback from multiple different departments along the way, with a more time-consuming workflow as a result.

As you think through all the different kinds of problems clients have, you can design a few profiles that fit. And that gives you the type of customer you are pitching to, so you can design appropriate marketing campaigns and sales strategies.  These profiles are also useful frameworks as you develop package pricing and bids.

Whether your creative business is large or small, creating detailed client and project profiles is a great way to jump-start your strategic planning for the New Year.

 

This blog post is adapted from Amy’s upcoming LinkedIn Learning course on Launching Your Creative Business. See LinkedIn Learning for more of her video courses. 

Photo by Gabriel Benois, Unsplash

Brands deliver value. To customers (a consistency of brand promise, or “knowing what you’ll get”). To shareholders (increased revenues, a shorter sales/conversion cycle). To employees (motivated and brand-engaged employees have less turnover, higher satisfaction, and deliver better on KPI’s).

So if the ROI of good branding is so high, why is it always so hard to keep the brand at the center of strategic focus?  One simple reason is cost.  If the opportunity cost of NOT branding effectively or efficiently isn’t factored in, decision-makers often think it is too expensive to expend time and financial resources on brand-building exercises.   Here are four strategies that are cost-effective ways to keep your brand alive and well.

1. Mine Your Own Content

A tool everyone has, but rarely maximizes is your own media library. Maybe because it’s not so much a library as a mish-mash of files that are not indexed, so no one can find them. Every graphic, photograph, video clip, newsletter article or blog post you and your team have created are already sunk costs. Properly archived and tagged with metadata, they can be repurposed and reused in multiple ways to put your brand front and center with customers, clients, employees and other stakeholders.   The key is to use a DAM (digital asset management system) or MAM (media asset management system–often for larger files like video and audio) and build workflow best practices into every time you create a digital asset. Create a consistent system that works for everyone in your organization, with anywhere anytime access–vital with teleworking–is essential, so that you can build and share branded content that everyone can access, not only the intern, editor or photographer who first created it. A photo DAM system can help you avoid those awful automatic names (IMG_001) for photos, for example, by batch renaming name on ingest. But always maintain the original name in the data. Adobe Bridge, Google Photos (heads up–free is over June 2021!) and Adobe Lightroom are tools for managing photo content. LuminarAI is out in Beta from Skylum* and has a number of great photo management tools built into its AI-powered creative engine. For video, there are a number of DAMs (digital asset management) systems out there–from Imagen to CATdv by Squarebox.  (If you are looking for a MAM, this is a handy guide.)  There are also brand-specific systems, designed specifically for the marketing department (as opposed to a video production company or broadcaster) such as Brandfolder, Bynder, and Cloudinary.

  • Bottom Line: If you can’t find it, you can’t use it. So whether you use a sophisticated archiving system or a spreadsheet, save money and create your own “stock” library of branded content to tell your organization’s story.

*disclaimer: I do some writing and marketing work for Skylum. I do not receive any fees related to sales.

2. Video Sells

According to IndieGogo, “Crowdfunding pitches with video content raise 112% more than those without.” Video certainly is one of the top-most searched items on the web. But producing a branding video in-house can be daunting. It’s a time-consuming process, and commissioning one to be made can be costly. With just the investment in a Zoom H4N digital audio recorder, a SONY FDR-AX100 4K Ultra HD video camcorder, and some basic audio recording/mixing software like Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve, you can quickly share useful branded video clips to your target audience. Or consider building your community by sharing useful content with a podcast. For a quick rundown on the latest podcasting software, check out this review.

  • Bottom Line: Build video into your brand strategy. It works.

    Photo by Sam Mcghee, Unsplash

3. Show Not Tell

So many people want to say WHAT it is they do, before really explaining HOW and WHY they do it. This is the core of your brand, and that’s the story you want to tell through any platform, whether it is a speaking engagement, podcast, blog post, or branded video.  BTS, or “Behind the Scenes”, is some of the top-shared content online. Why? Because as humans we are naturally curious and love to know what makes things work. So build “How to” or “How we made that” into every production or project.  That means adding a BTS camera. At the low end, could be a mobile phone. But for under $300 you could add a LOT of quality and pizzazz with a tool like the 4K DJI Osmo Pocket Gimbal Camera. Or if that’s too pricey, throw your mobile phone onto a gimbal with this little number, also from DJI. In a future post I’ll talk about good lighting and sound.

  • Bottom Line: Make shooting and sharing BTS part of your brand best practices.

DJI Pocket Osmo Camera in action

4. Email Signature is Free Branded Space

Lately, most of my incoming emails from systems like MailChimp and Constant Contact are going into my Spam and Promotions folders. So those are lost efforts to convey branded content. Why not supplement those efforts through a free space your contacts see every day: your e-mail signature. What a great opportunity to do a little brand storytelling!  A signature line doesn’t just give you a chance to tell your name and title, it gives you space for a blog link, twitter hashtag for an upcoming event, or YouTube link to your latest video.  This simple free advertising can be employed unilaterally—and uniformly–across your organization. (Send a “signature of the week” email to everyone in your organization with easily copied information and links.)

  • Bottom Line: Creating an email signature strategy builds brand awareness for free.

Using these four strategies, you can gain ground with your brand, and decrease the cost of creating or trying to find existing content to share with your audience.  More story. Less hassle. And that adds to your brand ROI.

 

Amy DeLouise is a video and virtual event producer, brand strategist, author and speaker.