In a short attention world addicted to entertainment, videos serve as great vehicles for public relations. But videos can be expensive and time-consuming to produce. My favorite part of video, and what can make a great video, is when you watch people react. And at Dreamforce, I’ve asked people “When is the best time to swear at your customers?” Watch the videos and you’ll see there are lots of people simply reacting to the question. “A good video in content marketing without the need to spend a lot of money should revolve around an idea that makes people say something to the effect of, ‘I should have thought of that … For instance, there are 56,000 college students who are homeless, according to 2013-14 Federal Student Aid Form (FAFSA) data. The well-produced marketing video about the trendy, expensive, San Francisco based coffee brand promotes the brand while educating the user about coffee. What is an explainer video? How about a video that shows you how to create a video? These productions are a clinic for the hospitality industry including Welcome to the World of Portland professionally produced with music and images. Here’s a great idea from the NFL Network that any creative person (with some time) could do.
Everyone likes to watch videos on the web.
According to official statistics from YouTube, they
have ” over a billion users — almost one-third of all people on the
Internet — and every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours
on YouTube and generate billions of views.” The statistics portal
Statista notes “As of July 2015, more than 400 hours of video
were uploaded to YouTube every minute, up from 300 hours per minute
in November 2014.”
Wacky cats, wacky stunts, cute cats, cute kids, offensive
comedy, and R-rated content are some of the most popular methods to
drive traffic. But if someone is trying to promote a product,
service, personality or other business, traffic isn’t always the
most important metric. Reaching the right audience with the right
message becomes the goal. Cute babies might get clicks, but not
business.
Audiences are bombarded by words and messages. In a short
attention world addicted to entertainment, videos serve as great
vehicles for public relations. But videos can be expensive and
time-consuming to produce. To discover what works, an all-star
panel of publicists and marketers gave us their best advice and,
along with me, selected a few of their favorites. Here’s how to
gain market share, reach audiences and achieve some of your public
relations goals using video in a very competitive world.
“What makes a good content marketing video?’ asks Michelle
Messenger Garrett of Garrett Public Relations. “It should reflect
your tone of voice. And you should know the goal behind the video.
What are you trying to achieve?” Garrett adds “User-generated video
is a very inexpensive way to go with video content marketing–and it
can be very effective.”
David Spark, of
brand journalism and media consulting firm Spark Media Solutions,
notes the value of emotion. “One of the big values of video is you
can see emotion. So often corporate videos are devoid of
emotion because they’re so heavily scripted, prepared, or they’re
just spouting out marketing jargon. My favorite part of video, and
what can make a great video, is when you watch people
react. Take a look at the reality shows and look at how
many times they cut away to reaction shots, and how the reaction
alone can tell far more about what the person said than the actual
words that came out of their mouth. For that reason, I like to
produce funny “man on the street” videos where I purposely go out
of my way to ask the question you’re not supposed to ask.”
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“For example, at the RSA security show I’ve asked people to
give me their password. At VMworld, I’ve asked people how they explain
virtualization to their mom. And at Dreamforce, I’ve asked
people “When
is the best time to swear at your customers?” Watch the videos
and you’ll see there are lots of people simply reacting to the
question. You want to spark a conversation in the industry, these
kinds of videos do it.”
Spark says big tech events can be a goldmine for user-generated
video. “Very few people can absorb an entire event after the fact
in real time. But, everyone would like a five-minute summary of the
event….
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