This week I’m featuring an article by top Director of Photography/Editor/Film & Video Expert Rick Wise. I’ve always admired Rick’s vast knowledge, mastery of film & video – both in lighting/shooting, his directorial abilities to know what works and what doesn’t, the ability to guide clients who’ve never worked in this surprisingly complex media through tough choices in editing, and his efficiency getting months of work done in just days. He teaches at the Academy of Art in San Francisco and is writing a book on lighting for film/video. (you’ll see his mastery in the video links at the end). This article summarizes his top tips for using video on your website. THANKS RICK!

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Placing a video on your web site or blog is a great way to introduce prospective clients to you and to your services. When well crafted, videos draw people in to spend time with you. As an added bonus, Google places a lot of value on videos and pushes your site up in its ranking so that a prospective client searching for your service is more likely to find you.

At first blush, making a video about you and your service looks like a simple thing to do. And in the hands of a professional, making a good video can be relatively simple for you. Yes, you can find a friend to slap something together. But to craft a video that both entices the viewer and promotes you and your service in a way that future clients will want to come to you, that’s not likely to happen by itself. After all, if you needed someone to work on your teeth, or paint your house, or give you legal counsel, would you pick just anyone to do the job?

Let’s parse that out a bit more. Here are some of the steps it takes to end up with a winning video:

• Identify what you have that sets you apart from others in your field. This can be a surprising difficult step. A professional such as Allison Bliss will help you enormously with this part of the process.

• Write an outline of points you want to make to support step one. You will likely want to include both testimonials of some of your clients along with a taste of what you do and how you do it.

• Write a script fleshing out the outline.

• Line up the people you want to video along with time and place. If you are shooting outside of your own place, obtain permits to shoot if necessary.

• Line up the video and sound equipment as well as the locations that you will need.

• Shoot the testimonials, perhaps at your place, perhaps elsewhere. To get five minutes of good testimonial footage it takes several hours and sometimes days of shooting. Capturing good clean sound as well as shooting people so they look interesting and inviting is an important part of this step.

• Shoot the sections of the video that show you at your work. Whether you are a dentist, a lawyer, a healer, a florist, or any other profession, there is always a way to make what you do look friendly, inviting, and professional. If you can get what you want by shooting ten times as much footage as you end up using, your are being extremely efficient.

• Find and shoot or obtain the right graphics.

• Edit. This can take multiple days, and many trials and revisions. In many ways, less is more. It is so much better to make a short, compelling video than a long one that bores the viewer. There is always a conflict between the desire to tell your “whole story” and the reality that at this stage no one really wants the whole story. What the viewer wants is a delicious taste of you. All the details will come later in person-to-person meets.

• Find the right music and obtain rights to use it.

• Encode the completed video so that it can be easily seen on your web site.

• Publish to your web site.

All of the above is labor, time, and equipment intensive. And that is why it is eventually going to save you both your time and money to hire a professional to craft this video with and for you.

Here are a few links to some sample videos.

• The first one is a video I edited to promote Gary Muzynski’s team-building service, One World Music, and is based on two-camera shooting at a convention site. Go to http://www.oneworldmusic.com/index.php, and click on the small TV screen to the right. The editing took about seven days with revisions. The shoot itself took a day.
• For a totally different style, a video with no words or “sell,” here’s “Kansas Harvest” that I shot and edited for a client who wanted to sell her farm in Kansas in a very different way: http://rickwisedp.com/RW%20Director/kansas_harvest.htm I shot this video and another one on location in Kansas over four days. I edited both over seven days.
• Finally, here are a couple of commercials I shot for broadcast: “Keds” (http://rickwisedp.com/RW%20Director/keds.htm) and “Box” (http://rickwisedp.com/RW%20Director/box.htm)

http://RickWiseDP.com

Here’s a principle from my upcoming book on “Marketing That Fills the Soul”. This section I’ve cut from the book to only allow for my blog readers:

PUTTING OUT TO THE UNIVERSE: THE CLARITY OF PROMOTION

There is little doubt that by expressing what we need, or putting out our requests to the universe in a clearly defined manner over a regular period of time, that we’ll receive what we ask for. Devout worshippers and business leaders have been utilizing this practice for centuries. Politicians develop slogans to espouse their merits throughout their campaigns. Mohammed and Jesus preached their beliefs to the masses to bring their followers joy, peace and education.

With the same purpose, albeit not as deep in spiritual focus, advertisers create commercials to educate and entertain with the purpose of helping people find what they want or need.

Critics feel ads compel people to be greedy and create desire for unnecessary items. While there are certainly plenty of unneeded items advertised on tv, magazines, newspapers and websites, it is not the advertiser creating greed, but rather the value system of the person watching or reading the ad.

UNDERMINING OURSELVES

Naturally, if we are undermining the ability to receive what we want, get in our own way, or are not qualified to do what we promote,  our requests won’t be met.

But, my experience working with business owners is that they are usually quite realistic in knowing what they want, they just need help defining it in specific terms and they don’t ask for it in their promotion. They don’t “put out to the universe” their true spirit or unique attributes and explain how that will help their prospective market.

Appropriate methods for this practice, such as a series of educational articles, blogs, presentations or similar – when sent to potential clients – can prove exceptionally successful when the message rings true to the reader. More importantly, it allows the business owner to express their own spirit and beliefs, so they will attract like-minded clients who want what they have.

There are as many ways to apply this spiritual practice of ‘putting out there’ or promotion as one can creatively dream up—from postcards to websites, from live events to billboards or sliding down a chimney—to get your point across.

The point is that the marketing tactic cannot be properly selected until the request is defined. Mistakenly, most businesses put the tool before the horse, to horribly mix metaphors, and don’t clearly define their request or their message first. They create materials with vague or nebulous messages that confuse their market and waste thousands of promotional dollars.

Once promotion is clearly defined, it’s relatively easy to select and test the various tools to determine what attracts the kinds of people you want to help. A marketing consultant will know which tool to use to send which message to each market over time for each specific product saving the company expense and time.

YOPLAIT’S EXAMPLE

For example, Yoplait yogurt decided to promote their product to a health market by becoming a prominent sponsor of “The Race For the Cure”, proceeds of which go to find the cure for breast cancer.

They were clear about what female market they targeted with their product and found a visible way to reach them through publicity for the races, signage at events, handing out their product to race runners, and visibility in just about every direction at the race itself.

Additionally, they run broadcast commercial promotion to a wide consumer market. Selecting these two avenues for promotion in tandem has not only given the product exposure but also helped them develop an image of healing women. Most people feel better buying products they know are using proceeds to help support a cause they believe in called “cause marketing”.

When Fedex created its “Absolutely, positively gets there overnight” campaign, don’t you think they were obviously responding to an unfulfilled need in the market? They used this extremely clear message to easily demonstrate exactly how they helped people and businesses? Sure, it was a huge risk to guarantee overnight delivery, and they paid dearly in their learning process. But the company developed such careful management systems for distribution and verification that they set the standard for their industry and have branded their service far faster and more clearly than any of their competitors.

That’s good promotion! How can you apply that to your business?

Sharing wisdom is actually what advertising and promotion is all about. Educating those who need our help is the soul of marketing. And helping our clients is the purpose of our business. That’s why I think of marketing as if it’s a kind of ‘spiritual’ practice. No, not religious, but soulful or the outward direction of the spirit of our business goals.

Almost every spiritual practice has a priest, wise woman (or man), holy person, shaman or spiritual leader who professes the truth to those who wish to learn.

As a business owner, it is our own spiritual quest to profess this truth—our knowledge or education about how our products/services can help others—in an inspired message to those in need.

A common mistake of business owners, usually in their early stages of development, is a lack of sharing this specific, critical information.

For example, common marketing wisdom states that if a company plans to run an advertisement, it should run at least 6-12 times before evaluating its effectiveness, as it takes that many “impressions” of seeing it before it sinks in and takes hold of the very busy people from whom we are trying to evoke a response.

It is important to educate your customers or potential market so they can understand how to use what you offer. The world’s great leaders, like the Ghandi, spent most of their lives educating their “market” -their constituents-  or those they were trying to influence through their teachings, prayer, and practices. As business owners, we could learn a lesson from them: If we spend more time teaching and less time telling people they need our products, we may move further along in our divine purpose.

As one observes the great world leaders from the Dalai Lama to Martin Luther King, we notice that even our great leaders spread their message through the use of many media—from word of mouth, to television interviews, direct mail, teaching and lecturing, and e-news or websites.

It is important to mix our messages into many type of media in order to reach as wide a target market as we can since not everyone watches tv, opens direct mail pieces, or follows Twitter.

And lest you think I’m being sacreligious comparing the gospel of our great leaders to marketing, well, it’s time you rethink your perception of marketing: It’s a practice that’s all about helping people. And in the thousands of clients I’ve helped, I’ve only ever met one person who was just in business to make money and not truly devoted to helping people in some way.

If you need marketing insight and services, we’re here to help. After all, Knowledge is Bliss.

This week we’re featuring our amazing client “One World Music” to showcase their demo video. We worked with the company’s creative director, Gary Muszinski, as well as stellar video editor and filmmaker Rick Wise, advising them how to strengthen the marketing points to show  the vast benefits of the company’s valuable training for organizations.

Let us know what you think: Would you hire them to train your teams to play and work together more productively? Don’t they look like more fun than a boring powerpoint speaker?

http://www.oneworldmusic.com/media/full_player.php

from my old blog: Saturday, April 5, 2008


I just read that Kaiser, the behemoth healthcare association in California, only signed up 100,000 new members last year. And that despite their fabulous ad campaign about ‘thriving’ using Allison Janney to voice over clever scripts about how eating blueberries and staying healthy is Kaiser’s mission. Well, of course it is. If you stay healthy, Kaiser saves money. Still, it was such a nice campaign, don’t you think?

It seems to me that Kaiser must have one awful sales force of brokers (or they’re not incentivized enough to sell Kaiser) if they can only find 100K new members.

As a small business owner, I can authoritatively comment on the awful selection of health coverage today–insane prices for awful coverage. Or programs that are so confusing to understand you can’t possibly get your value from the coverage. Or insurance providers like Aetna who loses every claim one submits, has the absolute worst customer service and earns their money apparently by ripping off customers.

Sure, this is a rant, but there’s a marketing lesson here. Advertising alone just doesn’t work. A successful company in today’s world needs a great product with decent customer service, great marketing and a solid sales force.

If Kaiser can’t even get it right in this aging baby boomer society of ours, who can? I think it’s the small businesses who are filling these needed niches. What do you think?

from my old blog: Sunday, April 13, 2008


81% of consumers prefer to purchase from companies with a ‘green focus’. Don’t you prefer to do business with those kinds of companies? Of course, that concern is so top of mind for most of us now that Al Gore has taught us the deeper truth.

I made a big mistake.

I stopped promoting the ‘green’ purpose of my own company figuring it sounded like ‘marketing hype’, I now realize the error of my ways — I’m not really speaking my truth if I don’t let people know my beliefs and help my own clients bring a green focus to their worthy businesses. Especially, when change is often very easy. . .

Here’s a simple example: I asked my gym to switch to a greener floor cleaner when the chemical lysol smell gagged me after ramping up my heart rate on my spinning cycle. They were happy to make that change not realizing how it bothered customers in a ‘health’ club — funny isn’t it? They laughed too and immediately switched cleaners and then started PROMOTING how green their health club was. See, easy change, big difference for me! And judging by the dozen sweaty club members who winked at me when I made that request, the club probably saved a good chunk of revenue (over time) too.

We all want to make a difference. So, I contributed content and examples to this article for the East Bay Business Times to stimulate ideas on steps we can all take—large or small.

I’d like to add a comprehensive list to my website for my clients and readers of my blog. So, please write a comment below to let us all know what you’re doing so that you inspire us to go just that much further in our efforts.

Remember: “Knowledge is Bliss” and lack of it can get you into trouble.