Instant Mobile Videos: Infomercials in Three Minutes
This column was written in August 2009 for Smart Business Network.
If you read USA Today, you know that the use of Facebook is growing as a marketing vehicle. The Gannett paper covers Twitter and other social media in a comprehensive way.
In early August 2009, I clipped Jefferson Graham's "Facebook's a Great Friend to Businesses". The article mentions seven examples of small and large businesses using Facebook's Pages feature for marketing. Pages is a relatively new service that makes it possible for you to create a Facebook page for your business or organization. Facebook's social features like "friends" are available as are dozens of Facebook add ins so you can notify "friends" or public visitors of new products, services, executives, or any other type of business-related information you want to make available. Facebook is potent marketing tool.
I continue to recommend that small- and mid-sized businesses sign up for a Facebook Pages account. Just follow the links from this location http://www.facebook.com/r.php. Another approach is to ask a recent college grad to handle the mechanics for you. With 250 million members, you have a good chance of tapping an avid Facebook user. You will be joining the 300,000 other businesses who want to tap this vibrant social network.
What I want to explore in this column is a way to create real-time videos that showcase your company's products, new hires, and success stories. You do not need the traditional TV crew with its white van, satellite dishes, and six figure price tags. You will need an Apple iPhone 3GS or equivalent device from Nokia, LG, BlackBerry, or Android.
The basic idea is to make these videos in real time yourself. You will need some software on your Apple iPhone and a Twitter account in addition to your Facebook Pages account. The bird's-eye view of this process is to ask a satisfied customer to give his or her first name and describe their view of your firm's product or service. Once the video is on the iPhone, you can review it and ask your customer to add a comment or repeat a statement. You will want to get the permission of the person whom you video to use the snippet, but you can show the person the 20 to 60 second video snippet. You then upload the video with a descriptive phrase to an online video distribution service. Most services will then craft a Twitter "tweet" informing your followers of the video. The automated "tweet" generator includes a link to your video. Click and you have an instant video distribution system.
To recap, from your Apple iPhone 3GS, you have created a video about your company, made it available to those interested in your company and tapped into the notification capabilities of social networks. What I find remarkable is that the entire process takes less than three to four minutes for short videos.
Why is this real-time digital video worth doing?
There are three reasons, and you will undoubtedly identify more once you explore this marketing and communications technique. First, short videos are popular and entering the mainstream as a potent marketing technique. Your firm may only have a handful of customers. When you inform those customers that a short 30 to 60 second video is available, a click on that link displays the video. You are able to deliver a believable, brief reminder about the value of your company's products or services. Second, once you own a device like the iPhone, the other components of distributing and alerting are free. Yes, free. Compare that value to the cost of producing a 60 second spot for a local cable challenge. Third, you can generate these videos in real time. When something important happens, you can blast out the information. Compared to a news release or a traditional Web log post, you are chopping hours, maybe days or even weeks, out of the message time line.
Let me backtrack and mention the software you will need to create your real-time marketing video. I want to focus on the Apple iPhone 3GS. That device is wildly popular and includes helpful software so you can do some easy editing of your video in your mobile device. Remember. No expensive digital video editing hardware or software. The idea is to create a video and get it online quickly. Speed in the digital ecosystem is what makes this marketing approach different from more traditional approaches. Immediacy and the realness of the video are what make the medium magnetic.
Next, you will want to download to your iPhone an application called Twitvid.com. There are alternatives available such as Twitterfon.com. These software ask you for your Twitter account information and some other basic facts, including your email address. These software products will send you an email with the url of your video in a short form. None of your customers and prospects wants to deal with an ungainly url which can be easily mistyped or corrupted with an errant line feed.
You get the okay of your video subject or just shoot your video for a product demonstration. The iPhone has a built in microphone so it will capture your narrative or the comments of the person with whom you speak. Twitvid.com will display a "new post" option. The recording begins. When you have the video, the iPhone's built in editing software makes it easy to chop out the unwanted segments of the video. You then hit the "upload" button, the Twitvid software performs these operations automatically: [1] the video is uploaded and you receive an email of the location of the video, [2] notification that the video is available is automatically sent out as a "tweet" of 140 characters on Twitter, [3] the video is automatically posted to your Facebook Pages and YouTube. You can work thorough a tutorial prepared by Shout Me Loud at http://www.shoutmeloud.com/twitvid-capture-and-share-videos-on-twitter-from-mobile-phone.html
Let me give you an example of how one person created a testimonial for a specialty restaurant in Mexico City. The person creating the video was a tourist who wanted to share his enthusiasm for the Lagunilla Market. You can view the video at http://img36.yfrog.com/i/5ql.mp4/. You can locate real time videos by navigating to http://www.twitter.com/yfrog. (Yfrog is a popular real-time video hosting site which integrates with Twitter.com.) You can search for iPhone videos on YouTube.com or one of the other popular video indexing services such as Metacafe.com.
To wrap up, I want to offer some examples of ways you can use real time videos in your business.
Most organizations have a Web site. Our research at ArnoldIT.com reveals that news is one of the most popular types of information on commercial Web sites. The real time videos that you and your team create at trade shows, at customer locations, or in your office are news. You can post an item on the news section of your Web site that explains the subject of the video, a synopsis of what the viewer will see, and other details such as the problem solved or the name of the customer who is showcased. You include the link to the video for your Facebook Pages, YouTube.com, and Twitvid.com copy of the file. Note that the video is not on your Web site. You point to the video with your Webmaster configuring the link to open a new window so your site visitor does not navigate away from your Web site. You have created news about your organization. You can, if you have a traditional public relations system in place, issue a news release that sends out a brief story to newspapers and journalists.
Second, you can use these real time videos as marketing collateral. You may find that showing a prospect a testimonial from a satisfied customer will close a sale. At ArnoldIT.com we use a Dell Mini 9 netbook with a Verizon wireless connection to show the real time video Exalead (www.exalead.com) made of me explaining my evaluation of that firm's content processing system. This real time video has paid dividends for Exalead and for me, leading to two consulting engagements. From my own experience, I know real time videos sell. You can view my instant video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PL8LGXw8cI.
Finally, the real time video distributed via social networks are one of the newest marketing tools. If your organization begins with a small scale test of this approach, you will be in the forefront of online marketers. With real time video a proven winner among those under the age of 30, today's real time video becomes the foundation of more sophisticated network marketing methods. For example, you can create a profile for you on LinkedIn.com and post the video's availability on that service.
If you want to know more about creating real time videos, you can find a wealth of information on YouTube.com. Run the query "real time video marketing" and see the method in action.
Stephen Arnold
ArnoldIT.com
August 7, 2009