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From IMC of St. Louis, http://www.imcstloius.org Technology Lights, Camera, ACTION! ___________
Power Up Your Practice, and Your Profits, With Easy, Affordable Business Video ______________
By Larry Crain, Consultant and Speaker
Video is the most powerful and persuasive business communications medium available today. Until recently, however, the difficulty and expense of producing and distributing a program put video out of reach for most consultants.
Today, consumer digital camcorders cost as little as $400, can shoot broadcast-quality pictures and sound, and are “point-and-click” easy to use. Every recent PC has included a FREE program that will import that raw video footage, allow you to quickly edit it into a business-quality program, and then output your program to video tape. Or post it on your web site. Or even to burn it to DVD or CD. And those programs are so simple that grade-school children are using them for class projects.
Video distribution options are also now numerous and attractive. In modest quantities, you can burn, print, package, and mail a DVD for under five bucks a copy. There are also web-based businesses that offer you the video equivalent of print-on-demand, complete with your own online storefront. Or you can distribute your video projects electronically: your web site can broadcast your program to a nationwide, even a worldwide, audience.
In other words, it is now both easy and affordable for a consultant to create and distribute his or her own business-quality video programs. This new, cost-effective Desktop Business Video technology offers you a wide array of opportunities to improve your services, your sales, and your bottom line.
This is the first of a series of ten articles which will introduce you to this exciting new technology. We will show you how to produce your own business-quality video, affordably and with just a modest investment of time and effort. We’ll walk you through a series of practical, hands-on projects to build your skill and experience. And your “final project” will be an actual product: a business video that you can offer for sale on DVD and/or via the internet.
Nine Nifty Notions to Boost Your Business Along the way, we also hope to tweak your imagination. Each of the nine subsequent articles will introduce a specific way you might take advantage of video to boost your business. These nine notions will focus on three important areas:
1. Presenting More Powerfully Let’s face it: as consultants, we sell hot air, flickering shadows, and smudged paper. Our primary product is our expertise and our insights, which we deliver verbally, visually, and in writing. Thus, the more effectively we can present and communicate our ideas, the more impact they will have, and the more valuable they will be to our clients. Our first few “notions” will therefore focus on ways we can use video to give our presentations more polish, more punch, and more persistence.
2. Marketing More Memorably A key challenge for most consultants is securing “that next engagement”. We need effective ways to make contact with prospects, to clearly communicate our unique value proposition, to lead the prospect to a decision to accept that proposition... and often, to then help our new customer support and justify that engagement to superiors and stakeholders. Clearly, video cannot replace person-to-person contact. But as we’ll see, video can play several valuable supporting roles in our marketing processes.
3. Earning More ... Effortlessly Many consultants are still stuck selling services; we’re so busy just making a living that we never quite get around to writing and publishing that book which will turn our expertise into an effortless income stream.
But here’s good news: a salable video product can be created more quickly and more easily than a book, can be published for less, and can then earn more per copy. Work your way through all the “homework” exercises included in this article series and you’ll end up with such a salable product.
Note that these “nine notions” are intended to illustrate the possibilities, and to trigger your creativity. That’s because the BEST ideas will be the ones that are specific to your own practice, ideas you discover, or which are contributed by your partners and clients. So we strongly urge you to start soliciting and capturing those bright ideas to boost your business.
What Will You Need? Over the course of this series, these articles will walk you through the specific equipment and programs that you will need -- eventually -- to shoot, edit, and publish your own business-quality videos. If you will need something for the “homework” associated with the “next article”, we’ll let you know a month in advance.
But if you would like to start identifying and assembling your key resources, here are the three critical “big ticket” items. You probably already own at least one or two:
1. Digital Video (DV) Camcorder: You can get started with your old analog (VHS, Hi-8, Beta) camcorder. But to shoot business-quality audio and video, and to edit it efficiently, you will eventually need one of the newer, digital models. If you don’t already have one, or a friend who will loan you one, suitable MiniDV camcorders are available from every major manufacturer, starting at under $500 anywhere consumer electronics are sold. But don’t go shopping yet: a subsequent article will go into features-and-functions, so that you can pick one that best meets your need and get the best value for your investment.
2. A Video Editing Program: If your desktop or laptop computer is less than three or four years old, you probably already have a suitable video editing program: it came bundled free with your computer.
The best bundled editor is iMovie. Running on the Mac, it is part of an integrated suite (iLife) which also includes DVD creation, digital photo management, a digital music jukebox, and a music creation program. If your practice has only Windows PCs, your alternative is MovieMaker, which Microsoft included with Win-XP.
Both programs are easy to use, yet surprisingly powerful. An iMovie-edited feature-length production, for instance, was recently the surprise hit of both the Sundance and Cannes film festivals.
(Eventually, you may choose to upgrade to a more powerful program: several are available for either platform, at prices starting in the low hundreds. But with this power comes complexity. So stick with the “free and easy” packages, at least until you’re ready for a project which demands the power of a “pro-sumer” or even “professional” editing system.)
3. A PC ... a.k.a. Powerful & Capacious: To edit your video, your personal computer must have a fast processor, a FireWire interface to connect it to the camcorder, and plenty of memory. You’ll also need lots of free disk space: in editable form, an hour of digital video requires nearly 15 gigabytes.
Every Mac shipped since 2001 will fill the bill. Most recent Windows PCs will too, although you may need to install a FireWire card. In both cases, you may also need to upgrade the memory, to at least 512MB of RAM. And you may want to add a large (120GB+) hard drive, either internally, or plugged into the Firewire or USB-2 port.
If your current PC is just too ancient and feeble, it may make more sense to buy a new one. If so, a subsequent article will introduce you to a PC which includes everything you need, and which costs under $600.
Again, if you don’t have one of these three key items, DON’T rush out and buy anything. Ask around: you might be able to borrow one from a friend. And in any case, for the first few projects, all you’ll need is a camcorder, and any (working) one will do. Later, if you choose to invest in new or better tools, this series will explain what functions and features to look for, and what you can ignore or avoid.
Practice Makes Perfect One of the key challenges in producing a business video is that everyone’s a critic. 99% of your target audience has been watching professionally produced movies and TV shows for their entire lives, so they know almost instinctively what “good” video looks like.
And what “BAD” looks like: if your productions are boring, or nausea-inducing, or reminiscent of “Uncle Fred’s Old Christmas Movies”, your business video efforts may be wasted or even counterproductive.
Thus, a key goal of this series is to teach you the basic Do’s and Dont’s of “good” video, rules you’ll want to learn and follow to avoid common, embarrassing blunders.
To supplement these articles, there are many good beginners books on video production: most target consumer or broadcast video, but the same rules and principals apply to business productions. Helpful magazines and web sites are also readily available. The next article will point you to several such resources.
But the best way to learn is to actually DO some low-cost, low-risk business videos. Thus, each article will end with a “homework” assignment, which builds on that article’s topic and “Nifty Notion”. For instance...
Next Article/Homework: The second article in this series is intended to give you a “Quick Start” into making your own business videos.
We’ll cover the bare essentials in planning, shooting, and assembling a quickie video. The first “notion” will focus on using video to prepare for and polish your stand-up presentations. And the homework will be to shoot a short “for-your-eyes-only” project, to help you get comfortable both in front of and behind the camera.
Thus, to prepare for that project, you’ll need a working camcorder. For this initial project, video and audio quality are not a big concern. If all you have (or can borrow) is an old VHS, VHS-C, or 8MM model, that will work fine. Or, if you have(borrow) a digital still camera which can record and play back video clips, that would also work.
Also, the sooner you start gathering ideas for video projects which could help your business, the better. Write them down in a notebook, or post ‘em on your bulletin board, or email them to yourself and organize the messages into a mail folder.
So Let’s Begin! If you’ve made it this far, you’ve probably already identified at least a few applications where video technology could make your presentations more powerful, or your marketing more memorable, or your practice more profitable.
Your investment should be modest. Each monthly article will require a few minutes to read, plus two to four hours at your convenience to do the homework project. If you already have, or can borrow, a suitable camcorder and computer, your out-of-pocket cost to work through all the projects should be about $100. If you have to upgrade your computer, you might need to invest a few hundred. Ditto if you need to buy a new camcorder. But even if you start from scratch, and buy everything you need to start producing business-quality video, you can do so for well under $1500.
So get started with your homework assignment. And “join us again next month, same time, same station”, as we dive into the affordable, profitable, FUN world of Business Video.
Larry Crain is the owner and principal consultant of Innovation Development Enterprises of America, a technology consulting and software development firm based near St. Louis. He has been helping businesses and government agencies to understand and effectively apply computers and communications tools for over a third of a century. You can contact Larry at: CrainLA@idea-inc.com |