Posts in category: Blog

As a writer, of sorts, I hate it when people look me dead in the eye and proclaim, ‘the written word is dead’. When I hear it, it feels like all of my career choices up to this point have been nullified by those who prefer to absorb information in other ways, and believe communicating is a ‘one or the other’ exercise.

But there’s no reason to feel like this! Even in this day and age, written content still plays an integral part of business, news and information.

The difference is that written content need no longer stand alone.

Incorporating videos into online content is a great way to add another layer to your message. It’s a tried and true approach for many organisations, bloggers and news providers.

But do not be fooled into thinking that it’s a simple matter of pasting a YouTube link into your text. As writers/content creators, it’s up to us to understand the ‘sweet science’ behind intermingling the magic of video with our craft.

Create a symbiotic relationship
It all begins with a symbiotic relationship. Before you can add videos to your work, an environment has to be created where your words and your videos earn their worth by relying on each other.

• A good video can help illustrate and visually stimulate the point you are trying to make, in ways that even the most coherent text cannot do on its own.
• Well-written content provides appropriate context to a video which would otherwise be pointless imagery.

Keep videos short, sharp and to the point
Including a 10-plus-minute video in the middle of a 400 to 600-word blog is rarely effective. However relevant, a long video with rich and captivating content will command readers’ full attention, and it pulls concentration away from the content you worked so hard to develop.

A video should be used as a quick illustration. If it’s too long, people could start losing interest or they may start to believe your written content is irrelevant. But we’ll get to that…

Keep videos relevant
While people are viewing your content, the accompanying video needs to support what they just read. It should provide imagery that helps a reader on their path to better understanding your content, and therefore should be relevant. Adding a video to your content just for the sake of it can hurt your message, especially if it has nothing to do with what you’ve written.

It may be tempting to add a video to your content because it looks cool, or fun, or it shows that you’re ‘with the times’, but pointless videos distract, undermine and generally get in the way.

Never let videos outrank your content
Typically a video should complement the content, not overpower it, and should only take centre stage in an online piece in certain and rare scenarios.

 

A well-edited video may lead people to think they can get all the information they need from its entertaining imagery, which will make what you’ve worked hard to create seem redundant and irrelevant.

But there’s a problem with thinking that an in-text video has all the answers: By forsaking the text, the key points are sometimes missed entirely.

Videos should always be regarded as merely a tool to assist your content – aiding where necessary so your content can achieve its objective in the best way possible.

I have been doing a bit of media training for clients lately and it has reminded what an incredibly daunting experience it can be for people who do not deal with the media on a daily basis. For the vast majority of executives – regardless of age, experience or gender – interacting with the media for the first few times can be cause to break out in a rash and immediately commence a search for any number of reasons why it is a bad idea (delegation to someone else to ‘help’ them develop their skills is a favorite!). Why engage with the media? Doing a media interview for the first time comes from the same place the fear of public speaking comes from, amplified to the size of the prospective audience. The fear of something going horribly wrong and the consequences for your career, business and social status can be terrifying. So why the hell would you put yourself through that? Because it is great for your business. Getting your name out through earned media channels allows you to reach a bigger audience with greater credibility than you could image with your paid or owned channels. Earned media drives four times the brand lift of paid media and 51% of millennials are more likely to be influenced by earned media (BazaarVoice, 2012) than advertising. There are plenty of other reasons why you should engage with the media.

Are you a goodie or baddie? To be simplistic, most interactions with the media can be characterised as either a threat or an opportunity. How you deal with the media depends heavily on this context and if you are a goodie or a baddie. Threats are where there is a risk your name or brand could be damaged as a result of a media report. The strategies you adopt in these circumstances are vastly different to how you deal with an opportunistic engagement. It will be fairly easy to tell the difference when the time comes. If you just jagged a $2 million bonus while profits and shareholder returns declined, you are the bad guy and should expect some tough questions. Your business just went into administration leaving customers high and dry. Expect some tough questions. Like it or lump it, asking these tough questions is a journalist’s job. In these situations, harm minimisation is the main priority. However, if you haven’t ripped anybody off lately talking to the media is something you should actively be pursuing and can deliver massive return, for minimal risk. The vast majority of interactions with the media are simple exchanges of information. You have knowledge, insight and expertise that the journalist wants to tell their reader, or viewer in an interesting and engaging way. It is a simple transaction. You get your name in the paper, they get a great story to tell their audience. Nailing the interview So your PR has done their job and pitched a story and the journalist wants to have a chat. Once you accept that all they want to write is an interesting story about you and your business, it is easy to let down the defences and focus on maximising the opportunity. The Seven Ps (Prior Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Press Performance) Like anything, being prepared for a media interview will drastically improve the outcome. Your first step is to understand your audience, or more accurately, the audience of the news outlet you are talking to. Visit the publication’s website to get a feel of who they are trying to talk to. Understanding the publication will better prepare you for the kind of questions you may be asked. Take the time to red the journalists recent pieces to get an insight into what they are looking for. It is also important to develop some key message points. If you already have some key messages make sure you review them and have some proof points handy. Your proof points support your messages and are important to justify your arguments. Key messages are not advertising ‘slogans’ but are based on the things you want to communicate about your organisation. Responding to media questions will be a smoother and easier process for you, and more beneficial for your organisation, if you have established these key messages and proof points. The simpler the messages the more easily understood they will be to reporters and the public.

Practice never hurt anybody. Ask one of your colleagues to ask you a couple of questions to make sure you are in the right frame of mind. Sometimes the most basic questions can be the hardest. What is your strategy? Tell me about the history of your business? What is your pricing structure? Interview basics Once you are actually on the phone or sitting in front of the journalist there are a few things you can do make the experience positive for both you, the journalist and your organisation. The best stories come from interviews where the journalist and the subject build a rapport. Treat an interview as a conversation with an old friend you are catching up with and telling them about your great new business. Get started by asking them about their day, other stories they are working on or what they are doing on the weekend. Don’t be afraid to ask them questions as well. Always be looking for opportunities to integrate your key messages while still staying focused on the question. Nothing will annoy a journalist more than simply parroting a bunch of canned lines that has nothing to do with the question. Remember your messages are just that and an interview is not a challenge of your ability to recite stuff verbatim from a cheat card. If there is one thing you should take away from this blog about interviews it is to try andbe interesting. That is particularly important for people who are not natural salespeople but find themselves as the CEO and media spokesperson. Remember you are competing for space with other organisations. Journalists even compete for page space or airtime within their own organisation. The simpler, more interesting and exciting your answers the more likely you are to secure your share, or more. Don’t use corporatese, legalese or any other style designed to put an audience to sleep. This is boring.

“If the external environment remains stable and we can execute our strategy effectively we expect to be able to achieve future growth in line with past performance.”

The silence you can hear is the journalist asleep on the other end of the phone. This is a quote.

“We’re killing it. We’ve got the best solution in the marketplace and our competitors can’t keep up. We expect to shoot the lights out over the next couple of years.”

By adopting these few simple techniques you can earn your business thousands of dollars, sometimes millions, of free publicity. If you’re interested in undertaking our media training workshops feel free to contact me on 0415 743 838 or ben@rgcommunications.com.au

U.S. Olympic medallist and ultimate-bro Ryan Lochte has a catchline he blasts at every media opportunity post the Rio ‘robbery’ scandal: “I over-exaggerated.” This would be OK if you’re a five-year-old fibbing about the size of your Peppa Pig collection, but when you’re a 12-time Olympic gold medallist with an image to uphold, it only takes one “over-exaggeration” for you to be labelled a liar.. Forever… Across the world. And just like that, the plug is pulled on your career, and the pool water gurgles down the drain taking your millions in sponsorships with it. Bye bye, Ralph Lauren. So long, Speedo USA. Such was the case with Lochte after Rio authorities revealed that the swimming sensation’s initial recount of being “robbed” and “having a gun at his forehead” was false. During his Good Morning America interview in the weeks following, Lochte owned up to his blunder but also rapidly blamed journalists for reporting his “huge mistake” and turning it into “the worst weeks of his life.” Said Lochte; “I have a great team. They are dealing with it, all the legal issues. We’re just trying to get this over with. It’s been dragged out way [for] too long. The media has taken this to a whole new level. I want to put this behind me and move on and move forward, and I think the rest of the world wants that, too. There are other, bigger issues that this world is facing..” There’s a lot wrong with his interview – for example, blaming everything on the media is a great way to attract even further negative press – but the one standout way Lochte made this a PR disaster can be generally summed up in one way. He waited too long to say sorry. And I’m not just talking about the big picture timeline of events. In this interview, Lochte made sure to correct his version of events, made an effort to thank his team, fans and family, and discuss the negative impact of the events on both his teammates and Team USA. His semi-apology – “I’m taking full responsibility” – then came later. By this time, though, it’s too late in the discourse. Lochte’s apologies were also peppered with elements of self-defense. For example, Lochte wasn’t sorry for the incident, he was simply sorry for “not being more careful” in explaining the “traumatic” events. See the difference? Lochte has lost an estimated $1m in sponsorship agreements since the Rio incident, including been dropped from leading brands like Speedo USA and Ralph Lauren, that many hard-working, deserving athletes would jump hurdles for. His swimming career is over, but his recent drama is likely to fuel strong interest in his reality television switch when he appears on US ‘Dancing with the Stars’. In light of this, here’s a sentence that I never thought I’d find myself uttering: Can ‘Dancing with the Stars’ redeem Ryan Lochte? Here’s the crazy part… With the right PR strategy and media training, it actually could.

When developing a communications strategy it may be tempting, especially for a communications specialist answering to a higher authority, to come up with dozens of different marketing and PR delivery tactics or to get sucked into the latest piece of marketing automation tech. This is usually done in order to make a strategy seem more impressive, but having pages of points in your strategy that say things like, ‘we’ll use social media outlets’, or, ‘we’ll send a media release to all the major newspapers’ is not so impressive. If these tactics don’t have quality content backing them up, it can be counter-productive to the overall goal.

Some of the most effective strategies often take a simple ‘quality over quantity’ approach, by spending a little more time on the story that needs to be told, rather than focusing all the effort on the latest marketing and PR trends to distribute that story.

There are a few easy tips to ensure a communications strategy is not ‘all flash and no substance’.

Know the platforms – match your content to their language

Choosing communication channels for your strategy is only half the battle. The next challenge is how to communicate through those channels. For example, wanting a media release on an online news platform or in the newspaper means making sure the content is ‘news ready’. This means the release needs to be interesting, informative and written in an appropriate news style. Journalists go through a gargantuan amount of media releases, but a large number end up lining bird cages because they appear more advertorial than informative, like promoting a business rather than what the business’ accomplishments mean for news readers. Another example is using social media, where content needs to be suitable for interaction, discussion, sharing/social interaction and have character limits.

Know the audience – how do they absorb content?
This is one of the most important factors because it’s where the most can go wrong. An off-putting message or message delivery is a business-killer. Taking the time to understand your audience leads to knowing what they want to hear, and how they want to hear it.

This does not encourage lying or spin; it simply means knowing how to engage correctly.

For example, young adults are likely to lose interest with long and text-heavy emails or articles that contain unnecessarily pretentious vocabulary. It’s important to know how they absorb messages before delivering one. In the case of young adults, tailoring content to them may involve writing short and sweet pieces that get the message across in a light and conversational tone. Even a small video that can visually illustrate a point help drive a message home for this particular group.

Similarly, a political or executive audience is far more likely to take you seriously if you communicate though formal and professional content, rather than an informal ‘hey, wassup?’ piece of marketing.

Know the product – how should you talk about yourself?
Understanding the value of a product or service is the biggest element in dictating how to talk about it. A communications strategy should weigh the impact of the product or service it’s supporting, and then the content should present a tone or style that reflects that weight.

For example, trying to write a glittering academic feature for the Australian about your company’s new brand of toaster might be excessive and unrealistic, but similarly the promotion of a state-wide awards gala shouldn’t be limited to a paragraph on Wikipedia and a casual post on Twitter.

The best way to remember these points is to consider a simple truth: Before you communicate, you have to have something to say.

Video is massive. It is quickly becoming the main weapon in any marketers social or content marketing toolbox. If you’re not convinced the stats speak for themselves.

• Facebook users watch more than 4 billion video clips a day
• 64% of marketers expect video to dominate their strategies in the near future
• By 2019, 80% of all internet traffic will be video.

Still not convinced here are 31 Video marketing Statistics To Inform Your Strategy Jamming hard up against this opportunity is the clear challenge of producing video content in a simple, cost effective way. For most SMBs the days of hiring a camera operator, sound guy, producer and editor to produce 60 seconds of video for $30,000 are well and truly in the past. Thankfully, like many industries, there are lots of smart people out there finding ways to let companies produce relatively affordable video content.

Biteable

Hobart-based startup Biteable is not only slicing down that time to less than 10 minutes, but also making the process as simple as it is to create graphics on Canva and as cheap as creating professional videos can get. So how does it work? You create a free account on biteable.com; and then start making videos by selecting a ‘scene’, customising the colours and text, adding more scenes to your heart’s content, and pressing done. A watermarked version of the video will be sent to your email in 15 minutes or less; and if you’re happy with your creation, you can purchase a High Definition non-watermarked version for $99, which can then be posted anywhere online. If you’re not happy, you can always go back and edit as many times as you like. We used Biteable to create our explainer for Content on Demand. Took me one hour to create the initial video and will take half as long again next time.

Shootsta

The Shootsta platform provides large companies with the necessary training and camera kits for them to shoot their own videos, with the footage then sent back to the startup for post-production. In just six months the company has secured more than 20 clients, including Qantas, Bank of Queensland and Toyota. It has also scored a $1 million investment from AdCorp. In their own words.

“We came from the corporate video production world and constantly had clients tell us they wanted to produce internal, marketing or promotional videos every week but it was just too hard and too expensive. We realised if we could equip companies with the right gear and training they could film their own content and we could do all the heavy lifting with the post production. And that’s when Shootsta was born.”

Shootsta offers packages starting at $2,000 per month on a 12 month plan which includes 2 videos per month. The $9,800/month package includes unlimited videos, 24-hour turnaround as well asa  range of add-ons.

Big Review TV

Big Review TV Ltd is an ASX-listed group providing online video content, video reviews and online marketing services to small and medium enter- prise through bigreviewtv.com Bigreviewtv.com is a brand new video review platform aimed at consumers. It is a video review platform that integrates video review shows, video marketing, and user- generated video content with social media via the Big Review TV app. The Big Review TV App is a free video review mobile phone application that allows consumers to search and view video reviews of places of interest, and produce their own video reviews that upload automatically to Bigreviewtv.com and can be shared via social media networks. The app can also be used by merchants as a video marketing tool to communicate with customers by uploading video news and updates to their business profile page on Bigreviewtv.com It then uploads the videos to its tech platform, allowing customers hungry for reviews of products, events, restaurants and more, to actually see what they want in living colour – a big edge over a written review. Following the initial video, the company then charges subscription fees to the merchant for a place on this online eco-system – providing exposure and customer engagement for businesses while giving people access to slick video content that helps them to decide where to spend their cash. A win for everyone. Customers can then upload their own video reviews to this company’s website, adding to the community conversation and to the value of the service.