Telling Compelling Stories With Video

Video is a powerful storytelling medium. Just ask Thomas Clifford, who has been using video for many years to tell some great stories. Many of them might have seemed dull or unclear at the outset, but video and smart storytelling can work real magic.

We’re seeing quite a few startups use video prominently on their website as a quick and very helpful way to show off their products. This makes a lot of sense; not because what they’ve built is necessarily complicated or difficult to understand, but because visuals are almost always more compelling and interesting than text. I can read five bullet points that speak to your value proposition, or you can just show me.

Short videos also force you to think creatively and distill your value proposition down to its very essence. You don’t want to ramble in a video; it looks a lot worse than rambling in text. So you have to put considerable effort and thought into what story you want to tell and how. And why you’re telling it.

Video = good. There, simple.

Now for a more personal connection to the power of video and storytelling. Stresslimitdesign was engaged by Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) to produce a short video about greening corporate fleets. Pardon? Greening corporate what exactly? You want to paint my feet green? Not feet – fleet. Cars. Lots and lots and lots of cards. Corporate fleets are big in the US. There are millions of corporate fleet cars. And they create a lot of pollution. EDF wanted to promote the importance of making corporate fleets a bit more environmentally friendly. This isn’t about a couple kids with Methos and bottle of soda. This isn’t some chubby Star Wars fanatic swinging around a light saber. It’s a serious topic, difficult to promote and get people excited about.

Stresslimitdesign took on the challenge and put an immense amount of work into creating the video you see embedded below. Soon we’ll be releasing a “How To” micro-site that walks through how the video was created. But what makes this video particularly cool (at least for me) is that I did the voice over! That’s right … click the play button on the video and you’ll get a chance to hear yours truly. I used the best “announcer voice” I could muster. It took about 2 hours to get right. I hope you enjoy it!

Please do me a huge favor and help spread this video around. It’s important to get the message out there, and everyone deserves to hear me, right? *smile*

Free E-Book “ClickPredictions” on Content Marketing Trends

ClickPredictions Content Marketing and Trends for 2010

I’m a big believer in content marketing. I’ve produced content to help market and promote my own business, and I’ve seen it used successfully by others as well. One of the biggest challenges with content marketing is that the barrier to produce content online is so low, everyone can do it. As a result, the quality of content online has dropped significantly. Noise goes up, signal goes down. Such is life. As a result, the bar is continuously being raised on the expectations that your audience has in terms of content quality and delivery.

Here’s a free e-book that can help — ClickPredictions: Key Content Marketing Trends and Predictions for 2010 (PDF download)

The e-book was produced by ClickDocuments. It’s a good refresher on the key content and social media marketing trends for the coming year. ClickDocuments and Ambal Balakrishnan collected predictions and thoughts from 39 top B2B content marketers. Folks like Gordon Graham, Rick Liebling, Michael Stelzner, Doug Kessler, Dave Fleet, Sunil Malhotra and many more. The e-book was also sponsored by Marketo. So there’s a great collection of people who participated, and a lot of actionable content to share.

Full disclosure: I’m not published in the e-book but I did help with its production. I work from time to time with a great digital design and development agency, Stresslimitdesign. They recently did a kick ass redesign of Julien Smith’s blog. Stresslimitdesign did the e-book design (which I think is beautiful) and then I helped them out with a couple of cool (hopefully!) marketing ideas:

  1. Customized toolbar. We created a custom browser toolbar for the e-book that kicks in whenever you click a link from within the e-book itself. The toolbar will show up at the top of your browser window. I’ve included a screenshot below. The purpose of the toolbar is to introduce you to other valuable B2B content (from Marketo) covering email marketing, demand generation and lead management. You can minimize the toolbar if you like, but when you click on the buttons, you’re taken to a landing page for more content. We’re using the ClickPredictions e-book as a content marketing test itself by implementing the toolbar. My hypothesis is that it will be better appreciated than the popups that we often see on sites asking you to join a newsletter (although I know they’re very effective), and a great way to stay connected with people who download the free e-book. But we’ll have to wait and see what happens.

    e-book toolbar

  2. ReTweet This to Slideshare. Of course, we want people to share the e-book as much as possible. And there’s a very nice page halfway through that provides readers with some options on how to share the content. But we also wanted to give as much credit as possible to each individual contributor and give readers as much flexibility as possible in terms of what content they wanted to share. So we implemented “ReTweet This” buttons for each prediction in the e-book. What’s cool is that each one of these will retweet a link to the actual page of content in question on Slideshare. The entire e-book is available on Slideshare. But you can also just retweet a specific prediction and it will link to the specific page inside the e-book on Slideshare. I’ve never seen that done before, but I think it’s a very smart way to let readers retweet pieces of content they particularly enjoy and highlight each contributor just a little bit more.

It was a fun project to work on, and I hope you enjoy it.

Click here to download ClickPredictions

What are the Social Media Roadblocks for Companies?

FlasherSeth Godin hits the nail on the head in reference to using the Web and social media for your business:

The problem is no longer budget. The problem is no longer access to tools.

The problem is the will to get good at it.

There also remains a very pervasive fear within companies (especially at the C-level) to opening up. I recently said to someone, “It’s time to expose yourself under that kimono.” We’ll see if I get that project or not… *smile*

Unfortunately, too many mid-level and junior-level employees are forced to spend a disproportionate amount of their time figuring out how to justify things to their bosses and how to create corporate policies that will calm executives’ nerves. If your company needs to spend a year developing appropriate, legally-binding, bullet-proof, fully documented corporate social media policies before someone at your organization can get on Twitter and say, “hi!” … you’re f-cked.

image courtesy of shutterstock

P.S. That’s not me in the picture…

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Ben Yoskovitz
I'm VP Product at GoInstant.

I'm also a Founding Partner at Year One Labs, an early stage accelerator in Montreal. Previously I founded Standout Jobs (and sold it). MY BIO >>

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