Earlier today, ReelSEO’s Grant Crowell interviewed Brian Solis, a social media expert and author of Engage and the End of Business as Usual: Rewire the Way You Work to Succeed in Customer Revolution. Throughout the interview, one notion comes up multiple times: businesses need to adapt to today’s online, social landscape or they will fail. Below is an excerpt from Gran’t conversation with Brian.
So Brian, what role do you see online video production playing as part of this transformation for businesses – as part of this “change agent” you’re mentioning here?
I’m glad you’ve asked me this since I’ve been experimenting with video editing a lot myself, recently. I believe that the future of business is storytelling, and video must play an increasingly important part in that – whether it’s an organization, whether it’s a company, whether it’s the government.
While we’re seeing some very interesting examples of video used in storytelling today, we’ll really sort of seeing it still from a monologue standpoint. Now an organization may have one or more videos that is interesting or sharable (or even goes viral), but they’re mostly designed with a top-down marketing take. Meaning that, these enterprises have the mentality of, “I want to create this one video and I want a big bunch of people to see it” – rather than it actually becoming a part of the day-to-day communication – much like we would see an e-mail or phone chat; or in some regards, even tweeting and blogging.
Video production storytelling puts a human face, puts an emotion in the way that other mediums can’t handle; or, are not designed to handle. I think that video is among the more perfect social objects there. Especially with all of the new technology taking place because you can carve it, you can edit it, you can remix it, you can just take out certain snippets that are appropriate for your audience; and you can have the voice, the person, the character, whatever it is, bring the story to life in just such a wonderful and engaging way that really what we’re talking about doing is not just engaging the viewer, but causing the viewer to share it; and then more importantly, to take action. So I actually believe that we haven’t even begun to see what’s possible yet (with online video for business communications).
So could you see companies assigning their own ambassadors around online video editing? I.e., people who can participate via video production to offer these experiences – where the technology is getting so much better now where you can have real time interaction, engagement; and where there can be multiple streams of conversation?
Oh man, well if anybody knows the answer to that it’s you guys at ReelSEO. But yeah, I say absolutely. What you’re mentioning here is one of the things that are most fascinating to me with online video editing and where I see it going. Take Google Hangouts for example: when that was launched, Michael Dell (of Dell computers) personally announced to everyone that they were thinking about using Google Hangouts for hosting customer conversations, having live dynamic discussions around certain topics. You could see maybe the Apple Genius Bar doing the same thing – scheduling calls with as many people using Skype or Google Hangouts to have these discussions. What a wonderful way to bring the brand to life through these “video ambassadors,” through these representatives who then embody sort of all the characteristics of what the brand is, what it’s stands for, it’s mission and values.
But, you know, what we start to get into the territory that again comes down to change. You have to first design that experience. You have to design the representative’s characteristics and mannerisms and passion and words and the persona, and what they’re going to represent. All of these have to be designed, much like old-school style guides used to have to be designed for brand usage. Now we’re talking about sort of the persona of the brand, the brand essence.
The problem is, businesses are not defining that right. The closest things they have are either the style guide, or the mission and vision statements. If you read some of those, I mean, my goodness, those must have been written by marketers; they actually don’t speak to you at all.
So this is at a time where a business could look at that and say, you know, what do we stand for? What is our mission and vision? Because if we’re going to use video to bring that to life, if we’re going to put real human beings on camera, what are they going to do? What are they going to say? What are they standing for? And more importantly, what do we want people to see? And what do we want them to align with?
Visit ReelSEO to see the entire interview. For help implementing video production and video editing with your business, visit Video One Pro to see what we can do for you.
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