Video Interview Tips for Social Media Campaigns

Social media evangelists and/or those that are communicating with the public via online communities need to be trained appropriately on how to respond to questions from a public relations perspective.  Opening the flood gates on all your employees to take part in social media is probably not the best idea to start with especially at a medium to large company (1000+ people). They need to be trained and get familiar with how to engage in conversations in a honest, truthful method.

In doing video interviews for social media purposes here are some tips:

• Write an outline of what you are going to talk about it (I assume those topics have been cleared by your PR team)
• Make sure you are comfortable in answering questions in an impromptu way. If the interviewer asks you a question, you better know how to respond to it directly, honestly, and all within the same shot
• Make sure with every video you do has a call to action – where do people go for more information? Make sure you know the web site url (or as Joe Biden would like to say the web site number, you know the ip address, right?..j/k 🙂 )
• Keep it to 30-seconds to 3 minutes. If the video is longer split it up into a series.
• Make sure the person you are interviewing is engaging and has a good, clear communication style. If you think people are going to fall asleep within 15 seconds of hearing him/her then coach him on how to change his style, tone, and facial gestures.
• The video should be in one continuous shot. Why? You really want the viewers to feel like they are there interviewing the person and not being coached by the interviewee. Style should be a causal conversation.

That’s all for now. What do you think? Do you have any additional suggestions for video interviews that are being distributed online via communities & social networks?  Add a comment below.

-Randy
http://twitter.com/djksar

Aggregate Your Brand’s Feeds with Netvibes

I’ve been trying to find a good way to aggregate all the public feeds for a particular brand and I came upon netvibes which easily allows me to import rss feeds and any other type of content that is public using their widget technology. I could of used myyahoo or igoggle but to my knowledge there isn’t a public non-password protected page that I can customize. Netvibes allows me to have a personalized private page and a public viewable page with whatever content that I can import via rss or any open source content. There are plenty of datasources accessible via their widget gallery such as adding your twitter feed or flickr feed. Here is a video demo (that I uploaded to blip.tv – was the best flash 8 conversion of a .mov movie vs. viddler’s flash version which is what I usually use).

Have you used netvibes before? Let me know what widgets you have tried and found useful. Do you use any other type of service like this? Could Google Reader be used in this way? Post your comments below.

-Randy

2am video from Viddler.com CEO

Here is a video by Robert Sandieman, President and co-founder of Viddler.com (video sharing web site) that loves his product just a little too much since he did the video at 2am! Nonetheless, a president that shows that he actually uses his product instead of just talking about it plus having fun with it is great evangelism and adds to the personality of the Viddler brand. Enjoy the below video and add your comments  .

-DJ Ksar

Video of Dirty Invites : Facebook App Invites vs. StumbleUpon

I did a short video recap of Facebook application invites flow (specifically StumbleUpon) verse StumbleUpon’s actual web site invite flow. Enjoy and add your comments below.

-DJ Ksar

Ibeatyou.com, Jessica Alba, and Sharing

Ibeatyou.com was just announced last week and is a site for creating online competitions via video, photo, or simple text. One scenario I thought of since it is the start of the baseball season let’s have a competition of who can mimic their favorite baseball pitcher. From the mound habits, their stance, and the eventual throw every pitcher has a habit that they do for every pitch. What comes to my mind is Hall-of-Famer Dennis Eckersley with his side-arm pitch! Remember that? Unforgettable at least if you are a A’s baseball fan! Anyways, that is an example that I thought of and will challenge you later on in April, when the season officially starts.

To launch iBeatyou.com, the company created a video competition on their site titled Best Group Lip Dub. Who out there can do the best lip sync to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” or perhaps Britney Spears’ “I did it again”? Pick any song, grab a couple of friends and upload your video to their site. Unfortunately, no prizes were/are involved, iBeatyou.com is assuming that you just want all the glory of winning the competition voted on by their users. To get the competition kick-started, all their employees and a certain preggers celebrity named Jessica Alba did a group dub to the Panic of the Disco song “Nine in the Afternoon”. Check out the very entertaining (and catchy) video below:

The site is version 0.1 and in my mind still needs some UI tweaking especially with the sharing functionality of the site. I wanted to share the video on my Facebook page but there was no way to do it plus when I clicked on my share Facebook bookmark (within my browser) it didn’t recognize the page as having a video. Even if you are starting your own video social network site you got to have the functionality of sharing on other networks. The only share functionality that is on the video detail page is a button below the video jammed in with 6 other buttons (refer to image below in the next paragraph). The sharing moment for the user should come right after they watch it within the video player.

Here is a snapshot of ibeatyou.com video detail page for the Jessica Alba video with the orange highlight box being the video player and top buttons in addition to the blue highlight being the one share button. Note the share button is not displayed after the user watches the video. I understand their main goal is get people to “compete” and upload videos but when your company is first starting and needs to spread their reach, off-network sharing functionality is key.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Check out the difference in Yahoo! Video on one of my video detail pages:

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Check out Viddler.com‘s video detail page with the share buttons highlighted in blue. Also, note the copy treatment is different here with: Email This, Get Link, and Embed This while other sites just have the copy: Share This, Share It or Share.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

And finally here is YouTube‘s sharing functionality highlighted:

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Let me know your comments on ibeatyou.com, Jessica Alba’s appearance in the video, and sharing functionalities on video upload web sites. BTW, snapshots are provided by a cool new Mac tool called Skitch – check it out at http://skitch.com

-DJ Ksar