Third-party credibility: the keystone of any good PR effort. Your potential customers are always more interested to hear what their peers have to say about you than what you have to say about yourself. As an old colleague of mine used to say, every mother is going to call her son handsome, regardless of the facts of the matter. As such, PR departments for years have anchored much of their work around customer testimonials. Written case studies are often the most reliable tool PR people have at their disposal.
AND YET, the written word can still be viewed with a skeptical eye: If it appears in a company’s newsletter, surely the message has been massaged and sanitized! While good PR folks adhere to the strictest of journalistic standards, there is still room for doubt when you see a glowing quote from a customer in writing.
That’s why, about two years ago, I started taking a video camera with me to every customer jobsite I visited. We were already spending the time and resources to travel and interview customers, why wouldn’t we also videotape the interviews and capture jobsite footage at the same time? Since then, every case study we produce for that client has a video element to it, shot in an interview/documentary style, that reinforces the main themes in the written case study and shows without a shadow of a doubt the authenticity of the comments: ultimate third-party credibility.
That just scratches the surface of the possibilities that video provides. With the absolute explosion of social media and advanced Web channels, there is now more opportunity than ever to spread the good word about your company or product. PR departments should act as mobile newsrooms. An HD video camera, a high-res DSLR still camera (or a camera that features BOTH) and a good microphone fit easily into a shoulder-mounted bag. Anything that’s worth capturing in writing is worth capturing on video. The possibilities are endless:
- Your website: Everything looks better with video.
- YouTube: The second largest search engine in the world is a great venue to build a channel dedicated to your products and your customers, and help drive traffic back to your website. There are huge SEO benefits here as people are more likely to click on search results that appear with a video link and a thumbnail image that teases them with the content at a glance.
- Social media and networking: Share content and engage your audience — video helps bring that to life. People are also more likely to click on video links, and a video is more likely to go viral than an article.
- Traditional trade press: Good press knows that the Web is not a means to destroy print, but to supplement it. More and more editors are asking for videos each day (although some media outlets are charging for the service).
- Trade shows: Big industry trade shows provide a venue attended by the best and brightest representatives from your company. Take advantage of this by capturing appealing content. Same-day video capture and production further helps you bring your story to your “fans” as it’s happening.
Bottom line: We’re trying to sell products, sure, but we also have to be storytellers. The decision for a person to stay engaged with a piece of content or move on to something else is made within a matter of seconds. In the age of the short attention span, well-crafted visual stimulation will help engage and retain viewers, which helps ensure that your message is heard loud and clear.
If you’ve been intimidated by video in the past, technology has improved and made it more accessible to the masses. You can go as advanced as you want (large crew, heaps of equipment) or as simple (one dude with a camera). Either way, the credibility factor of a good testimonial is taken up an entire notch when their peers actually SEE them say it, versus only seeing it in the written word. Get filming.
By way of example, here’s a recent story/video package we did for a client.
Editor’s note: Post written by Bill Elverman, with Jim Hibbs and Dan Johnson.
Tags: public relations, technology, trade media
