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: (more…)