The Value of Video
It is amazing how disarming a camera can be in the face of an otherwise articulate person.
It happens to virtually everyone: they are calm, confident, and eloquent normally, but turn on the camera, and suddenly it all goes to the dogs. We see this blinkless eye beaming at us and suddenly our brilliant trains of thought vanish and we are left dumbfounded, self-conscious, and fumbling. And it’s all being recorded.
Speaking on camera is a skill and it takes a lot of practice. This is maybe one reason a lot of companies opt for animations these days instead of live filming. Regardless of whether it is live filming or some form of animation, the value of video for a business can be tremendous.
For starters, every frame in video is important. This forces you to streamline your message down to the absolute essentials — a powerful exercise in itself. The limitations of time make you focus your message and articulate what your business does in its essence. Perhaps a narrative or analogy will be most effective; perhaps a case study. Whatever it is, the message must be clean, clear, and easy to understand, typically in 2 minutes or less.
Once you have a good video made, there is a lot you can do with it. Video is more easily digested than text or still images. It’s the fastest, simplest way of communicating a message, and that message can travel quickly to any number of people.
But the use of video doesn’t have to stop at just having a clear description of your business for your website’s homepage. If you can make video a core competence of your organisation, you can begin to use it for all kinds of applications. A presentation of a proposal can be watched by board members on their own time and passed around to all relevant parties. Customers can be educated on how to use a product or service. A video can be made quickly to explain a company’s process for maintaining a CRM and that video will not only be accessible to the whole sales team immediately, it will also be available for future reference if something has been forgot.
Video as a medium is very powerful, but creating good videos is not easy. Something with a clean look can be made relatively simply, but the message behind that video must be streamlined and focused, and that’s what takes the most work. It is, however, work well worth doing. Whatever business you may have, it is worth exploring the potentials of video in relationships with team members, customers, investors, and anyone else involved.
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http://www.rapidinnovation.co.uk/ Shields Russell
