With the amount of tension in and attention on the Koreas, it was a serious interview. Professor Robert Kelly was expounding on the impeachment of South Korea’s president Park Geun-hye, during a live BBC broadcast. Kelly was sitting in his home study in Busan, S. Korea, talking with BBC News presenter James Menendez in London.
All was going well until Marion Kelly, 3, marched jauntily into the room, wearing a bright-yellow top and pink glasses. Urged by her father’s firm arm to get out of the way, she settled on a nearby bed and upset a pile of books neatly arranged to project academic heft…all in view of the computer camera. As Kelly continued speaking, James, 1, followed his sister on screen. Seconds after that it became a family affair as the professor’s wife, hearing the racket, used her yoga training to twist flexibly to avoid the camera (she didn’t) and usher her children from the room. Apparently the culprit was the professor’s failure to lock the study door and the fact that to the kids, voices in the study are tantamount to the sounds of Skype, a regular activity for the family.
A disaster of live broadcasting. Not. Cat videos, move over: The short, spontaneous, interrupted interview is being hailed as the funniest video of the year, viewed countless times on the internet. The professor and his family have become overnight internet sensations. Can brand communicators compete with that? In fact, many aspects of the BBC interview line up perfectly with video best practices that brand communicators should be using. The incident and video’s growth prompted us to discuss video with communicators.
Small Budgets are Fine
While you can’t plan for so natural a moment to occur during a live stream, the serendipitous success of the botched BBC interview proves the importance of having a great idea and compelling visual content. “You don’t really need a big budget, just a cool idea,” says Cliff Chiet, chief integrated marketing director at iHeartMedia. “The idea is much more important than the camera you use,” he adds, noting as examples the dreaded cat videos but also the ALS ice bucket challenge.
Adds Alex Ptachick, social media editor at USA Today, “You don’t need much to shoot a compelling video…I use a gimbal, a stick mic and my iPhone. For video editing equipment, we use Final Cut.”
Small also works for quantity and length. “Start small. Always aim for quality over quantity,” she says. “Some sites are pumping out videos, but they’re not engaging and the payoff is not worth it.” Concentrate on a single topic per video, Chiet urges. A series of short videos is better than a single video that’s too long, he believes.
Ideas trump expensive cameras
Social Media Editor, USA Today
It’s easy to urge communicators to come up with good ideas for videos, but how do you do it? Based on the East Coast, Ptachick works with a colleague in L.A. “We bounce ideas off each other in Slack” and examine competitors’ videos they thought were done well. “I think our best ideas come from thinking outside of the box,” she says. For the Olympics in Rio last summer, two colleagues visited the city weeks before the games. “Their goal was to soak up as much of Rio de Janeiro as possible. Forget that the Olympics are there, what else is happening in this city?” The result was a Daily Rio series featuring a different trait of the city each day. “Surfing, acai bowls, the samba, futevolei, Zika, churrascaria…it was an incredibly rewarding project to work on” because it told the story of an Olympics host city in a different way.
At Chiet’s shop the deciding factor for ideas is whether they will result in “a video that’s cool enough for you to want to share with your friends.” In addition, the video must provide value to the audience. He uses a mattress company as an example. “Lots of people can make videos about mattress sales, but talking [in a video] about the importance of sleep” could distinguish the brand as a thought leader.
Recruitment
Are your executives reluctant to be on screen, especially in a live stream situation? It couldn’t be too much tougher than the situation Ptachick faces: convincing print reporters to appear in a video. “It’s not always easy, but it’s possible,” she says. “I really try to build up a reporter before dumping the idea [of a live video shoot] on him/her.” She adds, “I usually tell him/her, ‘We’re asking you to do this because you are the expert! No one knows…this [subject] as well as you do.’”
A tip: She’ll start camera-shy reporters with an Instagram live video—the video exists while it’s live, but disappears as soon as it’s over. “There’s something about a video living on after the live portion has ended that freaks out people.”
CONTACT: [email protected] aptachick@usatoday
Editor’s Note: Hear Chiet, Ptachick and others at PR News’ Video Workshop, March 22, 2017, in Washington, D.C. For information: http://bit.ly/2mBWDT6