i want to welcome you on behalf of the watertown belmont chamber of commerce we're very fortunate to have point she did your communications here today karen and kelly are going to present a video presentation that i think will be very very important and relevant small to medium size businesses as we talk to prepare this event we think that the economy of video now is at the stage where most take advantage of it and without stealing built on that they'll tell you how important it is and afterwards we'll have some questions and answers will have some more networking thank you all for coming and i'll turn it over to karen and kelly  thank you paul and thank you watertown belmont to all of you guys for coming out it's good to see you all again and we're excited to be here to present how to make video part of your marketing strategy and a little bit about our point we are a belmont based business were right in the center of town and the old fire house building it what do we do we help our clients by finding by helping them to find out what their story is everybody has a story what your story is and the best news to convey that story to your audience for an audience that you'd like to target so how do we do that we do that a variety of ways we do that by developing a content strategy by developing a website or marketing collateral we do that by public relations or providing support to trade shows and events we also help clients become thought leaders in their specific industry but today today we're going to i want to introduce my friend my friend and colleague kelly taylor and what she's going to do is she's going to share ideas on how to use video to go out and tell your story thanks karen i'm so glad to be here really good to see everybody today so as karen said we focus on telling stories right and i've been with our point now for almost three years and my primary role is helping our clients build up that content that they can get then get out there to their potential audience future employees whoever they're trying to target and most of that most of the time i do that in a text based format which is great because i actually have a passion for writing so it's really fun for me to do that to build content for websites to create press releases things like that but i have to say the most fun i have in my job is when i get to do photo and video you wouldn't be here if you didn't know how important video and it's everywhere right there isn't a person in this room probably who doesn't have a device on them correct me if i'm wrong but i'm i'm i'm guessing that almost everyone in this room has some sort of device on them right now a smartphone or a tablet that could create video right also all the major software corporations apple adobe microsoft they're all building software platforms or have built software platforms that really make the editing a video really accessible so everyone has the power of production today and not only is everybody creating video but everybody wants to watch it now by seventy five percent of internet traffic in two thousand and seventeen is probably going to be video which is a really astounding number and it's not just watching  netflix watching who live streaming movies things like that it's everything from product administrations to social media promotions name it name a task and you can apply a video to it so it's really fast growing and everybody's doing it everybody wants a executives that are out there today really will spend their time on video before they will pick up on you for better or worse right we're becoming kind of a low attention span society and with all the information that is constantly coming at us executives are wanting us to tell them what to focus on and help them find their way through that m of information so we've all heard the idea that a photo can be worth a thousand words well there's this researcher from forrester group i think that said one minute a video can actually be worth one point eight million words which is a crazy number and i'm not a mathematician so i can't tell you exactly how we got to that number but it makes sense if you think about what one image can convey as opposed to a whole string of sentences put together it's really fascinating so why are we here today i'm here really to have a conversation with you everybody is at a different point in their world beginning to get into video production i'm assuming maybe some of you are already doing some video and are looking for new ideas new ways to get it out there promote it things like that maybe some of you haven't started i really want to have a conversation with you so please don't wait til the end to ask questions if you have an idea or question jump in because i really want to make this as interactive as possible i'm going to focus on three key parts of video strategy we're going to talk a lot about planning we're going to talk a lot about production and we're going to talk a lot about promotion planning it's a big word we all hear every day in our businesses and it's probably the most important piece of the puzzle and when we sit down with our clients one of the first things we talk about is what is your purpose video can have a range of purposes sometimes we're looking to gain sales sometimes we're looking to strengthen our reputation today a lot of people are even using video in their hiring process or for internal development within their in their organization so defining your purpose is really the first step we also want to talk about what impact you're hoping to have on your viewers what message are you trying to send and who are you trying to target because especially when you talk about where you're going to put that you tube video that you just created or where what social media platforms your want to be on you really need to think about who the audience is and so when we're sitting down with our clients this is really a lot of what we're going to talk through with them and that's a key part of the planning process before we even get to sitting down and talking about storyboarding an idea or working out production schedules or anything like that we've got to be clear about what the  strengthening your reputation right establishing thought leadership is a great thing that we are now using video for some of our clients we're creating video blogs which is really interesting again people will sit down and watch a one minute video before they will sit down and read a blog text most often helping to build your team with internal development materials advertising your corporate culture right maybe you really want to get out there that you are a community based organization that you are doing good things in the community so you want to highlight an event where your protest where you're a key sponsor for example it's a pretty it's a pretty cohesive list and what i'd like to do instead of oh  product think you if you're a dog trainer for example that's one example ok that's right that's right it is a really important medium for education because it gives you the chance essential to make eye contact right people you've never met you're making eye contact with them you're able to really get across an idea so i'm going to actually jump right into an example because that's the best way to learn is by looking at examples and talking through them so the first one here as we're watching and like you to be thinking about what is the purpose who are they trying to target and a little bit about how they want to just point out a couple things about the production when you saw the two women sitting side by side it looked to me and i didn't produce the so i don't know for sure but it looked to me like there were two cameras one that was right in front facing head on and one that was focused on one of the women at the time and is in post production when you're editing you can move those angles in an out and blend them to really create some interest so you're not just sitting there looking at two people talking all the time because that's not so interesting job making sure that they didn't focus on anybody in the background in particular because as you're producing these things if you go out into the public or you're at an event it's really important to be careful about who's in the scene right you don't want anybody to come back to you and say wait a minute i don't want to be in that video take it down or worse take legal action against you which i think happened with amy schumer someone who was filming an event and purposely got the star behind her and boy was she not happy with that so it's important to think the background of who you're including when you're when you're creating these videos i didn't notice any mikes on them any level your mikes so they probably had something that was just on the camera and it's unclear whether it was just a smart phone or another small not so sophisticated phone but you're right the audio wasn't as clear it's still got the message across and i think in some ways it kind of created a sense of intimacy the other thing i noticed was there was a little bit of camera wobble did you see that things were shaking a little bit and i don't know if it was intentional but i don't think it detracted from the message because who is the target who's the target audience for future employees right not necessarily your customer but a young hip college person who's just looking for their first job who wants a fun place to work and boston you know camera and camera wobbles not going to make a difference they're focused on the of it but that's a really good point and as we move through and talk a little bit more in depth about production audio is definitely one thing that can either make or break what you're doing and there are lots of different tools that you can use i know today one reason for creating a video i didn't mention is for internal development today we are lucky we have media helping us out to tape the event i also set up my camera because i want to be able to take a look at this show it to colleagues that couldn't be here and also improve my presentation skills so for this purpose we've got the mike on the camera we've got the handheld right  the third video that i want to show you later is an interview series that we do with an organization in cambridge and for that we use the level you're mixing it makes a huge difference so it's a really good point about audio he has it does it can make or break it the other thoughts about the one we did it looked like something you could do if you wanted to it's pretty pretty accessible right pretty accessible has a message if you know a twenty year old who's looking for a job and would fit in with this you might say hey go check out old school it created it definitely had a purpose and it allowed you to make eye contact with these people and you feel like you you're in a relationship with right and you never even met them so that's pretty cool so back to the planning piece talk about the purpose talk about the impact and then the next step that we do when we sit down with our clients is talk about resources what do you have in house already who knows you might have a sketch artist who's sitting next to you who just  for fun and that person could sit down and help you storyboard out your ideas maybe you have someone who likes to videotape things at their organ in their community organization that person can really help you if you want to do something pretty informal like what we're doing  so doing it internal resource analysis like any other marketing initiative or business initiative is going to be a key part of that once we sit down and figure out what resources we already have at our disposal whether it's within our organization or with an yours then we start to figure out ok are there pieces and what pieces of the puzzle do we need to fill in we're really lucky at our point because we work with something we've worked with media before we have a lot of  across the country actually that have very different styles that we can bring in and they offer an awful lot we have film crews in boston we can call and if you happen to be interviewed joe in january i know a great guy who can come over and  and do some editing he's amazing so figuring out what the appropriate professional is and where they can fit into the puzzle is a key part of that also when we're having those discussions of course we have to talk about money right you got to talk about a budget be realistic about it for every organization it's not necessarily realistic to expect that you're going to be able to go out and spend five thousand dollars on a camera buy that fancy software program or whatever equipment you might need to do it in house so if you're going to look outside then you need to start talking to people who can bring in their own equipment and when you have those conversations or when we have those conversations with those people we're talking to them about all the details of the project what's included in the contract is this a project based contract is a sin hourly rate are you going to help us with storyboarding are you going to help us create get our ideas down and mapped out or are you just expecting us to hand you an outline of what we want done how many editing reviews are you going to let us do are you just going to give us one and we can give you one round of edits and then that's it and then you're going to start charging us about a bucket of money for every other vision we want to have done and who's going to have the rights to the material when we're done these are all really important questions that need to happen if you're going to start talking to people outside and one thing that i always talk to our clients about is it's really important to be realistic with yourselves be realistic about your budget and be honest with the people you're working with especially these professionals if you can't go over a certain amount of money make sure that's clear from the beginning because otherwise as you probably already know these projects can really snowball so it's important to be realistic it's also important to be realistic about your own time and energy if you want to pull in that colleague that does sketching f storyboarding make sure that he's got the time or she's got the time to do that and that they can be accountable for getting that done it's like any great idea in business you can start out with a fabulous project or goal but if you don't follow it up step by step it's probably just going to end up being shoved under the carpet has anybody  yes you know again i didn't produce that so i can't say exactly it depends on how much they did in house maybe they did the whole thing in house that's very possible because it wasn't that complex of the video in which case it's just costing your time and it's and the hourly rate for videographers really varies wildly depends on what kind of equipment they have depends on what you're asking them to do if you're asking them to stand in the back of a room and film an event without moving around it's probably going to be a lot less expensive than if you want them to go and do a moving shot as somebody is walking into the library and they've got to pay the police studio to stop the traffic and you can see how it snowballs so it's really hard for me to give you a number but compared to twenty thirty thousand dollars that it probably cost for the graphic animation the first one is definitely going to be under that does that help a little bit yeah and if you do do a project with someone and as long as they're there with the camera ask them first b roll give them an extra even pay them an extra half hour whatever it is and say you know what can you just walk around and get some b roll of what's happening in the audience because there's always going to be a place just to slide that in or use that in the future because you never know what purposes you may have down the road the other point i wanted to make about professionals and actually the planning process overall is one of the key parts of making video part of your overall strategy is to try to ensure that whatever you're producing is in line with your own corporate image with your own goals with your own guidelines so when you're talking to different professionals that's one thing you're going to be looking for you want to see some of the things they've done if they're doing the really hip mary out style stuff and your more traditional company that's maybe looking to promote a financial product or something that's not quite as hip and energetic energetic you might not want to work with that person so there are lots of different styles lots of different people out there and referrals as you know are always great if you know somebody who's done something that you like go talk to them because you're probably get something  production stopped to kill let's talk about venture caf i was to i was saying earlier that one of my favorite things to do is video and this is probably the most fun project i've done since i've been working at our point we do an interview series with the venture caf and i don't know if anybody is familiar with that but they are based at the sea i see the cambridge what used to be a cambridge innovation center in kendall square and every thursday they have a vent that's not just networking but it's all kinds of young not necessarily young but new entrepreneurs innovators come together and talk to each they have office hours where you could sit down and with a venture capitalist and have twenty minutes of their time and say you know what i need money how do i do it they have workshops on marketing or any other aspect of starting a business it's really fascinating and now they about so we actually are partnering partnering with them on an interview series called venture capital presence and the purpose of that is to really showcase some of these stories if you go to one of these events and you just walk into the room you can feel the energy everybody there is excited they've got lots of ideas they're probably a little stressed out there's free beer and wine so maybe that helps a little bit i don't know but it's really fascinating the stories that these people have to tell and they're not just people and we're talking about innovators in all different sectors we have we've worked we've talked to education people we've talked to people who are doing things for the inner city kids we've talked to a lot of talk people too so it's really a fascinating project our production is really very simple and we usually have one or two cameras set up and it's interview style and for us this is actually been a really good learning process because the point to the point about audio when we started doing the series we were just using the camera microphones and you get a lot of the background noise the hubbub that's going on during the event and some of that's good some of that we want because that's part of our goal is to convey the energy of the event but too much and you can't hear what's going on with the interviewers so that we try to microphone that was pretty good we got some pretty good results with that but me so you're probably not too interested in doing so going to turn the volume down and just talk to you a little bit about the production here you'll notice that were inside a glass room which again was intentional we've got some some b roll that we actually got isn't that cool i mean by that talk about looking at it we're going to put something in the middle that i mean that's really an amazing idea so we are in a glass room so that you can see the energy and what's happening behind us on that bench or cafe night because part of the goal certainly from venture cafes foundation perspective and also from ours is to take those conversations outside of the caf reach people that can't make it show them what kinds of energy what kinds of things happen here two cameras in this particular scene i actually made a change in the middle of the interview because i didn't like the angle of one of them so we have one that's just facing the two people and then one that's focused on the gust i thought that's too much of a profile so i'm going to move the camera physically moved it and you'll see as we move through that it gives us a much better straight on here he they have a lot of that on their website and so they were they are able to provide that for us and that's fabulous because it really helps to break this up and give you some more visuals to look at because there's the different camera angle abercrombie or whatever it is it's very very clean very solid i don't think he prepared too much for the interview i think you rode his bike there which is why is it a sweatshirt but you know it's a start up so they can get away with that  that's one thing to be really careful about if you're going to take a video of someone and they're wearing an abercrombie t shirt be careful because now you're backing abercrombie right you're making a statement and if you don't want to be doing  the supporting abercrombie's message then don't have it in your video you careful about what's behind what's in the background for some of these when we first started shooting we had a banner in the background the had the venture cafe logo on it which was helpful it was effective but i think clothing simple things because the focus of photos and videos needs to be on the subject not on what they're wearing this actually is what lighting was in the room we did not bring in any extra lighting if i had it to do over again i f i had this to do over again and if i had the space i would have brought in another light which i do sometimes do i have some big studio lights another light to kind of get rid of some of the shadow here because from a portraiture slate perspective it's not the best lighting but it is what it is the minot's the purpose was to be a little bit informal if we were doing this in a studio it would look different the other thing that we did with lighting is we made sure the shades were down because we were running these on thursday evening between five and seven or whatever it was so we had the sun moving across and we got some reflections from it which we couldn't really do anything about and yeah i mean li ting is a really good thing you have to think about for this we use final cut pro and that's kind of a fancy version of i movie if you're on a mountain i move you has some of the same basic functionality we used very basic standard music standard transitions nothing fancy what's in final cut here otherwise we go on and we look for royalty free music there are several websites out there that you can can find that have royalty free music that is it's important to be careful though and make sure that you're watching for the copyrights and things like that there are lots of places you can go also to download things for small fees depended stock photos stock video clips things like that depending on your budget and actually when we're done here i have a web address to give you where that we actually haven't finished the editing on this but that's going to be coming so if we move through you'll see the credits it's actually a really good point when you're doing credits on these things to make sure that you acknowledge everybody who's involved so  for gio or bill especially because they gave us the video clips we're going to be sure that we include them at the end and that's also all over the print but we didn't know he was bringing a bicycle with him he happened to bring it because they were doing a workshop in venture cafe and we said hey bring the bike in and there were a couple in the long version we do zoom in so that you can see the bicycle up close that he has and front of him but quite honestly the room that we were in was about the size from here to there tiny room we didn't have a lot of a lot of leeway to be able to back up or get any kind of different shots work it shows you kind of a timeline of our growth in doing this particular we've been doing it now for over a year so if you look back at some of the first ones i kind of go did we really do it that way but you know it's a learning process right and there are still valuable stories every time we walk out of the venture caf after having done one of these you're just inspired one night we did a female founders night and we were talking to all these women about how to encourage women and girls especially teen girls and tween girls to get out there take their ideas and run with them so it's really it's really fascinating it does take time it's not just about setting up the camera and filming if you are going to do some editing in house expect to spend several hours especially if you're new to the format new to the software and just be reasonable and honest with yourself about the time  and release forms whoever you're filming make sure you have their permission to film it's very important to keep it on file one example is one of the women that we interviewed at venture cafe at the same boat that this gentleman was at she does work with inner city youth and she brought one of her students with her and we were so excited with oh my gosh we can get him on camera will be great but he's sixteen and his parents aren't here to  created what do you do with it you can have a beautiful video but if you don't promote it or get it out there in front of the people you're trying to target it's not going to benefit you in any way so the first thing is you tube is a great platform it's easy you can put videos up there you can create a channel for your business you can make it private you can make it public you can share it with only specific people whatever you want to do my only suggestion about you tube i'm not going to get into too many of the specifics about how to do it because it's pretty user friendly my only suggestion is don't skip the bottom part where it says put in tags for your video tag words that's how people are going to find you if you put in a tag for the venture cafe videos we always put in you're cafe than half a percent entrepreneurship innovation and the other words we can think of because if somebody is out there and they want to find a video on how to train your cat to use the litter box or whatever it is those are the words they're going to search on and that's how they're going to find your video so don't skip that bottom part but you tube is a great place to start once you have the video on you tube you can put it anywhere you can embed most software programs most of the things you're going to be doing on your website they'll be able to take them very easily that you can embed the videos quickly on your website and social media platforms social media wasn't around when i was growing up now my kids are teaching me how to use it i'm told facebook is for old folks i just got on facebook and it was so proud but apparently i'm behind the times where you put your video on social media depends on who you're trying to target if you're a b to b company you really need to be on twitter and linked and because that's where those people are but if you're a clothing retailer and you're trying to sell to the thirteen to sixteen crowd if you're not on snapchat and instagram you they're not going to see so most of us don't have a full time social media person that can track all of it but if you pick one or two key platforms and really focus your efforts there then you would more likely to get the other thing with social media all of these platforms have sophisticated analytics that you put so you can track your viewership i'm not going to go into the specifics of each one because they're all little bit different but you tube for example if you look at the analytics of your video you can see who's watched how many people have watched it who shared it and from what geographical region they're from twitter same kind of thing you can see what your most popular tweets were if they were reassured if they got engagement so all of that is really helpful when you're thinking about should i pay to have the same post boosted on facebook should i try to do something more with twitter instagram looking at those analytics can really be informative and you should be scared of the word that's pretty change their restrictions on how long your videos can be i guess it used to be you could only have a twelve second video on instagram three months ago they increased it so i think that tells you how important video is on these social media platforms and they can all handle it you can put your video on youtube and put it into social media and they'll all take it ok well thank you guys so much for all of your time and energy i just want to leave you with one thought it's all about telling the story right that's what we do that's what you do and hopefully based on some of the information you got today some of the ideas from other people you'll be able to take a look at what you're already doing in video tweak it try something new or get started thanks a lot i appreciate it