YourStorysPodcast

Image via WikipediaAdvantages of Testimonial Marketing

Advantages of Testimonial Marketing

To me, it seems that telling business stories to communicate you passion and purpose in the business world should be a no brainer. How else can you tap into the power and persuasion of your key stakeholders, and clients’ personal stories of your benefits and values in such a compelling manner? The answer is, you can’t. Video testimonials lead the way in the ability to deliver real and authentic when done correctly.

From a walk around the exhibition hall at the SES Conference this week it is obvious it is not clear to the exhibitors. Very few companies use the power of their stories to leverage that strength. Expensive brochures abound, large graphic walls filled with glossy promises shout out from the booths, eager reps smile and draw you in to their canned pitch, but there is precious little use of compelling stories to circumvent the usual, and break your company away from the crowd. This is opportunity missed.

While many of the attendees spoke to me about the unique stories of their company and it’s offerings there was next to no video on these topics in the exhibit hall or on their websites. I know this to be a huge opportunity lost from all the metrics delivered by video testimonials throughout the industry of those enlightened. Video is an “always on” way to share these stories, and yet most companies I saw at the event are still not using them. When I asked people about this I got answers that were common. “We are planning to do it.” “What a good idea.” “We have clients who would love to do testimonials for us, but we just havent gotten to it yet.” In each and every case these companies have missed the point by sticking to a game plan that has been drastically altered by the new modes of business. Wait too long and the opportunity will go to the swift and you will see your market share dwindle to nothing. The business world is filled with such stories, remember Digital Equipment Corporation? They missed the fact that the power of computer was desired in new ways. IBM lost so much market share until they embraced new modes of business.

Just as in search, if you are not tending the garden, you are missing the opportunities to grow your business on a daily basis. It is important to get started and the start is simple. Resolve that it is ok to revisit that marketing plan written and implemented several years ago. Embrace ways to communicate across all the platforms and make them available internally to all the constituents. This is not an expensive undertaking compared to say, buying a Super Bowl ad, or even producing one more expensive direct marketing brochure that will be a success if it gets a 3% rate of return. Testimonial video done correctly (more on the correct ways to develop correct testimonials in my next blog) will always beat other forms of marketing right now, because it informs, engages, creates community, communicates honestly and authentically and pulls your clients to you.

SES Lessons Learned

1. Search is important.  While up to now I have paid more attention to the results like goals achieved, projects completed I realize now through an immersion into the importance of the search world that I can optimize the work I deliver so that it draws more people to it. This optimization delivers more value for my clients.  The attention I pay to keywords, Meta tags, and distribution model set-ups, the better my results would be.  Duh!
2. Search is both simple and complex.  While each of the many search people I met seemed knowledgeable, informed and focused, there was absolutely no consensus other than everyone agrees that search and best practices is a moving target.  So prepare to move, monitor what you are getting and don’t be afraid to zag when you thought you had to zig.
3. While content is king, kingly content means nothing unless it is found.  See lesson 1
4. Focusing on one aspect the business such as search, or content alone jeopardizes the success of the overall business.  It is important to find time for each discipline.  I heard that an hour a day spent on search and search related activities would deliver great results.  That would fit into my need to spend time editing (we do make video and video needs to be edited), research (We can’t truly server the companies we collaborate with unless we truly understand their business and the people we interview—research is important.)
5. Search geeks are fun and interesting people.  This is a lesson I relearn every time I venture forth into a new organization.  A focus on a single discipline allows that individual group to explore all the many layers of possibility.  What is shared is that wealth of depth for information and the search people are very willing to share their gems.
6. There are a lot of individual stories I will share going forward, this is a first step in that process.

Here is the long version of this interview. Yesterday I sent out a short version to my email list and got great response. Fred is a smart, engaging creative who has been a strategic thinker since first beginning work as a writer years ago. I won my first Communications Arts award with Fred, I think it was his first as well. In this wide ranging conversation we discussed the changes in the advertising business and how social media is forcing agencies to put digital in front of traditional advertising in many of their recent pitches. This interview is part of a ongoing project to bring to you some of the best practices as delivered by top thinkers in our industry.

I am often asked what I do, and the phrase “testimonial video” comes up. What this means to me is many things. Survivors of disease, or circumstance have a story to tell and this is their testimonial. A student sharing their experiences about a school is a story, and the telling of that story is their testimonial. I guess I would be better served to say I do “story videos”, because that is more accurate than “testimonial videos” but it is not.

The art of getting someone to tell their story in a compelling and interesting manner follows some rules, but the most important part is to listen to what is being said. A testimonial is an emotional telling of your story. The emotion will take the story in a variety of different ways. The job of a good director is to keep that story being told in as direct a manner as possible. This is a skill that grows with experience.

Testimonial videos are also the stories an executive has to share about the business, a client has to share about your product, or service. They are the honest sharing of their experience. It is so powerful on video because it is more than just the words, it is the expression, and the body language, and the gestures and inflection. When a story is captured and shared well it works wonders for communications, when it is a good story told poorly is works against your goals.

June 24, 2008 SMB8 was held in Cambridge along with Larry, there was the hosts from Overlay.tv Rob Cane, Jeff Glasson from PerkettPR, and Ben Grossman and Emily Belyea of The Plenary Group. We answered questions about the value of using video in your social media programs.

I am sorry for the delay with this new file. We are working through some production issues beyond just this single flash file. The question is how to delivery your content across a variety of platforms. More specifically this Social Media Breakfast file. It is 1.2GB of material (17 minutes of q&a) As a Flash file it is in the 100MB size, acceptable for Social media sites like tubemogul, iTunes, Vimeo, Blip, Boston.tv, YouTube, etc, but it is already compressed. You want to avoid double compression if you can. Compress once to the final file being seen is the most optimal way to work. YouTube looks like what it does because it compresses your file into their file (double compression). Anyway the new files our encoding and will be back in soon.

Happy 4th.

Bryan Person, host of SMB invited me to speak about how we are using social media devices with our Fortune 100 clients. Please send me a note if you would like to know more details than is shared in this eight minute presentation.

Kel Kelly Founder | CEO of Kel & Partners is an evangelist in Web 2.0. She brings her clients, her family and friends into the world of social media with a mix of humor and great results. This podcast is 23 minutes long, but well worth the listen. We will put up a shorter version soon, and also provide an outline so you can review the most important parts of interest to you.

It will only be a matter of time until corporations wake up to realize they need someone to manage all the content that is being built, and delivered to, and for them. Since 2001, I have been delivering testimonial video content to our clients. Massive amounts of data have been stored and cataloged for each of these companies, or institutions. We have developed a way to store, and retrieve this content for them in a seam-less manner so that they can use the existing content over, and over as they build their library. It is simple and effective

I was always annoyed going to a new client, and asking them for their existing files so that we could include some of that material into our new work. Time and again I would hear that some agency or individual couldn’t find the material, didn’t want to relinquish the material in an effort to keep a client, or felt that their work was proprietary to them and not for the client they developed it for. I decided to approach this differently from day one. I work for and collaborate with my clients. The work I develop for them is theirs. I want them to use it as much as possible, that adds value in their minds to this content and therefore to me and this company. If they decide to move on for any reason, I want to provide the next collaborator with a hard drive of great digital content in an organized manner so they can hit the ground running. To date, we haven’t lost a client, but we are ready.

In fact, I am sure what we are doing, and have been doing for our clients, is the next big internal job at corporations and institutions. Let me explain. You do an interview with your CEO and he explains some new product or service in a powerful way. That interview is used for a presentation he is making to his Board. Later, why shouldn’t that content be available to the sales force so that they can have the CEO’s exact words delivered through email or over the net to make some cold call warm? The answer is they should, and they would if corporations had a Chief Content Officer who understood the need to make this content available.

How about client testimonials. Once a testimonial for a product or service is created it should be available across all the sales, marketing, promotional, pr and news channels it can be. There are more and more venues for good content these days. The more you use good content, the more that good word is out there for all to see and hear. I read a blog today over at Cymfony, and Jim Nail had reported that almost 60% of the marketing and public relation folks don’t get new media or how to use it for their companies. I agree completely, they don’t. The people who do get it are those who are responsible for moving the needle with their business every day. That is the CEO, the COO and the Managing Partners, they understand from seeing the results. The marketing, and pr people are trying to protect their existing business rather than fully embrace new modes. It is a tough place to be, but the faster you adapt, the more relevant you will be tomorrow.

Imagine a corporation where one person, and their staff, was responsible for making content available across the many platforms in an “always on” mode through a content management system that is designed to deliver just that–content that is needed. It would be a beautiful thing. I am sure this is why our clients haven’t left us, and I am sure some of our prospects have gone back to their marcom and pr groups and asked how they can deliver such value. This isn’t brain surgery, this is just developing and delivering digital content in a manner that can be used across the growing number of outlets available to us today.

Do you think the agency of tomorrow will embrace this, or do you think the corporations will be the first to identify and fill this need? I am curious.
Link to Jim’s post

Paige Arnof-Fenn, CEO of Cambridge-based Mavens & Moguls, sits down for an interview with Diane Danielson of the Downtown Women’s Club to talk about her background, and share some of what she believes are the five most important steps for success in any marketing endeavor.

Listen and learn what you can do to become a marketing star.

Steady Camera: If you have a tripod use it, if you don’t, find something to put your camera on so the viewer isn’t forced to ride your roller coaster. Lay off the energy drinks, and stay focused on the fact people will be watching. Ok, all of this is common sense, but the reason you want to be steady is not just because of the ease of viewing something that can actually be seen, but also it streams far better when the computer doesn’t have to constantly refresh the entire page. Lowering the need for the refresh makes the image hold together much better.

Good Sound: This may even be more important than good picture. The public has gotten used to bad image quality (although that pendulum will swing, and is swinging for the best of video on the net–more on this later), but your audience will not sit and listen to bad sound. If you are just using an onboard mic, get close to the subject. Better yet, invest in a good mic, and use it correctly. If this is an event you are taping find out if you can plug your mic system into the sound feed, all it takes is the right cords.

Best Delivery: At one point Windows Media Player played a role in delivering to a corporate audience, no more. At one point, Real Player had a corner on the academic market, no longer. To this day, Quicktime is the most beatiful, but also the largest file and therefore slower to stream. Flash seems to rule now, and it is in most computers. Output your work using the latest Flash codec. Do not compress you work more than once, double compression just rips up your image quality–take a look at anything on YouTube. If you must load to YouTube then make your show short enough that you can load an uncompressed file into their compressor. Your work will look better than anyone else.

Content is King: Yes good content is king, funny content is also powerful, but content that is good, and delivered in the best manner will rule all. Learning the basics of your tools always separates the also ran from the good, and the good from the great. None of this is rocket science, but those who learn the basics will still be at work plying their skills when all the others have gone off to other work. It is amazing to me that so many social media types are so wrapped up in the speed to delivery rather than the quality of delivery.

We live in a world that is going HD, and yet some people believe it is ok to deliver content that doesn’t even match a Super 8 quality from the 60’s. (For those of you to young to even know, Super 8 was a film format developed to supersede Regular 8mm film.) I was a guest on the ThisDudeAbides TalkShoe show a couple of weeks ago, and the subject of the hand held work on the Blair Witch Project was brought up. Blair Witch broke new ground in many ways. The way it was shot, the way it was promoted, and brought in an audience, and the amount of money it made in compared to the cost of the production. All that is good. What is not noticed when this is pointed out is that there is no other hand held, web driven movie that has reached that level of success. One and done. Hand held has lead to the steady cam. Now all movies are promoted on the web, look at their quality and compare your own quality to that which people will plunk down their dollars to see. Quality will always trump lack of quality, this message is slow to reach some of the social media types.

While this may sound like the rantings of an old practitioner it is really a rallying cry for those smart enough to understand that if you practice the fundamentals of great delivery, your work will always be better than those who don’t.