Many consultants have many varying views of video blogging. But one thing is for sure - understanding your audience is a must.
Are you video blogging for your friends and family?
Are you video blogging for your current clients?
Are you video blogging as business development for potential clients?
Do your demographic and socialgraphic research first to understand if and how you should video blog.
Here is a list of pros and cons of video blogging to get you started. Do you have others?
Pros of Video Blogging:
Visuals, as opposed to plain text (blogging), do excite a lot of blog readers.
Video naturally encourages word-of-mouth traffic.
Some people (bloggers) can talk better than they can write.
Video assists strongly in building your visual brand.
Video blogging still holds a uniqueness factor. The majority of bloggers are not producing video.
Video can set you apart from the crowd of others in your vertical.
Video is much more personal than text blogging.
Video blogging reaches additional online channels such as YouTube, Viddler, Vimeo, Blip.TV, Ustream.TV, Qik, etc.
Cons of Video Blogging:
If you are self-hosting your video blog, server space can be expensive for serving up video.
Video shooting is much more difficult and complex than text blogging.
Video blogging can be very time consuming.
Video equipment could be expensive, depending on the scale of your shoots and production.
Video blogging requires much more preparation time than text blogging.
Videos are not optimal for search engines (SEO).
Not all viewers like to watch video.
Not all viewers can watch video. Think government installations, large corporations, educational institutions that do not allow video (flash) plugins to be installed on their workstations.
I recently presented the topic of Video Blogging for Business to a group of professionals in Hampton Roads. Click here to see the slidedeck and video from the presentaton.
I will be speaking next week to a group of Hampton Roads professionals, hosted by Realty Executives, on the use of video for their business. Of the many topics we will touch on are:
Should video be used as a part of your toolset.
How video should and can be used in your daily activities.
How video can be used effectively for lead generation.
How video can be used efficiently during your busy day.
Where you should store your video and using storage as part of your social network.
When you should quick produce your own video and when you should hire a professional.
What type of video camera should you use.
Live streaming video, when and why.
Join us at the Realty Executives office at 316 Office Square Lane, Virginia Beach, VA 23462. Register for the event on Facebook here. I look forward to our conversations!
Our Coffee with the CEO session today covered quite a few topics with a focus on each of our businesses. I sat down with a few of Hampton Roads’ smart business minds and talked about privacy on the Internet, reputation management, WordPress, Moveable Type, blogging for business, brand management, link building, inbound marketing, making your business successful, lead generation, today’s economy, and social media tactics including video marketing.
Today’s attendees:
Bill Boyer, CEO Focus of Tidewater
Mike Key, the Entrepreneurial Ninja
Keith Parnell, JASE Group Marketing & New Media
Stephen Quick, Stephen Alexander Homes
Carolyn Sulcer, World Class Travel
Ruben Vera, Exit Realty Central
Sit back, relax, grab your cup o joe and let’s talk about RSS feeds readers and how they can benefit you each day. Of great interest should be the way today’s feeds readers allow you to get all the interesting information that you care about in a very time efficient manner. And best of all, RSS readers do not require you to be a techie!
Benefits of using an RSS reader:
Aggregates all information that I’m interested in into one location.
Can read information from blogs, websites, news sources, forums, etc. in one location.
Accessible from mobile devices.
Resides in the Internet cloud so is accessible from anywhere that I am. If you have a web browser, you can access your feeds / articles.
Can quickly and easily share each article with family, friends or business partners via email within the reader application.
Can tag each article for later search.
Is an immense time saver for retrieving information or news from the Internet. You can scan through many article headlines very quickly.
You don’t have to remember URLs or web addresses for favorite information.
The reader automatically checks for new information so you don’t have to visit each website.
Not too many things that Google comes out with do I get excited about. This one is very cool - take a picture and the Google search engine recognizes the content and brings you back search results. Nice!
While watching Sportscenter a couple of days ago, I caught an interview done from the studios in Hartford, CT with a football coach at his office in Dallas, TX. Nothing unusual there except that the coach was sitting at his desk doing the interview over Skype.
Too sweet. What do you think? Aside from the obvious less-than-stellar video quality compared to normal television satellite transmission, could you get used to this type of television?
“Sometime real-time is not fast enough.” - Jeremiah Owyang
Translation: We must think about what will happen tomorrow and predict moves, changes, issues, and trends.
“B2B and B2C is dead.” - Ray Wang
Translation: Because of the ‘best of breed’ concept between on-premise information storage and cloud computing, the fundamentals of relationships are changing.
The Social CRM Space is becoming evermore dominant. Mapping out your social graph is what companies are doing today in preparation for tomorrow. Facebook wants to become an identity company, not a social network. Their vision is that wherever you go on the web, your Facebook friends go with you.
“I put that [RSS Reader] away. Most of my traffic is coming from Twitter.” - Jeremiah Owyang
Translation: We cannot afford to not have real-time data today.
iPhone vs. BlackBerry vs. Android - “Definitely iPhone because its platform is easier to build on.” - Ray Wang
Translation: A lot of developers will be able to build on the iPhone platform much easier than any other. Simple for the developer means power and more technology for the consumer and enterprise user.
Special Note: This may be the first time any comment has intrigued me about the iPhone. Being a BlackBerry evangelist (!), I’ve always contended that BlackBerry will be tops for a long time. I’m interested now in the iPhone purely because it could solve some of the limitations I have now with mobile technology.
This is a guy after my own heart. This is awesome. He stops the minister in the middle of his wedding to update his Twitter timeline and Facebook status to ‘married’.
I have a lot of family scattered around the country and we all use Facebook a lot to keep in touch. So when Tracy and I were engaged, most of my family found out via Facebook because we updated our statuses.
I surprised not only my guests, but also Tracy by pulling out my phone and posting on Facebook and Twitter from the altar during out wedding. I had her phone ready in my pocket, so when she asked for it I could hand it to her. No one knew about this except the minister, and myself.
Many consultants have many varying views of video blogging. But one thing is for sure - understanding your audience is a must.
I will be speaking next week to a group of Hampton Roads professionals, hosted by 
JASEzone
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