Category Archives: video

Creating video content for online marketing

Online video is a very powerful medium of communication. I’ve always believed that, even more so now with the availability of better internet speeds and wifi for video streaming. Although we are taught to not believe everything we see, video comes across as more authentic, real and credible than text. Its simply a more convincing type of content and great for marketing.

There are also more channels of distribution for video content with YouTube, Vimeo, Vine, Instagram, Viddy and more. YouTube has become the biggest player in this space for discovering and watching video content. Its now a search engine for whenever I want to find a tutorial, music videos, basketball analysis and startup interviews.

Native Tongue Apps Video Series

Hence I decided to create my YouTube video series on mobile apps. I’ve been thinking about it for the past few months as a way to build credibility & authority in this space for my mobile app consulting business.

I have now launched more than 10 apps in various app store (based on 4 product lines), and I’m currently working on 3 apps for various clients. So I decided to share my knowledge about mobile apps and give away some free content, with the hope that it leads to more consulting work!

My first video is on “top 5 tips to market your app”. I decided to pack in 5 essential tips.

With the video, a customer can see, hear and feel you on a different level than with images or text. Its a more powerful connection that you can make with them as they can see your face and visualise who is behind the brand.

I decided that I was going to ship my first video on 1 August along with my first email newsletter. I placed a call to Jamie Andrei and later that week we got it done, and we went through a brief editing process and turned around the video in 1 week. You have to set yourself some hard deadlines otherwise you won’t ship. I’ve got some more videos planned so stay tuned!

Putting together a video like this is not just a matter of recording the video. Jamie helped me put together a script, worked on my presentation, lighting, sound, even my wardrobe – I’m wearing his jacket & pocket hankerchief!

The fact that he has worked in digital and has domain experience also helped me to refine my video and what I wanted to convey. It took about 1.5 hours to get this video done, since its my first one. I also recorded a second video as well during that time. I highly recommend Jamie for video work and he’s worked with Amazon Web Services and CEBIT as Head of Video Production.

Microvideos

With respect to the above mobile apps mentioned – Vine, Instagram, Viddy, these are mobile apps that enable short form video content from 6 seconds – 15 seconds to be recorded and shared. I’m calling it microvideo as it sounds better than “short form video content”! Its quick and easy to consume.

I also came across this article today about brands using Instagram video which I thought was really interesting. Its fascinating how brands are starting to use these mobile distribution channels to get microvideo content out there. 15 seconds is also the standard online video ad unit, so there is a method to the madness 🙂

This is my favourite one which is a Lululemon video. Lululemon is a store that sells Yoga & running gear. We have some of these stores in Australia.

Let me know what you think about my mobile marketing video and what I can do to improve it in the comments.

I’m out like instagram videos,

Matt Ho

Link Love – Posse, Adioso, Boxee, Myspace

What I’m reading / checking out.

1. Travel + social discovery – great blog post by one of my buddies @pkattera. I was going to write about Adioso and Hipmunk as well, and his insights into how social serendipity and your social networks can influence your travel destinations are quite interesting. Yes, you should blog more!

2. Dear Mom and Dad – The first one is by Zach Klein, who founded Vimeo (think Youtube for HD videos). His current project is Boxee. If you know me, you’ve probably heard me talking about Boxee – great program. The blog post above is about social discovery, well Boxee helps you discover online video content and organises your media. Dear Mum This Is Why I moved To New York is another blog post by an employee of Boxee, Nick Crocker. He’s actually an Aussie who moved to New York. He co-founded We Are Hunted (another website I like).

3. Promote concerts using Posse – Came across this site a few months ago. It allows fans of music artists to promote concerts to their friends. You can generate money by selling tickets. In a way its like crowdsourcing promoters for concerts and generating a groundswell. The selection was initially quite limited, but it looks like its expanding. Win win for the artists and fans. The tech startup firm Pollenizer worked on this and Mitch Malone who I’ve met at Cebit is one of the devs at Posse.

4. News Corp to create iPad only newspaper. Magazines and newspapers have translated really well to this form factor. Question is whether an iPad only newspaper will get enough traction. As most of the iPad newspapers generally have an offline offering, but is also available through other online channels, predominatly a website.

5. I thought this was pretty funny – MySpace forced to offer FaceBook Connect. MySpace capitulated to FaceBook, but did they really have a choice? They had to allow it –  its the biggest social network. As has been written by many people smarter than me like Mark Mulligan, MySpace needs to reposition itself as a music social network not as a cool place for early adopters which aggregates your social information. Embrace it MySpace or die like Friendster. Oh, and the new logo sucks as well.

I’m out like Friendster,

Matt Ho

Basketball Jam

Yes, NBA Jam may be coming out for wii, however nothing beats the real thing. Playing basketball is something I’ve always enjoyed. Here is a video of the Halfsleeve basketball tournament I went to recently. Raw footage by yours truly and production by Saik Productions.

Video editing is def something I want to learn and get better at in the future. Enjoy!

HALFSLEEVE 3ON3 BASKETBALL CLASSIC from HALFSLEEVE.NET on Vimeo.

I’m out like NBA Jam at the arcade,

Matt Ho

Air Force 1’s

This is a cool upcoming doco about Air Force 1’s, probably the most famous sneaker out there, along with Chuck Taylors, Jordans, Nike Air Max and Tigers!

I must admit I have a pair of Cloverdale Park 25th Anniversary Edition Air Force 1’s. They are actually a bit tight, making them a bit uncomfortable and they are kinda heavy. But that’s more a sizing issue as they only had limited sizes when I bought them at the Nike Factory.

There’s a lot of documentaries about Nike Air Force 1. This particular documentary is part of WBF (World Basketball Festival) in New York which is sponsored by Nike. This looks like an awesome 4 days of celebrating the best sport in the world (MMA/UFC is second).

Nike also created this series of online docos called 1Love, which highlights the 5 boroughs in New York (Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, Bronx, Manhattan). They also have a video for Harlem, but I don’t think Harlem is a borough, and there’s no video for Manhattan. But enjoy nonetheless!

If you want to check more video’s look here:

Air Force 1, Part 1
Air Force 1, part 2
Top 100 Air Force 1 (Prolly my most favourite video, especially part 2)

You Gotta Stream

Some of you may remember the popular Rheem ads from the 90’s with the tagline “install a rheem“. Well in today’s online age, “You Gotta Stream!”.

I have been meaning to write about this topic for a long time. The linchpin has been discovering this presentation via Mark Cuban’s blog, who knows a thing or two about online video himself given he is the chairman of HDNet and sold Broadcast.com for a bajillion dollars.

This slide deck is from Netflix. Its very honest and insightful into where this company is going, the opportunities, the threats and the future of entertainment. Check it.

Netflix Business Opportunity

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Anyclip demo

I first heard of anyclip when they received runnerups in the techcrunch50 awards. So I signed up to the private beta immediately to test it out. I’m still waiting on my invite though.

Now, I’ve just seen the demo video and I really dig it!

A service that lets you find “Any moment from any film ever made”. That’s a very powerful tagline. Kinda like the Bill Gates vision “A computer on every desk”.

Watch the entire video for the demo and the questioning.

FYI the guys on the judging panel are:

– Scobelizer (Robert Scoble) is a huge tech blogger, former Microsoft guy

– Sean Parker, founding president of Facebook and co-founded Napster, Plaxo and Causes. And now joined Yammer!

– Reid Hoffman, once an aspiring Academic and Rhodes scholar (i think), founder of Linkedin and mentor to many of the top web 2.0 CEO’s

– Dick Costas, founder of Feedburner, Head of Google Social Products, and now COO of Twitter

– Mike ?, he used to be chief engineer at Mozilla Firefox, now Chief Engineer @ Facebook.

As you can see, its the who’s who of Silicon Valley.

Essentially they:
1) Aggregate short form video (less than 4 mins)
2) Allow people to metatag and categorise
3) have monetization models so you can buy the video or download or rent it

There are valid questions around legals, getting buy-in from the studios re content and also discovery.

Discovery is a good point, because that’s how I find a lot of interesting content on youtube from browsing other videos. I also think its going to be an incredible challenge getting the studios on board. But they did it with Hulu via a JV.

Ultimately, the guys behind it are right suggesting that it reinvigorates our love of movies. By me watching that scene from the Big Lebowski, I wanted to go to the video shop and rent it immediately. It might encourage others to go find the torrent, but they were never going to buy it anyway.

My other question is that can’t Youtube do all of the above? Youtube’s biggest problem at the moment, is that the most watched videos and biggest traffic driver is amateur videos. Not professional. If the anyclip guys have figured out a way to automatically tag, categorise and scale it, that could be a winner.

I’m out like long form video,

Matt aka Inspiredworlds