Let’s make pods of video, also–Chapter 12

The Social Media Bible, Chapter 12: Watch Out for Vlogs (Video Create)

This chapter sets up the basics of how to create video blogs, or vlogs, as another way to communicate with customers. In fact, the author continues the important theme of “communities” when he says “vlogging is so appealing because it removes geographic boundaries and truly creates a global community through personal interaction.” (p. 231) The following chapter (Chapter 13) will deal more specifically with how to share these vlogs once they are created.

The reader of this chapter gets a good historical perspective on software that has contributed to the wide acceptance of watching video clips on the Internet, including Apple QuickTime, Windows Media Player and RealVideo. Of course, it was the video storage site YouTube and the advent of video streaming that really contributed to the success of video on the Internet.

I was interested to read about the Yahoo!Videoblogging group, which the author says is the most popular community of vloggers. I didn’t know such a group even existed!

The Tips, Techniques and Tactics section of this chapter is pretty sparse, basically saying get a video camera, script what you want to say, shoot some video, edit the video…and there you go.  The chapter does mention several specifics in the editing section, like Apple’s iMovie, Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro. But mostly it’s “go get the software and start playing around.” That’s probably not the best way to teach us how to do something, but in this case, it is prudent advice. The best way to learn video editing is just to DO IT.

An interesting development since the book was published has been Apple’s announcement of the release of Final Cut Pro X. While this has been controversial among professional video editors, Apple is hoping this will open their software to a whole new world of consumers who want a slightly higher-end editing system ($299), without going all the way to the much more complicated Final Cut Pro. What makes it controversial is that the new Final Cut Pro X is NOT compatible with older versions, meaning an editor can’t import previously produced projects into the new software.

Although the next chapter of the book is designed to go into more detail on the uploading of video, this chapter does have a simple to understand explanation of how to use YouTube for sharing video clips. That section wisely admonishes the reader that “just because your video is on YouTube doesn’t automatically mean that others will watch it and you will become an overnight success. It is now your responsibility to drive traffic to your video.” (p. 233)

Once again in this chapter, the “Expert Insight” section is worth noting, with the senior director of marketing for Yahoo! Online search marketing explaining the process of sponsored search.  He says “as you probably know, small businesses are experts at what they do, but they are not necessarily experts at advertising.” (p. 237) We all need to keep this in mind as we advise clients on the use of social media.