Visually Speaking: Channeling Your Blog Through Video

Blogging: it’s all the rage these days. Business and social media counselors everywhere have it down: knowledge and expertise sell…and, lucky for you, you’re the experts in your own fields. In many cases, advertising and media are hugely advantageous, but many traditional techniques rely on the timetables of others to become a reality. Don’t have the time to wait for those reporters to call you back? You can blog about it. Or even better: translate that blog into video.

But blogging, while excellent in practice (contributing to a company’s goals in brand awareness, search engine optimization, customer/client service, marketing, public relations and, eventually, the bottom line), is often shoved to the side in favor of number crunching, email, online Sudoku—you name it.

For some reason, blogs aren’t being prioritized. But, just as Tom explained in his last post, the importance of Web communication cannot be ignored; rather it must be correct, on target and representative of your company, your product, service or industry in general. Taking this into account, blogging can seem an overbearing task for many.

Photo Credit to Flickr's mobilechina2007

Why not try video blogging instead? Depending on the complexity of the final creative project, a short video can be cut from the content of a quick five-minute interview in just a fraction of the time it would take to sit down and map out a written blog post. Let the marketing director share a quick message or listen to an industry update from the CEO. Video blogging allows you to diversify content, perspectives and engage your audience:

As Julie A. Jacko says in her 2008 book, The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook, “Dynamic media, especially video, have an arousing effect and attract attention; hence, video and animation are useful in improving the attractiveness of presentations.”

Even from my own personal experience evaluating our clients’ blog and Facebook performance, multimedia sells. The success of photos and videos typically far outshine the updates or posts that strictly rely on text to communicate the message.

If you’re ready to start experimenting with video, here are the two most common free video editing programs that will help you get started:

Mac Users: iMovie (Identity uses this one)

PC Users: Windows Movie Maker

For examples of how video can be used in a business setting, feel free to check out Identity’s YouTube channel.