Developing Your Own Video Podcast Mini-Series
I’ve been giving this a lot of thought lately – how to produce a podcast mini-series and maximize its visibility. Another name for such a mini-series is webisodes. Think of these as 2- to 3-minute pieces that typically make one point and string together a series of them around a theme or topic. An enthusiastic example of this is Gary Vaynerchuk’s videos on Viddler.com. Highly recommended from a motivational perspective if you’re wanting to build your own brand/business on the Internet. He’s like the modern-day, energized Pied Piper of motivational speaking.
What I want to illustrate here is that there are many different ways to produce your media. You’ve got to first decide if you want to do audio or video. Clearly audio is easier to produce. It takes less time and money to record and produce a piece or series of pieces that you post on the web. It’s fairly easily to post audio files for streaming, either on your blog or using a service like Libsyn.com (or LIbsynPro.com if you need an enterprise solution). I use LibsynPro to centrally manage and distribute the weekly TalkBMC and EnterpriseLeadership.org shows.
Like audio podcasting, there are many ways to produce your end result; however, I’m seeing some changes in the way a web audience is consuming content. I don’t have hard facts on this, but it seems that people are wanting smaller chunks of information to watch or listen to. If you have a number of points that need to be made about a topic, then a mini-series fills the bill. Someone can choose to listen to the ‘chunks’ they have time to hear or go back and catch them later. ‘Chunks’ have the added benefits of making it easier to remember what you’re being told, one piece at a time, and easier to locate the piece of information you want.
Though Gary is more like a constant flow of video podcasts (multiple ones a week), you don’t have to emulate him, and he’s not saying you should. Every podcast, whether it’s audio or video, needs to be of interest and educationally useful to the audience. ”How to” content always wins out over fluff and will continue to be seen and heard. I created a Flash-based animated training tutorial (moving graphics and still pictures with audio track) about SEO some 5+ years ago, and people are still writing me about how much they learned from it. Received a note from a doctor in New York this week, asking me to send a proposal to help her website be more visible.
This just reinforces in my mind what we’ve been told repeatedly in the audio podcast realm: It’s all about the content. Make it relevant and educational. Take the audience’s perspective – what’s in it for them? Get yourself out of your ego thinking that video podcasts are a way to get on the Internet and be popular and rich. Always, always remember ‘what’s in it for them.’ Put yourself in their shoes.
The only exception to this is if you can write or create content that is so dramatically entertaining that you have an audience just waiting on pins and needles for your next episode. An example of this is www.showbizzle.com which will be released in late September. But keep in mind, the executive producer of this effort also wrote the 90210 scripts that were so popular in the ’90s on traditional broadcast TV. But of course, don’t let that scare you. If your passion is drama and/or comedy – go for it. Do what you truly deeply want to do, but think about the quality of your productions – that will separate you from the crowd.
You likely have some ideas cooking. The issue is how to produce something with quality.
I’ll be covering more of that soon. You can take the kitchen tabletop approach that Gary and so many others do: Turn your PC or Mac around with the Webcam running and just start talking – echoey room and all. Sorta like reality TV. Gary pulls it off by moving around to different places and using different little cameras. More importantly, he’s CLOSE to the camera with an engaging enthusiasm that feels like an electric charge. He wants you to have what he knows and he’s authentic about it.
But like audio podcasting – if everyone is doing that how does the cream rise? How does the better content get seen? There are two components of this – the quality of the production sets you apart, and the way you distribute the content on the web helps you be visible.
I’m planning on working with AMS Production Group here in Austin and with tools like TubeMogel.com to further illustrate these points. So stay tuned.
Tom
July 11th, 2010 at 3:54 am
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