Video is the next frontier of Social Media… keep your eyes out for slideshows like this talking about the power of social media and video combined.

Dan O’Hara

Our first event was held at Casa Real at Ruby Hill Winery on March 30, 2010. You can watch the video I produced from this event HERE. The video above is TVWP’s second event held at Wente Vineyards on July 14, 2010.

As part of my responsibilities to the group, I was asked to produce a marketing video from each event. The video would be used to promote future events, and give a nice recap. It would be viewable online, specifically on Trivalley Wedding Professionals Facebook Group page. The committee relied on and trusted my knowledge of social media and web video to create an effective marketing video that built the groups brand recognition and got some buzz going for the next event.

It’s important to approach a video like this with a few web and social media fundamentals in mind.

• Who’s the Main Audience:
  Easy… Wedding Professionals in the Bay Area.
• Keep It Short:
  Since the average length of time a video is watched on the internet is under 3 minutes, keeping a video like this short was key.
• Know Your Obstacles:
  With a networking event, such as this, there are some unique challenges that exist in shooting the video. First, most everyone is focused on building or maintaining their relationships with the fellow attendees, and are not overly open to the idea of being filmed. Also, most are either eating or drinking at some point, and probably don’t like being the focus of attention with food in their mouths. Lastly, they are not expecting to be filmed, so seeing a camera focused on them can be a bit disconcerting.

With these issues in mind, I decided to produce a video set to music. The music needed to fit the event, it needed to be upbeat and fun. I also felt it needed to be personable, a key element to online video today is less is more. I try to find a balance between high quality and not too over produced. To personalize the video, I used a personal opening title, this was meant to grab attention. Next, with the use of a stabilizer (Glidecam 4000), a walked through the event as if I was a guest. In the edit room, I used time remapping controls to give some ramping speed changes and convey style and personality. From this point, I continued and finally concluded the video with candid moments of the main activities. I concluded with a call to action and finally, I snuck in a little surprise at the very end… my attempt to be funny. A memorable ending is important with any video, especially something like a short promotional web video.

The video was published on TVWP’s Facebook Group  just a few days after the event. I felt the timing was important, and waited until Sunday night (following the event) to post this video. I wanted people to view the video as they were starting out their work week. This worked, and we got an excellent viewership. Since Facebook is the hosting service, we were not able to track the total amount of views, but within 2 days we had over 30 comments. All the comments were positive, which is a good signal that the video was well received. A large amount of comments also signals buzz, which is exactly what we wanted the video to do. Many of the comments mentioned the ending, and some even said to “make sure to watch the entire video”…. gotta love social media.

It’s difficult to measure the effectiveness of a video like this to the overall marketing strategy for the group, but based on the buzz around it, there’s no doubt it was a success and most definitely achieved the goals of building brand awareness and creating buzz for the event.

If you are interested in having a web video produced for you business or company, please give me a call or shoot me an email. I’m located in the east San Francisco Bay and specialize in video for the web and specifically social media video for business. I also produce corporate video, wedding and event videos, along with custom web projects. I offer full service video production and design.

Dan O’Hara

In the video above, I talk about a couple tricks of shooting video for the web. It was my Birthday on June 18 and I received a couple cool new gifts.

Also, when it comes to lighting for video, its important to stick with the basics… you always want a key light (the brightest) and fill, which usually fills in the shadows created by the key light and if possible a third light, like a hair or background light. They call this 3 point lighting and its pretty much the standard way of lighting anything in video.

Enjoy…

Dan O’Hara