Events are great places to harvest video content. Not only do they frequently provide a festive backdrop of people having fun, but they also typically have lots of opportunity for shooting different types of content. It’s always great to plan – but live events have a life of their own and there can be many variables that aren’t known even to the event’s planners! (rain, small turnout, traffic, etc.) Bottom line is that you have to be ready for anything and adapt to the shooting situation. Here is how WE help you…
Many clients initially have the general notion that they want to shoot some video at an event, to document and share, but the plan doesn’t get much further than that. That’s a shame because events can yield content that addresses many of the business issues they face. Here are a few tips for these situations and ideas for how you can easily use video for a variety of business uses:
What’s the goal(s)? Is the goal to tell the world about an event that just happened? If so, maybe getting a video edited and posted fast is important. If you want to interest others in attending similar events, maybe that means that a polished and attractive and engaging piece is the best marketing tool. The big take away of this article really is: Know what business goal you are trying to achieve. The more we know in advance, the better video we can capture for you.
Short is better It’s easy to go overboard and make a really long video. We find that a few well targeted sound bites about the event with some extra footage of what’s going on can be edited into a 1-2 minute video that you can share on your website, You Tube and social media for an added visibility boost, and provides more content items than one long video. What a great way to entice people to your NEXT event, or netter yet – a membership!
SEO benefits (now we call this VSEO) I think there’s a great opportunity at these events to make several different videos on different aspects of the event: the preparation, the cause, the guests, the food, the music, you get the idea. Not only will you have more content but if optimized with keywords and meta-tags, it can really help boost your visibility in search.
Customer Testimonials Events are a lively and consolidated way to get customer interviews in one time and place. We like to ask them a couple questions first and then ask how they feel about your product or service last once they are warmed up. If there’s free food and drinks, even better! They’ll probably be more likely to come and be relaxed and upbeat. Other than a test-trial, nothing is more convincing in B2B-land than customer testimonials. Ask the BEFORE the event begins, and again AFTER– “what are you expecting to get out of today’s event,” and the “what did you get out of today’s event.”
Make it about one thing By keeping each edited video about one thing it can be far more targeted for purpose and audience and have a stronger ‘call to action’ at the end. I like the rule of’: make 1 video=make 1 point.
Find the action Video is about motion. We look for what’s moving and happening at the event: what’s the focus? Once we have footage of that, we get reaction shots and reaction statements from other attendees.
Lights & sound With ubiquitous mobile phone cameras, it’s easy to overlook the professional tools of video production…until you realize how dark and loud your event is! Once we get there, it may be too late to do anything about it. When the video is important, hiring a company like RMAVP to deal with those situations and be sure to take a walk-through with us and your A/V folks, we often give some ideas BEFORE, that may have little incremental event cost!.
Papers please You might need to get permission to film or air the images of the people you shoot. I’m no lawyer but my rule of thumb is if they are in a public place, they have no “expectation of privacy’ and can be used in a video. You have to be careful though, you can’t use their image endorsing a product or in libel. It’s also a good idea to get the spelling, title and contact info of the people who you interview, you may want/need to ID them in the video. We have forms for that!
Gravy In addition to video shot with a camera, maybe there are also Power Point slides, images or video that was shown at the event that can be used in your event video.We make sure to get them while you’re on site, or in advance -much harder afterwards!
Good luck and please let us know if you have any questions, we’re always happy to provide a free consultation.
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From a in idea started by our friend Dane Frederiksen