Yesterday, I was at VMX09, a video conference held in Austin. It was an outstanding intermediate-level event. They did a great job blending in marketing and new methods, for people who have been doing video, and then video production and scaling and workflow hints for marketing people who are looking to add video to what they do online. As a marketing person who’s done a few videos from start to finish, all by myself, it was helpful to know that I’ve been doing things right, how to do it better, and how to do it more easily and frequently.

Here are my quick and dirty take away tips:
1. Audio is the most important thing. People will put up with crappy visuals if the audio is great, but make them adjust everything and they’ll abandon.

2. Your content and info can’t suck. Be informative, entertaining, and to the point.

3. blip.tv is your new best friend.

4. Don’t go for the lowest quality. You can’t control where your content is shown. The services automatically compress and serve the right kind of file now, so you want to make sure people using web TV or big monitors have a good experience.

5. Read the Terms of Service for each site before you post anything. Period. Some sites can use your content without notifying or paying you, others absolutely do not allow anything of any sort of commercial intent and will pull your video. Yes, you demonstrating a product is commercial.

If this is something that interests you, or if your company is thinking about adding it, or if you already do it but want to improve production values or know where to spend your time and money to make it better, you might want to check out a few of the sessions. Everything will be available on streaming video next Wednesday here: http://www.vmx09.com/.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at 10:21 am and is filed under featured speaker, inspiration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.