Video Signal for January 3rd, 2023.
Subscribe to the newsletter with all the links here.
Video Signal for January 3rd, 2023.
Subscribe to the newsletter with all the links here.
What's up, everyone? Welcome to the first edition of Video Signals for 2023. Happy new year! This is the January 3rd edition. Twice a week, you get 5 links, 3 tools, and 1 tactic you can apply to your video marketing specialties. So one quick thing, I am changing a bit of the schedule. Originally, this was every Monday and Thursday. We're going to shift it a day, and it's going to come out every Tuesday and Friday now, which makes a little bit more sense so we can get it together on Monday. And so the news can catch up on Monday. That said, it has been a bit of a slow news week with the holidays and everything. So let's jump into our 5 links. First link, we've got an article from Inc. Magazine about why brands should consider making full-length documentaries for their brand to promote their business. Obviously, I'm a big fan of this, of any type of documentary and media. I think it is a great tool to get your story out there. But these are not just about films about your story. These are films that will sort of fit in your brand ethos, your brand vibe. Some examples they gave Patagonia has been a big maker of documentaries not about Patagonia but about topics that relate to Patagonia. So DamNation, which is about removing of dams because they're aggravating natural ecosystems. It's a really good film. Nothing in that that's overtly Patagonia, but Patagonia produced it because conservation and doing good for the environment fits into Patagonia's vibe. Some other examples they gave- I will say this article's pretty light, pretty tiny article. But some other examples, Airbnb has done a film or a few documentaries along with Nike, which obviously makes a lot of branded content. The one interesting stat that they did give was a study by the scientific journal Learning Memory found that participants who watched a 27-minute narrative episode could recall many events from the movie months later. So a little bit more than just quick social media videos or YouTube videos. Having that longer-form content does create a better recognition with your brand. There's also another example they didn't give, but Shopify produced a documentary called Own the Room which followed young entrepreneurs. Fun fact with that one, I was one of the camera people on that film. In that one, they actually had a distribution deal with Disney+ and National Geographic. So making these films, they are going to be more costly, but there are ways to actually make them either break even, or make money off them as its own product. All right, next up. Speaking of Shopify, Shopify released a 2023 Commerce Trends report. I don't do a ton of e-commerce stuff. I will say, digging into this, there wasn't really anything shocking aside from recession is coming, and influencer marketing and social media marketing is only going to increase. But they do have a lot of categories about supply chain, money marketing, e-commerce, retail. So if you do any type of online selling, you should check it out. We have the link in the newsletter. Third link, Spotify is considering rebranding its main podcast creation tool. So Spotify purchased Anchor. And Anchor was a podcast hosting tool, and it also is just kind of an overall podcast producing tool to record, distribute episodes. So because it's called Anchor, it's a bit confusing that it's part of Spotify and that they own it. So it might get rebranded to Spotify Creator Studio, but it doesn't seem like any of the functionality will change. It'll just make it a little bit clearer that it is connected with Spotify. And by hosting your podcast there, you can do extra things that you can't do if you host your podcast elsewhere, like uploading videos and having those videos playable in Spotify and doing polls and a couple of other things that you're only able to do on Spotify if you're hosting your podcast on Anchor, which could be Spotify Studio. All right, next link. Quick one about a new monitor that came out from Portkeys, the Portkeys PT6 monitor. So it's a bit similar to some of the higher-end monitors from SmallHD or Atomos. It has HDMI in and out so you can pass the signal through. It has the features you'd find on pro-level monitors, like applying LUTs to your picture, histograms, focus assist features. The thing that is different, obviously, it's going to be a little bit of a cheaper build, but it is a lot cheaper than you would find with the SmallHD monitor. It is only$169, so very affordable monitor that seems to have pretty solid reviews. So if you do need a budget-friendly monitor for your camera, it seems like a solid pick. And the last link, a quick update on Forbes about CES and a bit about the Metaverse and Web3. They are getting their own section at CES this year. So even though Meta and the Metaverse have not taken off quite as quickly as Meta and Facebook definitely hoped, I don't think they're going anywhere. And so it's going to be interesting to sort of see what other new tech is going to come out that capitalizes on that. And also CES, in general, we'll probably see a lot of updates come out of there. That's starting this Thursday. So I expect Friday, we'll have a lot of updates and new products coming out to talk about. All right. Now, let's go on to our three tools. First tool, Simon Says. So this one is handy where you can import your footage. It'll automatically transcribe it. And then you can do rough cuts with the text and create rough assembly cuts. Very useful if you have a lot of interview-heavy footage, like those documentaries you're going to make for your brand. So you can create those rough cuts and then export them, send them to your editing app of choice. There are a couple apps that do this. Simon Says is one. We use Descript for that similar feature as well. Next tool, EmojiAI. So if you're writing a newsletter like this one or other types of content and you're trying to figure out the best emoji to use, you can type in what kind of sentiment you want, and it'll recommend emojis that sort of match out. So you can type in your headlines, you can type in some captions, and it'll recommend emojis that would go along with that theoretically using AI. And the last tool, Moosend. This is an email marketing platform. The thing that's different about this one is it's pretty simple to use, and it's also very, very affordable. So if you're looking to get into email marketing, this is a good tool that you can start with and a pretty low lift tool. All right. And now, our one tactic. It is the new year. So one thing you may want to do this year is put out more videos, but also save a lot of time and not have a bunch of headaches in creating your videos. So a couple of things you can think about in how you can make templates and how you can systematize creating videos, promoting videos, publishing videos, all that stuff, so that you can create a checklist, save yourself headaches down the line of having to rethink everything. So 5 things that you can turn into checklists. Process checklist. So we have templates that we use in our project management program, ClickUp. But you can build a process checklist in any program, Notion, Todoist, Asana. Anything, you can create a template of just all the steps you go into making the video so you can stay on track and know what has to happen. YouTube descriptions. So we have templates for our channels of just fill-in-the-blank spots where we know we're going to have a section for links, we're going to have a section for the intro, we're going to have a section that has our same promotion links that we are always going to include. So we have a template for that, and then we just fill in the blanks. And YouTube has been adding more features where you can actually create a template of your upload settings, so every time you upload, you don't have to change the settings all the time. You can just create the template once and automatically apply those upload settings, including titles and tags. Thumbnails. So thumbnails can go either way. Sometimes, with our stuff, we'll just do totally different looking So they kind of get designed from scratch each time. But in other cases, like Video Signals, we have a thumbnail template where we just sort of swap out a couple of images, but we're not rethinking the whole thing from scratch. So it saves a lot of time in making those thumbnails for both the video and also the podcast. Promotion schedule. That is our fourth template. So once you publish a video, you got to promote it. Sometimes, this falls through the cracks where we promote it when we first publish it, but then we sort of forget about it. So we started creating templates that had a schedule where like day 1, day 2, day 3, then day 5, day 7, day 20. We have kind of a slower cadence that sort of slows down as time goes on, but over the span of like 3 to 6 months, to remind us to revisit old material and promote it. One thing that actually does this really well, social media-wise is a website called Missinglettr, where you can set up evergreen templates for up to a year and it will automatically keep posting stuff about your article, your video, whatever you want to promote. But it'll have a schedule that you can distribute out over the year. And then lastly, social media images. So this one, if you have templates for quotes, you have templates for quotes from your podcast, thumbnails, tips, something you can create a graphic design template around, and that makes it a lot easier to just swap out the text so you don't have to rethink the design every single time. So that is our tactic. And that was our episode for Video Signals. Let me know what you thought in the comments or over on Twitter, I am@C47. If you found this useful, or you think a friend might find it useful, please pass this along so they can subscribe as well. Hope you're having a great 2023 so far. It's been iffy for me. I will see you in the next Signal.