“The Internet Audio and Video Guy”
After a short update on how the World Internet Challenge from Shaune Clarke, (it was going fairly well) the first speaker of day three was Mike Stewart of InternetAudioGuy.com and InternetVideoGuy.com fame.
Mike told us that audio and video build trust more quickly than just words. He showed us some sites which seemed to prove this point rather well and were fun to boot. A good one to share is www.YuckyNastyBugFacts.com. To save signing up for the newsletter you can watch his video at www.northfultonexterminating.com/. After watching the video of Hal Coleman, ask yourself a question - “do I believe this man knows what he’s talking about? If I lived in that area and had a problem with bugs, do I think he could solve it?” A nice demonstration of how video builds trust quickly.
Other things to notice from that video are that you can point to things on the web page - Hal points up, down and to the sign up box on the left of his frame. That’s actually pretty cool, even if he is talking about bugs. Also notice that Hal tells you to fill in your name and email address to sign up to his newsletter. This brings out another point Mike made - tell people what to do; have a call to action in all your material, especially your videos!
Mike gave us a demo of how easy it can be to create a video or audio blog entry and upload it to the internet. He really did make it look simple. (On the video side he didn’t mention that you should take care in lighting the subject, I guess he didn’t want to put people off.)
Mike also talked about the kind of equipment you need to do the recording, video camera, microphone, suitable leads to connect to the computer, suitable software and so on. He sells this kind of thing plus training materials on how to be a home studio.
Audio and Video podcasting are a hot area. Once you have created some content, ensure that you use the power of RSS to allow your entries to work with an RSS aggregator such as Feedburner.com or Google’s RSS Reader. Note IE7 has an inbuild RSS reader. Apparently in the US Apple TV allows people to receive video casts via their normal TV! Same deal with TiVO in the US. In other words you can become a micro TV station. And this is what Mike termed New Media.
Old Media is the mass advertising even if the viewer might not care. E.g. you’re watching your favourite program on the TV and then they interrupt to tell you that you should eat this breakfast cereal, were this type of ladies clothing and so on, regardless of the fact that these ads might not be appropriate to you at all! In New Media the broadcasts are so niche that the ads can be included in the content, e.g. a review of a new piece of equipment you are using. OK, so you won’t broadcast it to millions, but then millions are not interested anyway. If you get a few hundred viewers who are interested then your recommendation will have a much greater impact on them.
Mike’s websites have the hardware information on getting started plus a bunch of other stuff.
-Paul
Paul Quirk is a director at Know It Use It Ltd
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