— DANIELLE O'HANLEY

We wrapped up the workshop on Sunday morning by presenting the results from our homework assignment for the weekend. We had been split into groups on Friday and told to shoot a video related to “Aussies in Banff,” given the ridiculously high number of Australians that live and work here. We weren’t allowed to use any post-production, and the video had to be less than a minute in length. The challenge: get as many views as possible by noon today.

Our team started off on Friday afternoon by discussing what videos we tend to watch – things that are witty, funny, or shocking. We also decided to maximize on views by going with a shorter video length (so that people would have finished watching the video before even realizing it). One of our team members, Dan from Sleeping Beagle, started telling us a story about the 2000 Sydney Olympics, when Roots was the official apparel/uniform supplier for Canada. The Canadian gear got fairly popular, because “roots” has a very different meaning in Australia.

We all loved the story, and then thought we could use it as inspiration for our video. We decided to stage a fight in downtown Banff outside the Roots store, and film it as though a tourist happened to come across the altercation while shooting some footage of the sunset.

Here’s the video:

Admittedly, it looks pretty staged. But the great thing this about this video is that it clocks in at 30 seconds in length. The action starts pretty quickly, and it’s over before you get tired of watching. Because we managed to tie in girls, sex, swearing, and a fight on top of the “Banff” and “Australia” keywords, I think we increased the likelihood that YouTube users would stumble across the video. This also increased the size of our target audience and pool of relevant places to post to online.

36 hours after posting the video, we had 500 views and were listed as 13th “Top Discussed Video” in the Travel & Events section on YouTube.

How did we do it? We started off with the basics, and posted the video to our personal Facebook and Twitter profiles. We used keywords like “knock out,” “hot chick”, and “fail” in the Youtube video tags so that the video would show up easily in the “Related Videos” section. We brainstormed Facebook pages, such as “Cheesy Pickup Lines”, “I Wish I Could Knock Someone Out”, and “Girls Kick Ass,” where we posted links/descriptions enticing fans to view our video. We also posted to the obvious groups, like “Roots Canada” and “Australians in Canada.” At Duncan Kennedy’s suggestion, we posted to Thwapr as well (though this didn’t generate many views). We submitted the link to Digg, FailBlog, and Reddit.

We got many, many negative reviews about the quality of our video. Funnily enough, though, the anonymous/public comments were the most negative. Comments on our personal Facebook accounts tended to be more positive. The lesson here: don’t just show your videos to your friends. Get real feedback from a multitude of sources. For this project, more comments meant more views, so we were happy with anything. Obviously, if you were making a video for your company, you would take a very different approach.

Here’s what I took away from this:

• Don’t try and squeeze a lot into one video. Keep it short and simple.
• Think of what other, less obvious, audiences you can reach with your video.
• Brainstorm about what you like to see in the videos you watch before you start creating your own.
• Spend the majority of your time planning the video. Spend less shooting.
• Keywords are your friends.
• Use your networks. Use their strengths. Adopt your message for each.
• Keep the video relevant.
• Go a step beyond what you think is “enough” marketing.
• Don’t just show your content to your friends. This won’t give you real feedback.

The other teams did some pretty creative things with their videos. You can take a look at Aussie on the Spot and Banff Beaver Hunter on YouTube. I’m having a hard time finding the last team’s video, but will update when I locate it.

I’m spending the weekend at another Banff New Media Institute/Digital Alberta workshop – this one is called Video 2.0, and we’re covering some tools and methods for making short videos for marketing and how use social media to distribute your content. You can follow the action over on Twitter.

A lot of the participants are coming from small and medium-sized businesses that are starting to recognize that it’s high time to develop an online presence aside from the typical company website. Some have experience shooting/editing video, but most do not. Aaaand lots of us are pretty tech-savvy (you should see how many iPhones there are in the room…).

So here are some of my thoughts on what’s been going on so far.

Many of the presenters are coming from a media distribution background, where they (most likely) have a larger budget/pool of resources than most of the participants will have access to. Still, they’ve put forth some good things to think about when you’re getting started with video.

One thing that keeps coming up, though, is how to get your content to go “viral”. Everyone is asking how to get more views, more followers, more Facebook fans. I think that misses the point. As Ashkan Karbasfroosha said yesterday, you can’t plan for hits on the internet. My thought: if you want to get into social media and distribute videos for your company, you have to ask yourself why you want to be using these tools in the first place. That’s right, tools. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr, and all of these other sites are really just tools to get your message across. You can’t use them just for the sake of using them.

A step that I see a lot of people forget about is research. We all get so excited about these new tools that we have a tendency to jump in and go. You need to look at what other people in your field are doing first. Make a note of what tactics you like, and what rubs you the wrong way. Think of how you use your social networks, how you search for information, how you like to get your updates, and then go from there.

Forget about trying to get X number of followers; that can come later. Don’t set yourself a deadline for success. When it comes down to it, social media is an ongoing conversation. Slowly start to amass a following of dedicated fans who appreciate your content. These are the people who will be most likely to forward your videos/tweets/links on to their friends.

Remember – you can’t just push your content at people. It might be okay to blast your friends and contacts with your “ZOMG NEW VIDEO” a couple times, but if you keep it up, people will stop watching your content (and may even start to resent you for it). I can’t count the number of times I’ve unfollowed people or left fan pages because I’m tired of getting irrelevant messages/updates. Just focus on making your content available, searchable, and relevant to your desired audience.

Learn about the platforms you want to use. How does your content have to change to suit them? Should you be updating all of your profiles with the same frequency? Longer, less frequent posts may be appropriate for Facebook while short news updates may work better for Twitter. Again, this probably has to do with who you want to reach.

We’ve also been working on an exciting homework assignment – I’ll post a breakdown of what it involves and talk about the tactics our group has been using tomorrow.