Welcome back to this very personal journey…

By way of reminder from yesterday, my role is to provide you with a number of possible outcomes:

Any of those outcomes are fine. I’m here to move you forward, no matter what that looks like.

I hope you were able to take the interactive assessment yesterday. If not, I highly encourage you to do that now.

Anytime you take a trip it’s good to see it laid out in front of you before you start navigating. I suppose we take it for granted in a world of GPS, but it’s still unbelievably helpful to get a “You Are Here” moment before setting off on the journey, and that’s exactly what you’ll get from this assessment.

Here’s the link to that video.

The Big Bugaboo of Video Technology

Let’s talk about the big bugaboo of technology first, and how writing, being on camera, selling and uniqueness affect your video creation.

For almost everyone, technology is the biggest hot button issue. Video is technology. No matter how simple some try to make it sound, you have to grapple with it to some extent.

You’ve got to develop a half-way decent feel for your personal tech to make your videos work. The good news is, that’s not so difficult…because it IS yours.

Think of it this way. Maybe you don’t know a catalytic converter from a fly swatter, but you’re a good driver. Because it’s your car and you’re used to its weird traits. “Oh, yeah. It always does that in the winter when you turn on the AC”.

The same is true for video. Whatever camera you’ve had the longest is the one you’ll know the best. But if it’s more than 10 years old, it might NOT be the one you’ll get the best results from.

So what do you do?

Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

Say your tech is perfect, but your writing lacks clarity, urgency or uniqueness. Maybe you even think you’re writing about one thing, but your viewers think you’ve written about something else.

Think that could never happen to you? Well, then you’re smarter than I am because it happened to me quite recently.

This is a story about how important it is to never get so far behind your own ideas.

One day I realized that if someone called you one in a million, numerically speaking it’s not nearly as cool as it sounds. Because if the population of the Earth (8 billion) is taken into consideration, there are 8,000 people exactly like you out there. 

A tad on the creepy side, really.

So I put that fact right in the introduction to a video called “How to Become One in a Million” and people totally missed the point. They thought I was telling them how to become one in a million. One person even said it back to me, thinking they were paying me a compliment. 

Clearly that video failed to get its point across.

Hey, the tech was fine though, so the worst it caused was a flip in the original meaning of the title. 

The download it linked to received a healthy 22% click-through rate. In a world where 2% is considered outstanding I found the whole thing somewhat ironic. After all, my bigger idea was still lost to the ages. 

Maybe I’ll try it again someday.

The point of this is that a video can fail on one level while succeeding on another. The selling, the tech, on-camera work and my odd brand of uniqueness built trust and that saved the video from what otherwise would have been a real pile-up.

That’s why it’s important to pay attention to all 5 of these elements as a whole. You never know which one will make your efforts pay off, or save you for that matter.

So what happens, all other things being equal, if the tech is bad? Well, that means you’re a little harder to watch and a little harder to listen to. People come to know you by watching you. If what they’re watching isn’t really perceived as you, then there’s a disconnect.

People come to like you by what they hear you say. If they can’t hear it well, then you lose some of the “like” factor. This in itself is probably not enough to sink a video, but it certainly doesn’t develop trust. You might respond one time to that producer, but you’ll remember how that video made you feel and you likely won’t be up to watch another one.

This actually happened to me recently. 

I watched someone’s sales video right on YouTube. The quality wasn’t just bad. It was flat out horrendous. But I bought his program on the basis of my admiration of him as a world-class thinker. 

However, the course was hard to get into. The tech was lousy, and when I thought about it later I realized I would really not want to suffer through any more of his sub-standard video work. I didn’t finish the course, obviously.

Again, a video can succeed on one level while failing on several others. In this case he won the sale and lost a fan. This is another reason it's worth getting all 5 elements "Goldilocks" right.

Investing in making good video is a long-term strategy. I’d rather get the chance to experience several “at-bats” rather than be forced to make one home run or have to quit the game.

But hey, what happens when all the other elements are not very good, but the tech is perfect? 

I call that sort of generic SEO-inspired content “Corporate Video”. That’s a scripting problem, a uniqueness problem, a selling problem and probably an on-camera problem, since there’s likely some A.I. character doing the selling.

The point here is that great tech cannot save a video where the other 4 elements don’t provide significant support.

Now, if you do bring those other elements in with a high degree of quality and clarity, fixing your tech may be all you need. I have an amazing client who came to me with all the other elements intact. All he needed was the tech. And once he grokked it, he was off to the races. Now his competitors even ask him to make their videos.

If you’re a relative beginner in video you will want to figure out your best technology setup. 

It doesn’t have to be green screen.

It doesn’t have to take place while flying an airplane.

I do those things because I love doing them.

I advise using similar criteria.

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