Video Marketing with Santa

My wife forwarded me an email the other day. It was one of those emails that had been forwarded 100 times over. She’s pretty good at filtering the stuff she sends, so I opened it. It contained about 20 different images taken over the years by parents who took their children to go see Santa Claus. The expressions captured on the kids faces are truely priceless. Anyway, I saved the email and was going to post a few of the images here on the blog just for a little holiday fun. I asked a friend if they saw the pictures of the kids with Santa and he said no, but would like to, so I said I would forward them to him. As I was forwarding the email, it hit me… my wife was sent these images because someone thought they were funny and wanted to share them with her. She passed them along to me because she thought I would enjoy them and I forwarded them to my friend and wanted to post them on the blog because I wanted to share what I had seen. Since we all think the images are funny and worth the few minutes to view and share them, why not make it available to anyone who wants to see them. Why not take the images, create some sort of slideshow video, add in some relevant holiday music and post it on YouTube! And if I’m going to take the time to do that, why not add a little plug at the end letting people know more about this blog.

So I downloaded all the images from the email, opened Microsoft Movie Maker (which you can download for free from Microsoft), imported the images and began to create my slideshow movie. I did a quick search, found a holiday midi sound file, converted it to Mp3 and inserted that as an audio track while the slideshow was playing. To spruce it up I added some transition effects between images and lastly added some intro text and credits so I could plug this blog.

In total, it took me about an hour to produce. Not too bad considering it was my first time using Microsoft’s Movie Maker and converting a midi file to Mp3. I saved my movie to PC video format and made my way over to YouTube to upload it. Added a caption and a few tags and within minutes, the video was available for the anyone to enjoy.

Before you watch the video, I wanted to cover a few things that you can take from this and possibly use in your own business.

1. The opportunity to do something similar to this is available to all of us all the time. The software to create video and services to broadcast it to very large number of eyeballs is all free. So why not utilize it?
    
2. Marketing on social networks, like YouTube, requires a different type approach thus a different style of thinking. It’s typically not well received when marketers try to push their information through the network. Instead, join, participate, then offer something. This way you understand the culture and how to best format your contribution so your message is well received.

So without further ado…

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