"Video Is Becoming The Best Way To Communicate A Message In Real Estate"
So says Kevin Hawkins, CEO of WAV Group Consulting from Inman. Inman plays an interesting role in real estate - one of our vertical markets. They're journalism in its new-ish form - news and opinions in a mix of free and paywall. I pay for the Inman Select (paywall) news, and probably read something there at least every day. (I'm a particular fan of Craig Rowe, who writes great technology reviews with pragmatic eloquence.)
Inman also puts on a conference - called Inman Connect. We've paid to be "sponsors" - those eager-looking folks at vendor booths - at two Inman Connect events. Those events have been integral to learning about the real estate industry in its current form.
If you're interested in video - which I am - it's worth studying what the Inman Group does. They've very good at turning conversation into content. Every event at their conferences is shot for video. They're well-lit and well-miked. They even grab people from the Connect hallways (more or less) and put them on-camera for a quick @1-minute interview. Kevin's interview is one of 'em. They use and re-use and re-re-use the resulting video content.
Two guys in a well-equipped room can bang through a lot of 1-minute interviews. Lots of companies bleat about how hard it is to get video content - Inman has done a very clever job of turning conversation into content. (Granted, it's all talking-head content and hence mainly language, not visuals, but it's still effective.)
If you want to take a page from their book, notice a couple of things.
- Well-lit and well-miked.
- Structured (the 1-minute interviewees all answered the same 3 questions.)
- Edit, edit, edit.
(Did you consciously notice that this video is grayscale, not color?)
The value of all this footage goes up at least two-fold if the audio is transcribed. (I don't know if it is or not btw.) It becomes searchable, translatable, SEO-unique and manageable in many new ways. Transcription isn't free, of course, but since computers can't quite yet make sense of video, transcription turns video/audio into digital information (language) that they can manipulate.
Good stuff, Inman.
--md