Thank you to our Episode 16 sponsor:
Busivid, who have provided our PM teams with a swag of tools and gadgets to use for video creation from their smartphones for the ‘Amazing Race’. Busivid is a simple mobile sales tool that quickly integrates emotive video content into e-mail and text messages with near real-time analytics.
Coach:
Coaching Transcript:
I’m Helen and I’m the co-founder of a software business called Busivid, which was supposed to be half-business, half-video. I think the biggest thing that we usually strike as business people start to venture into the abyss of video and what they’re going to do with their business and video, is that there’s a lot of fear. I’m going to try and break some of those barriers and say, “Hey, this needn’t hurt a bit and it can actually be an incredible leverage to create a point of difference.”
Sam’s asked me to run through, for the Amazing Race, we’re going to provide you with just a taste of some of the equipment. Busivid is a software platform that allows you to very, very easily create branded content. You can use your smartphone, or you can use more elaborate cameras if you’d like. We have a whole lot of free training that shows you how to grab a terrific testimonial.
The beauty of smartphones is that they’re in your back pocket and you can just grab that. The nicest thing is if you want to point the camera at somebody else, which is where we all like to start, you’ll find that you get really great authentic video this way, as opposed to the big guns, the whole big lights and big production, which has its place.
If you were, for example, doing an overview of your property management team, or your business, I would highly recommend bringing in a professional because they give it that extra touch, the perspective that an outsider- You know, you get very close to your own business or your message, but for everyday purposes, it’s still very, very doable to have a quick app that allows you to brand, top and tail, and automatically publish.
Our system is made into a desktop interface, which is designed, when you’re in the office you can manage all of your video assets. Then the big challenge for business, as we move forward, is that over the next five years, every business is going to contend with the dilemma, “How am I going to store and keep tabs of all that video content?” It’s a search engine that finds all your videos. It puts it all into projects that you establish, and then it allows you to search for those. It could be years later and you think, “Oh, where’s that footage that I shot?” Or “There was that interview we did with somebody,” or “There was something I grabbed.”
Busivid is designed to grow with your business and tackle that challenge that you have, because Millennials, who now represent 41% of the audience out there, don’t read and they also don’t want a highly polished and sophisticated video. They’re looking for authentic. We believe we’ve met a lot of the needs to help a business delegate the tasks. Within your organisation, you can have the structure to allow some people to film and others to create the voice over, for example, if you wish. Particularly in a sales environment or anywhere where you want to build trust, the human voice is like a fingerprint. It’s a unique sound and it is a very compelling way to break down barriers and create trust, even if you just wanted to quickly film some footage, and communicate to the owner of the property.
Here’s what you’ll be receiving for the Amazing Race. It’s a little super mount here which holds any smartphone. This is the Stealth iPole. It’s out of the U.S. It was developed for Homeland Security, so you can imagine that this is a very robust version. You can actually create aerial perspectives, looking up and over fences or whatever, not that you’re going to necessarily going in the car keys and shimmying through.
I imagine that, having a few investment properties myself, knowing how the e-mail issue can escalate very quickly. I’ll come back with some data around how we communicate and understand message. Video can be very simple. I can literally turn on my camera. I can, then, come up to, let’s say, I’ve got a mould issue up here. I could just quickly pan across there, use the app to quickly top and tail it so it will have your branding at the intro and conclusion, with a watermark throughout the presentation.
You’ll see all of this when you’re doing the race. You could actually use this as a monopod. If you extend the legs and want to stand it on the ground, and straighten this up, it doubles as a monopod or a tripod. If you wanted to get a nice stable pan across a room, you could very, very quickly combine still photographs and video, assemble it all, and typically I would say you could do a, well, the test will be on when you’re in the home on the 18th, but you will find that the combination of still photographs and a little bit of video, you could assemble something in, typically, around 7 to 8 minutes, fully branded, published, ready to send.
We have analytics that allow you to send that message to somebody and know when they actually watched the video. That might be of great relevance when you’ve got people like me, who don’t open all their e-mails, and don’t read the messages that you’re sending. To know that it was actually watched might be fantastic if it was an important property condition report that you prepared as a video.
‘It’s Not About You.’ I did this YouTube video, which I looked at this and in 6 months, it’s more than doubled in views. Now I’m up to 11,000 something or other. It was just me showing how to film a car with an iPhone. It was a previous company name, before we moved into the U.S. and became Busivid.
What’s interesting about it is I did absolutely no optimisation. I just had the most simple search terms at the time. The engagement, some people are making snide comments of course. You know, sometimes you’ve got thumbs up, and sometimes they’re thumbs down.
The main thing is that if you do the smallest amount of research and look at what’s available on YouTube, which is the second largest search engine – the reason it is so prolific, and when people are searching to find, let’s say, your business, you will come up way higher on any search because Google purchased YouTube, and they preferentially select video content to come onto page one.
Now, you have 53 times more chance of being found on page one if you can include video for your business, and obviously you might find a perfect opportunity to pop up a testimonial of somebody who’s had a wonderful experience working with your organisation. There’s countless things you can do, but the views and the counts will continue to work long after. That’s the message. Long after you’ve done the exercise, it will be working for you.
You know, yourself, when you meet people face-to-face, that is going to be streets ahead of what you can achieve with an e-mail or a phone call. How practical is it to meet face-to-face? That’s the challenge. You’ll have clients that interstate, overseas, whatever. Really, video is the very next best thing, and it is the foundation of the strongest way that you can communicate and ultimately diffuse a lot of things that can escalate out of control, because the e-mail wars. You know, all of that stuff could be handled if we can find more effective ways to streamline the communication. By doing so, you’re actually creating a point of difference.
The other key point I would suggest you consider is reducing that day-to-day agitation. Has anyone FaceTimed? Okay, so all that fear and hesitation you have about video, you’re actually doing it, except you’re not perceiving it as that. There’s something that goes on up here that say, “Oh, I’ve got to lose 5 kilos. I’ve got to do this and I’ve got to do that.” No, you are meeting face-to-face, so just think of it as an extension of a face-to-face meeting. You don’t lock yourself away and say, “I can’t leave the office until I get my hair done.” No, you’re going to pull it up into a ponytail and you’re going to tear out the door because that’s just life.
I think the way to cope with dealing with how you’re going to produce video, obviously you can start by filming other things, whether it’s a property report or a testimonial, and get comfortable with it, but eventually you’ll find that your point of difference and the engagement that you get.
When I produced the video, many years back, about how to film the car, I actually had people ringing me, saying, “You changed my business. You changed the way I thought about how I was doing things,” so I realised at that point it wasn’t about me. It was about how I can be helpful, and in your industry, to create that point of difference of being helpful, being concise and effective with your communication is fundamental. Investing in simple techniques will give ROI over time.
You’re doing this elite program, I want to think about positioning your property management team as elite industry experts.
Explain why you’re different. Harness the emotion that you can get from producing video, because that’s what really on the table here.
If they have fears or if they’ve had a bad experience, just the reassurance that they are leaving their investment with somebody who can manage the whole process, deal with it calmly, that is what you can use in your mind to embrace technology and use it to your advantage.
In the sales arena, 73% of vendors say they would list with an agent that offers video to market their property online, but only 4% of agents actually use video regularly. That is in the sales area. The other stat is that when you add video to an e-mail, you increase the click-through rate by a further 96%, which is nearly double. Again, it’s how we like to receive information. Our software tools will make it so easy for you to then publish and distribute the videos that you’re creating.
That can always happen later. Just think about building a library and starting to think this way, and it won’t hurt a bit, I promise.
