Hotel Rip Off Or Reasonable Charge

I met a prospect this morning for a casual chat over a coffee at a country house hotel near the M4. Upon arrival the hotel informed us that because it was a business meeting they would charge us £10 plus the cost of the coffee (£2.50 a cup) to sit in their public lounge and chat. They justified this charge on the basis that lots of business people came in with laptops and used their wifi. We left immediately and had our meeting at Costa Coffee at the Leigh Delamere services instead. Is it just me, or is this self-defeating nonsense? I can think of no better way of pissing off potential customers than this. I would have thought hotels would want to encourage foot fall and casual visitors. Instead they now have two annoyed business people who will never go there again and may talk about it on social media sites like this one. What do you think? Should I name and shame or is this fair enough?

Web Video – Can I have one of those please? (Part 2 of 3)

How To Commission a Video

Assuming you are sure about your message and your target audience then you have to decide if you’re going to do it in-house or use professionals. Here’s my very best tip – USE PROFESSIONALS!!! Now there’s a lot of “amateur” video out there, it’s the backbone of Youtube and many companies have used John’s brother in law with his handycam to produce a video (well he did a good job at Bob and Vera’a wedding didn’t he?) But my advice is this: Unless you have a really compelling reason for your video to look and sound appalling (in other words the shaky camera work, bad lighting and awful audio is somehow part of your message) then please don’t let Jim from accounts anywhere near it with his camcorder. Amateur video will damage your brand and make people think you couldn’t be bothered. It is usually worse than not having video at all.

Find the Right Production Company

There are loads of us out there just desperate to take your money and turn it into the next youtube megahit. A quick Google search will reveal just how many. But ask around your network, find out if anyone has been down this road before you, and once you have a few names, look at their websites and most importantly, watch examples of their work. If there is nothing on-line to watch then my advice is to surf away as quickly as possible. You want a company that understands web video, so if they haven’t bothered to put any video on-line then it’s a fair bet they don’t. Try and watch a real client video not a compilation show reel. Ask yourself the all important “So What?” question, bearing in mind you’re probably not the target audience. And be honest – does the video effectively communicate an idea or is it simply a sunset and cheesy music fest? This will give you a very good idea of the sort of outfit you are dealing with and whether they understand the importance of content and storytelling. Once you’ve made the film you then have to get it on to the web. With a good production company this should be easy as they will do it for you as part of the package. The video can and should be hosted by them, so you can easily embed it on your site and they deal with all the issues around streaming and storage. If they don’t do hosting then you may be stuck with Youtube or something similar which frankly is not good enough if you’ve just spent money on a professional production.

In the third and final part we’ll be looking at what sort of video you could make and how much it might cost.

To download the complete article click here.

Web Video: Can I Have One of Those Please? (Part 1 of 3)

You can’t have failed to notice that the web is now bursting with video content. I’m not just talking about those surfing dogs and clips from the X factor that populate Youtube, or even the fact that you can now watch virtually any TV show when you like on your computer. No, what I’m talking about is the stuff that’s increasingly appearing on your customers and your suppliers websites, maybe even your own organisation’s site; the corporate video, the product promo, the customer testimonial or whatever other video incarnation you’ve stumbled across.


So what if you’re faced with the task of researching, reporting on, or perhaps even commissioning a video for your organisation’s website – what will you do, where do you start and who or what are you going to put in it? Over the following series of 3 blogs we offer a brief guide to how to get your corporate video made and how to get it on-line.


Let’s start at the very beginning



Videos get made for all sorts of reasons and most of those reasons are wrong. For any organisation there really is only 1 good reason to make a video. Communication. That’s it. No hidden agendas, no complicated business or marketing theories – the only reason you could possibly want to spend time and/or money on a video is to find a better way to communicate with other people. And to do this your video simply has to tell a story, with a beginning, middle and end – in other words it has to have effective narrative content.


Does it Pass the test?


Before you try to produce a video you need to have a very clear idea of the message you’re trying to communicate and who are you trying to communicate that message to. These points really are fundamental and they are regularly ignored by most video producers. I know this because most web video fails a crucial and time honoured test. Namely, the highly respected and fearsome “So What?” test. This is the one great test that all communication (not just video) must pass with the intended audience. It goes like this: When you’ve watched the video, read the article, listened to the concert, attended the seminar, stared at the painting – you simply ask yourself the question “So What?” If the answer is “dunno” or worse “I don’t care”, then the message has failed, at least for you. Of course it may have worked brilliantly for someone else, and that’s fine, but it must work for somebody and preferably the person or people it was aimed at in the first place.


In Part 2 we consider how to commission a video and how to find the right production company....



To download the complete article Click here.

Why Music on Business Web Video is a Bad Idea

The mistake that many web-based video productions make, is assuming that because music works so beautifully on film and television (and yes in commercials too) where it enhances the drama, deepens the emotion and generally transports us to un-dreamt of worlds (because it’s all about entertaining us) that by copying this formula to the web – the same dramatic results will occur to their sales figures. It seldom works. If somebody wants entertainment on the web they can use the BBC iPlayer or YouTube. If they come to your business website – they are not there to be entertained, they are there to learn about your product or service and unless your product or service is actually music or music related then using it (especially the cheesy library music on most web video) is annoying and disingenuous. Video can and does work brilliantly on the web – but don’t confuse corporate messages with award winning drama – they are different beasts entirely and music, most of the time, is entirely inappropriate for the business website video.

This is an extract. To download the full article click here

A Christmas Video

Here's a little something we all need to see - the video they tried to ban....

The Caravan - 500th performance opens in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire

You’re never going to be bored at a performance of The Caravan (Roses Theatre, Tewkesbury Fri 2nd Oct to Wed 7th Oct then Canterbury Festival Wed 21 Oct to Sat 24 Oct 2009) For one thing, at around 30 minutes, it doesn’t last long enough, but more importantly you are experiencing a piece of genuinely innovative theatre that keeps you spellbound for every one of those 30 minutes. Oh yes, I nearly forgot, the whole thing takes place inside a caravan in which you most certainly could not hope to swing a cat. In fact, so small is the performance space that by the time the full audience of 8 people (yes 8) is crammed in to one end and the four actors are literally nose to nose with you, a whole new meaning is given to the word intimacy. But that is exactly the point of The Caravan, a startling piece of documentary theatre from the Look Left Look Right company.
The inspiration for The Caravan are the floods of summer 2007, that devastated large parts of the UK, and the stories of the thousands of real people that were left homeless by the deluge. Many of them ended up living in Caravans and this play uses their words verbatim, gathered in interviews conducted by the producers during research for the play.
The Caravan was first performed to great acclaim at the Edinburgh Festival of 2008 then sold out at the Royal Court in London before going on this tour around England including visits to many of the flood affected areas.
This was the opening night in Tewkesbury, a town that itself was ravaged by the floods of 2007. It was also the 500th performance of a show that the excellent cast must perform 5 times an evening to a maximum of 40 people a night.
As with all good theatre the mood of the piece swings from amusement to pathos to exasperation and very effectively takes the miniscule audience with it. All the performances were excellent and it didn’t take long to believe that these actors were the real victims of the flood. This play strongly resembles a TV documentary without the camera and TV screen between you and the subjects. In fact there's virtually nothing between you and the characters apart from a few inches of stale caravan air. Like all good documentaries it weaves the narrative and the issues by jumping deftly between the victims contrasting stories. In the end the setting of The Caravan in a caravan is merely a device – the real meaning of this play is in the words – real words spoken by real people.

Web TV and Quilting

I've recently been privileged enough to enter the world of patchwork, quilting and textile art thanks to some very nice people who are setting up a new website called Justhands-on.tv. The site is still at the pilot stage but should launch officially around July 2009, and will be offering the vast numbers of quilters and textile artists out there a valuable new on line video resource. Here at BizView.tv we're delighted to have been appointed as the producers of much of this material and as a result found ourselves last week, filming at Quilts UK '09 at the 3 Counties Showground near beautiful Malvern. Not only did we see at first hand the stunning beauty of the quilts on show, but we were also lucky enough to meet many of the ladies (and it is mostly ladies) involved in this difficult and highly skilled process. If you are part of this world then you don't need me to tell you how amazing some of this stuff is, but if you're a quilting virgin like me, then make a start by checking out our friends at http://www.justhands-on.tv/.

The picture above is of Justhands-on founder Valerie Nesbitt and myself at Quilts UK '09.