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.