A major brand recently provided some good lessons about what not to do in online video. The brand succeeded in breaking all five major rules in the online video book according to Steve Washer, an online video entrepreneur.
Five Rules of Online Video Marketing
Steve Washer makes his living educating companies on how to achieve results from their online video presence. His five essential rules of online video are:
1. Your personality is baked into your product or service. If you commit to video, you must display some personality.
2. Your message and your persona must be aligned. For example, don’t give bad news with a big smile on your face.
3. Production values must fit the market and the message. If you are a high profile brand, your production values should be correspondingly high.
4. Every video should have one (and only one) purpose. Don’t try to stuff a bunch of messages into one video.
5. Where there is value, video adds more value and where there is no value, video makes it worse. If it seems like a bad idea, it probably is.
In the video below, Steve seems part incredulous, part sympathetic and part appreciative that a major brand would so blatantly violate his five essential rules of online video and give him such a strong example of what not to do — so that he could relay an important lesson his audience.
Sometimes, learning what not to do is much more effective than learning what to do. As, such this is a good online video marketing lesson.
