Like, Comment, Share, Buy

The beginner's guide to marketing your business with video storytelling

Jonathan Creek

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780730390015
• eBook ISBN: 9780730390039
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship
• Index: Business

Take your video marketing to the next level with this practical and insightful resource

Like, Comment, Share, Buy: The Beginner's Guide to Marketing Your Business With Video Storytelling delivers powerful and actionable strategies to move your company's brand to the forefront of your customers' imaginations. Celebrated author, speaker, journalist, and consultant Jonathan Creek explains why video is the most impactful medium in which to market online and how you can leverage it for maximum benefit.

Providing a fully interactive experience for readers through the book's video companion app, Like, Comment, Share, Buy contains an approachable and comprehensive method to unlock the power of online video and discusses topics like:

• How to make social media videos with just your smartphone
• The formula to creating contagious, compelling and viral content
• The scientific research underlying the author's approaches to social media
• The tools and tips to marketing your small business on social media

Perfect for social-media savvy entrepreneurs, small business owners, marketing managers, and advertising agents, Like, Comment, Share, Buy provides a compelling message that deserves to be heard by anyone hoping to increase their online and offline profile.

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part I: videology The study of video and human behaviour

In the five chapters of Part I, the aim is to establish a common understanding, a place where you can still be uniquely you but our beliefs around the lay of the land are aligned. I'll share insights, observations and learnings that I have gleaned from my years of dissecting, testing and analysing video that spreads, and the powerful roles played by social platforms and humans in these interactions.

It all begins with the most valuable resource we can draw on, human attention, and how to capture and use it to your full advantage in both business and life, before introducing the new powerhouse in the attention space, the viral video.

The statement ‘Content is King’ is everywhere, but what does it mean, and is it true? Or is it just noise? We'll explore beyond the simple statement that gurus use to skip over what's needed, because it's a bit more complex than just doing. You can't just turn on a camera and expect your videos to magically work. Great videos need many aligned ingredients to be successful, and that's where viral videos come into it. We examine why and how they work.

Sharing is the most important ingredient of success in the new media world — it validates your content, and in turn your brand, service or product. Learn to understand the modern-day mystery of spreading your message and the key principles to getting it right.

At the top of the principles pile is one that, more than any other, is vital for success. Context. Without proper context embedded into your content you risk simply adding to the noise that already exists. So what is context? How do you identify it? And most importantly how do you communicate it to those who find it relevant? The answer starts with your purpose: identifying, extracting and focusing on the desires of your audience and then fulfilling them in a way that delivers real business outcomes, which is what this book is all about.

The Like, Comment, Share, Buy approach is based on a working formula that encourages you to think differently. This book introduces viable strategies that will be unique to you and easily implemented. In Hollywood it's ‘Lights, Camera, Action’; in social media it's ‘Likes, Comments, Action’. This is the sequence we will focus on so you can lead your way to the top using video marketing.

Now before you dive in, understand this one key difference. This book — the approach, the system, the Virable formula — is not one-size-fits-all. It's about your own particular journey. The work you do as you progress through the chapters will be unique to you, and that's a powerful thing. Your values, your insights, your experience and your story. It is important that you find the true you and your own business values.

Don't ever be afraid to be different.

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chapter 1
the struggle for attention

How would capturing 1 million views on social media change your life? Would it make you rich? Famous? Would having a million views give you greater influence, in your business or personally?

The reality in today's world is that attracting enough views at the right time definitely gives you clout. Just as with popular movies, TV shows or public speaking, the more you can attract people's attention, the more people will stand still long enough to listen to what you have to say. If they like it, they'll be more likely to come back and listen to what you have to say next time. If they don't, they may still come back to check you out next time. However they feel, they will begin to rely on the value you deliver to help enrich their own knowledge and therefore their own public profile.

The game, the fame game, has been around since the amphitheatres of ancient Greece and Rome. What's new is the multitude of ways in which our messages can now be delivered, how we can reach crowds of almost unimaginable size, and the skills we need to master the arts of this mass communication. Get them right and you can influence a lot more people more easily than has ever been possible before. There has never been a better time to spread your message and increase the influence of your business and, ultimately, your bottom line.

It wasn't long ago that prime-time TV was the go-to platform for delivering a commercial message to the masses. But with the maturation of social media, the exponential growth of the digital audience and the evolution of the first generation of digital natives (whose entire lives have been dominated by digital communication), there is a new powerhouse in the attention space.

The new player, which sits at the pinnacle of attention-grabbing excellence, is the viral video.

For those who don't know, viral videos are online videos that seem to spread through a life force of their own. Once posted, for very specific reasons that I will explain in the course of this book, they trigger viewers to push them out to greater audiences by sharing, commenting and engaging with them. Audience interaction is the vital difference between videos that attract millions of views and others that attract none.

Anything video — my early experience

Understanding how to trigger this ‘sharing’ was the challenge that captured my attention with the growth of online video culture. During the early 2000s I was a TV journalist for Australia's biggest and most popular TV network. I was producing three or four stories a week for a public affairs show whose primary, unashamed focus was on attracting as much viewer attention as possible. Critics would often say this came at the expense of ‘good’ journalism. The truth is that unlike news reporting, where the structure of a story is 90 per cent predetermined, public affairs allowed for greater creativity, higher production values, more storytelling and, yes, often a bit of ‘shock and awe’ too.

I had at my disposal professional camera operators, editors, researchers, producers … and millions of dollars' worth of the latest technical equipment. I also had something of a captive audience. With only 10 TV channels, the Australian audience didn't have that much choice in what to watch. As a result, our show attracted a significant national audience of around 1.8 million viewers a night.

At the time, this put the show at the top of the ratings: it was a bulletproof, ever-reliable attention-grabbing machine. So much so that executives were totally unprepared for the approaching tsunami of Facebook, YouTube and the rest. Whenever these platforms, today's social media giants, were raised in conversation, the bosses dismissed them. They never anticipated a world in which anyone had the potential capacity to broadcast their own message to a global audience. They continued to ignore the advances in phone technology that led to HD cameras becoming standard issue. They didn't believe that mobile networks would be able to handle the data amounts it takes to deliver video affordably for the mass market. And they absolutely refused to believe the general public would be able to produce better content than they could. The truth they missed is that the world had changed. TV networks are no longer protected by expensive infrastructure and the high cost of entry. Their traditional advantages have evaporated; their business model is broken. YOU now wield the power. You can broadcast your own message and if you're good enough, you will attract a million views.

From the very beginning I found the internet intriguing. I had a cousin who was building chatrooms and online noticeboards that operated over the family phone lines in the late 1980s. I remember my mum and aunty never being able to speak because the computers had taken the phones offline. By the time my cousin was in his late teens, those hobbies had grown into a significant business. This early exposure opened my eyes to the possibilities of the internet. But the thing was, I found no joy in chatrooms or coding. My real love was for anything video, especially storytelling and communicating, games and cameras. I loved video games that followed stories and I leapt at any chance to get closer to a video camera. Those chances were rare in the eighties. We certainly never owned one, so my exposure to the art of filming was restricted to sometimes at school getting to share a 15-minute window with four other kids, all of us recording on the same VHS tape. It was far from ideal, but it was enough to give me the video storytelling bug.

In my final year of school I learned I was the first student in the State of Victoria, if not Australia, to submit a final-year assignment on VHS tape. It was all shot and edited in camera. (And if anyone from the Victorian Education Department is reading this, I would love that tape back sometime.) My first job was in TV, as were my second and third, each step getting me closer to creating and producing stories using video. By the late nineties my two overriding interests — video and the internet — started to converge. I didn't know it at the time but this changed things; it changed humans, the way we communicate and interact and, most important to my mind, the way we share.

At first, online videos spread as tiny, low-res files attached to long email chains. Numbers of views weren't recorded. Their success was measured by how long the daisy chain of email addresses was, and also by word of mouth. Then came websites and forums with catalogues of links to videos. Those early sites led naturally to the creation of video platforms, the unrivalled king of which is YouTube.

Understandably, YouTube began as an unsophisticated, somewhat random platform without so much as a Share button — it was a matter of copying the URL and emailing the link around — but before too long, driven by its popularity, YouTube scaled, and it scaled hard. In 2005, Nike produced the first video to reach a million views. That milestone finally had media bosses and brands starting to take notice, albeit still half-heartedly, and even today not nearly enough.

As more and more videos reached tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• foreword
• author's note
• part I: videology The study of video and human behaviour
• part II: the Virable formula Unlocking your Viral DNA
• conclusion
• the Virable framework
• about the author
• Index
• End User License Agreement