How to do Business

I’ve been exploring some new ways of telling our story over the last couple of months. The most impactful has probably been the use of Music to illustrate some marketing issues that was carried out for the Brand Network this week. The video was shot with a standard sony camcorder and then edited in Windows movie maker which comes with most PCs these days. It was rendered in Camtasia which gives a lot of flexiblity in the output format whether you need to get it into 10 minutes to fit on YouTube or the 500 Mb limit that Viddler imposes on you. Here’s the 10 minutes in which we were discussing what the evolution of the Stones can teach us about personal branding.

The editing was a piece of cake compared to learning to sing and play the piano at the same time

The other approach is useful for giving a quick context for complex ideas. I had wanted to get the ideas in “Just 12 Hours” to a wider audience so I came up with the idea of doing the workshop as 90 tweets. However they are a little bald and needed some context. So what I did was use I-Mindmap from Tony Buzan to create a context for a group of tweets. This will output the mindmap as a Powerpoint slide that builds as you click through. I then used Camtasia as means of putting on the voice and the talking head – it sits inside PowerPoint and uses the webcam in the laptop to do the video insert. The editing capabilities are pretty powerful too – I’ve only scratched the surface to create this one.

I’m intending to use these tools on a couple of new projects which we’ll be running in the winter – so I’ll let you know how we get on.