Want to know an easy way to put a fine polish on virtually any video or audio produced by your organization?
Brand it with a donut.
A "donut" is simply two short, but professionally produced, files that brand your organization and can be tacked onto the beginning and end of all your video and audio. Here's a donut intro we just produced for our upcoming video blog.
Even something as simple as a recorded-on-your-laptop podcast can be dramatically transformed into a high-quality piece by a well-made branding donut.
As noted above, our company is about to unveil a regular video blog called "Keybridge Live." We'll film it using low-cost equipment in our conference room. These videos will be posted on our website and certainly aren't meant for primetime. Nevertheless, we want them to reflect the fact that our company delivers high-quality services and doesn't compromise on quality. Also, if one of our posts goes viral, we want people to know who produced it.
So we cooked up a donut. Our weekly video posts will be sandwiched between the intro shot above, and the outro shot below. The same concept can be applied just as easily to audio.
Branding donuts give you a lot of bang for your buck. They're short, which makes them relatively inexpensive to produce, and they can be used repeatedly. The intro/outro shots seen here were produced in just a few hours, yet this donut will give a professional polish to all our future video blog posts.
In late June, Keybridge Senior Writer Rob Montz took a vacation. Unlike most employees, however, he didn't go to the beach. Instead, Rob flew to North Korea to eat clams doused in gasoline, drink soju, and work on his upcoming documentary, "Juche Strong." When he's not toiling away at Keybridge, Rob is an up-and-coming filmmaker and a fellow at the Moving Picture Institute. This week, Rob was featured in the Huffington Post. Here is a preview of his documentary, which will debut in theaters this Winter.
Over the years, we've tested virtually all the major media monitoring services, including BurrellesLuce, PR Newswire, Vocus, Meltwater, and Cision. We've literally compared their results for individual press outreach campaigns....
Establish a spokesperson. Someone at your organization needs to be able to field calls and answer questions from the media. Choose someone who is a clear writer, knowledgeable about your organization, and comfortable speaking to reporters on the phone.
Refine your message. If a reporter from the Wall Street Journal calls you, what will you say? Your talking points should be clearly defined on paper, so you don’t fumble when the big moment comes.
Build a list of journalists (and this should include influential bloggers). Chances are, there are only a limited number of journalists who really care about your industry and would be likely to write about your organization. In fact, there are probably fewer than 200 of these reporters. So make a list of them and keep it up-to-date.
Embrace Twitter. Follow your list of journalists on Twitter – and, if you have a good Twitter feed, invite them to follow you.
Establish yourself as a source. When appropriate, let those journalists know about your areas of expertise. When interesting stories break, offer yourself as a source of information for their articles.