Not everyone likes to write. Or, frankly, to read. Luckily, on the internet, we can use a combination of multimedia elements to tell a story, our story. I wanted to share how a client of mine, BuildDirect, is starting to use video, in combination with their blogging, to tell their story.
BuildDirect sells high-quality building materials direct to contractors and consumers via the Internet. They have been blogging for quite a while now - from a CEO blog to expert blogs about a number of topics (bamboo, wood flooring, stone tiles, etc.). Now, they're smart and haven't been blogging just about their stuff; for example, Rob Jones [twitter], who blogs about bamboo (and who also has a wicked personal blog about music and culture) finds great examples of bamboo (a green, sustainable flooring material) in use beyond flooring or heck, even beyond building materials - bamboo underwear, anyone?
So far, this has been a pretty good blogging strategy - curating and annotating with personal expertise a collection of articles on topics related to your business.
But BuildDirect (or any business really) has another resource that they could exploit - heavy internal expertise as well as access to places that most of us can't go.
Here's something you may not know about me - I am an ardent fan of shows like Megastructures and Frontiers of Construction. So when we were talking about what the next step for BuildDirect might be in social media AND I found out they could go to the places where they quarry the travertine - well, I had visions of Travertine Dream coming to the Discovery Channel.
Not surprising, perhaps, the Discovery Channel's production budget was a little out of BuildDirect's league. However, armed with a couple of Flip video cameras, BuildDirect has started to film their journeys to their manufacturers - first up, the travertine tile manufacturer in Turkey.
And this is where the great storytelling comes in - by illustrating a descriptive blog post with snippets of educational video, BuildDirect now has a comprehensive piece on how travertine tile is made.
So smart! And this kind of content can be used for customer education, sales team education, show-and-tell at school. Also, they can take beautiful, personal images (like the one of travertine above) that they can then use online and off - so much better than stock photography.
So ... what aspects of your business can you make visible to your customers? Where do you have latent expertise that, armed with a camera, could become explict expertise and start to tell the awesome story of your business?
Bamboo Hut Image via Inhabitat
Travertine Image from BuildDirect