Talk about milking a topic in multiple channels! The Marketing News Radio interview I did on multidimensional lead scoring is now available. And…we’ve now added a “video white paper” to the mix, which you can view on the Bulldog Solutions web site [Update: since the redesign of the Bulldog Solutions web site, and, presumably, due to my departure from the company, the video no longer seems to be available.]
The story behind how this 8-minute video came to be is kinda interesting. At Bulldog Solutions, we’re constantly (too constantly, at times) looking for ways to put new Internet-based technologies to work for our clients. Generally, we like to put them to work for ourselves first. First, that lets us suffer through the hiccups and snags that come the first time you do anything new. And, second, it gives us something that we can use as an example of what it is our clients would get.
The truth is, this video white paper was driven more by the fact that we were starting to talk to prospects where the medium seemed like a fit than it was part of a glorious, fully-baked, multi-channel strategy for marketing multidimensional lead scoring.
In the case of the radio interview, our Field Marketing Manager pinged me months ahead of time about doing the show. She then wrote up an abstract for the interview. We had a timeline that we worked to, and the preparation included a pre-call with the interviewer the week before the show to get everyone on the same page and lay out the overall flow for the interview. And, the show itself was on my calendar for months.
Contrast that with the video white paper experience. I was in Austin for a week a couple of months ago. I flew in on Monday morning. On Tuesday, the same Field Marketing Manager said, “Tim, we’re going to be shooting a video of you talking about multidimensional lead scoring for 5-10 minutes on Thursday. It’s no big deal — just you talking through the concept. But, we’ve got a prospect who is interested in having us do some of these for them, and we need an example.” On Thursday morning, at the hotel, I realized that I’d brought all of one collared shirts on the trip (it’s Austin, we’re a startup — casual attire is the norm). The shirt was dark blue with some plaid-like stripes. I wore it to the office, and our video guru took one look and said, “We’re shooting you on a green screen — that’s a risky shirt to wear, as you may wind up with holes in your body on the final video.” At lunch, I headed to Stein Mart to pick up something that was solid (I clothes shop voluntarily approximately once every 3 years — this was not “voluntary”). I then spent an hour in one of our conference rooms with the A/C turned off (to eliminate background noise) doing three takes on the video.
The project then actually languished for a while (the urgent opportunity died or evolved to be something else — I’m not sure which). But, our video guru jumped back on it last week…and the end result turned out much better than I imagined it would, given the material he had to work with!