“GOOD – FAST – CHEAP: Pick Two” is the mantra for producers in the film industry.   It’s applicable to most project-based endeavors and it’s an easy concept to grasp. If you have the money to spend on an experienced crew, equipment and other resources, you can complete your production quickly at the highest professional level of quality. Since almost all producers are concerned with budgets, sacrificing on expenses necessarily impacts speed, quality or both.  You only get two of the three!

The rules are different today with online video. But many production houses trying to work in social media don’t seem to understand how the rules have changed and why that’s good for customers.

Given the low cost, high quality video imaging and editing technology available today, along with more varied distribution methods that re-define production quality, now it’s possible to achieve all three elements in video productions – especially if we substitute “effective” for “good.”   Following below are some examples of where the smart social media marketer can make sacrifices to maximize the return of the three elements on any video production.

Social Media with Video Services vs. Production Company

First, we have to consider that Page One video services is not a traditional video production company – think of it as Social Media with Video Services.  We are not equipped to handle large-scale productions requiring a pool of talent, set locations, crew and motion graphics or effects.  And with online distribution, an expensive broadcast standard is not necessary. We could eventually expand into larger scale productions, but for now, let’s take a look at some examples of videos that are more modest in scale, yet remain creative and integrate well with social media to deploy your message.

Animation: Simple cut-out drawings animated by hand are popular and a low-cost way to explain complex technology ideas.
Cloud Computing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJncFirhjPg

White Board Video: Similar to animation, using whiteboard drawings to help explain technology.
Funambol: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek93ABPxVa4

Video Tweet: A wave of short quick creative videos, linked through Facebook and Twiiter, may be good way to make an announcement.
http://12seconds.tv/

Standard Interview, Plus:
Using Titles Creatively:
Yahoo: http://tinyurl.com/kjztjc
Lilipip: http://www.lilipip.com/about/
Adding Visuals:
Cisco/Leapfrog: http://tinyurl.com/daywp7
Vinagame: http://tinyurl.com/ydo65xr

Screen Capture: Ideal for showcasing your software.
Google Wave: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6pgxLaDdQw

Documentary Style: These short documentaries were great PR for Intel.
China Quake: http://tinyurl.com/y9ye43c
Vietnam Classmates PC: http://tinyurl.com/yfxobk5

Music Video: A clever, fun concept well executed, doesn’t always need expensive, complex lighting or lots of production time, though a bit of preproduction went into the creation of the song.
The Real Linus Torvalds/Linux: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzqnA793unc

Collaboration, Preproduction and the Script

In previous blog posts, and in our recent newsletter announcing our video services, Craig Oda made some good points about the need to define roles and responsibilities, and the process of developing a clear script. I’d like to emphasize that collaboration among the client, account manger, and video producer is key to producing an effective, visual video that grabs a viewer’s attention. It’s the key to creating the best concepts at the lowest costs.

Hopefully, the examples above can help spark some creative ideas for your company. All of these programs offer engaging, cost-effective messaging for social media distribution. And with rigorous planning and pre-production, you can save time in both production and post-production, and achieve all three elements of the Project Triangle: Good, Fast, and Cheap.

Social media makes a lot of noise. In order to sift through all this noise smart marketers need to use monitoring tools to prioritize the most relevant information. I recently conducted a review of four monitoring tools for Page One PR: eCairn, Overtone, ViralHeat and Sysomos. The most important information I can share isn’t which tool was best but rather that no one tool will meet all your specific social media needs. Each tool I reviewed performed different functions with unique strengths. If you’re doing serious social media monitoring, pick the mix of tools that best meet your needs. There’s no way – yet – to automate monitoring. You still have to do manual work to fill the gaps. A smart marketer will select multiple tools that, when used together, will provide the right level of data to develop an effective social media strategy.

eCairn

eCairn specializes in the blogosphere. Their Conversation application is a tool that maps out blog communities. Users manually create a list of blogs they wish to track. A proprietary algorithm ranks these blogs by “influence,” largely by measuring how frequently the blogs cross reference other influential blogs. The tool’s functions are less about search, and more about text mining.  For our agency, identifying key blogs and conversations is important, but if the tool also worked for Twitter and other social media sources it would be much more valuable.

Overtone

Open Mic by Overtone works on a platform that operates on keywords, and does a great job of analyzing data from search terms. I especially liked their emerging trend alert function which identifies potential spikes in a keyword that could lead to future trends or issues. However, Open Mic seems designed to focus on single brand topics for companies to manage online forums or customer service surveys more than for use as a general purpose monitoring tool. It’s not well suited for agencies.

ViralHeat

We signed up for a free ViralHeat trial after Mashable described them as a sophisticated, yet affordable social media tracking tool. ViralHeat pulls data from Twitter, websites, blogs, and YouTube from search profiles we create in the tool. It can tell you specific information such as the number of total unique authors who tweeted about your search term. They also pull together a convenient summary of daily metrics activity. However, a downside of the tool was that the search capability wasn’t as user-friendly and flexible as other monitoring services. Our account was limited to 10 profile searches, and it was difficult to figure out how to compare multiple keywords in the same search. Starting at $10 per month, ViralHeat is priced aggressively. But for Page One, ViralHeat would best serve as a secondary tool that would complement a primary monitoring service with better search functions and less rigidity.

Sysomos

Sysomos offers two main products, the Media Analysis Platform (MAP) and Heartbeat. MAP is an in-depth tool useful for historical analysis over time. The tool is able to identify key influencers in social media communities and uses text analytics to determine tone and sentiment. One attractive feature is that MAP’s database reaches back to 2006, and the data can be effectively categorized by geographic location. It can also monitor across multiple companies.

Their second product is Heartbeat, and is targeted for real-time, day-to-day monitoring, usually for a single brand/company. This tool tracks social media mentions instantaneously, determines sentiment and key influencers, and lets users view their current competitive landscape. Heartbeat also allows multiple users to log-in to the website at one time, which facilitates the sharing of information with your colleagues. Like most other tools, the social media data only goes back 30 days, which is hopefully something that could be tweaked in the future.

Because of its flexibility, search functions, easy-to-use dashboard, and the real-time component, MAP and Heartbeat from Sysomos appear to be good choices right now for our agency (we also plan to more extensively test drive eCairn for its blog capabilities). But we understand that social media monitoring is still an evolving service, and our monitoring needs as an agency will change over time. One thing to remember about choosing a social media tracking tool is that what’s right for our agency may not be right for you.

If you have any insights or questions, please feel free to leave a response in the comments.

Happy tracking!