Three steps to breathing new life into your promotional campaigns with vlogs and ‘vitches’
I’m sure by now you’ve learned or heard that YouTube is the third-largest search engine, with 85 million unique visitors in November alone.
YouTube is growing more than three times as fast as Google and Yahoo, with a yearly growth rate of 35 percent—compared with 11 percent (Google) and 6 percent (Yahoo). I’d say Google has a lot to be thankful for here in 2009 as reported by The Wall Street Journal.
As PR and media relations professionals, we have a lot to learn from this reality: The public, including the media, craves video.
We’ve incorporated video into awareness campaigns for clients. One way has been creating vlogs, which are part of an online library of video content for their Web sites, and even “vitches”—yes, you heard me right, a vitch, a video pitch.
Learning from YouTube’s popularity, we’ve come up with three reasons you and others should strongly consider doing vitches:
1. Direct contact to the resource. The media’s needs continue to evolve and change. Traditional press releases are more for SEO today than for influencing a reporter to write about your company or client. An e-mail pitch gives you limited time and words to make an impression. You might have great success picking up the phone, but time is even more crunched as newsrooms get cut and beats begin to pile up.
Try capturing your next pitch on a Flip video of your resource (not you), send the link to the video quickly outlining what the media contact will see in the video and see what happens. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
 (Watch CEO Mark Ragan's show communicators how to use Flip video.)
2. Entertain, don’t educate. It’s valuable and necessary to educate the media, but in today’s environment you might consider taking more of a lighthearted approach to convincing them about your story or resource. You don’t need to be “funny,” but just by doing a video versus a written pitch you will allow them to sit back and envision their story based on your vitch.
3. Broadcast requires video footage. The vitch is especially influential when pitching to TV and radio outlets. If they’re going to invite your resource as a guest, they need to be sure they have someone who is of value and ready for a “live” interview. If they see your resource can carry the conversation for 60 to 90 seconds (the longest that a vitch should run), they’ll certainly feel much better about booking them as a guest.
Matt Batt is founder and CEO of Pipeline Media Relations, an agency focused on Awareness Campaigns which focus on a combination of traditional and social media relations strategies – you can also connect with him on his blog – Story Assistant.
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