Podcast episode #9 - Making Content Creation Less Stressful, Repurposing Content, and Finding Your Voice on Linkedin with Andy Owen from Techsmith
Show Notes:
Verbatim text version of this episode is below for those that prefer to read. Made by a robot so probably only 80% accurate.
-Download "3 Absolutely Crucial Components Every Compelling College Student/Alumni Testimonial Needs"
-Connect with Andy Owen
-Techsmith.com
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If you're a higher ed marketer or part of the Marcomm team in some fashion, you know that the demand for content and staying in the algorithm and all of that is always looming over your head. Maybe you sat down at your desk this morning and you thought, What the heck am I going to post today? You're running out of ideas.
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The spreadsheet with all your content ideas is kind of wearing thin and you know, you should be more consistent. But you're just you just don't have the content at the ready that you wish you did and you don't have the luxury of content writer. Well, there are some shortcuts and these are all problems we address. On today's episode with my guest, Andy Owen from Tech Smith.
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Hey, welcome to the Higher Ed Storytelling University Podcast, a podcast dedicated to helping higher ed marketers tell better stories and enroll more students. My name is John Azoni. I'm the founder at Unveild a video production company working specifically with colleges and universities on automating their video storytelling through a subscription approach. So if putting your school's storytelling efforts on autopilot is something that would interest you and would make your life easier,
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You can learn more at unveild dot TV. That's UNVEILD dot TV. My guest today is Andy Owen, who is the social engagement and video manager at TechSmith, the maker of some products you may have heard of, one of them being Camtasia, which is a popular piece of software that a lot of organizations use for content creation. Andy is someone I follow who has really gone all in on being consistent with creating content that adds value to his followers, and he's really honed in on how to market tech.
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Smith Through his own personal brand, and he's got a lot of good nuggets to share about the kind of content he creates and why and who he's talking to and how he repurposes content, how his team ideas its new content ideas, all of that. So here is my conversation with the one and only Andy Owen. All right. We are here with Andy Owen from Tech Smith.
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So tell tell our listeners what you do, who you are. Yeah, I'm the social engagement and video manager at Tech Smith. And a lot of people, I'll say I work at Tech Smith and they'll kind of have that blank look on their face. And then I say, we make snag it, we make Camtasia. And usually, you know, like one out of three times someone go, Oh yeah, you snag it all the time, or I use Camtasia.
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So like, they know the products more than they know the brand name sometimes. And that's what we do. Our software has been around since, gosh, I think 1990 snag. It came to market in 2000. Two was the beginning of Camtasia. So they've been around for quite some time and have evolved drastically over the years and their screen recording and image capture, screen capture products, it's what they started out as snag.
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It started as you know, it can capture an image on your screen if you need to show someone an error code that was literally the origin of the product. And it's turned into so much more. And now it's essentially a video recording tool and Camtasia is a screen recorder and video editor and so much more. But, you know, a lot of people are like, oh, well, you know, I use Adobe Premiere and that's great for you and me, you and I, who actually work in the video field.
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The Adobe Premiere is awesome, but people who just need to make a little video or like aren't planning on a career in the video field. They don't need all the power behind the Adobe Suite. They need something that's easy to use and easy to be able to create a quick screen recording and video and and send it off.
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And so that's what Camtasia does. I work in the marketing department, so I do a lot of social media and video creation. I work on a small team. We have one social media coordinator, one video production specialist, and then myself, who's video production and social media. And so the three of us basically are in charge of content. Now, there's more than that, actually.
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There's there's a bunch of people throughout the company that all contribute to it. But the three of us, that's our sole focus. You guys have a pretty good content strategy, very consistent to talk about. What's the what's your team strategy with with content. Yeah. Thanks. So and it's so I talk about the social media side of things. We also do have a content team.
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It's kind of split up now. It's not just under one umbrella. We used to be one in the content team and it included, you know, everything from newsletter to webpage, editing to blog content, social media, our podcast, our academy, because we have an online academy for people to go and learn about video creation or specifically our tools and then our certification course.
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So you can get certified in our tools as well. But the big thing for our team was if I'm making a video about how to add music to a video, right? So it's a simple topic, but there's a lot I can say about how to how to add music. I can talk about volume, I can talk about leveling, I can talk about free royalty, free music.
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There's there's all sorts of paths I can go down, but I don't need to reinvent the wheel every time I do this. So if I start to write the script for this video, I'm going to check with our content writers and say, do we already have a blog post that talks about how to add music to a video?
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And sure enough, they're going to say, Actually, we have three. So here they are. And that's a good point, Andy. We need to now consolidate our blog posts. So we we have biweekly meetings every two weeks where myself, the content writers, we get together and kind of like assess what we already have, what's upcoming, what merges well together.
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And they've got a whole part of their job where they'll go through and merge blog topics. If we find we've got repetitive ones and they'll, you know, look at the Google Analytics and say, well, this one is doing really, really well, but the content on this one is a little more accurate. So let's merge the two together and then I'll also take that content from the blog post, write my script based off of that, and then add the video to the blog post eventually.
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Now the benefit there is that for Tech Smith, Especially if we have a topic, you know, at adding music to a video is a good, good example where if you Google how to add music to a video, there's a good chance you're going to see my face show up in the first page of the Google results because that's a topic that text Smith can own, right?
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It's in our niche, it's in our subject matter area. And so because no one was covering that and I'll be honest, I didn't I had hesitation about like making a video about how to add music to a video because for me, for you, adding music to a video is kind of like step one. Like I learned how to do that on like day two of college, right?
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And so, yeah, I don't need to make a whole video about this. Everyone knows how to add music to video, and that's the curse of knowledge. Like, that's me saying everyone knows how to do this when really what I mean is I know how to do this. And I had to kind of bring myself down to a level I can't.
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But what do our users need to learn? And our users who are newer to the field need to learn how to do the basic stuff. And so rather than talking down, just very simply explaining the process to them, making sure the blog post had all those points, making sure the video had all those points that they aligned well together so that if you are on the blog or if you are on YouTube or if you're in Google and you see these results come up, they're going to look like they came from the same place.
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Then talking to a content strategy, we say, You know what, people on LinkedIn might want to learn this. Let's take part of the blog post, turn it into a shorter form version for LinkedIn. So it's a little bit of a rewrite, but not much. And in the first comment of the LinkedIn post, we can add the video or maybe we'll do an actual embed into LinkedIn.
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So not using the YouTube link, but then taking the MP four and loading it directly into that LinkedIn post. So that that to us is content repurposing. It's not, it's not taking the YouTube video and just pasting it into LinkedIn and going, that's good enough. It's taking the content and making it fit the new platform. If we were to do the same thing for TikTok, which we do sometimes, I wouldn't take the YouTube video and put it on TikTok.
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Anyone on Tik Tok is going to look at that and go, This is this is stupid. Like this doesn't fit here. And so you just very quickly like turn your phone on, talk to the steps you've already scripted three times because we've got a blog, we've got a LinkedIn post, we get a script. So now I'm pretty familiar with the content and now I can do a vertical video for Tik Tok recording myself, talking about it, showing the steps, you know, if it's in Camtasia and then upload that to Tik Tok now yep.
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I had to recreate something but man it was a, it was way easier than staring at a blank screen and going what I need to make today. So for us, like we have 300 blog posts to pull from, so that's still 300 videos to create and we've created 110 so far. And you know, we started with the highest ranking ones first we're going to go through our catalog and we're going to make sure that all this content that's doing well, according to Google Analytics, is going to hopefully then rank in YouTube, Tik Tok and LinkedIn and, you know, Facebook, Instagram reels, whatever, whatever platform we decide to focus on, we want to make sure that
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that content aligns with all the rest of our content and within within those topics or those like value sentiments. There's probably like if you if you were to have a student profile, maybe it's a text based blog post, there's probably so much in there that the student said that, you know, you could just post that whole thing, you know, to to social and then it's done, you know, or you can go in there and be like, Oh, she said this one line, I'm going to pull that out.
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It's going to be a quote, you know, with her picture, maybe we'll do an offshoot a couple of, you know, a little post based on that little anecdote that she that she said, you actually, I knew I was going to say something early and I couldn't remember what it was. And you just brought me back to it. There's a company that we work with and their whole thing is repurposing content, right?
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So their goal is to take content that you've already had. You had one successful blog post, write one, hey, we got that one at least. But what was it about that one? And this company will take that and they will turn that blog post. Right? They're going to find ten different ways of making this one blog post go farther, whether it's a Facebook post, whether it's, you know, a Tik Tok video, or they're going to pull something from the blog post and turn it into a LinkedIn article.
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Or maybe they're going to have you go back and record a podcast based on this topic, or they're going to take that podcast and they're just going to turn it into small audio snippets and share that on LinkedIn and share that on, you know, YouTube, whatever it is. There's so many ways you can take one piece of content.
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And my friend Justin Simon actually coined the content repurposing roadmap. It's his it's his thing. And he's got this whole avenue that you can follow to basically say, like one piece of content is at least ten pieces of content because you've got LinkedIn, you've got Instagram, you've got YouTube. And so many people are like, Well, my audience is going to get bored of hearing the same thing over and over.
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I guarantee you out of those ten times they might hear at once, unless you've got these like rabid fans, but really like they might hear it once. My wife worked in Michigan State's financial aid office for for 12 years, and she made a library of content. Right. Whether it's how to fill out a FAFSA or how to apply for grants.
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And these are frequently asked questions that she was able to turn in to frequently viewed videos and she put like this video library onto their website so people could click on them. It also made it great for their sales team or, you know, I'm thinking of the wrong team, but basically admissions, their admissions office was able to take those videos when people would have questions and admissions officers don't necessarily know the answer to financial aid questions all the time, but now they knew this resource existed.
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And so they were able to take this resource videos in this case and share it with prospective students. And so then there's not this gap anymore of like, well, we have this content, we don't know how to get it in the right hands. Talk to your admissions department like marketing always thinks about like how do we get it out to the students?
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Don't forget, you've got sales, you've got admissions, you've got, you know, people going to high schools, like trying to reach out to guidance counselors, like give them these resources that you've created, whether it's a blog post, whether it's a link to a video, like let them see that there is content that they can kind of digest on their own time.
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And that's the other thing, like asynchronous is kind of the word of the year, right? Where it's like, it doesn't have to be right now, but you've got this resource. Check it out when you've got time. Sure. What are some things? Because I've I've followed you on LinkedIn and I just kind of I kind of see, you know, the progression of the things that you post.
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What are some things that you. Well, first of all, like where where where are you focusing your efforts mostly like which channels personally or for tech? Smith I would say for tech. Smith For tech Smith I would say we've I mean, three going back to the history of tech. Smith Facebook and Twitter were huge. Right now they're both dumpster fires.
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Like, it's just a terrible place to be and not just for the content, but for like Facebook doesn't want to feed pages or groups to individuals anymore. Facebook kind of moved back to being like a social sharing just with your social network. So they're not going to push corporations or universities as much as they did in the past.
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So, like, we could put something out to our 90,000 people who follow our page five likes, like, are you kidding me? 90,000 people are here, but five saw it or engaged with it. So so we've not abandoned, but we've really toned down how much we post to those. We've ramped up Tik Tok and Instagram reels, but I stay off of them and I say that only because we have interns who know these platforms like the back of their hand and are excited to create content for them.
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And so so we've actually hit it off once our interns are familiar with our products and they're familiar with kind of our messaging and our marketing, it's a great opportunity for them to lean into that like, hey, take some of our YouTube videos, turn them into tiktoks like turn them into quick how to make them under a minute.
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Like you can make a three minute video, but make them quick. Nobody's nobody wants to get on there and hear a message from a corporation for 3 minutes like keep it succinct. So we do some tik tok. But like really for me it's been LinkedIn has been huge and and YouTube has been has been quite huge. That being said, LinkedIn for our company has been slightly less successful than LinkedIn for our employees, meaning this tech smith as a page is still a corporation.
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People still want to follow individuals. So like, I don't know about you, but I'm not following a ton of companies. There's some companies I follow because I want to know what they're up to. But really the majority of what I'm looking at is like people who work those companies, like, what are you doing? Like, I love following the marketing director at Lego because like who doesn't love Lego?
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And they've got some of the most amazing marketing stuff, so I'll follow him. James Gregson is interesting to me, but Lego as a group is just kind of marketing what their latest product or shows or movies are. So, so it's it's individual. So what we've done is we've kind of talked to our employees and we just had a brown bag lunch and learn recently about like, Hey, here's what you should try and like that if you're interested, because it's up to everyone's individual selves.
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If they're interested, post your field of expertize. You and I, we know video like we know how to create video. So I'm talking about video and I'm talking to an audience who doesn't know video. And I could choose to talk to an audience who does, and it'd be very different content. But I choose to talk to people that tech Smith would kind of want me to talk to, right?
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So a lot of my content is basic video stuff or one of my most successful posts was, Hey, you're on a Zoom call and it's really dark and you're in a basement, so you're not going to get a whole bunch more light open up a Google page because it's a bright white screen and just go full screen with that Google page and you're going to let your face of that post took off because people are like, Oh my God, that's a great idea.
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I do have this problem. It's relatable for people and it's like and it's just like a one nugget thing too. That's yeah. You're not creating a whole course on how to light. Exactly. You're not trying to sell you anything. Yeah, this is just here's some free information. Here's and really what it is, is here's some free value. Like, there you go, you follow me, you got a little bit of value from it.
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I'm not telling you. Hey, good news. I got a promotion today, like, at Cool, but, like, I mean, good for you, but where's my value? Right? And for a college marketing department, what I would say is, who's your audience? Are you talking to students or are you talking to other college marketing departments? Because those are two very different paths you're going to take on LinkedIn, for example, so your college can be on LinkedIn.
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And that's great. Although probably not going to find a ton of high school students. You might find their parents, but you as an individual can make a little bit of waves on LinkedIn. Talking about the struggles with being a first time. First time, I don't know, with being a college senior trying to figure out the path through to college because every time an 18 year old graduate high school, it's their first time doing that.
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Like, so it's always a new process unless they have like an older sibling or parent who recently went through college financial aids, new process admissions is a new process. Like all of that is new. So you giving free tips on like, hey, you know what's funny about the FAFSA? These two parts of the FAFSA are super easy to fill out.
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And everyone kind of. I don't know, I'm talking out of my body. Yeah, but you know what I'm saying? Like, there's there's definitely nuggets of information. I know, because my wife is shared them with me and I'm like, you got to tell people this. Like, no one knows that. She knows people know that now it's the curse of knowledge.
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Like, share the stuff that you find easy and people are going to just blow it up because that's huge for them. I don't know how to get into college. I did that 20 years ago. If I had to look at it again now, man, it stresses me out thinking about it. So, so bring that value to your audience of like, here's some here's some ways we can make your process a little bit easier.
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Right? Right. And there's probably so much in there, too. Like I don't know much about fast food and how to apply and stuff, but there, you know, but your audience does and that's where they're going to find their audience. Yeah, there's but there's so many like one, one of the most transformative things that I that someone someone encouraged me was like, you know, I create a lot of content and stuff.
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But like for a while I was creating, I was trying to create like big stuff, like big racks of content and post it in like hope that it would go somewhere. And this person who's like a LinkedIn influencer, she's like, take that, take that one thing, that one topic and break it up into like seven different little nuggets.
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You can get so much more out of it. So, you know, there is there is so much knowledge and value that I think schools have to give to other people. But there's also like there's probably so much like micro content pieces within there that can make their lives so much easier. Not having to, like you said, reinvent the wheel.
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And like every day, think of what's what's some monumental piece of value that I'm going to bring to the Internet today. Well, we refer to it internally as pillar content, right? So there's like three pillars maybe that are holding up all of our marketing content under each one of those pillars, though, pieces that are holding them up. So like one topic for for a university could be and again, I'm spitballing here could be admissions.
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All right. We're going to talk about admissions all year long. We're going to really post about admissions and how to apply and all that. But like under that is financial aid, applying for grants, scholarships, you know, the different colleges that you can apply to within our university like. So all of that falls within that admissions pillar. But that's one topic with a bunch of subtopics.
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And so like if you focus on like two or three main pillars of communication that you want to really hammer home on in 2023 or 2024, whenever it is, then like that is going to be what supports the rest of your content, and you'll feel like you have a framework for where it's going to go, right? If admissions content is doing really poorly on LinkedIn but doing great on YouTube, you know, to take that whole pillar and post it over here because that's where it's it's going to be shining.
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So so it can it can really help kind of define your path to success for each topic. Yeah. How does how does your team ideate those those topics? Do you guys like sit down and have like dedicated conversations about what what do not put you in a sense? So a lot of them come from above, if I'm being honest, like will ideate with that.
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But like, you know, our C-suite team kind of has ideas of what they've researched, what they've seen, be successful in other companies, what they think our products can lean into. And then if if we see those and we all kind of go, Oh, boy, then we might have some pushback. And luckily we have a great team. And so they're open to that kind of feedback.
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But but when we are the ones picking the topics which has happened in the past, when we're the ones picking them, usually it's one person saying, You guys, we are we are killing it over here on YouTube with this like we need more of this and we need to really focus down on this. And so we had a live event in the middle of last year that was called Level Up and it was, you know, leveling up your video creation.
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And we had guest speakers and it was all all digital event and we took all that content and have repurposed the crap out of it because we had some amazing speakers that weren't even from Texas, but that came in and just delivered some knockout performances on the topic. And so we have a tech Smith Academy course related to it, which is gated, but then we also have taken some of the content unguarded and posted it to LinkedIn from time to time.
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We've taken some of it and put it in email newsletters like, Hey, did you catch the level up? If not, you may have missed. You know, when Tiffany talked about this. And so it's just kind of one of those things you can take for the rest of the year at least, if not longer, and kind of repurpose into different parts.
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And that was not even the guy who ran level up who suggested it. He kind of got us together afterwards. I was like, Let's brainstorm. We've got all this content, what do we do? And one of our other teammates was like, Yeah, we've got all this content. Let's continue to drip it out now. Like, We're not going to sit, it's not over, it's not done.
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We're going to repurpose the crap out of it. Like Let's just let it live on for another year at least. And the other thing we did, we did have a big brainstorm. We got together with bunch of whiteboards and it was like we'd all been assigned to go back and relisten with a different ear to those topics. And I was like, What bigger topics do you hear them talking about without them really like hammering on a specific keyword?
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What do you really hear them talking about? And then we came up, I think it was like six or eight for pillars, and we kind of had to narrow it down still because it was too many. But then we organized each speaker into the category pillars. We thought they really, really shown on. And so it was it was a big brainstorming session.
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It was like half a day, maybe longer, that we kind of focused on. And that was with pre work where we actually went and listened to our assigned speaker and tried to figure out what they were talking about if we were to, you know, simplify it. So it definitely came with some brainstorming time, some dedicated like group work time, which isn't always everyone's favorite.
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Some people shine in those, some people hate them. I'm not a big fan like I'm I'm terrible on the spot. I like to sit and ruminate and think about it, which was great that we had kind of that pre time because I was able to to spend some time thinking about it. But our team did great that had some wildly successful ideas from that brainstorming.
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There was like there's like 13, 14, 15 of us in that room just like hammering on these ideas. So it was a fun time. But yeah, it depends if you don't have that big of a team, if you have a smaller team, maybe it doesn't need to be an in-person brainstorm. Maybe it can be, you know, a jam board on Google, one of those free like whiteboards online, basically.
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And you can kind of just go through and put some sticky notes up and have some ideas and just kind of keep it there so you can revisit it and say like, Oh, you know, we forgot about this content that matches up with it. I can't tell you the amount of spreadsheets I have with these ideas to man and I know I've I've got like, I've got like multiple versions of spreadsheets of like the same content ideas.
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And then I have like another content ideas. I'm like, when did I write the first one I know? Like, I'll go back and revisit my, my, my videos. I'm like, When did I come up with this? This is a great idea. How come I never actually executed on it? And I'm like, Oh, still good. I've got new video ideas and that's too.
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I love that idea of like hosting, you know, having an event like, like level up and then getting other speakers to come and basically just like fill your content calendar for you, you know, because and for me, like it's like you were saying, like talking about yourself is, is one thing and that's fine, but it's so much better to talk about something other that's sort of like hosted by the brand and not so, not so much like talking about the brand.
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So for instance, like randomly, I don't know how I'd maybe I got served like a Facebook ad for Hillsdale College and it was like it was like this beautifully done trailer and like a master class kind of thing and like the Book of Genesis. So I'm like, cool. That's like, that's something that would interest me. And the quality of the teaching was like so apparent and it like makes me want to go back to college to learn more from that guy.
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Yeah. And, and that's so much more effective than, than just saying, you know, come to such and such college because, you know, we have smaller class sizes and whatever else. And and there's so much in when you have somebody like, you know, so many schools have these genius professors and people that have bring so much real world knowledge that, you know, it's doesn't have to be up to the marketing team to be the ones to figure out, like, how what are we going to talk to?
00:24:53:06 - 00:25:24:15
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Like, what are we going to talk about today? You know, just shine so much already have yeah. Yeah. There's there's so much power in just sitting down with someone that's a business leader, you know, at business school and just talking about a concept of business, you know? Yeah, not so much come to this business school, but like it like your manage cash flow or like I love the master, I love the masterclass idea to write because it's actually like it's the professional world taking from universities and colleges, like it's what universities and colleges are.
00:25:24:23 - 00:25:41:02
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But the, the brilliance behind like the official masterclass, you know, concept, right, that I think I saw one that was like Aaron Sorkin, who's my favorite writer, television writer, you know, taught a masterclass on television writing. And I was like, I have no interest in television writing, but I'm going to take that because I love Aaron Sorkin's work and I'll follow.
00:25:41:02 - 00:26:04:13
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And like, it was that idea of like, I want to learn from the people who inspire me. Well, if you have these professors who are brilliant at what they do, lean in, like you said, like take take a recording they've done. I guarantee in the past, you know, over the pandemic, they recorded something, right? So like find that bit of brilliance and just share that if they're willing and if they're going to allow you to kind of chop it up into digestible snippets.
00:26:04:13 - 00:26:24:07
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Because the thing you hit on that I think too many of us forget is like, yep, we can repurpose content, yeah, we can share content, but is it good? Is it good content? Like if you've got a brilliant professor and your point is like we're the greatest college small class size, it's like, okay, but what really is going to sell the college, it's the quality of teaching.
00:26:24:07 - 00:26:41:07
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And so like if you've got a shining example of that man, put that front center because that's just going to be gold, I think. I think that's a winning strategy every time. So like you said, we didn't have to do the talking for our event. We had these professionals come in and do the talking and had such brilliant things and they didn't have to push our products.
00:26:41:07 - 00:26:57:14
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That was never, never a request on our part, and most of them didn't. They were just there to share knowledge, add value to people's jobs and lives. And with that as the goal, hopefully just makes our name look better because we're here to provide value to you. Like that's that's our goal. And I know that's a university goal, right?
00:26:57:14 - 00:27:21:18
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Like they're trying to enrich students lives. So like focus on that. Tell them how you're going to do that and look at the quality of classes you're going to take if you come here. Absolutely. No, that's awesome. Tell me about like your development. I see most of your stuff on LinkedIn. What have you learned in the in the last maybe couple of years, two or three years since you've been since you've really been like consistent because wasn't there a point where you were like, I'm really going to go all in on this?
00:27:21:18 - 00:27:43:10
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Like, tell me about that and like what you've kind of learned. Yeah, the thing I think the first thing I learned with LinkedIn and I've said this already is that it's not about me. And that's the biggest thing. It's not Facebook, right? And I'm not even talking from like a social perspective, like Facebook. I'll go on there and I'll I'll gripe or I'll share joy or I'll post pictures of my family like LinkedIn.
00:27:43:10 - 00:27:58:12
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I could do that, but it's not going to go anywhere. I deal with LinkedIn is that I'm one thing, I'm one thing, whatever. That one thing I chose to be is what I am on LinkedIn. So for me, I chose to be a video guy who can teach you to make better videos, right? And that's that's the summation of everything.
00:27:58:12 - 00:28:16:19
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So if I start writing a political post, guess what? It's not going to align with who I am on LinkedIn and it's not going to do well, and it's probably going to hurt me a lot. And so, so really focusing on who I am on this platform, right? What value do I bring to my audience turning on creator mode?
00:28:16:19 - 00:28:33:02
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That's something that LinkedIn has allowed most people to do in the past few years. Is is supposedly a helpful way of kind of showing people that you're there to create content and share value as opposed to just being a user here for user user contact, which is also valuable. A lot of people think of LinkedIn still is like the human resources site.
00:28:33:02 - 00:28:53:00
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It's just where you go to host your resume and apply for jobs, and that's just not the case. It does happen all the time, but that's not its sole purpose. I love networking and I think of it more as a networking opportunity to like meet other pros who are doing what I do. I follow our competitors in my same job role because I want to see what they're doing and if they'll share it out, I'll share what I'm doing.
00:28:53:01 - 00:29:07:12
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Like I you know, what's successful for you, what's discussed with me? Because you know what? Like you and I know from our days in wedding films, there's only so many weddings to go around. There's only so many wedding videographers or filmmakers to go around, and there's a ton more weddings, like there's a ton of potential customers out there.
00:29:07:12 - 00:29:23:07
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So like, yep, sometimes I'm going to steal a customer. Yep. Sometimes they're going to steal a customer. But like the really long and short of it is, it's like Nike and Reebok. People will make their opinions of the brands that they want to follow and the products that they want to use. And I'm not necessarily going to sway anybody just because I'm talking about Camtasia or snag it.
00:29:24:03 - 00:29:46:11
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But if I can add value to someone, hopefully they'll remember me as someone who added value. Right. And if they can then associate that with the brand I work for. Fantastic. And if not, hopefully I've made their day better. I don't know. It's kind of a philanthropic way to look at LinkedIn. I guess the other thing is, and this is this is much more like really in the nitty gritty of LinkedIn, there's times that do not work for posting and that time is specifically noon.
00:29:47:01 - 00:30:02:10
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I don't know what it is, but at like from 10 a.m. until about 4 p.m. is like a dry spell on LinkedIn. If you post content, I post either like at 7 a.m. and sometimes I'll schedule it. LinkedIn just released scheduling. By the way, I'm super pumped about this because I used to use a third party to do it.
00:30:02:16 - 00:30:21:07
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Now you can schedule it right on LinkedIn and it's like rolling out slowly, but so you can scheduled to go at 7 a.m., you can scheduled to go at 10 p.m. and I know this is going to not really matter as much to colleges and universities, but like my audience isn't necessarily in America. So if I post something at 10 p.m., it may be something they're just waking up to somewhere else.
00:30:21:07 - 00:30:38:10
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And so it, it's a little hit or miss, but I've found that like, yeah, I really do. I post at 7 a.m. or I post at 10 p.m. and any other times don't do that. Well, for me it's very strange. My videos don't do that well. Videos like videos don't do that well on LinkedIn. Like they'll fine. They get a higher percentage of engagement.
00:30:38:19 - 00:31:05:03
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So like I'll post a video and it'll only see like 290 impressions, right? Which is very low for an impression on LinkedIn for me, but it'll get like 40 likes or like 20 likes and like two comments, which is a huge return for like 200 impressions versus a all text based post or text based post with an image will get thousands of impressions but a lower rate of engagement.
00:31:05:08 - 00:31:29:16
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So it's it's very strange the way that kind of works, but I would rather have the higher impressions because I'm a vain man. I know. Me too. I, I, it's, it's it's sometimes a crapshoot on social media as to like what, what works, what doesn't, why things take off, why things don't happen. And it's never the ones you think you'll spend your poor, your heart into something and be like, this is this is the one man.
00:31:29:16 - 00:31:56:16
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This is the post right here. And it just dies on arrival. And then you'll like think of something at 11 p.m. and just type it out real quick and go to bed and wake up the next morning and it's blown up. And really it's just a thought like, yeah, you can't control it. Yeah. Do you, do you got, do you have a method for testing, like testing and measuring like what's were like what time of day works or like do you have a way of like a B testing on social or anything like that?
00:31:57:01 - 00:32:13:13
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Not on social with the B, I mean, like HIV testing and social for me is things like thumbnails on YouTube like I can a B test those using a third party tool like vid IQ or to Buddy. And so like, you know, on day one it'll be thumbnail A and on day two it's thumbnail B be in they'll do that for like 14 days and tell you which one has better click through rate, etc., etc..
00:32:13:13 - 00:32:29:20
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But, but that to me is not as valuable as like, like you're saying if, if a certain time does better on LinkedIn and that's harder to measure except for us. We have an internal group here at Tech Summit. There's like five of us, six of us who have a Slack channel that's it's a private Slack channel just dedicated to growing on LinkedIn.
00:32:30:02 - 00:32:47:09
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And it's, you know, I think four of us from marketing, maybe five from marketing and one from h.R. And, and essentially we just share our successes and our losses on LinkedIn. And then we'll say like, oh my gosh, you guys, I shared a newsletter and it actually did well, like normally, you know, newsletters or links outside of LinkedIn don't do well.
00:32:47:15 - 00:33:10:15
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And so we'll share one that did really well and try and kind of all dove in and figure out why things are succeeding. And so in that regard, yes. And one of our team members is she's very analytical in the best way. And she like spreadsheets, all of this. And she's got like results from our past six months worth of posts like how many impressions, how many engagements because and then she compares it to our corporate one, which isn't nearly as good because again, people follow people.
00:33:10:15 - 00:33:29:01
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And so, hey, your university could be have this great presence, this really well branded page, but it's not taken off that well. Doesn't mean it's a failure. It just means no one's following it. So repurpose the pages content, don't share it necessarily. Like take the nugget and make it your own. But from your perspective, are you working in financial aid?
00:33:29:01 - 00:33:48:11
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Are you professor in business? Are you in marketing? Okay, now share your experience and how this has affected your job. And that's the strange thing. You have to get your brain around is it's not just like me marketing myself and this is it gets a little meta, but I'm not marketing myself on LinkedIn. I'm talking about my job, I'm talking about the wins, I'm talking about the losses.
00:33:48:11 - 00:34:09:02
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I'm talking about what might make your job better with video, because that's my thing again. But if I just share something from Tech Smith, I've got to tweak it to be more relatable for what my audience would care about. The one last thing I was thinking of speaking of higher education when I said that my wife worked in financial aid for 12 years, one of her most successful events she talked about was this Q&A she did with parents and students.
00:34:09:02 - 00:34:25:08
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Prospective students. Right. And it was, again, financial aid. So it was whether it's FAFSA or, hey, we don't have enough money for this first semester even. Like, how are we going to make it through? Like she came home from that and she just said, Why didn't we record that? Like, that would have been so valuable. And so now everything's recorded, right?
00:34:25:08 - 00:34:41:22
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Like it's always Zoom or it's always Skype or whatever it is. And so, like, if you can record these calls, if you can record these just open mic Q&A sessions with prospective students and let them know, Hey, this is going to be recorded, we're going to share it out afterwards. It could be on our social channels like they don't have to step up and ask questions.
00:34:42:04 - 00:35:00:23
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So that's their opportunity to say, Oh, nope, I don't want to be shared out publicly, otherwise this is great content because again, we're talking about adding value. If these parents came and asked the question that you were going to ask, you just got your answer. Like you don't have to go through. You know with customer support. I don't know what that would be, admissions or whoever the support is for the university.
00:35:00:23 - 00:35:26:00
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But now you've got your question answered and you're able to to move on to the next step of the process. Yeah. Just creating, creating situations where there's going to be a wealth of content opportunities in there and really for, for other people to bring those to the table. Less so for the distributor of the content to be always the one that has to be the expert and has to come up with creative ways to say everything.
00:35:26:00 - 00:35:48:06
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And and there's a lot to be said, too, for just a low fi kind of thing. You know, you don't have to. Sometimes it's even more it's more authentic and more effective to have something that's lower quality. And I found a video or a zoom call or something like that versus a very polished video shoot. Go look at Tik Tok right now.
00:35:48:06 - 00:36:19:08
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This generation doesn't need highly polished to be effective at all. Right? And they're going to find the authenticity way more valuable than the polish. If you can't come across with an authentic message in the highly polished. Yeah, absolutely. Love it, man. One last question I did want to ask. Like, what? How can because I think I think Texas has cool stuff going on that could be very useful to college marketing teams that that aren't, you know, that aren't trained videographers or whatever.
00:36:20:19 - 00:36:40:11
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How can Tech Smith's products save them time and money and energy? And the first way is we've got lecture capture software, too. I didn't even mention that at the beginning, but we have another product called Nokia. Oh, Maya. And that's it. I'm being told not to call it lecture capture only, but it does. It does lecture capture. You can also edit your video.
00:36:40:11 - 00:37:00:05
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You can include, you know, a Camtasia video uploaded to Nomi. It's a platform essentially where professors can host their their videos. So, I mean, Camtasia is an easy to use video recorder people. I have a friend who's a professor at MSU who used it to record a presentation that he wanted to give, but it was at a school in I'm going to forget.
00:37:00:05 - 00:37:21:12
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I want to say Israel, it was it was across the world and it was like a5am call if he did it live. And so he recorded Camtasia. He recorded his whole presentation using his iPad. You know, you can plug your iPad in via USB and record your iPad screen with Camtasia. And so he was able to do this presentation the way he normally does, but he was able to sleep in that morning and not have to show up live.
00:37:21:12 - 00:37:38:20
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And so there's there's all sorts of ways it can benefit you. We have we have educational pricing on our Web page. It's definitely worth looking into. But more often than not, people are surprised to find out that their university already has our software and they just need to contact their I.T department to find out about it. So a lot of times, I mean, we're, we're in every Fortune 500 company.
00:37:38:20 - 00:38:04:17
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Like that's the crazy thing too, right? Like we're an every fortune 500 company. And so many of those companies, individuals are looking for products like ours because their I.T. department just maybe hasn't had time to release it to you know, the masses and say, hey, by the way, we have this it's internal marketing that sometimes shoots us in the foot that we are very much we have a whole team is doing a great job now of kind of have recognized that problem and are saying like, hey call your i.t department and request it.
00:38:05:17 - 00:38:24:05
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Yeah. So, so i would tell people that I like start with your i.t department if that's who you go through to get software and just say, hey, do we have snack or do we have Camtasia? If not, could you look into the educational pricing discount at Tex? Mccolm because exists and it's super useful and we do have bulk discounts with educational discounts.
00:38:24:05 - 00:38:42:03
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So it's definitely something we want in the hands of educators. And for a long time that was a big a big push of ours. And so I would love to see that happen again, because you're right, it definitely is something beneficial, especially now when so many more asynchronous classes are going on that that professors don't need to show up live for, but can record and repurpose over and over again.
00:38:42:04 - 00:38:59:06
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You can even do quizzing through Camtasia. You can stop the video and say, okay, have you learned up to this point you can't pass this point until you answer this question correctly. And yeah, so with that you either use Nomi or our own screencast dot com or you can upload it to your LMS, you know, blackboard or whatever learning management software you have.
00:38:59:06 - 00:39:13:22
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And so there's, there's a number of ways to incorporate quizzes doesn't work on like YouTube obviously because it's just an MP for video. But anywhere that you can host a video on your own, you can include quizzing Awesome man. Well, this has been this has been fun. Thanks for that. Thanks for coming on the podcast and sharing your knowledge with us.
00:39:14:00 - 00:39:32:15
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Yeah, man, always good to chat with you. Anytime. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much for listening. I'm three things I want to give you before you go. Number one, if you want to take the storytelling you're already doing to the next level, I have a free resource for you. It's a it's a three part framework for creating compelling student testimonials.
00:39:32:21 - 00:39:58:15
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You can get it at unveild dot TV slash student testimonials. That's UNVEILD dot TV slash student testimonials. It doesn't even have to be for video. It works for written content as well, or even telling stories on stage or a presentation. Your next TEDx talk, whatever. So go pick that up. Number two is having a lot of student and alumni stories at your disposal for filling your content calendar is something that would make your marketing life easier.
00:39:59:04 - 00:40:25:12
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Let's talk. I've got something great for you with our student testimonials subscriptions. Imagine having one new student or alumni story drop in your inbox every month, plus ten other supplemental videos stemming from that story. 11 videos per month. That's 132 pieces of video content per year, plus all that B-roll end and interview footage that you can use as you want forever for anything else.
00:40:25:12 - 00:40:47:03
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Repurposing the heck out of it for no extra charge like a lot of other production companies would charge you for. So head over to our website and book a call with us if that's something that interests you. Number three, leave a review for this podcast. It helps us out a ton. Thanks so much for listening. You can reach me at John at unveild that TV that's J-O-H-N and go connect with me on LinkedIn.
00:40:47:03 - 00:40:54:02
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In the meantime, we'll catch you on the next episode of the Higher Ed Storytelling University podcast.
