Business Coaching

Want to try your hand at video marketing? OpenForum.com suggests making a video that provides intrinsic value.

Customers need to know why they should watch your video, why it’s important, and what’s in it for them. How do you show all these things in your video? Try showing it in these four forms:

Inspiration: To bring to light inspiring stories of courage and bravery.

Enlightenment: These are documentaries similar to what you’d see on PBS or the Discovery Channel. Example: Worse Than War, a documentary you can find on YouTube about genocides.

Entertainment: Some videos are plain and simple guffawing funny. Example: the Evian Roller Babies that people have watched twenty-seven million times.

Education: Educational videos show how to do things and use products. Example: how to fold a t-shirt in two seconds.

For more tips on how to make videos for your consumers, read the full article here.

…when it comes to social media marketing.

Debate might still be going on as to whether CEOs should be fluent in social media or not, but there’s a new platform CEOs might be taking advantage of now: web video.

Video is a great tool to leverage to promote business — it’s engaging, it gives the chance for CEOs to talk and sell their business, and besides being informative, the most successful web videos are fun and entertaining. For example, Tom Dickson, founder and CEO of BlendTec, has a popular YouTube series, “Will it Blend?” where he puts any imaginable product, including an iPhone 4 and vuvuzela, into a BlendTec blender to see if…you guessed it: if it blends.

See more CEOs who are leveraging web videos here.

At least, that’s according to a blog post on Fast Company’s blog. Amazingly, scientists have found that brain size is related to a real-world skill…yes, playing video games and winning is a skill…right?

Depends on the video game. Scientists asked study participants who weren’t avid gamers to play a game called Space Fortress, and scanned two parts of the brain. The first region deals with the pleasure the brain feels at achieving a specific goal.

People who showed lots of activity in that region did better in early stages of the game, when they were still learning. Those that had lots of activity in both regions did best at both learning the game, and adapting to its changing complexity.

What does this mean? Just by looking at a brain scan, you could tell who’s going to better at learning certain skills and adapting those skills over time.

This information would be useful not only for ourselves, but in hiring decisions, too. Maybe video games aren’t such a bad idea.