Although I expected money to be the single biggest reason that people wouldn’t want to employ my services when I started my business — and it is certainly a factor, in today’s economy — I didn’t expect that lack of ideas or vision about how to use new media, including internet video and podcasts, would be a popular reason to choose to do nothing instead of something. Clients in many industries, have shown lack of interest in my services due to the belief that because they haven’t used new media, and they’ve “been in business 35 years,” that there was no reason to start. Without naming names, the people that in talking to me have tended to subscribe to that school of thought have often been in the following industries:

• Real estate
• Manufacturing
• Book publishing/writing/authors/literature/etc
• Print marketing

Fortunately, many times — not always though — it’s just a matter of creating a vision for how their industry could use some different marketing methods, and maybe be the first in their area to do that. Although real estate agencies, especially the ones that have been doing business for a long time, are some of the strongest in sticking to how they sell houses, others have taken advantage of the capabilities of the internet, and have done quite well with it. The “realtor video tour” for listings as an upgrade to those dizzying spinning picture tours, or simply still images, have become one of our most popular products. Here’s a few samples of what they look like, and having the realtor narrate the video also adds a personal touch, and creates something that the realtor can use to promote themselves once that listing has been sold:

http://www.vividedgemedia.com/our-videos/realtors.html

Marketing directors at manufacturing businesses are regularly some of the toughest to sell on new ideas, but some (large) businesses, like GE, have figured out that shipping huge and expensive machines to trade shows with salespeople when a DVD with a video of the product can be just as, or more effective, doesn’t make business sense. As such, the following video was developed. This one is narration free so that the salesperson can talk over it:

http://www.vividedgemedia.com/our-videos/corporate-industrial-and-trade-show-video.html

Book publishing can also be tough, and it took us some time to break into this industry. Many authors don’t necessarily associate the internet with books, although Amazon.com alone is probably proof enough that they couldn’t be more related. After some less succesful trials of other products, we developed the “video book trailer,” which large publishers will turn into an expensive production to promote a book on youtube and amazon. We developed a streamlined trailer production that does not even require being geographically close to the author, and can easily be posted around the various important sites to booksellers, including the gigantic Amazon.com:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvlEqgS5tJM

With clients in every industry that I’ve met with, it has been possible to come up with a creative and compelling idea for either audio or video media to promote whatever it is they are doing on the internet, or to more easily promote it offline, and usually for an affordable price. The number one red-lighting factor has simply been that many have “done it their way” for years, and aren’t comfortable with doing something new. There’s no better example than print media, however, that shows why that’s not a great reason to keep doing the same thing. With newspaper circulation down, and many out of business altogether, the ones that are surviving are using audio and video on their websites. If there was any business that could use the “we’ve been doing it our way for 100 or more years” defense, it would be newspapers, and many of the ones that did are no longer around.