At home we have a problem with our neighbor’s yard, Grove Park Inn’s golf course, causing major runoff problems almost every time there is a burst of rain. This particular time I decided to step outside and make a little video with my cheap Flip video camera. It ended up being the lead story on the 6 o’clock news that week. This is how that happened, and how you can use video and social media to get some attention:

1. Capture simple video of something “remarkable”
2. Upload video to a sharing site like Youtube, etc.
3. Write a short blog post about and embed the video on the page
4. Mention it on Twitter, Facebook etc. (There are tools that can tie all these accounts together and make sharing easier.)
5. Get other people to mention it on Twitter, or “retweet” it
6. Get noticed by people with popular blogs (In this case it was Ashvegas)
7. Get noticed by local mainstream media such as the newspaper or TV stations
8. Agree to do the interview when they call, even if it’s inconvenient

I’ll admit that it may be a little harder to promote your business the same way, but not impossible. Surely you have something, at least occasionally, that will be interesting to a lot of people. But you have to put it out there, and give it a promotional nudge if you want people to see it.

If you don’t have a blog for your business, get one now. There are numerous free options and you don’t need technical skills. So there are no excuses. Then get a cheap video camera. We like the Flip product line, but the are other good brands and cameras out there for less than $200. Now, what are you going to video and blog about? We have a mind map about content creation that may help.

Video of newscast at WLOS.com

Post at Ashvegas blog

The backyard Flip video that got the social media ball rolling:

AVL Marketing is an Asheville marketing agency. We can help you tell your story.

I don’t have a large list of Twitter followers and couldn’t care less. I don’t use social media tools to shout at people. I’m there to share things, mine and others, that I think are interesting, meet interesting people, and stay plugged in to various “communities.” So, I’ve never wasted time following people in the hopes thatthey too are desperate to have a large list of followers and that they will follow me back, or risk getting unfollowed. I also never use anything like auto-following people back or automated direct messages. That’s not real.

All that said, often I have wanted a tool that would let me quickly manage followers in bulk. I don’t have Twitter send notifications to my email when someone follows because I have enough to deal with in my inbox already. And Tweetdeck can tell me I have new followers and whether I’m following them back or not, assuming they’re interesting to me. But Refollow does just one thing, it manages your lists of followers and following-ers (couldn’t resist making up a word) and it does it really well. You can filter and sort by a bunch of dimensions and that really saves time.

Thanks to Scott Stratten at UnMarketing for turning me on to Refollow.

Check out this Twitter tool at Refollow.com