Simon Wakeman - marketing, public relations and digital communications

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Producing audio and video for the web

Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007 at 8:23 pm

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A project I’ve been working on recently has involved creating video news shorts for Medway Council’s website. I’ve also recently been involved in producing podcasts for the first time as well.

The video and audio content for these is recorded and edited entirely in-house by members of the council’s Communications and Youth teams.

Now both projects have launched it’s interesting to reflect on the differences between producing video and audio content as a professional communicator.

The barriers to entry for both these tools are so low that anyone can produce audio and video themselves without specialist equipment or skills. However the real barrier is the quality threshold that you choose to apply as a communicator.

Do you want your podcast to sound like it’s been recorded in a bathroom, or your video to have the production value of last year’s home video?

Equally you don’t want to sound or look too slick either, as that moves away from the genuine, personal style that works well nowadays to something more corporate and less credible.

It’s a fine balance to achieve, made all the more difficult because it’s easy for a professional to deliberately sound/look amateur, but it’s really hard for an amateur to sound/look professional.

In my experience it’s more straightforward to produce audio content that gets closer to the mark than it is to produce video content, although there’s always more you can do to learn.

The team had many discussions about the look and feel that was appropriate for audio and video content coming from an institution like a council. The consensus was that the content needed to appear professional and credible.

Feedback on the first video is here. Offline feedback has been very positive, although we have had some problems reported with the Quicktime player we’re using. However I think these can be relatively easy to solve soon.

I also underestimated the amount of time it takes to plan, write, record, edit and upload content - something that anyone considering using audio and video on the web needs to take account of.

However I’m absolutely convinced that audio and video news will be part of the council’s future communications mix in some form, as they open up opportunities to reach new audiences and show richer information than is possible in text format.

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Links to interesting information I've spotted recently on the web:

  1. Councils told: embrace social networks
  2. Communications: Some lessons from the New Deal for Communities Programme - Communities and neighbourhoods - Communities and Local Government
  3. e-Published: my e-book, Brands in Networks...
  4. Research brief links engagement, business improvement to internal use of Web 2.0
  5. AskPeople: Easy, quick & simple online feedback surveys, polls and questionnaire forms
  6. What is Social Media? eBook on Mashable
  7. Cook & Hopkins Social Media Report - 3rd Edition
  8. What does really advanced IC look like?
  9. Trust, the Media & the public sector

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  2. Utilising Web 2.0 in local government
  3. MySpace and Facebook Fast Becoming the Leading Mobile Social Networks
  4. searching for the impact of empowerment report - MORI
  5. Demos | Publications | State of Trust
  6. Pew Internet: Teens, Video Games and Civics
  7. Advance » Blog Archive » Homepage redesign harder than it looks
  8. Final Report Available - Youth Work and Social Networking Research Project
  9. How are young people using social media?
  10. RSS plugin for WordPress » :: TechBlog ::

Simon Wakeman

I've been on the web since 2001 and have been blogging about marketing and public relations since January 2006.

I'm currently Head of Marketing at Medway Council as well as a freelance marketing and PR consultant.

The content and opinions expressed on this website are not endorsed by nor reflect the views of any company or organisation I work with.

Very capable manager with great attention to detail. Great fun to work with too. Damon Reynolds

I highly recommend Simon. He is an experienced marketing manager with excellent digital channel skills. He thinks strategically, is exceptionally reliable - always delivering on time and with good quality - and is also a good team player…It was great to have him on the team at Egg. Wendy Schratz, Egg

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